My father, Daniel Angelo Coletta II as he was formally known, was a cement salesman.  An Italian-American cement salesman.  In Youngstown, Ohio.  I’ll give you a minute to put that all together.  I know, it looks bad.  Based on that information it may surprise you to know that he was, in fact, not in the mafia.  But, he was very, very loosely associated with people who were.  But honestly, it’s hard to live in Youngstown and not be.  I mean, everyone there was within six degrees of separation from someone who may or may not have a cousin who’s connected.   And if you weren’t, you kind of wish you were because you never know when that might be useful.  We all want to be able to at least say “I know a guy”.  Kind of like “there’s an app for that!”,  –it’s simply being polite and offering to help. You have a problem?  No worries, I know a guy.  Not that you’d ever need to call the “guy”, but it’s nice knowing where to find him if you did.

My dad knew a few “guys”.  Like Mr. G, who showed up at our house in a luxury tour bus to take our family to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh to see the Steelers play from private viewing suite.  Yeah, he was later indicted.  And then there were the sausage making parties.  I kid you not.  A bunch of my dad’s business associates would get together to make homemade sausages.  I have a picture somewhere of my dad at one of these parties, smiling, wearing an apron, high on testosterone. Normally this wouldn’t raise any eyebrows—“oh, how cute,” people might say.  “Alpha males wearing aprons and bonding over cooking!”. But put it together with the other undisputed facts (Italian-American-cement company employees -Youngstown), and even I have to admit it starts to look a little sketchy.  Anyway, one of these “sausage guys”, Michael Carlo, was the owner of the cement company my dad worked for.  That “guy” eventually went to prison for tax evasion, bank fraud and embezzlement, but not before my dad was subpoenaed to testify against him in a lawsuit brought by one of their customers.  One July night, the summer before my junior year of high school, we all were awakened by the sound of glass shattering.  The whole family ran downstairs to see that someone had taken the rocking chair off our front porch and smashed it through our living room windows.  A warning.  Don’t testify.  After that, my dad was understandably pretty shook up. He hired an off duty police officer to sit in Mr. Worland’s driveway for several weeks.  There were no further incidents, and it is my understanding that my father did testify.  Dad left his job and worked for a Canadian cement company for the remainder of his career.  Sadly, Daniel Angelo Coletta II had attended his last sausage party.

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My mom got a phone call one day from my little brother’s 3rd grade teacher.  “Mrs. Coletta, this is Chucky’s teacher.  I was wondering if your husband would come talk to the class about his job.”

“Umm, ok…”

“I tried to reach your husband at work, but NASA said they couldn’t find a  “Daniel Coletta”, so I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home”.

“Ummm….,well, my husband doesn’t work for NASA. But he could come talk to the class about cement if you like…”.

My little brother told his class that my dad was an astronaut.  I think that’s hilarious.

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I think every child thinks their parent would be just a little more interesting if they were an astronaut.  And I think every parent knows that their child doesn’t even know the half of it.