Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s, I came from an Italian neighborhood where we knew each other and understood that they may not be our parents, but we better listen anyway. The charm of having a neighbor caring about neighborhood kids was the norm. My parents policed the gang, as did my neighbors. The neighborhood was always safe.
But there are memories that come back to me like a warm stove on a bitterly cold day. The constant aroma of cooking emanating from ‘La Cucina’ as mom with her floral apron with a pot boiling on the stove, the crusty bread that sat ready for one to break off into pieces, the wine waiting for the orange slices and sometimes peaches about to be deposited, the plate of pasta faggioli calling out my name.
I can still smell the basil fresh from the garden, the parsley ever present, the rhythm of my mother’s mallet as the veal was tenderized, the slow swaying of the wooden spoon in the pot of pasta as she turned it one more time.
Eagerly I waited at the top of the steps for my father coming upstairs from a day of work, whistling as he climbed a Journal American folded under his arm and a fedora topping his pate with wing-tipped shoes that he changed into to travel the subway to Manhattan and Canal Street and back home again. A laborer by trade, a gentleman by distinction, and a father who ruled with supreme love was Dad’s way. Mom had her way of showing affection too. If the wooden spoon wasn’t serving up love for her family in a hot pot over a hot stove, it was serving out the just desserts of the misguided child, namely me!
I would come home from college and sit at the kitchen table, dad in his plaid shirt and work pants a cup of coffee in hand and mom in her apron relating the latest family news and asking questions of me as I ate my dish of pasta.
Sometimes dad would regale me in stories of his childhood as he painted a picture with clarity of detail that made me feel I had lived it. He told of great grandparents and uncles and aunts, of immigrants who came to America under the sponsorship of my grandparents.
If you sat in grandma’s house there was only one room you really knew, the kitchen. It held a large kitchen table butted against another head to head. The doorbell would ring constantly and a parade of jovial Italians would visit, speaking loudly and lovingly about their lives and life itself. Their language was a bi-lingual extravaganza of words and motion, lifting the roof and falling into the cellar, life itself.
Visitors were greeted with kisses, squeezes and no pats on the back that was for sissy people, Italians got down to uubusin-ess, a shouted greeting and a story to begin the visit.
We rooted for Italians to make good, Joe DiMaggio, Carl Furillo and that colored kid with the Italian father, Roy Campanella. We marveled at the local kid that went off to ‘col-ledger’ to become a doctor who we would all support by having him take our temperature, or the kid next door or downstairs who became a lawyer and inherited us all as clients. Teachers were just below a priest or nun, but we gathered together to make our race equal to anyone else’s.
We worked for the day we would grow as a race for our people that excelled in all we do, becoming teachers, doctors, and lawyers, priest, nuns, and cops on the beat, examples for the next generation. We gained power like politicians and engineers and laid the groundwork for other nationalities to learn how to become Americans too.
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