Each time there was a news flash on the television we paid attention. Breaking news was just that, breaking news, I expected them to announce Russian missiles were on they’re way. We were urged to build bomb shelters in our backyards and stock them with water and imperishables. Those were paranoid times. And they wonder why I’m a paranoiac?
Farms and farmers still played a large role in the social fabric of eastern Massachusetts. A quarter mile up the street, at the top of the hill was Ryan’s Farm, the only working farm left directly on the lower half of Liberty Street. During harvest time old farmer Ryan sold fruits and vegetables out of a wood slat farm stand beside his house at the top of the hill. My mother would give me a quarter and say, “Bobby, go to Farmer Ryan’s and buy a half dozen apples.” I knew she was baking pies that afternoon. I’d trudge up the hill with a quarter and ask for a six apples.
“What kind?” He’d ask.
“The baking kind.” Visions of apple pies and apple butter danced in my head.
As he got older, if he didn’t have what we wanted stacked behind him in his small stand he send us to the orchards to pick our own. “Just the fruit on the ground. Don’t climb the trees,” he’d admonish. We’d picked our own apples and pears or what ever vegetable was in season, brought them back to the stand and he charged accordingly. He did not have a scale, all business was done by sight and in coins.
Around the bottom of each tree lied scores of fruit in various stages of decomposition. Flies and sweet bees swarmed aound the more decomposed fruit, the sweet smell of rotting fruit.. I wa careful not to step on any of the soggy apples and. Whne I thought farmer Ryan was not looking I’d climb into the trees. More than once, if I couldn’t find enough of the fruit I thought mom wanted, I’d climb up the lower branches. Farmer Ryan’d yell from the top of the hill. “Get down from the trees. You’ll break the branches”
Discarding apples that were too bruised or rotten or wormy, I gather us the best dozen apples available and trudged back to the stand. Pesticides were used sparingly. They were expensive. If Farmer Ryan was not pure eco-green, he was probably more so than many of today’s so-called green stores selling overpriced foods to people with too much money.
“Fifteen cents,” he’d say.
I handed him the quarter.
“Do you have a dime and a nickle?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t have any change. We’ll make it up the next time.” He took out a small pad of paper wet a pencil with the tip of his tongue and wrote the IOU. Then he handed me back my quarter and packed the apples in a paper bag. When I got back home, my mother not wanting to be beholding to anyone gave me the fifteen cents and sent me backup the hill to pay farmer Ryan.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
CHAPTER 1 -- Post # 5
While the Fifties might have seem Paradise to a six year old, they were far from idyllic. The Cold War was raging. The two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, tested ever larger atomic bombs with reckless abound. Doomsday seemed to be marked in red on the calender. Fear of nuclear war was real. People were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards and stock them with canned food and portable water against an nuclear bomb attack. At school we practiced air raid drills. Our teachers instructed us to go single file to the basement or if there was not time, dive under our desks at the first sound of the air raid horn; Duck and Tuck. In the basement we lined up and faced the whitewashed walls to avoid flying glass and blinding radiation from an atomic blast. We kids enjoyed these air raid practices, they broke the monotony of classes, yet they were a poignant reminder, the world was a dangerous place.
Television was new, they were expensive and to own one was a status symbol. My Dad love gadgets and as soon as he could afford it he bought a new RCA 14 inch screen black and white television which was set in the place of honor in the living room across from the sofa. Afraid of damaging the precious set we kids were not allowed to touch it. We had to wait until Dad got home and we had dinner before the family would gather around the television and watch the news and variety shows. My favorite after Disney World was Topper and later Sky King after whom I named my first dog, a toy Boston Terrier.
Like most families we only had one television and each summer we’d carefully wrap it in blankets, place it in the back of the Ford station wagon and take it with us to the bay front Cape Cod cottage in Pocasset. By the mid-fifties, as disposable income soared, a sea of TV antennas sprouted from every home like a month’s worth of old stubble. Even people with no televisions hitched up an antenna from their chimney roofs. Not to have one was a scarlet letter of poverty. It was the time of keeping up with the Joneses, of greener grass than your neighbor, and Detroit telling us that a two year old car was obsolete. Later they’d do everything in their power to make that true. Then the Japanese took over and the unnatural spectra of ‘planned obsolescence’ was finished. At least in cars.
Morning shows were restricted to Author Godfrey and other variety shows. I especially remembered Bob Emery beginning each of his shows strumming a ukelele and singing,
“The Grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard,
Oh that mortgage we have to hold, oh boy that’s hard.
Now if we could all wear green glasses it wouldn’t be to hard
To see how green the grass was in our own back yard.”
Not exactly rap or hip-hop music.
But this was before the Japanese, and Cuba and Viet Nam. It was before the race riots, Watergate and dope and free sex. It was thirty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We owned the world, or at least the free part. The dollar was king and we had a television set.
Then there were the Russians. While we were distracted by growth and progress, they cooped the high ground of space by rocketing Sputnik, the first man made satellite, into orbit around the earth. We now had an enemy flying over our heads.
Television was new, they were expensive and to own one was a status symbol. My Dad love gadgets and as soon as he could afford it he bought a new RCA 14 inch screen black and white television which was set in the place of honor in the living room across from the sofa. Afraid of damaging the precious set we kids were not allowed to touch it. We had to wait until Dad got home and we had dinner before the family would gather around the television and watch the news and variety shows. My favorite after Disney World was Topper and later Sky King after whom I named my first dog, a toy Boston Terrier.
Like most families we only had one television and each summer we’d carefully wrap it in blankets, place it in the back of the Ford station wagon and take it with us to the bay front Cape Cod cottage in Pocasset. By the mid-fifties, as disposable income soared, a sea of TV antennas sprouted from every home like a month’s worth of old stubble. Even people with no televisions hitched up an antenna from their chimney roofs. Not to have one was a scarlet letter of poverty. It was the time of keeping up with the Joneses, of greener grass than your neighbor, and Detroit telling us that a two year old car was obsolete. Later they’d do everything in their power to make that true. Then the Japanese took over and the unnatural spectra of ‘planned obsolescence’ was finished. At least in cars.
Morning shows were restricted to Author Godfrey and other variety shows. I especially remembered Bob Emery beginning each of his shows strumming a ukelele and singing,
“The Grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard,
Oh that mortgage we have to hold, oh boy that’s hard.
Now if we could all wear green glasses it wouldn’t be to hard
To see how green the grass was in our own back yard.”
Not exactly rap or hip-hop music.
But this was before the Japanese, and Cuba and Viet Nam. It was before the race riots, Watergate and dope and free sex. It was thirty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We owned the world, or at least the free part. The dollar was king and we had a television set.
Then there were the Russians. While we were distracted by growth and progress, they cooped the high ground of space by rocketing Sputnik, the first man made satellite, into orbit around the earth. We now had an enemy flying over our heads.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
CHAPTER I Post # 4
I know now that our family did not have a monopoly on familiar dysfunction. But we wore it on our sleeves as a badge of honor. That’s probably Italian. My father was first generation Italian American. Both my paternal grandparents, Grandpa Francisco or “Cice”and Nona Teresa were born in Castel Morone, a village a few miles outside of Caserta in the hard mountains above Naples. It was from Castel Morrone that the father of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood art movement, emigrated to England. My grandmother was a Rossetti. The Italian ran strong in my father though I found later it ran stronger in me.
Love was never absent in our family, though at times it was well disguised. My father instilled a strong sense of family, expounding ‘the Family this, and the Family that.’ “Never repeat what is discussed here to anyone,” he’d say. What goes on in the Family stays there and in the end it is always the family you can rely upon. Friends, lovers and even husbands and wives come and go -- the Family remains. Dad showed his love by being a good provider. We never wanted for anything. Mom gave us children a mother’s unconditional love for as long as she could. Then she went away promising to return but she never did. I had a hard time forgiving her for it. But that was my story. The truth, I’m told, lies elsewhere.
My father believed in strict division of labor. The women had their chores and the men theirs. Growing up, I accompanied him every weekend to work on his real estate projects. These were mostly three and five family apartment buildings that he renovated, rented for a number of years then sold at a profit. He had a good eye for real estate instilled, he said, by my grandmother Teresa. I painted apartments, cleaned out basements, and learned to lay tile, repair plumbing, sheetrock and do minor electric work. I also raked dried condom-filled sludge from acre-sized septic filter beds of a forty-one unit complex Dad owned in Sagamore, Massachusetts -- a job none of the workers wanted. At home, except for taking out the trash, I was not required to do any house work. That was the realm of my two younger sisters, Carol Jean and Susan. Outside work was delegated to me; I mowed the lawn and racked the leaves, washed the cars and painted the house every five years.
Grandmother Teresa, or Nona died when I was seven. She was a shrewd woman, owned real estate and ruled her family with an iron hand. In a weak moment my father said, she had nagged my grandfather Francisco to death after he had been injured in an accident that left him a partial invalid and unable to work.
Grandpa Francisco played the guitar. He was also the president of the Lincoln Credit Union that served as a bank for the local Italian community,
A hard woman or not, death had marred Nona Teresa. Early in her marriage she had returned to Italy with her youngest child, a year old daughter who like her had blond hair and sky blue eyes. It was winter and cold in the Appennini Mountains that surrounded Castel Morone. The oversized floor-level fireplace that kept the house warm was blazing with wood gathered that afternoon in the fields and forests that surrounded the town. Nona Teresa and her baby slept on the floor near the hearth to keep warm. During the night the baby rolled over into the fire and Nona Teresa watched her baby burn alive. Her next child was a boy she named Nicolas, after another child that had died. Still mourning her lost daughter she dressed him in girls’ clothing and kept his hair in long curls until he was twelve. Nick was her favorite.
Nona Teresa was fickle and would change her will as one of her children would fall into or out of favor. Perhaps hurt by the injustice of a parent playing favorites, my father never openly said any of his children were his preferred. We were treated equally. Of course I was the male and had close proximity to him, a wide and wildly swung two edged sword. In the end any inheritance was equally divided between the children as per his often stated instructions. My father was a man of his word. If you got it in writing.
Love was never absent in our family, though at times it was well disguised. My father instilled a strong sense of family, expounding ‘the Family this, and the Family that.’ “Never repeat what is discussed here to anyone,” he’d say. What goes on in the Family stays there and in the end it is always the family you can rely upon. Friends, lovers and even husbands and wives come and go -- the Family remains. Dad showed his love by being a good provider. We never wanted for anything. Mom gave us children a mother’s unconditional love for as long as she could. Then she went away promising to return but she never did. I had a hard time forgiving her for it. But that was my story. The truth, I’m told, lies elsewhere.
My father believed in strict division of labor. The women had their chores and the men theirs. Growing up, I accompanied him every weekend to work on his real estate projects. These were mostly three and five family apartment buildings that he renovated, rented for a number of years then sold at a profit. He had a good eye for real estate instilled, he said, by my grandmother Teresa. I painted apartments, cleaned out basements, and learned to lay tile, repair plumbing, sheetrock and do minor electric work. I also raked dried condom-filled sludge from acre-sized septic filter beds of a forty-one unit complex Dad owned in Sagamore, Massachusetts -- a job none of the workers wanted. At home, except for taking out the trash, I was not required to do any house work. That was the realm of my two younger sisters, Carol Jean and Susan. Outside work was delegated to me; I mowed the lawn and racked the leaves, washed the cars and painted the house every five years.
Grandmother Teresa, or Nona died when I was seven. She was a shrewd woman, owned real estate and ruled her family with an iron hand. In a weak moment my father said, she had nagged my grandfather Francisco to death after he had been injured in an accident that left him a partial invalid and unable to work.
Grandpa Francisco played the guitar. He was also the president of the Lincoln Credit Union that served as a bank for the local Italian community,
A hard woman or not, death had marred Nona Teresa. Early in her marriage she had returned to Italy with her youngest child, a year old daughter who like her had blond hair and sky blue eyes. It was winter and cold in the Appennini Mountains that surrounded Castel Morone. The oversized floor-level fireplace that kept the house warm was blazing with wood gathered that afternoon in the fields and forests that surrounded the town. Nona Teresa and her baby slept on the floor near the hearth to keep warm. During the night the baby rolled over into the fire and Nona Teresa watched her baby burn alive. Her next child was a boy she named Nicolas, after another child that had died. Still mourning her lost daughter she dressed him in girls’ clothing and kept his hair in long curls until he was twelve. Nick was her favorite.
Nona Teresa was fickle and would change her will as one of her children would fall into or out of favor. Perhaps hurt by the injustice of a parent playing favorites, my father never openly said any of his children were his preferred. We were treated equally. Of course I was the male and had close proximity to him, a wide and wildly swung two edged sword. In the end any inheritance was equally divided between the children as per his often stated instructions. My father was a man of his word. If you got it in writing.
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