I forgot Mrs. Cirillo died last year. More later. M The conversation—one part of it, anyway—we’d had at Mistral stuck with me. I thought later about the notion of leaving Boston, of moving away not only from Doug but from my father, my one true remaining tie to family. This train of thought, of course, got me thinking about family in general. About families. Is any one family better than the other? It seems everyone considers her own family to be the worst and sometimes, also the best. So how can you really evaluate craziness? Leaving aside the obviously criminal families, the parents who lock their kids in basements and feed them canned slop; the Munchhausen-by-Proxy mommies; the daddies who mistake their kiddies for sex slaves. Take JoAnne’s family, for example. Or, rather, what we’ve heard of her family, because JoAnne’s the only Chiofalo we’d met. There was the brother in LA and JoAnne thought there might be a cousin or two somewhere in a trailer park in Schenectady, otherwise JoAnne was it.
