Autoethnographic Verse: Nickys Boy: A Life in Two Worlds

This autoethnographic verse is about my childhood experience of two distinct and ethnically representative family cultures. Poetry and qualitative research share in their goals of providing meaning, density, aestheticism, and reflexivity They are also evocative I selected verse as a means to express my experience, and to invite the reader's reflections on this experience for themselves and others. Key words: Autoethnography, Culture, Poetry, Verse, Reflexivity, and Inquiry Methods ********** "One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art." (James Baldwin, 1990) What follows is the product of my writing as a method of inquiry. It was, for me, as much about "discovering" as "telling". However my "discovery" is limited by the discourses available to me. I can discover only insofar as I can interpret my experience. Readers, too, can only discover my experience insofar as they can interpret my writing through their own experiences. Together, or separately, we can create meaning from these words. Nicky's Boy: Life in Two Worlds Ron grew up in two different worlds.... Saturday world. And Sunday world. On Saturday, he was Ronald, in a world of straight-backed chairs, of parlor games, of patient conversation. On Sunday, he was Ronnie, (Pronounced "Rannie"). A world of cousins too numerous to recall without ticking them off in clusters, by the aunt, or the uncle, to whom they belonged. Of loud games, of dizzying, overlapping, inscrutable chatter. Clatter. Saturdays were three course meals..... Garden salad, roasted meat, or boiled. Tea. Cookies. A citrus cake, perhaps. Sundays were biscotti, and cold pasta with red gravy, and melon, and pan fried smelt and strong coffee and chicken and nougat and cucuzza..... in just that order, perhaps. Appearing pell-mell, Willy-nilly. from pantry shadows-- backstage of the kitchen with its aqua linoleum on its floors and its counters. "Modrenized", Uncle Tony called it, who'd had it installed it for his aging parents. Fruit perhaps. A tomato salad sometimes... afterwards. Ronald spent Saturdays at the home of his Grandmother..... his "Granny". She was of English descent. He didn't know what descent meant. But he understood what English was. It was something his school thought worth studying. Ronald spent Sundays on the farm of his father's parents. They were Italians. They were from Italy. They weren't from here. Their marriage arranged by cousins, it was said. They raised vegetables.... and grapes... and children. From the vegetables came money, from the grapes, wine, from the children, more children. Saturdays were easy. There was Ronald, his mother--Granny's only child, his father--an Italian which Granny learned to accept, and Admire, and Granny. His granny in her gently flowered dress, with lace trim, and fabric buttons, that could only be seen up close. Ronald talked with the adults. The adults listened. What he said was worth hearing, it seemed. There was a set time to arrive. And to leave. Sundays were uneasy. For Ronnie. "You sweat like a pig," an aunt once told him. "You're too fat, you don't shit enough. Like me" his Nona said. They said what came to mind. It was their way. It meant caring, he supposed Still, it was hard to hear. There were cousins everywhere--everywhere--all of them more favored, it seemed. Some of them could understand Italian. Ronnie could not. …