Vol. 34 - Nature Boy

On DNA and Being a Little Bit Napolitano

Before I had kids, I was a pretty hardcore nurture guy.

I thought a child’s upbringing, his or her environment, privilege or lack thereof, the support of their parents (or lack thereof) and interests and needs of their immediate communities are what created the grown people that kids become.

And in most ways, I still believe that. My son is my son because of who my wife and I are and how we’re choosing to raise him. He’s going to be the man he becomes because of how we choose to interact with him, the ways we let him see the world, and how we handle ourselves as people when he’s watching us.

But if there’s one parenting adage has rang very true, it’s the idea that kids very much are who they are when they come out. And that’s often who, in some ways, they’ll be forever. If the first four years of my son’s life are any indicator, he is who he’s always been; loud, rambunctious, cuddly, extremely emotional, impatient, and very, very daring. He never crawled; just stood up and walked one day. He taught himself to ride a two-wheeler when he was just two-and-a-half. He’s fearless (unless it’s The Dark we’re talking about) and always has been. But he also wants to make sure everyone around him is okay. He cracks jokes when his friends are sad and tries to make his baby sister laugh when she’s crying. These are things he’s never been taught. These things are just who he is.

He’s also a petty criminal. It’s in his nature, something that we’ve never displayed for him, never showed him, never expressed was okay. Every day, as we drive home from preschool, he’ll pull from his pocket some little toy he’s absconded with; a Lego or a Matchbox car. And on those days he’s sent to school in clothes that don’t have pockets, he’ll unfurl his haul of contraband from his underwear. He once unpackaged a toy in Target and just walked out with it. He often leaves his ill-gotten gains in the back of our truck, which tells me he has no intent to ever play with them. He’s in it for the thrill of the snatch, I guess. Because he assumes whatever’s not nailed down is there for the taking, just like his great-grandfather.

Let me back up.

My grandfather was a petty thief. Not in a way that ever harmed anyone. If anything, my grandfather was an upstanding citizen, a civic and political leader in his community in mid-century Jersey City, New Jersey. He took care of people, got everyone he knew jobs, made sure kids citywide had safe places to play and hang out in the summertime.

But he also assumed that anything not nailed down belonged to him.

Which is why the slide on my childhood swingset was spraypainted “Property of JCNJ Dept. of Parks and Rec.” Same with the basketball hoop beside the house I grew up in (and often even the basketballs themselves).

To this day, I have hard plastic trays in my kitchen that were once stolen on a snowy morning from a Jersey City diner.

“They don’t fuckin’ need em,” my grandfather said, as he stuffed a small stack of six or eight hard plastic trays beneath his shirt. “Now all you kids’ll have sleds.”

My cousins and I spent the rest of that afternoon sliding down a nearby hill on diner trays.

One afternoon, when I was ten or eleven, he took me for a ride.

“Come on, Mikey. We’re gonna go get some stones for my garden,” he said. I assumed we were going to the nearby garden store.

Instead, we arrived at the new shopping plaza which was just built in my little Jersey Shore town. In lieu of grass, which was always hard to grow given our proximity to the ocean, all of the little islands throughout the parking lot were filled with large, four or five pound gray stones. My grandfather pulled his van beside one of the islands, popped the trunk, hopped out, and began piling stones from the islands into the back of his van. He was in no hurry and made no attempt to be covert. He yelled at me to get out and help him.

“If you act like you belong there, no one will ever bother you,” he once told me when I was six, maybe seven. It was my first lesson in larceny.

He would blame it on being Napolitano (even though he was born and raised in Jersey City). He told me that all Napolitans were crooks. More likely, it was the fact that he was a child of The Depression.

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I see a lot of my grandfather in my son. Not in looks of course, as my son at just four years old is more than half my grandfather’s height. He’s blond-haired and blue-eyed, nothing like the olive-skinned Italian-American my grandfather was. He’s tall and slender. My grandfather was built like a boulder.

Rather, I see it in his kindness and in the ways he looks out for the quietest, smallest, and meekest kids in his class. I see it in his toughness and how he always finishes what he sets out to do. I see it in his ability to make people around him feel better, to make them feel like they matter. I see it in his stubbornness, his toughness, and his fearlessness.

But nothing makes me draw that line from great-grandfather to great-grandson than a shared set of sticky fingers, the nature of which seems to be imbued in him.

Because though he may be less Italian-American than me, who is less Italian-American than my mother, who was less Italian-American than her father, whose own father emigrated from Napoli more than a hundred years ago, my son, 1/16th Napolitano, has the blood of a thousand petty criminals in his veins.

Because all Napolitans are crooks. At least that’s what my grandfather used to tell me.

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