Before one can tell a tale properly one needs to go further back in time. Five years before I was born my mother gave birth to a dead child. She carried the fetus for the entire term and then, horrifically, the baby strangled on the umbilical cord and was delivered that way. He would have been her first child (Peter) the name then given to her second child that came two years later. I was born three years after that, and they named me Philip, which would have been Peter’s name if his older brother had lived.

One can only imagine what my mother went through having such a thing happen. Alas, she really never did recover from that horror, and for working class families in those days few went for therapy. The ‘Well off’ as they were called then did have that luxury, but folks like my Mom and Dad could not afford such a cost. So, she relied on her own family and a few close friends to walk her through. Yet, the pain of such a loss never left her, perhaps for her entire life.

My mother became overprotective of my brother and me. Even when we moved to a new neighborhood she would not allow her third grader to walk the three or four blocks to school by myself. I would fight her on this, so she compromised with me. She would walk across the street all the way to the school entrance. She put up with all my cursing as we both made it to our destination. Coming home from school was a real bitch, as all my classmates could see her waiting for me outside. If this was ‘Tough love’ I didn’t want any of that crap!

Getting ahead of myself a bit, because that was when I was eight or nine. The real crux of this tale is when I was six or seven and we stayed at a bungalow colony for the summer. My father wanted us to get off of the hot Brooklyn concrete streets and used their vacation savings to allow us to get away for two months. My mother was a very social person and really enjoyed being upstate in the mountains. She made friends easily and loved to swim and play Mah Jong. My father would come up each weekend and he too enjoyed playing gin rummy with some of our new neighbors.

It must have been a weekday in July when my first encounter with fear of death happened. I was playing with this boy, perhaps a year older than me, who was deaf and dumb. I still remember his name, Glen, and we were both attempting to climb a tree. Suddenly, I slipped while going up pretty high for a six year old, and fell hard to ground. My head hit a rock and I jumped up in pain. I felt my hand to my brow and it was full of blood. So, what does a little boy do who is hurt and frightened but run to find his ‘Mommy’. I ran to the bungalow where my mother was having a ‘Coffee Klatch’ with the other women. I knocked on the door yelling out ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Out from inside came my mother. She looked at me and became hysterical. ‘He’s gonna die, oh my God he’s gonna die!’ she screamed, never once holding me. She had her hands around her head as she was having a fit. Another woman pushed her away and grabbed me in her arms, telling me it was going to be OK as she wiped the blood from my brow. I was able to calm down after a few minutes.

Now, that was mid July at the bungalow colony. Well, the stars were not aligned for me that summer as August approached. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, who had a history of mental illness in her family, was staying with us for the month of August. She actually made my mother look normal with her own mental condition. I was playing on some kid’s spinning wheel equipment and the two of them were watching me. Suddenly, something stung me as I could feel the pain on my ear. It really hurt as I jumped off the spinning wheel and cried out to my mother. The two of them ran over to me and both became hysterical. ‘Mama, look at his face, it’s turning purple!’ my mother screamed. My grandmother looked at me and started to cry out ‘He’s gonna die! Oh my God he’s having a fit! He’s gonna die! ‘ For my salvation there was a doctor on the grounds and his bungalow was twenty feet away. He must have heard the shouts and ran out. He took me inside and gave me a shot of epinephrine, and cleaned out the sting wound. He told me it was from a wasp and informed my mother that I must be sensitive to wasp stings for future caution.

The epitome of it all was, after those two summer nightmares I developed a tremendous fear of many things. There was the fear of wasps, the fear of heights and of course, the mother of it all: The fear of death. Sadly, it seems that this ‘Tape’ played out right into the present, which is almost seventy years later. As my dear old street corner activist buddy, the late Walt DeYoung would put it: “Nuff Said!”

PA Farruggio
Summer 2025