Today would be the 110th birthday of my godmother, Josephine Nicastro Sharp, known to everyone as Aunt Josie. She was born in Sicily on April 4, 1904. Though the place is uncertain, I received an astonishing astrological confirmation that I was in the right place when I put my feet on the ground in Piazza Armerina, Sicily, one day in 1996.
 |
|
Me with Aunt Josie outside her home in Brooklyn, 1992, when she was 88 years old. Photo by Sabine Ferandou.
|
As an immigrant from the Old World, Aunt Josie is my most direct root into my mother country and gives me some claim to being a first-generation American.
Aunt Josie was my godmother in the true sense of the word, taking the place of my parents, particularly my mother, in various times of extended absence. She also helped raise my father, and was his mother’s sister, so she knew something of the family influences that were at work in my life.
Josie was the most interesting blend of forgiving and shrewd; faithful and worldly; loving and insisting on integrity, particularly from herself. A deeply spiritual woman, the Roman Catholic Church was her spiritual home, particularly in her relationship to Msgr. Jolly, who ran the local parish.
Before being married, Josie worked scrubbing floors and then was in the typing pool of Westinghouse. She never finished high school but was highly literate and an expert secretary. Like many of her generation, she scrimped and saved and could stretch a dollar. She was a clever stock trader and made something of her modest, handmade fortune. My father said that she insisted on having a separate stock account from her husband, my uncle Howard Sharp, because their theories of trading were so different.