House Special: Carm

NEW FEATURE ALERT! Along with the Adventures in Leaving the House, I'm resurrecting my "Specials" feature from past sites/blogs. My House Specials will essentially consist of pieces that don't neatly fit into any of the other categories. 

How often will I be doing these? No idea. Hopefully not too often, as this House Special is a lightly edited version of the eulogy I gave for my grandmother last week.


Carmella Faccinto was born on April 23, 1928 in West Hartford, the daughter of the Rocco and Antoinette (Gallinoto) Faccinto. She was the third eldest of seven kids and tall for her age. In an era where schoolchildren were seated by height, she was sent to the back of the class with the other boys. Carm was no timid wallflower, and wasted no time joining in with their shenanigans.

One time during phys ed, she tried to impress the boys by charging across the soccer field to drill the ball with a booming kick… and missed, and fell over, Charlie Brown-style. She did succeed in catching the eye of one boy who promptly told his buddies, “That’s the kind of gal I want to marry.”

And he did. In 1948, Carmella married the love of her life, Kenneth Nelson. The two resided in New Britain, where they raised their three children. Carm was a fanatic for keeping things neat, and every Saturday morning was spent with the kids cleaning the whole house (I really only bring this up to point out to the kids here today how easy they have it). It was also here that Carm developed a parenting style – one that I have adopted myself at times – of “parenting by terrorism.” For example, to make sure my mother and my aunt took their afternoon nap, Carmella glued the eyes of a teddy bear to the bedroom wall and told the girls she would be watching them to make sure they stayed in bed. The two toddlers would just lay in bed, petrified, feeling the beedy button eyes stuck to the wall staring at them. Later, when my aunt threatened to run away from home, my grandmother helped her pack a suitcase and waved goodbye from the front door. My aunt only made it to the top of the street before running back home.

This is not to say she wasn’t loving to her children – far from it. After tucking them in at night, Carm would stand in the doorway and sing to her kids, “How much do I love you? / I’ll tell you no lie /  How deep is the ocean? / How high is the sky?”

Now by the time I came into the picture, Carm was working at the candy counter at Sears. Even as a small boy, I could not imagine a more perfect job for a grandmother to have.

I remember Saturday afternoons spent over at the house on O’Donnell Road, sitting on the porch on this white, wrought-iron love seat with yellow cushions and generally being bored while all the grownups did grown-up stuff like talking and… more talking. The only toy in the whole room – the only thing I could play with – was a magnetic rail twirler, much like this one here.

Pictured Above: What people did with themselves before smartphones.

So I would sit there and play with this thing while all the adults talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t occur to me until I started writing this that it wasn’t that there were no toys at Grandma Nelson’s house but that this was her toy. 

And that totally makes sense, because part of her refused to grow up. This is the same woman who loved collecting animatronic decorations – singing fish, dancing Santas and, most disturbingly a small Christmas tree that you thought was just a tabletop Christmas tree until you got to close to it and it’s large, eyes would roooooll open and a deep, slurred voice would slowly boom “Meeeeeerrry Christmas!”

This is the same woman who bought herself a Rubix Cube and when she couldn’t figure it out, she peeled off all the stickers to make it look like she solved it… and after showing off her victory, attempted to put all the stickers back.

This is the same woman who officially stopped aging in 1968, insisting that she was 39 years old. It wasn’t until 40 years later when she admitted that maybe, just maybe, she was a tad older than 39.

I haven’t even gotten into how she played cards. Because, Carm played cards. Canasta, cribbage, rummy, hearts, whathaveyou, she played it all and she played to win – which she usually did. We used to kid that she sold her soul for her card-playing abilities and about her ruthlessness, but she was never as bad as all that. I remember when she and my grandfather first started spending their summers in a mobile home, in a park down on Route 85 that isn’t there anymore, I would get to spend a week with them there all by myself, and we would play crazy eights and go fish and gin rummy, and I loved it. In the afternoons we’d go down to the watering hole – I’m sure we called it a “pond,” but it was a watering hole – to go swimming, and then maybe even spend a bit of time playing arcade games in the little game room by the lockers. At night, we’d fold down the table and convert the bench into a bed, and I thought that was the coolest. I loved that week. I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I wish I could have told her that I remember those times and that I cherish them.

By the 1990s, Ken and Carm had both retired and sold the house on O’Donnell Road and bought a mobile home in Norwich. Ken and Carmella spent their days together, where Carmella beat my grandfather mercilessly at cards, razzed him with an alarm she rigged on the refrigerator that oinked like a pig any time he’d try to sneak in for a snack, and occasionally threatened to trade him in for a younger model.

But generally, Carm would talk my grandfather’s ear off, much the same way I’ve been talking your ear off. I know I’m not the only one with stories about my grandmother and I don’t want to hog all the good ones, so I’m going to pause here and invite anyone who wants to come up and share a story to do so.

[at this point, my sister and my aunt shared some memories]

Thank you for sharing your stories and memories. I know I’ve been carrying on quite a bit, with lots of tangents and asides, but I'm doing that intentionally. We’re all mortal – we wouldn’t be here today if we weren’t – but it’s been said that the only true immortality is in the stories we tell each other, because great stories will live forever. And my grandmother had so many great stories.

Carmella passed away in her home on Sunday, February 25, 2018 at the age of 39. Besides her parents and husband, Carmella was predeceased by her sister Ann, her brothers-in-law Charles, Whitey, “Bud” and “Ritchie,” and her intensely over-fed cat, Kramer.

But Carmella is survived by more than just those of us here this morning. Her siblings in Florida and Arizona are thinking of her today, as are her numerous nieces and nephews, the mailman she used to play cribbage with every day during his lunch break, the folks working the deli whom she’d make change gloves every time they went to handle something new, a frightening number of QVC phone operators who knew her by name, and countless friends at the Windsor Senior Center and Fitch Court, the apartment building geared towards seniors where she's lived the past six or seven years. You'd think the loss of someone at Fitch Court would be just a fact of life, but the folks there were so heartbroken – residents and staff alike – by Carm's passing that they actually brought in a grief counselor. I hope my grandmother knew just how much of an impact she made on the people in her life.  

She is missed.