Robert had a file for everything: he had a massive collection of files in neat rows of many file cabinets, from the 1960s on. I was consumed with guilt when I recycled them. (Paper never gets thrown out, in our home, it gets recycled.) There were files for every place, everywhere in the world that he intended to visit. Architecture files, etymology files, theater files, movie files, exhibit files, stupidity files, on and on, and of course a file full of obituaries.

But let’s not forget the food files.

If Robert were home and still reading The New York Times, cover to cover, daily, extracting articles and filing them into files or as he did later when he ran out of space, just dump them into cartons, to become dusty, yellowed and frayed, the above obituary would be saved. For now, this blog will suffice in archiving the obituary, of Domenico DeMarco. He was an Italian immigrant who had a pizza shop in Brooklyn. But, it wasn’t just any pizza shop. It was owned by a man who did things his way. This must have been the attraction for Robert. He had read an article about Mr. DeMarco of Di Fara Pizza, years ago; it went into a food file; to visit was on Robert’s bucket list and of course we went. Around twenty years ago. In fact, we went all over. We followed articles to food in the U.S. and Europe. But, for now we’ll concentrate on Brooklyn, New York.

And I just said to myself: we did all of this when Robert could walk.

Robert thought Brooklyn was the coolest place on earth. He wanted to move there, he talked about it, thought about it. For me, it did not have the same caché. My parents were born there, and their siblings and families lived there. We were different: we lived in Manhattan. In my childhood we spent hours riding back and forth on the “L” train, the Coney Island line, and on weekends trekked to Brighton Beach. We visited family by car once my father bought the black 1963 Studebaker Lark with the red interior. We never did anything cultural, just visited the scattered clan in Brooklyn. Robert’s people had their own birth land, much farther north where there were large stones and outcroppings of glaciers, part of  mainland New York—no island for them, their digs was The Bronx. So, Robert had this romanticized vision of New York City. in the form of the borough of Brooklyn.

One Sunday we ventured to Di Fara Pizza, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn where old blocks held venues for Kosher food as well as for any immigrants who might have settled there. It was a food adventure, a realm of neighborhood exploration. But first it was pizza. Di Fara Pizza, where the line could snake up and down the block and even around the corner. Where the whole experience was, well, an experience. There was the experience of the line, the experience of getting to the door, the experience of going through the door, the experience of turning to the left and seeing a small, elderly man slowly fashioning dough with his bare hands, precisely adding the ingredients but barely moving. He was an automaton. He was programmed, he knew what he was doing. He stood in place bent over a counter in a tiny work area in the front. Everything seemed to be old and covered in oil. He was probably covered in oil. The place was crowded and tiny. You were lucky if you could find a seat. And even luckier if you didn’t have to share a table. But, you would likely have to share. You were on the ground floor of an old tenement that held the names and voices of people who were long since gone.

Now, Mr. DeMarco has joined their ranks.

At the time I couldn’t see what was so damn special about this pizza. I forget, was it that it was drowned in oil after it was baked, or was it that crowning, post-oven of parmegiana? Or both? Was it slightly burned and crispy? Hell, I can’t even recall.  But the venture took hours to complete. I remember looking around in wonder. What made this a destination place? Was it the stack of empty cans of real San Marzano tomatoes? The totality of the ingredients that came together in a masterpiece of pride?

Was it the show of the creation and the total orchestration? Was it that some people felt it was an imaginable trip to the  Caserta province of Italy? Was it the ritual of waiting and the buildup to the finality; that experience of the first bite? I do not know what to tell you except that for me, in my observance, the unwritten words in the above article are passion, and purpose.

Mr. DeMarco left behind a show, food performance art, that he performed over and over during the years since 1965, when I was still in High School. When my only exposure to pizza was on East 14th Street and Avenue B at The Prince of Pizza, where I will never forget the flavor, it was like nothing I have ever had since. And how it always burned the roof of my mouth.

Robert and Domenico DeMarco began their careers during the same era, in fact, they were one and the same: passionate men who found a purpose in what they did, how they performed, doing their show over and over again, every day. DeMarco fed the body with a vision, Robert fed the mind with knowledge and they both nourished the soul.

Now, Robert lies in a nursing home bed and has virtually lost all purpose; his passions have ended, his files of yellowed tattered pages have been recycled and will be reincarnated into new pages. I find this hard to believe, to grasp.

Losing one’s passion is dangerous. Losing one’s purpose is even more so. I wonder how Robert survives in his new form, a shadow of himself, a fragment of who he once was, the passionate teacher who would load the car each morning with not one but TWO briefcases along with a carload of materials: graphically designed printed pages and equipment for experiments, much of which was purchased with his own money. I am left with all of this, these symbols of over forty years of work, that now languish in the basement and sadden me because unless I can find someone who would appreciate it all and rehome it, what will become of it, this endless amount of memories in boxes everywhere I look?  Someone else’s work is hard to deal with. It’s too large a responsibility to curate.

In addition to work, there was  the constant desire to see every place, to know every exhibit, concert, show. Sometimes I would balk: can’t we stay home, I just don’t feel like running again? To which he would respond: we live in the greatest city on earth, we have to make use of it and do as much as we can.

He was right.

That is what I miss the most. The going. Sometimes literally being dragged to another venue, to another experience like an over-stimulated child, but then I, too, would catch the passion: photograph it, blog about it, internalize it.

Now there is a void.

At least Mr. DeMarco worked pretty much up until the end. Maybe he was wrapped in a shroud of pizza dough before he was laid to rest. But Robert, who no longer teaches, or reads The Times, or collects clippings, or builds endless piles of stuff, lies in a bed, is turned and fed and cared for. His main event is watching an overhead television. I don’t know how much he can comprehend, recall or process. Maybe his purpose is just to get through another day. But I do believe that on some level, he could not stop the running, going, seeing and doing because he knew that to live he needed that purpose and he knew that it wasn’t going to last much longer.

But in some ways, his losing his ability and subsequently his purpose, affected mine: I am left numbed.

I am, the observer, the former caretaker, the caregiver, the guilt-ridden survivor who soldiers on and wakes-up, often with no energy, no ability to make sense of it all. With the feeling, that dangerous feeling, that I, too, have lost my purpose.

There’s been no muse, no flagrant belly-laughing joy. I, too, the witness, have been changed.

I find myself asking: what is this all about, what am I doing here, why? I desperately need someone to look me in the eye and say: today we are doing such and such. I need an agenda, a date book, a reason. Someone to fill in the pages and take me by the hand.

But as I write this I realize, I do have purpose, maybe not every day.

I find it in words.

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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