COFFEE WITH DAD

There was a candy store across the street from me but down at the corner of Stone Avenue and Hull Street called Sam’s. This corner store had a large candy window were I spent my time trying to select from the many choices it offered for a penny.

As you approached the front door there was a window where you could order from the outside an ice cream cone or pop, cigarettes or cigars if you were an adult or maybe a mellow roll. Under the window outside was a stand that held all the daily papers. In those days there was the NY Daily News, the NY Daily Mirror, the Brooklyn Eagle, the NY Herald Tribune and the Journal American, Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. When you entered the store there was a rack for magazines and comic books on your left and some booths for sitting down for a soda or ice cream.

Every morning before he departed for work, Dad would give me a nickel and I’d go across the street to Sam’s and buy from the outside stand the NY Daily News, bring it home to Dad and sit with him as he read the paper and drank his coffee. Accompanying the coffee was a cigarette that lied in the ashtray as smoke curled lazily upward with a very poetic curly-cued movement as it slowly dissipated into thin air.

It was under those circumstances and conditions that Dad told me so many wonderful stories about his childhood as he slowly thumbed through the newspaper from the back to the front pinching the pages as he turned them. He liked the News because as he said: The News has the best sports pages in the world” His stories that I still keep in my heart and soul are because Dad told them to me.

There was one story that was about a boy named Johnnie. Johnnie sounded and looked like he lives on the streets, coming from an alcoholic father and a mother who passed away long ago. Dad said he always wore this old brown corduroy coat with the buttons missing and an undershirt that was stained and dirty.

Johnnie would come by every so often and stand outside my grandmother's fruit and vegetable store. Dad got to know him and gave him fruit when grandma or grandpa weren’t looking. Johnnie would take the fruit and run away to wherever he stayed and ate it. Dad felt it was better to feed a thief than have him commit a crime.

One day Dad was standing outside the store and Grandpa came over and said: “Stai cercando il tuo giovane amico?” (Are you looking for your little friend?) He then went on to tell my father that grandma had taken him inside into the apartment and was mending his jacket and washing his clothes, that she was giving him some of Dad’s old clothes and feeding him. It turns out that Johnnie's father was a paisano from the other side and was too proud to ask for help, so grandma took it on herself. The fruit stand was situated on a corner and a trolley car would pass turning the corner every once in a while.

Johnnie became a mainstay with the family, Dad taking him to school to make sure he went and helping him after school with his homework.

It was one school morning when Dad’s world was turned upside down. Johnnie was crossing the street to approach the fruit stand while grandma was with a customer and Dad was eating breakfast in the kitchen apartment. Suddenly he heard Grandma screaming, JOHNNIE, while the terrible sound of steel rubbing against itself screeching through the air.

Dad ran into the store to see what was wrong and saw Grandma cuddling Johnnie who lay on the street not far from the trolley that had run him over. He lived momentarily to recognize Zia Francesca as he called her name then died.