PAH!  #147    January 2002

by Mark Morelli

“Mark, Lisa, Olivia -- you are loved. I’m not fishing for a hug. Just want to give you one.”

Back in 1995, my friend Sam Cucchiara, a retired English teacher thirty years my senior, accepted my invitation to come to a retreat of Catholic men at my parish, St. Peter the Apostle of River Edge, NJ.

It would last about 24 hours and consist of personal spiritual talks, discussions, meals, periods of prayer, and a mass.

I was part of the planning committee for the parish's first Cornerstone Retreat. We prepared meals, set up tables, unfolded row after row of uncomfortable cots in the school gym, where at 3 a.m. the collective, synchronized snoring of 75 men turned the place into the world's largest accordion.

Some men gave personal talks that illustrated their bumpy, circuitous journeys toward God. One of them was Bill Bracken, a Teamster trucker who every morning left his Hackensack home extra early to practice Zen meditation with a priest before hauling retail goods throughout New York City.

After a bleak period, Bill embraced Catholicism as an adult, and like many converts, understood the faith better than most who grow up in it. He discussed the appeal of Zen meditation.

“Breathe in, breathe out,” he said, explaining that recognizing your blessings begins by becoming cognizant of each breath you take. From that awareness grows awareness of larger and larger spheres.

“Breathe in, breathe out,” he said. And he had us all doing it in a moment where Feng Shui met Father O’Malley.

This was a miracle. Not only do most Catholic men not talk about spirituality, many of these guys were there only because their wives had signed them up. Worse, the retreat coincided with NCAA finals.

But “breathe in, breathe out” was novelty enough to get the men to thinking more deeply about cherished blessings, and slowing down to think for the first time about blessings which they have shamefully overlooked.

And after they got over their misconception of Zen meditation, (I think a few of them thought Bill Bracken was going to roll out a statue of Buddha,) these guys wouldn't shut up. Like dominoes falling, each man opened up, newly liberated to discuss without embarrassment the state of his soul. The sound of broken shackles was overwhelming. Although these men talked about stuff that’s run-of-the-mill over white wine during lady’s-night-out, it gushed like a long neglected water tower that finally gave.

Sam sat at my table. We both were delighted to witness the room flower. As the night went on and on, our eyes met and we were overwhelmed as we witnessed the novelty of man after man rising to tell uncharacteristically emotional stories. I recall that moment as a rich treat, our communicating without words, since the basis of our friendship had been in our mutual love for words, and in our constant correspondence by mail.

Our paths first crossed in 1989 when he became a subscriber to PAH!, which was then a print newsletter. I later began contributing essays and stories to Slugfest, Ltd., the literary journey he helped to edit. We met in person in 1991, so as you can see, our friendship was founded solely upon the written word for two years.

The baby of something like 11 children of Sicilian immigrants, Sam’s letters described travels to the corners of America to visit his far-flung family. The nephew who ran a hot dog business in Hawaii. The Florida niece whose 9-year-old son recited from King Lear. His older sisters, whose rich, Old World customs would sadly die with them. The third generation who broke free from the tyranny of some of those customs. His observations were peppered with rich quotations from St. Paul to Emily Dickinson to Jodi Lanciani, a high school-age flutist and poet he knew from Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Sam rented a senior citizen's apartment for a song and would spend long stretches of time away from it, hopping on cheap flights to Europe and crashing at hostels, sending me letters filled with stories of poets, musicians and scholars with whom he dined, stuffing the envelope with mass cards, snapshots, colorful Czech money to amuse my daughters, and descriptions of vagabond adventures that gave vicarious thrills to this diaper-changer whose big escapes consisted of grocery shopping.

He was a connector of people, not married to one but married to all, a cynic and optimist at once, for his was no fairy tale affirmation of life. He was grizzled and growly as anybody. Once, while on the phone with him, my infant daughter screamed in the background.

"Cry out, Olivia, let your voice be heard!" proclaimed Sam, who lifted every voice. But the old bachelor all too soon tired of the baby's howling, added: "Okay, knock it off, sweetheart, Sam wants to talk to Daddy!"

Sam signed off many of his subsequent letters with “breathe in, breathe out.” His was a ministry of affirmation. He was a recognizer of people. I was going to say, a listener, and that is rare enough, but he was more than that. He quoted you back to yourself, distilling the best of what you gave, and he showed you, on a silver platter, your worth as a creative human being. He further demonstrated his support by helping writers and artists get their words published, not only in Slugfest, Ltd., but also in other publications. I even found my work being published in journals I’d never even known about thanks to Sam Cucchiara, literary yenta.

Talent is never enough. It requires the leavening agent of recognition. Sam was our Ed Sullivan, a tireless recognizer of fledgling poets, flutists, and writers and painters, in addition to those who ought to be one.

Sam Cucchiara -- who died, peacefully I hear, on December 9 at age 71 -- was a former seminarian who considered the sin of omission our worst. The sin of not saying “thank you,” “great job,” “your smile warmed my day,” “that picture meant so much to me,” “you make my life better,” “I saw your picture in the paper,” and “I love you.”

How do you avoid committing the sin of omission? Breathe in, breathe out and be a recognizer of things. It requires more than piety. It requires imagination.

After learning that Sam was gone, I flipped through the hundred-plus letters he sent me since the late 80s. Some were typed, some scrawled on buses, some postcards sent from abroad, some Christmas cards sent in July. Our lives were enriched by his letters. I’m sure his experiences were equally deepened by writing to us about them.

At first I wanted to put them in chronological order and re-read them in the order I received them. But that illustrates what’s wrong with me. I’m middle-aged with two growing daughters, a calendar that’s chock-a-block with kids’ activities, shelves filled with unread books, and a file cabinet filled with unfinished plays, essays, cartoons --- a museum of literary impotence. To regain focus, I’ve declared war on clutter, which is good for the most part, but bad when I overreact. For instance, my neck almost blisters with impatience when my 5-year-old-daughter takes 15 minutes to brush her teeth because she impulsively rolls herself into the shower curtain, or sticks her tongue out in the mirror playacting, or in the middle of brushing bolts to her room to tell something important to her doll. Julia exists in what Sam called the shining now. And as my stomach tightens, I envy her and wonder how I can reclaim a little of the shining now for myself. So I did not put his letters in order. I plucked them out as if they were snapshots in a shoebox.

And so the wonder of Zen meditation saturated the room filled with Catholic New Jersey men on retreat. Salvatore Cucchiara scratched his beard, gave me one last look, rose, walked toward the hallway, waved his Sicilian arms, and said in his gravely voice: "Breathe in and ---”

He stepped into the men’s room, and we could hear him finish in the distant echo of the lavatory:

“Breathe out!”

We all laughed, took a break, and let the heavy thoughts settle.

I mention Sam Cucchiara in the essay “Give A Little Whistle” published in Friction magazine.

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