Aurora
I’m not sure when I first met Aurora Montenaro. I think it was in eighth or ninth grade when her son Pete was recuperating from a knee injury in St. Mary’s hospital and a bunch of us went down there to create havoc with him.
Peter often proved a challenge to the educational establishment. Our Bishop Scully High School Principal Father Anselment has said, “Peter and I occasionally had diffferences of opinion on the administration of the school.”
Oddly enough Sister Maria Christina discovered a similar pattern in her English class. Once she attempted to settle some disruption issues by spacing Pete and Mark Olbrych and myself as far apart as was physically possible.
She failed miserably. I leave it to my biographers to dig up the details. (Peter, naturally. went on to become a school psychologist).
Pete and I had more than a few things in common, and one of them included his future wife, Mary Alice Mezzio. All three of us had mothers giving birth while we were in high school, all in their forties. Sean and Stephen came within days of each other in May and Aurora brought forth Anthony the same October.
After high school I went to work for the Montenaros as Snow Cone Bob, and worked alongside Snow Cone Pete, Snow Cone Frank (Romeo) and Snow Cone Mr. Harrington the Mailman.
And I got to know Aurora.
Taken as a group the Montenaros were the hardest-working family I have ever met. They would have made great pioneers. None of them worked harder, and with more cheer, than Aurora.
She was simply a wonderful woman. Selfless, caring, devout, long-suffering (she had five rambunctious boys before producing Marilyn, who frankly could hold her own with her brothers as far as I could tell), and in endless motion, whether working in the big kitchen making sandwiches for the food truck, or mixing the snow cone syrup, or cashing us in at the end of the day, or teaching Marilyn to use an iron, or just trying to figure out where everyone was.
Once, early in my second season, I had a difference of opinion about the administration of the snow cone business when Jimmy Dick, who couldn’t drive, got to milk the city swimming pool traffic by himself instead of sharing it with the rest of us. I tendered my resignation.
Aurora came to me with tears in her eyes and begged me to stay.
Aw, shucks. I stayed. And my commission on those fifteen cent snow cones paid my way through college.
I always felt right at home at the Big M farm. Aurora made everyone feel that way.
Years and years later I performed weddings for a couple of the kids. After the last one Aurora came up to me and said, “Bob, what do we owe you?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “You’re family!”
And then the tears came again.
As they did for me this week when I picked up the paper and learned that she had died.
There’s probably no grief worse than losing a mother, but losing your friend’s mother can come pretty close, especially when it’s someone who did so much for so many for so long, who loved so well, and who left the world so very much better than she found it.
