by Barry Girolamo

Created on: May 08, 2010   Last Updated: October 28, 2011

There's a road in New York State that runs east and west, numbered Route 17. It has been around for as long as I can remember, and back in the sixties, even though it was always a heavily traveled road, they didn't do a very good job of keeping up with it during the winter months. There was a lot of ice build-up on route 17 back then, and also what is referred to as "Black Ice", as it tended to look like part of the road at night. You couldn't always tell that it was there.

Our family would travel that road on trips from Long Island to visit my sister and brother while they were in college, and we also traveled the route to visit relatives in Corning, New York. I still use the road, as my son attended school in Ithaca, New York, and the scenic route is really breath taking, particularly in the fall season. Sometimes I'll stop at some of the more scenic areas and enjoy the beauty of the countryside.

On one trip on Route 17 back in the late sixties, our family (all nine of us including my grandmother and uncle) were on our way to a family wedding which was taking place in Corning. We had gotten a late start that Friday evening, as we had to wait for my father to get off of work and pick up my grandmother and uncle from Oyster Bay, as they didn't drive. We all piled into our 1964 Chevy Impala station wagon, with all of the luggage tied on the top, and headed to Corning. My father was tired, and so my brother, who was about eighteen at the time, drove. My two younger brothers and I were in the back of the station wagon laying down. We fell asleep.

I was awakened by the frantic sound of my father's voice, and I realized at the same time that the car was weaving back and forth on the road as I had never felt before. "Easy", my father, who was seated in the back, implored to my brother over and over again, as the car became increasingly out of control on the black ice. The car spun around completely on the ice, doing a “three sixty“, slamming into the center guard rail. We came to a stop.

I think about that evening almost daily, some forty years later, remembering different details, reliving the moment. We lost both my mother and my grandmother that night on a stretch of Route 17 between the cities of Roscoe and Binghamton, but the memories which I carry with me of my mother will always be there. She was kind and warm, and had a great influence upon all of her children.

Mother's are the heart and soul of a family, and even though I lost my mother at an early age, she still is with me. There was a poet named William Ross Wallace who wrote a poem published in 1865 which sums up a mother’s role much more eloquently than I ever could. He wrote about mothers, "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world". A mother's influence is forever.

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