Unsung Creative Lives

We all have impressive imagination, but it's not always indulged by the world.

My Mom died two Saturdays ago. The circumstances are an indictment of the healthcare system in the United States. For years, she had multiple sclerosis, an incurable immune system disease that we have known about since at least the 1930s. The treatment, which kept Mom walking and out of a wheelchair, damaged her liver, so a woman who went through life rarely drinking died of liver failure caused by her need to treat a debilitating disease.

I’m very interested in biotechnology and am convinced that both multiple sclerosis and liver failure should be treatable by gene therapies in 2024. But our regulatory system has slow rolled the approval of such medicines and we still live in a healthcare world driven by scarcity and the law of averages when we should be well into the era of personalized, precision treatment. We did get Mom onto the transplant list, by the way, but the surgery is dangerous and painful and by the time her condition had been fully diagnosed, she was deemed too weak to survive the surgery. My mother was only 73 — barely of age to become president of the United States.

Mom was an educator by profession. She began teaching in New York’s public schools, but then stopped when I was born. She picked up the profession when we moved to New Mexico in the 1980s. She taught elementary school in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque, and was the “Head of School,” in a little town called Algodones. A “Head of School” is a teacher given the responsibilities of a principal, but allowed to stay in the union. She delighted in bringing art to her students and every year she staged an elaborate holiday variety show, with musical numbers, based on whatever ruled pop culture at the time. The kids always loved it.

The legend about my Mom is that, as a child, she wrote the song, “On Top of Spaghetti.” It’s a pretty well-known parody of the songbook classic, “On Top of Old Smokey.” For some reason, the provenance of this Italian-American song parody, presaging the Polish-American remakes by Weird Al, really inflames some folk. I have run into people strangely adamant that my Mom did not, and could not, write the song. These are people who can’t think past the first Google hit, though. My Mom wrote a version of the song, which itself is a version of another song. Her meatball goes on a totally different adventure than the one in the song attributed to Tom Glazer. There are more meatballs in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in your philosophy, you see. The one I grew up with is credited to Sharon, performed by her childhood band, Sharon and the Lollipops, and she always owned its copyright.

Mom in 2016 at the National Chess Tournament — Chess being another big Middlebrow activity.

This happened because her father, Carlo “Charles” Naclerio, was a studio sideman. The quick story there is that he refused to follow his parents into their Hell’s Kitchen fruit vending business, learned to play banjo, got a job on a cruise ship, and became a musician. In World War II, he wound up part of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, but he didn’t go on their fatal journey. After the war, he did backup work for all sorts of musicians, from The Beach Boys and The Monkeys to Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday. He worked under the name Charles Macey.

You can see how this story veers towards him. Charles Macey loomed large in our family. He was the great creative success story. He played backup for Leonard Nimoy’s album and had a sleeve autographed to, “my favorite space guitarist,” as part of his reward. He retired, I think, in the late 1970s. He bought land in Rio Rancho, which is why my family has some roots in New Mexico. For most of my life, he lived off a pension and royalties. Musician friends in the age of Spotify micropayments, just imagine that. He made more money playing backup for songs played in shopping malls than big stars make per stream these days. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say to end a paragraph like this.

My Uncle Al, Mom’s older brother, wanted to be a musician as well. He played bass and used his dad’s connections to get jobs in the orchestras of Broadway and touring shows. He almost made it but he also had a taste for drugs. He washed out, went to New Mexico, got into criminal mischief and became something of a scam artist in later life. After he died, of a drug overdose in upstate New York, a “friend” came calling, trying to get Al’s name put onto the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. I think you know Al never served in the military, much less in Vietnam.

Mom wanted to sing and write songs and to write plays and short stories. She didn’t take it seriously (she wasn’t precious about it the way I am) but she always had ideas and hopes and I think she wanted to be recognized and certainly would have loved to see her name on the spine of a book of stories. When I helped my Dad access her computer I found some of her writing exercises from a short story workshop she’d been taking in St. Augustine, Florida, before she got sick.

A few years ago, a colleague remarked to me, when I told him that The Scholar Wife and I were going to see an opera at the Met, “That reminds me of Italian immigrants I grew up with. Seeing the opera was always considered a sign of social mobility.”

On the other side of my family, this was certainly true. I knew the people my colleague was talking about. My Mom’s side was more into swing and rock and roll. On the other side, you had the Bronx business story — an industrial dry cleaner that did good business in hotel uniforms and linens. That side of the family turned out a lawyer and a physicist. But they also pursued creative successes. This isn’t the place for those stories. I only bring it up to make the generational connection about Baby Boomers looking to shape their lives according to the middlebrow intellectual values that emerged in the U.S. after World War II.

My Mom encouraged middlebrow activities as I was growing up. She encouraged my writing from a very young age and when, in elementary school, I plucked The Odyssey off her shelf, she helped me through it, because I wasn’t ready for it on my own. When I decided, at 6, that I wanted to draw a comic strip for Long Island’s Newsday, she helped me package up all of my hand drawn samples and to write a cover letter, where I offered to sell them at the price of $1 per week. I only wanted to contribute to the weekend funnies because they were in color and, as I explained in my letter, I did not have time to do more work because of school. To their credit, the editors of Newsday wrote me back quickly, calling my prices and conditions reasonable but turning me down because my work did not “meet our needs at this time,” a collection of words I have since grown very used to seeing. I do remember Mom telling me, at the end of the school day, that the paper had written me back and that the first words out of my mouth were, “Did I get the job?”

Nine years later, in New Mexico, I would get the job, writing for the Albuquerque Tribune and Mom did encourage that, including my taking nighttime assignments and going into the paper in the early morning hours, before school, to file photos and to string agate for the sports pages. It always delighted her that I was assigned to interview every golf pro in the city and to write tips for every hole at every course, as I had never golfed even once (and still haven’t).

She encouraged all the novels and plays that I wrote through middle school, high school and college. Eventually, the plays got weirder, but she still showed up when she could and then I went off to New York to do my own thing. She really liked showing off my byline in Forbes magazine and other places.

What we value changes over time, and so does how, or if, we celebrate creative works. Mom was a middlebrow, though, and so am I.