Nonno would have been 112 today. Once Removed just turned one.

When I looked at my calendar today, the most prominently displayed event was “Nonno’s Birthday.” What I’d forgotten to mark on the calendar was that today also is the first birthday of my debut linked short story collection, Once Removed.

The oversight surprised me since my grandfather’s birthday and the launch of Once Removed were so intertwined in my mind last year. I even held my book launch party in New Jersey to honor him and my grandmother, who inspired Rose DiCorscia, a main character in the book.

Nonno, my paternal grandfather, also inspired a character in Once Removed: Gabe DiCorscia, Rose’s husband. Gabe makes few appearances in Once Removed, though he’s a central character in my novel-in-progress, Piecework. Rose is a force to be reckoned with in both books. She dominates every room and story she enters. Still, Gabe is the one who steadies and centers her; he is the one whose loss she fears the most, even though she’ll never admit it.

My grandparents were much the same way. Despite their differences, their relationship was strong. They tolerated each other’s weaknesses and admired each other’s strengths. They also made an eye-catching couple, not only because of their good looks, but also because of the differences in their heights and personalities.

Born in 1908, Nonno was a giant of a man at six foot three, with hands like catcher’s mitts and fingers as thick of two of mine from years of working construction. He was an easygoing guy, happy to live a simple life after growing up poor and hungry on his grandfather’s farm in Northern Italy before running away to the United States at fifteen years old after he discovered he’d been born in Idaho during one of his migrant worker parents’ stateside trips to pick potatoes. Nonno was also known as a strong-willed man of integrity. A construction foreman in New Jersey, he once turned down some thank you cash from a notorious mob boss who’d asked my grandfather to find a job for his nephew.

Grandma Sartor was a year younger than Nonno and barely five foot two. What she lacked in height she made up for in brains, spite, and grit. She, too, had grown up poor but in the States, and poverty and its accompanying hardships inspired in her a drive to conquer and acquire. She was determined never to be trapped by need again. Unlike, Nonno, Grandma never met a rule she wouldn’t to break, or at least test. When my father was young, she rented the bottom unit of their triplex to some bookies for a cut of their earnings. She only kicked them out after a cop friend tipped her off that a raid was in the works.

I’ve spent years writing about Rose DiCorscia in the stories that became part of Once Removed, but it’s only in Piecework that I’ve given voice to Gabe DiCorscia, which has allowed me to explore my grandfather and his wealth of contradictions. Bitter childhood memories made him hate Italy–which he refused to visit for 50 years–yet he clung to his Italian accent, which was so thick I didn’t understand a word he said until I was five years old, and he insisted on being called “Nonno,” not “Grandpa,” which was too American for him. He spent hours puttering in his huge vegetable garden next to the fenced-in doghouses where he kept guard dogs year round, even when it snowed. Animals belonged outside, he said. Still, he fed the dogs leftovers from the table for breakfast and dinner.

Despite having a wife who owned her own business and worked as hard as he did, he was a man of his times when it came to women tending to the home and children. He even told my father it was a waste of money to send me and my sister to college since we were just going to get married and have kids. But when he discovered how prestigious it was for us to attend Ivy League schools, he became our biggest cheerleaders, telling everyone he knew where we went to school. After I graduated law school, he used to joke that he was going to hire me to help him divorce my grandmother. “No way she’s gonna win against a Harvard lawyer,” he would say.

We both knew, though, that he’d never divorce Grandma. Even after Alzheimer’s left her a confused, paranoid shell of her former self who sometimes recognized him and sometimes didn’t, he refused to put her in a home. “We lived her together, we’ll die here together,” he told me once when I visited them from law school.

I was in my mid-twenties and living in Los Angeles when he died after a stroke left him partially blind and paralyzed. This was a man who climbed ladders to prune trees well into his eighties. He wouldn’t know how to live without being able to conquer any physical feat; without being able to care for my grandmother on his own.

When I kissed him goodbye after visiting him in the hospital, I told him I’d fly home to see him in a month. He shook his head. “I’m not gonna be here,” he said. “Who wants to live like this?”

He died a few weeks later.

He would have been 112 today. Once Removed is one year old. He is as etched into every page just as my grandmother is. They are part of everything I write.

Happy birthday, Once Removed. Happy birthday, Nonno. The two of you will forever be entwined in my mind.

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