About
I am the middle child of Mary (Barrett) Rizzo and Michael Joseph Rizzo, Jr. My brothers are Jonathan and Elliot.
My mother was the fourth of five kids, growing up in Peabody, MA. Her father, my grandfather, was a World War II veteran who served in the Navy as a member of the Fire Control Unit. I knew him as a stern but loving presence, always in his garden, always making clam chowder and yelling at us kids to wash the sand off of our feet before coming into the house. My mother remembers him as very strict (although not unusually so for that time), frugal, scrupulous, and far softer in his old age than in her childhood years. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, was described by all as “just the sweetest lady.” As most women of her generation, it feels like she lived her entire life in quiet service to her husband and to her kids. Only in her 80s, after my grandfather had passed, did she indulge in ice cream whenever she wanted and buying what she needed when she needed it. I remember her most for her loving presence, her cinnamon butter, and her scones (although I never liked those!).
My father was the oldest of five children, growing up in Revere, MA. His father, my grandfather, was blue collar to the bone, oftenm working two to three jobs to support the family. My father reported to me that his father told him: you can play any sport you want, as long as you can get yourself there on your bike and it doesn’t cost any money. My father set out to provide me and my brothers with something more than that, and he succeeded beyond his imagination in that regard. Elliot and I played travel hockey as kids! My grandfather passed away when he was 53 and I was just a child, so we never really knew each other. My grandmother, on the other hand, is 95 at the time of writing, and only just this year moved into an assisted living facility. She is built like a brick house (figuratively, in case she reads this) and has been making meatballs for me for as long as I can remember.
With these loving influences at my back, I grew up in Kingston, MA. I attended elementary school and junior high (where I met my wife, Kiley) in Kingston and then moved up to BC High, a Jesuit school in South Boston, for high school. I went on to Harvard to study anthropology, and then, as you can see from this website -> Walking in India -> the military -> Palantir -> Momento.
I have two spritely, eccentric, precocious children now -- Gloria and Barrett -- and we live in Duxbury, where Kiley and I are slowly turning our home into a homestead.