Around the Kitchen Table

Bull's Head Creek was in Staten Island, New York,  Port Richmond, across the street from Pop's house where my Dad grew up.  I wasn't allowed to play in the creek because it was "swimming in leeches",  my Dad said. But Pop's insisted the leeches had "medicinal " use for all sorts of ailments. The murky creek ran through a wooded area that disappeared when the Verrazano Bridge was built. The leeches were gone, too.

After that, a lot of things changed at Pop's house.

What remained at Pop's house was the big kitchen table. 

The big kitchen table was the centerpiece of the home where my Dad grew up. It's where my Grandma  made homemade ravioli and spaghetti sauce from tomatoes Pop grew in his backyard garden. Sunday dinners brought people from around the neighorhood to the table. Pop would go to the cellar and draw a bottle of wine from one of the huge barrels and sit down - "Salud!"

I wasn't born nor live there, but it's where my childhood began, too. 

We lived about 60 miles north of the city in Goshen, but my Dad drove us to Staten Island nearly every weekend. "Us" at the time included my Mom, Dad and me. 

Dad had taken a coveted path in the old neighborhood - he went to college. Then my parents - first-generation Italian Dad and Irish-English-Swiss Mom, met and married in the late 1940s.

It wouldn't have happened without the dreams Pop had for Dad the moment he was born. I mean, my Dad's life was unfolding as planned. 

Pop wasn't born in America but he wanted the American dream for his son. He had left southern Italy with his brother, Pasquale, for New York City in 1911. I never met my great-uncle, Pasquale, because he went to Brazil and Pop stayed in New York City. 

Only 22 years old, Pop packed his own parents' values and his love of family into a trunk. He worked and saved for the day he could send for his bride, Carmela. She arrived by boat in the Camden, New Jersey port, and they were almost immediately married in a church in nearby Gloucester City.

Immigration officers didn't take chances that any groom would change his mind.

Pop was a sanitation officer working for the city of New York.  He and Grandma raised their family in the least urban borough of New York City - Staten Island, the Port Richmond neighborhood, across the street from Bull's Head Creek. 

Pop's work was grueling and the hours were long, but he wasn't a man to become discouraged. He moved up the ranks to drive a truck, and stayed motivated with one aspiration: to send his son to college. 

Dad seemed to know he wasn't going to stay in Port Richmond or see Bulls Head Creek forever. His first summer job was in a local grocery store - a stockboy who also  wheeled groceries to neighborhood homes with a wagon. It went so well he was offered more work in the comingyearr. But he already saw a future out of Bull's Head - and turned down the job. 

How did Pop and Grandma managed to send him to college - Syracuse University!  When Dad was only 17, he was accepted and Pop paid the tuition. 

When he first went away to college, he missed the family, but he wasn't homesick in longing to return. He was homesick in worry about his parents and sister. Were they all right? What if they needed him? There were no instant messages in the 1940s. 

Dad adapted to university life, only coming back to B ull's Head in the summer. Four years later, his degree in journalism in hand, Dad returned home and started working in Bayonne. Before long, he took a job too far away to live at home. It seems unlikely he fit in around the old neighborhood after college. 

Dad respected the old ways with new eyes, envisioning a new American dream in the 1940. His heart was connected to Staten Island. Dad's Italian dialect resumed effortlessly whenever he visited ,which was often. The entrance opened into the kitchen, where a white formica table spanned the length of the room and everyone gathered for three- hours dinners to savor every course. 

After they married, my parents moved to Goshen, NY, where my Dad, a rookie reporter, had a job offer with one of the major dailies. I was born in Goshen Hospital two years after they married, a 7 pound girl, soon to have a headfull of brown curls and green eyes, my father's eyes. Goshen was the home of the Hamiltonian harness race in the 1950s, the Orange County Fair and rural life on the cusp of suburbia. After the horses' carts stopped running, the track became the site for the National Harness Racing Hall of Fame.

Childhood thrived in Goshen in the 1950s. It was a small town where summertime lingered into fall. After school, I would often walk deep into the woods with my friends and perch on Orange County's rocky hills. We'd talk about life and watch horses prance in the corral at a local farm as cars sped by on Route 17. Nearby, one of the first housing developments was rising out of the acres of farmland and trees. It wasn't far from the pond where my friend Johnny and I watched the tadpoles beneath the surface. Occasionally we'd catch one or two frogs and hide them in our mother's milk boxes, lidded contraptions on the front stoop of every home in the 1950s. We weren't enlightened children out to save the planet or even those poor frogs!

Goshen was also where I first peered out a window from our first house on Delta Place and knew what "home" meant. But I was so "adventurous" that I remember having my sheets "safety-pinned" to the bed to keep me in it! The two-story house on Delta Place was not my parents' first home but it was the first one they purchased. Mom was a stay-at-home wife, a true homemaker who created a welcoming family home despite the century's lack of labor-saving experience. There were no "smart" appliances, microwave ovens or crock pots; the washing machines had wringers to extract the water and the clothes dryer was a 20 feet of rope strung outside between two poles! I remember her tearfully trying to match socks in the washing machine, frustrated by her own high standards and the inadequate machinery of the day. After that, she'd iron sheets and shirts and even crease Dad's undershorts with a warm iron. There was that milkbox - usually without frogs - outside the front door where the milk and butter was delivered. Everything Mom cooked or baked was made from "scratch".

Dad was an ambitious newsman, a talented young journalist who was bound to be noticed - and he was, courted by local politicos to run for office. He had an office in the basement of our house, too, and started freelancing - with Mom as the art director.  Mom did the artwork while Dad wrote the copy. She'd had to drop out of college because the money ran out after her sister got a degree. There weren't any student local programs in those days -- but Mom was also bright, well-read and maybe more frustrated in her role than I ever imagined. Like many children, I appreciated her without fully understanding her many responsibilities.

Adventurous excursions started from birth, I'm told, on my part. Toddling down steps and encountering Lambie, my parent's dog, I was in the throes of exploration - and Lambie became Pop's best buddy, moving from Goshen to Staten Island. We had so many joyful moments on Delta Place - we lived in that house until I was about four or five years old. I had a lot of time to spend with my parents then and playing for hours or being read to in my mother's lap. I was "the little adult".

Despite a seeming rigidity of male-female roles in our culture, my parents introduced me to interests and activities for a boy or a girl. I didn't have a brother and delighted in fulfilling their desire for a boy and a girl. I went to the theatre and sang soprano in the choir, but I played with electric trains every Christmas. I had a favorite doll, Rosie, but spent hours with a cowboys and Indian fort, strategizing my life plan! My Davy Crockett hat and cap gun wouldn't be allowed in my own home today but I was a cowgirl in the 1950s, firing away at the "bad guys" of the day. I also had a swingset in the yard and one morning I remember flying through the air as my Dad pushed the little seat faster and faster, higher and higher as I squealed and shrieked! I fell to the ground more than once but would quickly get up and plead "Again, again, again!"

My best friend, Kathy, lived in the house directly behind us with her five sisters and one brother. Our screen doors, a large lot apart, would seem to swing into each other the summer breezes and into autumn. Kathy's Dad owned Joe's Fix-It, a bicyle/bicycle repair shop in the center of town. Next door to me, Aunt Katie and Uncle Nick made their home with their little rat terrier, Toby. He was much loved by his human "parents", who had no other "children". They were not "blood" relatives but they were family, too, to me. Katie would invite me in for cookies and spend time with me. Toby was not pleased at my presence and so I had to keep my distance from him. He and my parent's dog, Lambie, didn't like me and weren't going to cuddle up to me willingly. I was a child, detracting their humans' attention from them, after all.

Katie & Nick's neices, Ann & Louise, were twins who never married, lived with their Mom, Louise, off of Golden Hill Avenue. They traveled widely and worked in the local banks as tellers. At the time, women's lives were viewed as quite incomplete without a man - "what a shame such nice girls never married," people would quip; but "the twins" as they were called, were apparently quite happy in their financial independence and freedom. There were two banks in town; Ann worked in one bank and her sister, also named Louise, worked in the other. Right down the street from Joe's Fix-it.

Each weekday morning, my Dad left in his car, which was then a DeSoto, for work and come home in the evenings at 5 o'clock or so. We were a one-car family.

When Dad got home, it was time to relax or at least appear to relax. Mom, not unlike a "Father Knows Best" character, really did primp and change and prepare the house in anticipation of his arrival. They had a certain romance that I didn't understand but somehow perceived, even as a young child. I remember him singing "Unchained Melody" while my Mom played the piano in the evening. Many weekends, we'd drive to see his parents and sister in Staten Island; Bobby Darin singing "Mac the Knife" would play on the car radio or Dad would sing along with "You've Got Personality". It was background music for the 50s, riding in the white Plymouth Fury with its huge fin-like spoilers in the rear. He would often say that my Mom was "his girl".

Then when I was just about to turn age five, we spent about six months in Europe, which was something of an oddity in those days. We set sail on the Cunard Line, where a tiny room with portholes to nowhere and an imposing deck that seemed to wrap around forever took us from shore to shore. My Dad was only 28 years old but he decided it wasn't clear when he'd have the time to take such a grand trip so we sold the house and went to Europe for six months. I went to my first school, the "English school", just outside of London, had my first crush on John (from the English school), complained about walking up too many steps to look at old castles at various other locales I barely recall. I wondered how short kings really were to sleep in those awful tiny beds. I scowled in Amsterdam because a canal ride didn't look like much fun to me. In Geneva, I played in the park and joyfully ordered ice cream every day! We took a boat from Spain to Portugal, an unfortunate and unexpected adventure at sea because the captain set sail during a storm. We saw the Rock of Gibralter when the ocean calmed and the clouds opened a view. Then we lived on the Island of Majorca for a time. My Mom would carry a sack and we would embark on a daily shopping trip for groceries. The smell of the fish wafted through a net fabric.




Later on, in Spain, on my fifth birthday, I decided to dance on a balcony in Barcelona; it was a daring event which got me in all sorts of trouble with my parents. There was a photo of me prancing happily along the edge, but it got lost in the 70s.