Inside OLLI
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Standing at the Edge of the Pool by Cathy Fiorello
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Standing at the Edge of the Pool is Cathy Fiorello’s second memoir. The stories take us on Cathy’s journey from her Italian immigrant upbringing in Brooklyn to starting over in San Francisco at 75. Along the way, we celebrate her successes as she reaches for a life beyond the boundaries for a woman of her time and upbringing. The book is an intimate coming-of-age story.
As Cathy tells it, the book evolved from a college paper her granddaughter Leah wrote contrasting the images of womanhood then and now. After three days of conversation, when the inevitable question of regrets came up, Cathy gave what she thought was a shallow answer. “I said I regretted that I had never learned to swim.” On further thought, she realized her answer had real depth. The memoir, in 39 short chapters, relates the times when she jumped in and the times when she hung back. Cathy was the fifth and youngest child in a noisy, extended Italian family living in a several-block area of Brooklyn, New York. The earliest chapters bring to life the immigrant struggle and survival during the Depression. Reading and writing were Cathy’s favorite things then; they still are. “Because I read I’m never lonely; because I write, I’m never bored. And these are activities you never outgrow.” Protected by her older sister Eleanor from needing to assert herself, Cathy first defied her mother’s expectations (like mothers in most Italian immigrant families, Cathy’s mother held the power) when she decided to attend Hunter College in NYC, “the first battle in what would be an ongoing war.” Three years later, the struggle became more intense when Cathy, previously the quietest and most obedient daughter, wanted to attend a Summer Writers Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the chapter, “Forget You Have a Mother!” Cathy writes of the struggle to convince her mother to let her travel so far from family and home. Acceding to her daughter’s relentless pressure, her mother reluctantly gave in, only to face another challenge. The program cost $500, much more than Cathy could save from her part-time job at Macy’s. |
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Like many immigrant mothers, Cathy’s mother had scrimped to purchase an insurance policy to pay for her daughters’ weddings. (There’s a charming section on the insurance man coming around every week to collect the ten cents due on a policy.) “I cringed but I rose to the challenge. I was already in deep water; it was swim or sink now.” Arguing that she had no plans to marry but instead wanted to work in New York and travel, Cathy finally convinced her mother to use the insurance money to pay for the Conference.
Once away from home and experiencing the fabled life on an idyllic college campus, Cathy wasted no time on academic pursuits. “I was failing my classes and I didn’t care, because I was passing another test: I went from timid to not-so-timid. It was a beginning.” Once in the pool, she rarely retreated. Quitting a first job that locked her into a secretarial position; pursuing work in Manhattan as a copywriter; experiencing the delights and thrills of life as a single working woman in New York City; moving to the suburbs, adopting two children, and finally learning to drive; studying public speaking and discovering she enjoyed the spotlight; and re-entering the workplace after her children had grown—Cathy may have entered the pool later than many women her age, but when she did, she kicked and splashed with the best of them. Ten years into their retirement, “at peace with the idea of comfortably living out my remaining years in the suburb where we raised our children,” Cathy and her husband relocated to San Francisco. The decision wasn’t easy. Her daughter and family lived in New York, as well as their friends of many years. “I didn’t know,” she writes, “that taking that risk would give me a future at a time when I thought my life was all about the past.” Cathy Fiorello has always been a writer, but she has not always shared her writing. Writing classes with Barbara Rose Brooker at OLLI at SF State gave her the impetus to complete and publish Standing at the Edge of the Pool as well as her earlier book, Al Capone Had a Lovely Mother (2012). “None of this would have happened if I hadn’t moved to San Francisco at 75, found OLLI, and taken that class with Barbara. And if I didn’t have the support of the writers’ group we created in that first class.” Standing at the Edge of the Pool is a tale of what life was like when, in her granddaughter’s words, strong women had to “stand for what they believed in and push against what was expected of them.” The book is an intimate and beautifully written portrayal of times past and challenges met through the eyes of a woman who used books and writing to find her voice. Editor's note: an excerpt from Standing at the Edge of the Pool, "Rose," is published in the Nonfiction section of this issue. The book is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
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