The Beacon on the Hill

By Stephanie Accongio Dray

Mother of Sorrows Church sits atop Paddy Hill in Greece, New York. It is the highest peak in my hometown. From this vantage point, you can see civilization carved out of the orchards below and the community seems to radiate from the church. Mother of Sorrows is the oldest church in the area, and my mother told me that Catholic missionaries built it amidst an Iroquois village. She said that the lantern at the top of the steeple served as a guide to settlers, so if I was ever lost, I should simply aim for the steeple light and it would guide me home.

My mother grew up in a house at the foot of Paddy Hill. I know this, because it's impossible for my mother or my grandmother to drive by this summit without comment. They always tell stories about that house, that hill, and the church atop it. Sometimes they would stop in front of the old house and look for something that my grandma had planted there.

Meanwhile, my sister and I would be in the car rolling our eyes and shrinking down in the back seat. We hoped no one would know we were with those two trespassing Italian ladies. To add to our humiliation, my grandmother would wave at the car trying to get us to come over so she could show us the tomato plants.

Or maybe they were basil plants. I can never remember. I'm pretty sure it was a vegetable or an herb. Everyone else's relatives seemed terribly interested in vegetables too, so it didn't seem odd at the time. After all, almost everyone I knew was Italian. If they weren't Italian, they were Irish - which, according to my relatives, was close enough.

When my mother was young, the community had been farmland and orchards. By the time I was growing up, it had grown into a thriving suburb. Thankfully, the apple orchards are still there. Without them, you would never know that there'd been farms where the malls and the huge grocery stores are now.

Under the Church Beacon is a statue of the Virgin Mary. I have never passed by that Church with my grandmother and not heard her tell me that the pigeons on the Madonna's head are there to protect her. Once, my cousins and I argued with my grandmother that the pigeons were only on the Madonna's head because the light kept them warm. She looked at us and said, "Don't you ever question the power of God. Even the pigeons are smart enough to know His goodness. This is a sacred spot."

It was hard for us to think of it as a sacred place, because the town had converted the old church into a library before we were old enough to remember it any other way. But we'd never seen my grandmother so angry, and it shut us up in a hurry. For grandma, there were a few things in life that were sacrosanct and the Madonna was one of them.

My parents' generation was different than the one that came before them. Like most people from Greece their age, my parents were the first generation of their families to graduate from high school. They were also the first children in their families to go to college. Neither of my parents went far away, and both of them studied to be teachers. My grandparents insisted that education turned my parents away from the church. I think it was less that they'd turned away, than that they were looking from a different direction.

It was difficult to walk through my grandparent's home without tripping over a statue of angels or other religious icons. By contrast, my parents wouldn't be caught dead with a statue of the Madonna in their living room. They were, in many ways, your typical secularized middle-class American parents. My sister and I, quite predictably, became your typical secularized kids. Our Italian Catholic heritage showed itself mostly in terms of guilt, good food, and a strong sense of family. So my sister and I were often very much surprised when our parents would snap back into more traditional personas. We felt as if we had no way of predicting what was going to set off their knee-jerk cultural reactions.

Despite all of her snide remarks about the Prodigal Son and Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac, my mother kept a Bible by her bedside. I think she still sleeps with rosary beads under her pillow. And even my father, more rebellious in terms of religion, had a healthy Italian resistance to promoting disharmony in the community without a really good reason. They projected a non-ethnic veneer, but they were firmly rooted in their own upbringings.

One particularly memorable struggle between my parents and their daughters centered on the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ." When this movie debuted in the area, people picketed the film on the grounds that it was "blasphemy." Of course, my sister and I planned to see it. My parents had always allowed us to read anything we wanted to, so we were caught off guard by my mother's crying when we told her we were going to see this movie. She forbade us to see the film until we were out of her house. It was one of the first, but not the last, reminder that, whatever my grandparents might have thought, Italian Catholic values are always lurking in the community - even in my parents.

And yet, for all the perceived provincialism, my parents encouraged me to go away to college. The Rochester Institute of Technology and Monroe Community College were not "good enough" for me. The parents of my friends seemed to feel the same way. My generation, the third generation of Italians in the area, was the first to truly leave the nest. And our parents wanted it that way. Our parents wanted us to go to prestigious colleges and bring back home with us the American respectability that ethnicity denied our immigrant ancestors.

The irony was that sending us away seemed to have had an effect quite different from anything our parents could have anticipated. Marc from Cornell, Joe from New York University, Jeannie from Rutgers, and Stephanie from Smith College all came back to town in the summers politically reformed and absolutely resistant to any economic or professional goals our parents had for us. What we had seen "away" contrasted starkly to the remarkable uniformity of opinion and experience of our hometown.

We would come home for holidays and vacations and we would ask our parents impertinent questions. "Why doesn't Kodak have a union?" "Why does The Church seem to actively discriminate against women?" (It was always "The Church" as if there were only one.) We would arrogantly admonish them for racist, sexist, and heterosexist remarks, and our parents would stare back at us with confusion. They did not even know there was such a thing as heterosexism until we told them about it. One summer, some college students took a truck and ran over the teeny white crosses on a church lawn that memorialized aborted fetuses. Everything was changing.

"The college students" would vow ritualistically to one another that we would never move back home. We would rant about what seemed like our limited and limiting roots. Our town seemed uncultured. The family homes with the lions, or fountains, or Italian stucco siding seemed horribly tacky. But, in spite of all the rhetoric, there was much that still bound us there.

Our town had a sense of family, dignity, hospitality and priority that was unique in the world. We wondered if those values could only be found at home. I think though, that we took them with us out into the world.

After college, I didn't move back home. Neither did my sister. There was law-school, and then there was marriage, and now I live in a city that dwarfs my hometown entirely. I know only enough about my neighbors to know that most of them don't have Italian surnames. This maddens my mother. We may have known too much about our neighbors back home - especially that one family that drank too much and drove their car through the back of the garage - but at least we knew them. That's her thinking.

She and my father ostensibly have plans to move to be closer to my sister and me. But ultimately, they pull back, perhaps fearing to leave the only place that has ever been "home" for them. "I bet you can't get good Italian bread where you are," my mother complains. And she's right. It's even worse than she knows. I haven't even been able to find good pizza here.

Perhaps the parents at home seem to fear that they pushed their children too far out of the nest. But the light of that little beacon on Paddy Hill shines far. It served as a guide to all the other generations who lived under it, and it's also a guide for mine. After all, there's a certain freedom to explore the wilds when you know that, if lost, you can always follow the light back home.