So who else is in the Family?

Well, technically these aren’t blood relatives, but they may as well be. The handsome young fellow in the center here is my freak of a best friend, Adam Fitting. We have now been best friends for five years! I can’t believe how long it’s been... on one hand, it doesn’t seem like any time at all since we were working on Godspell together and getting to know one another, and on the other hand we are so perfect for each other that it seems we’ve known each other for lifetimes. For those of you who are wondering, we’re not lovers, just friends.

Also in this picture are Nana and Poppy, Adam’s grandparents, who are as much a part of my life as my own grandparents.

This is me with my actual Grandparents in 1985 on their anniversary. I forget which anniversary that was; I’m thinking it may have been their fortieth or at least thirty-ninth. Please forgive my white pants; it was very much in vogue at the time, and we have Don Johnson to blame for that.

This is me with my Grandma Hubiak, one of the best cooks I have ever known. She is one of five sisters and three brothers in the Ciani family born of Italian immigrants. I know that my cousin, Father Michael di Gregorio, has been doing a lot of geneology research on the Ciani family, and I’m hoping that eventually I can work with him to get a Ciani website up and running when I move to Philadelphia (he has a parish there).

This is my Gramps when he was young, right after World War II when he was courting my Grandmother. My Grandfather’s family came to America after the Russian Revolution and moved to the coal-mining region of Old Forge, Pennsylvania, near Scranton. He met my Grandmother from Staten Island, and they married and moved to Cranford, New Jersey, where they raised three sons and lived until retirement, when they moved to Lakewood, New Jersey. My Grandfather passed away in 1992.

My Grandmother tells the rather amusing story of how they met. She used to like to go to social bars to hang out with her friends, drink, and bowl. She had a particularly pious Roman Catholic aunt who was always admonishing her for her behavior and said that she’d never meet a good man if she continued frequenting bars. Instead, she said, my Grandmother should go to church every day and one she would turn and see the man of her dreams sitting next to her. Well, my Grandmother met my Grandfather while she was bowling at one of these bars and wasn’t sure what to tell her aunt when asked where she had met this wonderful man. So she said to her aunt, "It was just like you said it would be -- I turned to my side and there was the most perfect gentleman you would ever dream of seeing." Through of the sin of omission she led her aunt to believe that she had met my Grandfather in a church pew when in fact they were on barstools! I wonder if the aunt ever learned that my Grandfather was Russian Orthodox, and not Roman Catholic?

More Aurora, June of 1997. She is so adorable! How can you deny her a solo space on this webpage?

Uh oh! More Aurora! Look, here she is with her little cousin Madison (my other niece, my step-sister Jess’s baby)! This was taken just after Christmas, 1997. Aurora is now TALKING in sentences and says she loves her cousin Madison. I can’t wait to visit her in Massachusetts at the end of April! And I just got done visiting with Maddy and her Mommy, and Maddy is now walking a little bit and making lots and lots of little baby noises. It won’t be long before she’ll be talking, too, and then she and Aurora and call each other on the phone!

These are my favorite cousins, Jon Alex, Helena, and Adriano from left to right. Their Mommy is my cousin Christine. When my sisters and I were growing up, Christine and her brothers are sister (Joseph, Stephen, and Paula), who are all about half a generation older than us, were our favorite cousins. Likewise, when they were growing up, our father and uncles, who were half a generation older than them, were their favorite cousins. Now there’s another generation half a generation from us, and it looks like this familial favoritism will continue!