Please Update Your Security Questions

1. What city were you born in?

City of Hope and Good Fortune 

City of Omens

City of Storms

City of Scars

1. What city were you born in?

Rochester 

2. What is your mother’s maiden name?

Trinacria, Sikelia, Siquilliyya, Sicilia, Land of the Lombards, Land of the Cyclops, home to caponata and cannoli, to Sanguigna pulp running red down the chin, Vulcan’s fire running red down the slopes of Etna, Island of black-shawled women, Isle of passion, Isle of sorrows, Island of memory, a dwindling rock in my grandfather’s teenage eye, the faded jewel of the old man’s rue.

2. What is your mother’s maiden name?

DiBenedetto

3. Where did you attend school as a child?

Inside my mother’s clasping arms. Against my father’s tobacco-scented chest. The playpen more dangerous than any of us knew. The blue-shag carpeting of the living room that prickled my knees in red dots, the faded white linoleum of the kitchen, the wood-grained tiles of the den so much colder than the other floors. The backyard, rectangular and flat and perfect for games save for its border dangers: the split-rail fence with the rosebushes you didn’t want to back into, the olive trees with their two-inch thorns you needed to evade as you wormed your way to whatever ball had rolled into their tangle, the stern neighbor’s level-straight hedge that marked automatic homeruns until we outgrew its range. The uncovered foundations and skeletal frames of new houses. The schoolyard playground.  “The Woods” — that wedge of trees that separated our neighborhood from the school and that seemed so much wider and more shadowed than it was in truth. “The Fields” — that unkempt no-man’s land between our neighborhood and the next one over, with its marching silvery row of transmission towers shadowing beneath them a chaotic tumble of tall grass and brush and trees where we dug and erected our first forts, rode dirt bikes, and played our first spin the bottle game when I kissed both red-headed twins though I suppose it’s possible it was the same one twice, them being twins and I still being dazed by the first exhilaration of lips.  Everywhere and anywhere.

3. Where did you attend school as a child?

Jefferson Avenue Primary School

4. What was your first vehicle?

A fire-red plastic convertible that could go from dining room to den in under ten seconds. The tricycle I pedaled after my grandparents’ car after they left our house and that got me several blocks away from home before I was found by a frantic parent. A red saucer sled. The green Schwinn that my father ran behind with one hand on the seat until he eventually let go forever. Our VW camper bus, a living room on wheels my sister and I blissfully wandered around, unbelted and untethered amidst wood and Formica and sharp corners as it wallowed down the highway while our parents happily chatted in the front seats so young and unconcerned. The blue Fiat convertible my dad eventually pulled up in 30 minutes late for my birthday party that was too small for the four of us boys who had been waiting on my porch to fit comfortably in so that when he finally drove us to miniature golf we sat on each other’s laps while the wind blew our voices away but could not cool my face hot with embarrassment. The Buick station wagon my mother almost ran my father over with after she had hustled us out of the house and into the car that after it did not hit him eventually took us screeching down the driveway and away to a motel where it cooled in the parking lot as she cried alone on a bed covered in a thick brown comforter that was no comfort at all. The silver Jaguar that sat in our garage after my father died until it was sold undriven and unmourned. My best friend’s blue Maverick I learned to drive on at two in the morning when the road stretching out long and empty pointed far, far away from home.

4. What was your first vehicle?

Toyota Corolla

5. How did you meet your spouse?

First a point. Infinitesimally small. Then a bang. Big.  Inflation-expansion. An intensely spicy broth of particles and atoms, a plasma soup so hot it strips atoms of their electrons and leaves them zipping madly about on their own, corralling light-carrying photons so they cannot travel, leaving the universe opaque. A slow cooling, about 300-400, 000 years. Electrons, calmer now, rejoining the atoms and but remaining this time, leaving the photons free to cross space. The universe transparent but dark. Then, after a few hundred million years, a spark. Billions, trillions of sparks. Suns candling one after the other, beacon fires leading, eventually, to our own. Rocks and other space debris coalesce. Earth’s stately circular dance, soon joined by another moving in time, keeping one side turned away, like a shy countess hiding behind her fan as she paced her steps at the court of Louis the XIV. Magma then rock then oceans then land. All of it a cradle. A crucible. A creche. More soup, this time not of simple atoms but RNA, DNA. Another dance ensues, a whirl and twirl of partners, a reel, an allemande, a quadrille, a haka, a hora, a samba and semba, dancers cutting in, dancers cutting out, lifts and dips, an unending marathon of movement between sea and stars, life spilling out off of the dance floor into the halls and onto the stairs, into rooms and out on the lawns, out of the seas, and then we come down from the trees and stride on two feet into the swirling spiral to dance not noticing how one by one the others bow out until it is only ourselves touching palm to palm and in that lonely quiet one palm is mine and one palm is hers and then they are ours.

5. How did you meet your spouse?

Ultimate Frisbee

6. Who was the best man at your wedding?

My father-in-law, a psychiatrist by trade and demeanor. Whose voice I never heard raised, never heard sharpened, never saw turned into a weapon. Who graduated college at thirteen. Who could not go at once into medical school because of his youth which would change and being a Jew which would not. Who had been meeting weekly with a patient since 1965.  Who when asked why he was still seeing her after 30 years because isn’t she supposed to get better replied that the fact she was still here to see him after 30 years was better. Who still charged her the same rate he had in in 1965. Who wore the same clothes for 30 years that unlike his patient did not show evidence of getting better. Who every year sent us a lengthy, detailed evaluation of every musical work in every concert offered by our Philharmonic in their new season so we would know which to choose so as to get the most enjoyment. Who came to Rochester when the RPO performed Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and as he always did each time he heard it began to cry nearly halfway through when the soprano sings of the family lying on the “rough wet grass of the backyard” and through to the end when the little boy is put to bed and now so many decades after he cried beside me in the theater and so many years after his passing I cannot myself listen to Knoxville save that I begin to cry at that same moment and as the boy names his mother “who is good to me” and his father “who is good to me” I cry and as he asks of God to bless them I cry and as he prays that they are remembered kindly in “the hour of their taking away” I cry, for my own mother and my own father and our own backyard and for my father-in-law and his mother and father and for all of us living in Agee’s “sorrow of being on this earth” but also for the beauty of being on this earth where sopranos exist and cellos and violins and harps exist and so do too cellists and violinists and harpists and someone put them all together and someone wrote a poem and someone set that poem amidst song and music to draw from me saltwater to bathe my cheeks in the same warm broth we all were born from on this earth that is always more water than rock but sometimes enough times the rock is enough.

6. Who was the best man at your wedding?

Dan Holmsten

7. Who was your favorite teacher in elementary school?

Miss LeBlanc who played piano at the front of the kindergarten classroom and ushered me into this strange new world away from home with a contagious enthusiasm, as when she handed me the silver triangle during music time as if it were a newly-discovered Stradivarius or gave me the “Wake-Up Wand” I used to gently tap on the shoulders of my classmates who lay on their padded mats, gave it to me like it really was a tool of magic and mystery and not simply a repurposed majorette baton. Mrs. Prachel, who lived in our neighborhood and had a son who was like all of us children of the 60s fascinated with space and who also played with Major Matt Mason and so I would regularly pack my action figures — Matt Mason and Doug Davis and Sgt. Storm and Jeff Long and maybe the space sled and glider or maybe the reconojet instead into my Matt Mason Space Carrying Case which was different from my Matt Mason lunchbox and walk a quarter-mile down our road to his house where we would play in his living room while his mother/my third-grade teacher gave us Hi-C and cookies and never once made it feel strange.  Mrs. Yackell who in memory appears looking like a stock film/TV character — the stereotypical big-bosomed, broad-shouldered, wide-hipped immigrant grandmother from Eastern Europe even though I have no idea where she was from, and I’m sure she was younger than I recall her as. Recall her warmly even though she did not know what to do with this boy in her class who read the books in two days and who finished the fourth grade math book and then the fifth and then the sixth so she ran out of textbooks and so gave me prints of Currier and Ives and tracing paper and left me to myself in the back of the room as the class plodded on through long division while my pencil glided across the thin page like a capering skater on ice. Miss Saturno, who filled her classroom with hamster, rabbits, and laughter, who had us make a movie of “These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things” which included all of us sitting in the trees outside the school, who played music while we worked, who knew enough to be nearby as I neared the end of The Yearling at my desk in the back during independent reading time and who held me while I cried because of course I cried and I think now she had given me that book because I would cry because when good teachers suss out those kids in their classroom, the ones who will cry at books, rather than stand guard at the gates of sadness and mortality and turn them back they give them all the books — all the Yearlings and Charlotte’s Webs and Old Yellers — and then wait to meet them on the other side. Miss O the music teacher who could not get enough of The Beatles, Three Dog Night, Chicago, or “One Tin Soldier”, who had us sit on the floor and close our eyes to listen to The Who, who wore so many bangles you could hear her coming down the hallway from 50 yards away, and who every boy had a crush on including I’m sure some of the teachers, both male and female.  Ms. Grouse, the petite principal of West Avenue who roamed the halls like a benevolent spirit from a gothic novel, so small and light she walked without footfall so when you and your friends were holding stair-jumping contests to see who could leap the most steps downward your only clue to her sudden unexpected presence was the immediate scattering of your traitorous partners in crime from the landing where they awaited your attempt, followed by her doll’s hand falling lightly on your shoulder, and her wistfully resigned, “What might we be doing here?” and when you turned you knew you would face not retributive anger or stern disappointment but that wry sideways smile she always wore, and that glint in her eye that somehow made you feel she was in some way complicit in your minor violation of order, that you were a conspiracy of two against the strictures and rules she was meant to uphold, though not apparently this day, this moment. Mrs. Cummings the librarian who never once questioned or even raised an eyebrow as month after month for three years amidst all the new titles I read I would also check out the same Andre Norton books again and again and again — Space Ranger and Star Guard and The Stars Are Ours and The Beastmaster and so many others, so that if you pulled out the library card from the little manilla envelope taped in the front of the book and ran your finger down the list of signatures you would see a long column of “Billy Capossere” interrupted only occasionally, if at all, by a single different name before mine would begin a new run, so it looked like the inside cover of some of the girls’ notebooks where they would doodle the name of their newest crush over and over and over and honestly, and I’m sure Mrs. Cummings knew this as well — that the only real difference between the two was my love affair with these books would last longer, far longer than the weeks or months the girls dreamt of Gary Thompson or Tom Coriola, far longer too than my time at West Avenue School where Mrs. Cummings would stand behind her desk and hold out her hands for my pile of signed cards as if it were she and not I who was who was receiving a gift, and I think of her every time I look on my shelf and see those same books with their same covers.  All of them.

7. Who was your favorite teacher in elementary school?

Choose another question.

8.  What is your job?

Board sponger/Eraser cleaner at the end of the day at such a deliberately slow pace that I would “accidentally” miss the bus and so need to be driven the mile home by Principal Welch, the kind of principal who walked by your table at lunch and stole your milk or worse the cookie you’d been saving to linger over until his nimble fingers made it magically disappear like he was some street urchin pickpocket out of a Dicken’s novel and even as he denied your laughing accusations all wide-eyed innocence and indignation those same fingers had somehow replaced the stolen item on the table without you noticing until he pointed out he couldn’t have taken anything because look, there it was and so it was and so you collapsed giggling back onto your hard round seat, waiting until you had your breath back so you could eat your Oreo which you kept encaged in both your hands in case he came by again which you always hoped he would. Radiation Companion which entailed missing a day of school to sit beside my mother in the hospital waiting room where she would always point out how she was the only overweight Hodgkin’s patient there, a continuing mystery to her doctors and a point of no little annoyance to her and which also involved looking through a small round window into the room where she received her treatments which in memory had her lying on a table below the tapering white arm that went up toward the ceiling then over to a large machine though I can’t say for sure that’s a real memory or something mixed in from a Star Trek episode or Space: 1999 or any of the other science fiction shows I feasted on at the time where technology was white and clean and sleek and could fix any problem. Garage Cleaner which meant pulling everything out into the driveway — the trashcans, the pair of Schwinn bikes, the lawnmower and fertilizer spreader and more —  and then using the too-long push broom my mother gave me, starting at the back wall in the corner with the door into the den and the stiff bristles going scritch scritch scritch moving via short staccato arm motions the dirt and dust forward in little clouds that billowed around me until I was standing on the black of the driveway then returning to the back wall and starting a new row and doing this again and again though honestly less and less attentively or effectively until I was finally at the pegboard wall on the other side of the garage and truth was I never understood the point it being a garage after all and not like we were going to eat off the floor or sleep out there and dirt and dust were going to accumulate no matter what so it was like making a bed you were only going to unmake every single time except this took so much more time and effort while my friends were somewhere throwing a football or softball or riding bikes and yet somehow though I made this same argument every time somehow I still ended up with that broom in my hand and though looking back I’ve understood many things I did not then this Sisyphean task was never one of them. And still I would wish myself back there at least one more time to take the broom from her hands and gaze one more time on her face I can still remember and listen one more time to her voice I cannot and perform my useless task but this time with care and attention all the way through so that garage floor was so free of dust it could have qualified as a clean room in a chip-making factory, her own little haven from the chaos and contamination of the world. Dishwasher at the Chinese restaurant where once one of the cooks threw a cleaver at another which emptied the kitchen area faster than any fire alarm would have and where the owners called every one of us “boy-you-boy” and would scream at you for sneaking dried noodles from the waist-high box the waiters scooped them from and do worse if they found you nicking a fortune cookie from the smaller boxes and where vegetables arrived every Thursday making it the worst day to work because it meant carrying crates and boxes from the cold truck interior into the freezer which was, well, freezing but even worse was carrying them down into the basement with the metal steps covered in cooking grease and the poor lighting that I was sure was on purpose to hide the bodies of all the prior workers who had slipped and broken their necks to lie at the bottom of the stairs until their bodies were dragged into the shadowy recesses still covered in noodles the loss of which the owners would be bemoan more than Poor Boy-You-Boy. Retail floorperson at Gold Circle which smelled of popcorn and baked pretzels and failure and which I hated so much I just stopped going and sent my girlfriend in to collect my last paycheck and retail floorperson at Sears which smelled of floor wax and where I faked my way through discussions of power tools and flirted with the cash rep girls and pretended I didn’t hear the misogynistic and racist comments from the paunch-over-the-belt commission guys who sold tractor mowers all while debating in my head the different amount of time it would take for a ¾ drill and a ½ inch drill to burrow into my brain. Box maker in the shipping department at RF Harris where nobody called me anything but “college boy” and everyone smelled of tobacco smoke and Mennen and all the stories were about bar fights, cars, and annoying wives and because the day started at 7 am I sometimes showed up still drunk from the night before or didn’t show up at all too hungover to do anything but call in “sick” which happened so many times my aunt who had worked there for years and who had gotten me the job was called into the shipping supervisor’s office and told she should talk to me because the whole “dead sister’s son” was quickly losing whatever human resources magic it had when she originally recommended me for the job and when she did speak to me her gently disappointed demeanor only added to my sense of molten shame helped only a little by my stealing the stapler off the supervisor’s desk that afternoon. Pizza delivery where some nights my friend would call in late and order a pizza using a famous author’s name and so at closing time when nobody had picked up the large for Jim Joyce or Bill Faulkner or Tom Pynchon and the counter guy would ask if anyone wanted it I’d raise a hand and then take the free pizza to wherever my friends would be waiting with cold beers and we would eat and drink under the stars and it was the best job ever.

8.  What is your job?

Teacher

9. What was your childhood phone number?

It was from there I could dial a number to find out what time it was and what the outdoor temperature was and in the practical way of the telephone company the number was called “Time and Temperature” and though I had no need to know either — we had clocks in the house and windows and where did I have to be as a child anyway— there was something magical about that mysterious female voice on the other end and the way she could tell me about the world I inhabited so long as I waited for the tone. And it was from there I made my first romantic outreach to a girl I liked, Becky from fifth grade, unplugging the phone first from the downstairs outlet and carrying in in one hand to my bedroom upstairs which became a daily ritual for a few weeks or maybe a month or more until the relationship such as it was petered out the same way those afternoon phone calls did in awkward silence.  And it was from there my mother the next year called the school to tell them I wouldn’t be there the rest of the school year when my father died in June. And it was from there I, or maybe it was my sister, called the ambulance the few times my mother told us she needed to go to the hospital, unable to rise from the living room couch she’d taken to spending most of her time on including the last though that time was not at her behest and I don’t recall who made that final call just the way she begged to not be taken, crying she didn’t want to die in that building though of course she did and then someone called the school to say I would not be in for some time. And it was from there my sister would talk to her girlfriends and boyfriends stretching the green cord from the phone now attached to the kitchen wall down the front hallway and halfway up the stairs where she’d sit and whisper while my grandfather yelled at her she  was “ruining the cord” and “what is it anyway you need to talk about we can’t hear?” And it was from there my grandmother called around to my sister’s friends when she didn’t come home and then the police and it was from there she took the call from the police who had picked her up several states south and were sending her home. And from there we took the phone call some months later that she had arrived in Florida and was going to stay there with an old boyfriend. And it was from there my brother after calling around to my friends’ houses finally tracked me down at a party to tell me my Uncle Tom had died, and I needed to come home not just to mourn but because my grandmother was wild with Old World grief and he didn’t know what to do. And it was from there late at night all the house asleep I would stretch the cord through the kitchen to lie on the dining room carpet while my girlfriend and I would tell each other what we wanted to do to one another.  And it was from there my brother called me at college because my grandparents had found pot in his room which meant he was “doing drugs” which meant he was in “gangs” which meant he was involved with “gangster stuff” and probably “gambling too and who knows what else” and they couldn’t have that in the house and so were kicking him out and so I hitchhiked home to mediate. And it was from there my grandfather called and said my youngest brother was too much for them and something had to change and so I took over guardianship of him and we lived together for a year in a low-income housing project where we failed at housekeeping and he failed high school and I failed as a guardian which I will always remember and regret. And it was from there my grandfather called to say they were selling our childhood home which had gotten too hard for them, my grandmother no longer able to handle stairs and so they sold the house and the phone and the cord that stretches down the hallway and up the stairs and all the way to now.

9. What was your childhood phone number?

377-0284

10. What did you want to be as a child?

A fireman as I told Principal Welch one morning when he complimented me on the fireman’s hat I wore to school that day, one that had a red light that lit up. My father. An astronaut like Neil Armstrong who I watched step out onto the moon on the lumbering console television in my grandparent’s living room while my family watched hushed and then loud and then hushed again as my uncle pointed his video camera at the TV and maybe at all of us watching too but I was too rapt to notice.  And an astronaut too like the 4’ tall hard plastic ones — paired and space suited — my parents brought back as a gift from their trip to Florida and an astronaut like Commander Matt Mason and his companions with their Space Crawlers and Cat Tracs and  Space Bubble and Firebolt Space Cannon and Gamma-Ray Gard and Space Station and assorted and sundry other pieces I was gifted on birthdays and Christmases. And a space traveler astronaut like James T. Kirk and Will Robinson (but not so lost) and Space Ghost.  And a space traveler like the two boys who flew to the Mushroom Planet or like any of the ones in Heinlein’s juveniles, or Asimov’s, or Norton’s. And a time traveler like Tony or Doug but mostly Tony (but not so lost). An inventor like Tom Swift or Danny Dunn or Reed Richards. A professional football player like Roger Staubach or Franco Harris or Lynn Swann. A scientist like the ones in Microbe Hunters or the Tell Me Why books. A fossil hunter like Roy Chapman Andrews. Not my father. A chess player like Bobby Fischer. A chess player but not like Bobby Fischer. A writer like E.B. White like Roald Dahl like Jack London like E.L. Konigsburg like Mary Norton like Andre Norton like C.S. Lewis like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings like A.M. Lightner like Madeleine L’Engle like Isaac Asimov like Robert Heinlein like Jack Vance like J.R.R. Tolkien. A doctor who cured cancer.

10. What did you want to be as a child?

A child