Omerta literally means manhood.  It is a code of honor, a code of silence recognized by immigrant communities who established their traditions in the United States.  Manliness is defined by one’s ability to be independent from the authorities and to remain detached from their influence.

Uncle Louie thought he was a gangster.  He was my father’s younger brother and the youngest of four, my Aunt Helen being the oldest.  Everyone has an Aunt Helen hanging about somewhere in their family tree. The name may not be the same, but the embodied spirit of wanton disregard for the well-being of the rest of the world seems to be a universal characteristic of at least one family member.  Her children grew into equally unpleasant pieces of humanity who with their mother as a mentor had learned a proper disdain for almost everyone.  Aunt Sissy was in between Uncle Louie and dad and as a teen was thin, frail, and considered unmarriageable.  That was until she met Eddie who was equally thin and frail and made money working circus sideshows as Eddie the Rail.  The two of them managed with little apparent effort to quickly produce a family of four.  When Aunt Sissy began to put on weight Uncle Eddie, her beloved, deserted his bride and brood.

Aunt Sissy gained weight and looked healthy, for Aunt Helen gaining weight was the opposite. She swore it was from a medical condition of which she could not remember the name.  My dad sitting back in a chair at the dining room table with his right arm dangling over the back while swirling a glass of beer would look up and say, “Overeating.”

The family learned of Uncle Eddie’s tragic death in a telephone call.  Sobbing heavily Aunt Sissy kept repeating in between snorts that Eddie was killed falling from a freight train somewhere in Kansas. Eddie the Rail was killed hopping the rails. There is a perverse justice in there somewhere.

While lying in bed, enjoying the early cooking aromas on Thanksgiving morning, I could hear my mom and dad having a discussion.  As usual they were using hushed voices in the kitchen and my guess was they were expressing concern over Uncle Louie. You would figure that there would be some unwritten rule about no nagging during a holiday, but that would be too much to ask for. Holidays are like that.  By design they force you to relive and remember the good, the bad, and the ugly. Or solve everyone’s problems.  I could hear Uncle Louie snoring in the bedroom next to mine.  Every once in a while he would gasp for air and there would be a brief pause of silence.

We never saw much of Uncle Louie during the course of the year, but like the rest of my father's family at one point or another they showed up around the “holidays” any day in-between the weekend before Thanksgiving until January second.  

Grandma’s family had this old country holiday tradition of money envelopes at Christmas.   To my knowledge no one ever claimed a particular “old country” they were from and we had no other “old country” traditions.  The holiday money envelopes were backed up by some kind of legacy that required the oldest living sibling to pass out the cash.  As the sole survivor Grandma was bound by family tradition to provide for the children. Some of these kids were reaching sixty, but they still came and plopped themselves in our kitchen or living room eating mom’s food, drinking dad’s beer and complaining about the television reception.  Uncle Louie and dad used to say that the legacy was the remnants of a large sum of money paid to the family to leave their home country after some kind of scandal.  The scandal being the real mystery. After years of contemplation, Dad and Uncle Louie had decided that a distant relative had put the daughter of a wealthy landowner in the family way. For everyone to save face her parents dumped a lot of cash in the man’s pockets and put him on a boat, never to be seen in the homeland again.  Mom liked to believe that he had paid too much attention to a young lady who was above his social status.  But the rest is basically the same, they dumped a lot of cash in his pockets and put him on a boat. Eventually ending up in Scranton, Pennsylvania he began a family whose descendants are a bunch of rather unusual types who love to freeload.

They would linger about eating, drinking, and maybe staying over for a couple of days at Grandma’s next door. We lived in a double block home in Scranton owned by my father’s family.  We lived on one side and my demented grandmother occupied the other.  The two sides of the house shared everything by way of open passages allowing travel back and forth through the basement.  It would not be unusual for me to come down to breakfast and find cousins sitting at our kitchen table slopping down the last of the cereal. As we all got older bathroom time became increasingly limited.  There were no showers just two old claw footed bathtubs that took about a half hour to fill. “There are buckets out in the garage” was Uncle Louie’s favorite holiday joke if you needed to use one of the two occupied bathrooms.

After receiving their Christmas cards they would slowly disappear back home to celebrate Christmas free of any family obligations. There was a spell for a couple years where a few real diehards would come for Christmas and stay until the New Year. It used to drive my mother nuts never knowing who was who, how they were related, where they expected to stay, and for how long. One year my mother had a break down, secretly packed a bag and went to Atlantic City or so the note said. I kind of believe she grabbed a bus to Wilkes-Barre and hid out in a hotel blowing the money she had hidden over the year on room service.  While my dad’s immediate family was small, grandma’s retinue of estranged and familiar relatives was a much larger troublesome brood.  Anyone who was fortunate to meet any of the extended family would in all likelihood have generously donated to mom’s rest and relaxation fund.

Thanksgiving was Uncle Louie’s favorite holiday.  Typically he would show up at our house sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday and park himself on the sofa within arm’s reach of the telephone just in case anyone who needed him could get right through. I can never remember any phone calls for him. He loved turkey, Thanksgiving parades, and stuffing in about that order. He brought the booze and loved to share his Canadian whiskey with my dad. The two of them would sit up late into the night doing shots and beer until someone either puked or passed out. They would share stories, talk about their mother, make fun of their sisters, and get drunker and drunker until around about midnight one of them would start reliving high school football glory days.  This would result in a friendly toss around of an old football eventually breaking something of value to my mother and then the night was officially called over and done. The entire sequence of events would be repeated over and over until Uncle Louie left to return to New York City.  The day Uncle