nourishing obscurity

Can’t find the album North by Graham Connors – there’s a track called Sicilian Born on it.     It’s not on youtube and the only things available are 30 second teasers [one below]:

Sicilian born

Frustrating. Can’t even buy it. Anyway, the lyrics are the thing and here they are:

He was Sicilian born, a fisherman’s son
Came over in ’23
Worked like a dog for a couple of years
Then sent for his family
Well he worked on the docks and worked on the railways
He worked till his back was gone
Bought a semi-detached in Erskineville
Moved in and paved the lawn.

His three boys grew and married
Young blonde and blue-eyed girls
And soon enough there were gradkids coming
To look in on his world
And they were fair and blue-eyed too
To him they all looked the same
If Sicilian blood flowed through their veins
You’d only know it by their last name.

And he never talked in his native tongue
And he never talked about going home
And he told me once the reason why
He said: “Home’s not where you’re born,
Home is where a man’s prepared to die.”

He outlived his wife Maria
She died in ’82
And for a long time after
He was lost for what to do
He’d sit alone at the window and doze the days away
So I didn’t see him much anymore
Unless he happened to wave.

And he never talked in his native tongue
And he never talked about going home
And he told me once the reason why
He said: “Home’s not where you’re born,
Home is where a man’s prepared to die.”

Well I went up north on a two week spell
About a month ago
And to my surprise when I came home
I found his place had sold
I called the other neighbours to find out where he’d gone
They said: “He packed up and just went back
To wherever he came from.

And he never talked in his native tongue
And he never talked about going home
And he told me once the reason why
He said: “Home’s not where you’re born,
Home is where a man’s prepared to die.”

Makes one reflect.

Home’s an interesting concept.   You can be home and yet lightyears away when your country’s changed beyond recognition and everyone you knew has gone.    So you might go back to what was your home before and it’s changed too, there’s no one you know and so you go back to the one before that.     Same thing.

Some people remember you, most are friendly, you don’t belong.

My aunt did that.   She went to Australia, came back [she'd kept her home in Yorkshire], went downunder again, met someone, married, he eventually died, she came back here.   I think that lasted a few years but it wasn’t the same so she went downunder again to her seaside home and that’s the last I heard.   Don’t know where she finished up.

People are dying off all around you too and then you lose links through busyness or neglect and never get them back again.  people shift house, marry, have kids and there you are.

Only thing to do is put to sea.

Filed under: History & Culture, Society & human issues