A Baby Named Freedom by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

A Baby Named Freedom | Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

In Dublin, two Dubs this week asked me, “D’ja have a gun on yer?”

“No.” 

“Well, d’ja have a gun back home in The States?” 

“No. Not yet.”

This week, being an American abroad means having guns. Luigi Mangione captured the imagination as either a modern-day vigilante folk hero, man with a gun and a cause, or as just another thug Dago, depending on who you’re talking to. I hop a cab on O’Connell Street by the GPO. I say, “Take me to The Teacher’s Club, Parnell Square.” The cab driver, muscular arms, a peaked cap, starts giggling in a high-pitched voice: “You sound like you’re in the movies.”

“What movie?”

“Goodfellas.”

“No, I’m the real deal. Where you from?”

“Croatia.” He can’t stop giggling hearing my voice. “I thought that voice was just in the movies.”

“No, I’m real.” I know I sound like a Jimmy Cagney character to people who’ve never met a Bronx Italian in real life. Ayyy whaddywanna live forevah? Many tell me, “You sound like Al Pacino.” I say, “No, he sounds like me.”

The movies travel further than any of us from my Zerega Ave neighborhood. 

One day a friend brings me into her local coffee shop in Clonakilty, about an hour’s drive southwest of Cork City. I met eyes with a beautiful blue-eyed baby, sitting way down the oak communal table with her mother and their friends. I speak to babies like an adult. I want them to hear my serious alto comfort. I don’t do baby talk. Babies need to hear real talk. To be grounded. To know where they’re headed. I can summon the feeling of being a baby and wondering why the adults were all acting weird, giddy, talking in high pitched sounds. I remember how it felt when my father tossed me up high over his head and caught me, pretending he was going to drop me. My breathless fear. Why was this so fun for the men? I lost my breath a lot as a kid. Being a baby meant adults controlled my body, tossed me up high and scared me for fun, tickled and wrestled me for their enjoyment, put me in chokeholds long past the point where I was out of breath and unable to beg “Uncle!” for them to stop. I can feel all this in the abstract landscape inside me. Except it’s not abstract at all. It’s just a moment ago. It’s all inside. It’s now.

The Clonakilty baby girl’s name was Saoirse. Her mother taught me that Saoirse means Freedom. That is the most beautiful name I ever heard. In Ireland, freedom is not just a concept, people can taste it, cheers to it, know what it means to die bleeding for it. Many know stories of their parents or grandparents fighting for freedom, a great-aunt or uncle dying for freedom. I don’t know when baby girls began being named freedom, but really, I can think of nothing better. Baby Saoirse of Clonakilty and I were enamored with each other, one of those magic moments when a baby leans in toward you, makes eye connection, locks in, and whatever the goddess power is, I feel it, an all-loving presence of golden light. A shimmer. “Hey Saoirse. Hey, you wanna come to the Bronx?” The more I talk, the more she’s smiling and laughing and voicing. She loves my voice presence. My vibe. And I love her. 

A man walks into the café with a dog, and pretty quickly he says to me, “Me dog is sensitive to loud noises, and you’re talking too loud.” He plants himself a couple of feet from my body, squaring off to me as if we are about to duel.

I say, “Oh I’m sorry.”

He says, “Me dog is blind and he’s very sensitive to loud voices.”

I say, “I’m really sorry.” I lower my voice and step closer to Saoirse who is on the other side of the table. I sit down. We continue our conversation. 

What was beautiful about that interaction, that man, for me, shocking even, you could say “culture shock,” is that in New York City, at some point, I stopped interacting like that, because you don’t know who is packin’, who is high, who is nuts and liable to shoot you, push you, do who-knows-what to you. At this point I would never dream of telling an American in a coffee shop, “You’re too loud for me dog.” I’d be taking my life in my hands. Oh I’m botherin your dog am I? I’ll show you how I can bother your dog. I’ll give him a good kick. What’s a dog need to be in a café for anyway? Your dog belongs in the street. I belong in this café. Get your dog outside. And you with him. This is the voice I grew up hearing. This is the response I got when I voiced a need, a sensitivity, like asking to open a car window for example, or asking someone to not smoke around me because I was asthmatic. I learned that none of my needs or sensitivities would ever be taken into consideration. I couldn’t breathe around people. After too many asthma attacks and visits to emergency rooms, I learned to remove myself from situations. Preventive action. Stay away.

In New York and in America, I’m extra cautious about mouthing off to people. The ethos I learned as a kid, was say nuttin’ to nobody ’bout nuttin’. Mind your own biz’ness. This is for survival. I learned to think that everybody is crazy in their own special way. I hedge my bets, assessing: “What kind of crazy is this one? That one?” I don’t beep in New York traffic anymore. I don’t look at other drivers. Sometimes on the Major Deegan Expressway, through the Bronx, cars come at you like they’re aiming for you, like they’d just wish you’d get a little closer so they’d have a reason to run you off the ramp. The aggression is maniacal. I err on the side of caution. I say to myself, “Chances are, that person is out of their mind.” And they might be packin’.

The flip side of that coin is that when I walk the streets of New York, I try to assure people that I’m not crazy or packin’. This is harder as I age. Now I walk with a walker. I carry many things: medicine, oxygen machine, extra sweaters because I get cold, a pillow for my sensitive neck. It looks like I’m carrying all my life’s belongings. In the winter I wear a bright blue Irish dry robe, an electric peacock blue, long down to my shins, with a hood, the kind of coat swimmers wear when they get out of the Irish Sea for their daily frigid swim. In New York, very few know what a dry robe is, so I just look like I’m living in the street or from another planet. When I’m walking down a New York sidewalk, wearing a facemask on my way to a doctor’s appointment, I easily appear vagrant, or dangerous, or nuts. Seriously, no one is dressed like me. Vagrant is the archetype I rock. Without trying. The other day in the rain, after a doctor’s appointment, I wheeled my walker into a midtown hotel to get out of the rain and to sit for a cup of tea. I’m wearing the Irish peacock blue dry robe, face mask, pushing the walker full of stuff. Immediately, the concierge eyes me, I pull my facemask down and greet him with a sparkly smile announcing: “I’m okay, I’m just going to the café.” 

I know that I can look like the shooter – in America. 

It’s on everyone’s mind. Is that person a shooter? What about him? The surveillance images they circulate for manhunts more and more look like lots of people I know, look like me. A person walks in a North Face zip-up, hat, facemask. It could be any of us. The other day I was talking to a friend who is actually quite optimistic and has a lot of joie de vivre. She’s in her seventies. She says, “I rather get shot than stabbed.” The conversation went something like this:

“I rather get shot than stabbed. I dunno, getting stabbed is so––”

“Intimate?”

“Yeah, they have to get right up on you.”

“Yes, I guess if you put it that way, I rather get shot too. Boom. Shoot me twice. Get it over with.” 

We agreed. Two Americans. Two women. Two New Yorkers in a fancy restaurant with tablecloths and golden lamps in an expensive part of town, with fresh sprigs of mint in our water glasses, talking matter-of-factly about how we rather get murdered. And this is about random murders. Mass murders that happen every single day in our United States of America. 

My months in County Cork were a relief for me as a human, to be in a culture where this man with his dog could trust life, could have confidence in my humanity, to confront me: “You’re too loud for me blind dog.” Music to my soul. He was a local. That was his coffee shop. I was just a visitor learning that little baby girls could be named Freedom. He walks his blind dog there every day and gets his coffee. This is his spot, him and his dog. Maybe I was standing in the spot where his dog is used to laying down. What a beautiful life, to have a local café to be able to bring your dog companion inside, your dog angel, and to have a neighborhood, somewhere to hang out, somewhere where how you feel matters. Up the Republic!

Bonus audio of Annie reading from her essay…

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