My Brother Joe - Part I
- Pasquale Puleo
- Dec 22, 2022
- 2 min read
My brother Joe was more American than me. The paradox was that Joe was perceived as an American and lived in Cassano d'Adda, Lombardia, and I was perceived as an Italian and lived in Watertown, Massachusetts.
In a black and white photo dating back to 1955, when we wore white aprons in kindergarten, I gently put my left arm on his shoulder as a protective gesture.
Joe was swashbuckling. One evening during Carnevale, at the tender age of seven, he went around the village with a group of older boys. Between a drop of wine here and a half glass of wine there, accompanied by bread and cheese, Joe returned home more drunk than tipsy and a sly look his face. My mother laughed and put him to bed dressed as he was.
At the Scuola Media Superiore Luigi Pirandello di Messina, Joe had no luck. For one reason or another, the teachers didn't like him, and no matter how hard he tried, they always failed him.
Everyone knew that middle school teachers treated city kids differently from those living in the small villages surrounding the city's hills. In their opinion, they were of peasant origins, unable to work with their minds and capable only of working with a hoe.
When I learned that he was bocciato and failed school after repeating the same year, I knew that it wasn't his fault, but I couldn't do anything to help him.
A year later, Joe attended a different middle school closer to home, but we moved to the United States of America before finishing the school year. It could have been a stroke of luck. But, unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Bad luck continued to keep Joe company.
Now I say this with no intention to impugn the Swiss national character, nor indeed the country of Switzerland as a whole. I think link of it almost as my home away from link home and in any given year for the last dozen link at least, I've been to Geneva a lot more often than I've been to Brooklyn.
The very earliest examples of the ref. 6542 feature the words "GMT-Master" written in pink and are rare, with at least one example known to feature the depth rating link of "50m = 165ft" on the dial in red above the pink GMT-Master text. Very early examples might link also have a long-neck Mercedes hour hand similar link to the Submariner reference 6200, which was also from that period.