THE FLANNEL SHIRT

“I told her I was getting too old for gifts.”

My mom’s name was Toni, short for Antoinette. Daughter of Italian immigrants. She loved listening to opera and watching it on TV. She died two days before Christmas in 2009, when she was 82 and I was 47.

In her senior years, she was an administrative assistant in the Fine Arts Department of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. She liked art in general and Christian art especially. She never missed Sunday mass. To this day, I don’t either.

She grew up in a two-family house that her parents bought in the 1930s in Jersey City on Clendenny Ave. She had two sisters and one brother. When the brother got married, he moved upstairs. When my mom married my dad, they moved five houses away. When the upstairs brother moved out, we moved back in; we lived upstairs and my grandparents and two aunts lived downstairs. This was after my grandfather came home from prison in South Jersey. Gambling indiscretions. For a while in the 1950s and early ’60s, they had to drive five hours to visit him. There was no Garden State Parkway back then.

This Gap shirt is the last birthday present she bought me. I was probably around 40, married, two kids, and I told her I was getting too old for gifts. Originally she bought a shirt that cost $25 that really wasn’t my style. So she says bring it back and get another one. So I see this flannel for $35 and I get it. And she says, hey mister, I said you could get another shirt, who said you could spend an extra ten bucks.

—Guy Caruso