THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND

And I thought they’d never end! Life was simple with a lot of style.

In the early 50’s in Brooklyn, Dad got up at 7:00 AM sharp, ate and took his brown bag of lunch and the brown bag of garbage as he left for work. The lunch supposedly destined for the noon hour and the garbage for the grey metal can in the front yard, next to the stoop. Dad did have his days, where he took the wrong bag to work!

Mom was like a traffic cop in the mornings in the early 50’s, school shoes resided on the cast iron stove all shiny and polished, the cereal on the table ready for her offspring to devour, and admonishments to speed it up or we would be late for school.

My older sister Tessie (much older) would dutifully eat her breakfast, check her homework and be ready to move out, to maintain her ‘A’ average and good deportment with the nuns, and of course there was me. Let’s go to the next paragraph, this may take a while.

My biggest fear was the one that Dad kept putting in my head that Congress was going to vote on having school all year long. There was to be no summer vacations for kids anymore so they could teach us even more. This was a reasonable fear in so much that I dreaded having to see the brothers and lay teachers all year long. The thought of being in a dreary classroom where there was no coddling, no laughing or talking depressed me. Thank you Dad!

After the last threat to “get moving” with a wooden spoon in Mom’s hand, I shuffled off to school in the cold winter mornings, and along with my older sister Tessie (much older) would walk the one block along Stone Avenue to MacDougal Street Aberdeen Street to the school yard, avoiding stepping on cracks or we would break our mother’s back! Passing Sloppy John’s messy and sloppy vegetable stand, I would reflect on what I did to him the afternoon prior as I played with my friends, and hoped he didn’t come after me with a baseball bat!

Up Stone Avenue to MacDougal Street toward Broadway we came to the overhead El, and the noisy rumblings as it went by overhead on the Broadway Junction. My long hard day was quickly approaching, and with it my apprehensions of the homework that was due and may or may not have been completed.

Reaching the schoolyard, if the weather permitted, I would stop and watch a game of handball between I think Franciscan Brothers and upper classmates. Then the dreaded bell sounded, and I went to my respective area to line up with my class and march into the building, the one grade after the next, upon entering the building: smelling the steam from the radiators that meant this is business. Once in the classroom, we stood at our desks, put our books in the desk and said our prayers, then the Pledge of Allegiance.

I hated the school, and the classroom and the teacher, and the idea that 3:00 PM dismissal was so far away in the day. Although I managed to get through the school day, I didn’t like it, and I guess no one said I should.

3:00 PM was the magic hour, and Friday’s 3:00 PM was the super magic hour!

But there was a lot to like, for instance the last day of school before the summer vacation, and like I said, Friday’s.

Almost next door to me was a small grocery store called Curialie’s and it had a bakery in the cellar that made fresh Italian bread every morning. Do you have any idea what it was like to awaken in the morning and smell the bread baking? Do you have any concept of what instant hunger really is? Then go into the kitchen and smell the coffee just brewed, and take a whiff of the Maxwell House coffee can and the fresh grinds? This is living!

Then Sunday mornings: on Sunday mornings Mom made me do two things. One was to wear my Sunday best suit, and two was to go to Mass. I had to march to church, taking the same route I took every morning to school and sit with my class, then when we were supposed to kneel, not rest my butt on the seat or: it would get whacked with a long stick by some patrolling nun or brother. (You’d think they’d be praying instead of looking out for my ass.)

In those days you didn’t eat anything before Mass so you could have a clean stomach for the host. So by the end of the Priest’s prayers at the foot of the altar, my stomach was praying along with me for this service to be over with.

 

Now the neighborhood was pretty much Italian with some Irish or German mixed in. As we walked home, we could smell the sauces being made as we past the many homes that house Italian Americans. This added to the hunger pangs and the need for crullers, crumb buns and jelly donuts, to hold us off until the feast at 1:00 PM.

Mom would lay out the Sunday dinner that always consisted of pasta, or in the old days, Macaroni with gravy, and not the sissified “Pasta with sauce”. Italians made gravy from the meat they cooked first, that’s why it is called gravy. You fried those meatballs pal, not baked them, you rolled your braciole and threw in the hot and sweet sausage, and “abbondanza!”

The wine that sat on the table was home made, from my grandfather’s grape vines, squeezed by Grandpa and bottle by Grandpa. We should not have called it ‘Home-made’ we should have called it ‘Grandpa’s Soul’. Along with that wine was Grandpa’s figs, grown by you guessed it, Grandma’s spouse.

On holidays or not, Sundays at Grandma’s was special, and I used to go on my own before my family got there. Why? Because I loved to watch Grandma as she maneuvered around the kitchen and out to the garden, picking her parsley of basil, the thing I called Green Gold. To this day, whenever I smell fresh Italian basil, I think of Grandma, her floppy slippers and her going into and out of the screen door on the hinge as it slammed in her huge bottom floor kitchen.

The Kitchen was headquarters for all to come to. Grandma was like the neighborhood Godfather or in her case Godmother. You had a problem be it financial, medical or loneliness, you went to “Zia Francesca” and she would straighten it all out.

Those were in essence beautiful days, days of golden virtue and sterling lessons of the life of what a family should be, days gone by and never to be reclaimed again.

A famiglia in primo luogo!