Beaver Cleaver's Evil Twin

We were kids growing up in a white, middle class American neighborhood that happened to be Hollywood, California. To us, the glamor of the silver screen seemed another world. Considering the way Hollywood sentimentalized us relentlessly in movies and would soon in television entertainment, we -- the real kids who lived in the Los Angeles district of Hollywood, could well have come from another planet. 
Me, 1948

We were in that sense, the evil twins of those saccharin screen kids played by the likes of Margaret O'Brien and other child stars of the 1940s. By our own lights, we weren't a bad kids -- not spawn of the devil - but full of the devil nonetheless, 
pranksters who fought a running guerrilla war with parents and other adults who we somehow knew we must resist. 

Some of us did have parents who worked in the studios, but as grips, extras, office assistants, and even some who played character roles occasionally. But living in the movie capital of the world held no special magic for us. Only the movies themselves retained their magic -- for good or ill -- as they did for everyone everywhere. 

The large screen and the small screens beginning to invade households, showed us heroes and villains, lovers and brutes, fools and wise guys, vamps, dolls, dames, long-suffering mothers and everything as it might be but seldom was in real life. But it seemed as real as a rainstorm in the darkened theater where my mother took me often twice a week and I went along on Saturday for the 15-cent four hour kiddie matinee at the neighborhood bijou. 


The two Hollywoods just didn't fit together, and it seemed usually that our real world was the one that didn't measure up.  Maybe we became tricksters intuitively to even the scales. 

Life -- aside from the drudgery of school, was about getting out of the house or apartment, out of sight and earshot of our parents. Those were days when kids were told to go out and play. 

I did like books - which marked me as a wierdo --  but there was no TV, no video games to keep any kid inside, and even radio dramas and comedies only were broadcast at night.  Daytime one only heard soap operas. Having to listen to soap operas when I was home sick -- to pass the time -- seemed worse that any flu or even the chicken pox.

Don't think it was innocently Beaver-ish, however. Home lives were usually less than ideal. Adults and their fights, fears, depressions, delusions, and what seemed arbitrary rules were to be avoided. 

My best friend's Dad didn't wear cardigan sweaters and unlike Ward was known to smack mom around after a few beers. My father was away on the road most of the time, and when he came home, nothing but fights which I'd avoid by heading out the back door and getting my bicycle.  

Out there I'd go around the block and find my usual friends -- a half-dozen neighborhood kids -- five boys and a girl we liked because she was what was then called a "Tomboy."  I dressed and looked like Beaver Cleaver a decade before "Leave It to Beaver" debuted on TV in 1957 and terminally sentimentalized the kind of "Beav" I had been in real life. .  

This 1948 model Beav looked all wide-eyed and innocent for the growups, but. when alone, fancied himself cryptic -- a character out of Edgar Allen Poe -- a schemer who wished he could be The Invisible Man real life around his parents and other adults, except maybe at Christmas and my birthday so I could get presents.  


This "Beav-Cleave" doppleganger had a father he feared and was happiest when away on business, which was at least half of the time.  His mother was no June Cleaver either --   depressed and frustrated, thwarted from following the musical career she's started on the East Coast, felt alienated in Los Angeles, constantly struggling to make ends meet with the tiny, inadequate allowance my father would leave her before taking off in his big, fat, black Oldsmobile 98 for weeks at a time.  

The evil "Beav" had a best friend named Bobby, a shy,, skinny, beanpole whose father owned a local grocery store. Bobby had an older brother, a mom and dad who did not seem on the edge of divorce. (I was only to learn later of their strife behind their respectable church-going exterior.) The lived in a normal, house with a yard, a dog and a fat, calico Persian cat, instead of the apartment where i lived and slept in a pull-down Murphy bed in the front room. 


People would think if anything, I with the foreign-sounding name and being the smaller one, would have been "the bad influence," initiating mischief .  Bob had a normal name everyone could pronounce.  


But he wasn't popular. He was an outcast like myself at our grammar school class. That associated with the odd-ball, Boston-Italian boy who talked funny, with soft "r's"  He was my pal because he was six-feet tall in the fifth grade and looked upon as something of a freak himself. And, of the two of us, he was the one who most often came up with dares and urged us on to the next level of trouble. 


We didn't stay after school and play kick ball. We didn't get invited to birthday parties at local miniature golf courses. But like other kids in that day, we spent most of our free time outside playing, unless we were sick. 


Bobby and I rode our fat-tired, stripped down, bicycles all over Hollywood, and out to Santa Monica beach, through Beverly Hills and up into the Hollywood Hills, and along a still- glamorous, clean, upscale Hollywood Boulevard lined with palm trees, department stores and big first-run movie palaces like the Pantages, the Egyptian and, of course, The Chinese. 


We often rode our bikes up to Hollywood Blvd. to goof around, shoplift candy from the Woolworth's, have a malted milk or banana split at the counter and maybe take in a movie for 15 cents apiece. 


Sometimes we locked our bikes and went into the Broadway Hollywood, then a posh, 12-story department store on the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine.  Our mothers often shopped for dresses and shoes there, instead of Sears where they bought our corduroys, khakis, cotton shirts, sneakers and jeans for school. 


I hated Sears with a passion, because the company would put up billboards reading "First to Sears and Then to School," early in August that reminded me that we had less than one month left to our enjoy the dolce vita of summer vacation. I still feel nauseated in remembering the slogan.


The only good thing in our boyish minds about the big Sears store, then on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Big Red Pacific Electric trolley cars ran, was the special "Rite-Fit Shoe Vision" machine in the children's shoe department. It was Sears exclusive -- a four-foot-high metal stand that looked something like a gum vending machine.  


There was a step in front and a hole big enough for me to slide in  my feet while standing up against it. At that point I could look down into a flat glass shaded by a black plastic cowling.  I'd press a large button next to the cowling and hear a buzzing.  

The glass would light up and there, in dark gray against a glowing, sickly green background I could see the skeletal bones of my feet through the tops of my shoes!  


Parents could peek in to make sure they were getting the right fit -- with room to grow -- on shoes they were about to buy.  But I always ran to it to see "my skeleton" through the old sneakers I was wearing, and so did the swarms of other kids drawn to the machine and ignored by clerks busy selling to their parents and other paying customers. 


The button only activated was obviously was an X-ray for a few moments.  But like the other kids, I'd just push the button over and over as I gazed down at my toe-bones in fascination. Once, on one of the rare occasions one of the Sears staff walked over to shoo us off the shoe-viewer, I asked him if the x-ray machine could make people sick  -- having seen the 1943 bio-pic "Madame Curie," with Greer Garson in which the heroine dies of cancer having discovered radium without realizing the side-effects.  


"Not at all, son," I remember this pasty-faced, clerk answering me as if he knew what he was talking about. "It's perfectly safe radiation, not an X-ray.  It's a fluoroscope!" It wasn't till several years later than I found out that a fluoroscope is just another kind of x-ray machine.


Not even the super-dooper see-through shoe-skeleton machine could draw Bobby and I to Sears when we were on our own.  Besides, we favored the then, genteel glamour of Hollywood Boulevard to the blue-collar Sears. We could pretend to be movie stars. 


Sometimes we'd go to the Mayflower Coffee Shop on the boulevard. There was a donut-making machine constantly running behind the plate glass of the coffee shop's front window. It was worth watching for a long time to see how long we could resist the temptation to go inside and buy some of them.  


Next we headed to the Broadway Hollywood department store.


We took elevators and escalators to the top floor and slipped into a storage area behind the glassware department. With a little exploring, we found what we sought - -- a stairway to the roof. 


We sneaked out onto the roof, from where we could see the whole city, and on some days that yellow-gray stuff people had started calling "smog," because they thought it came from a blend of local fog with sludge-pot smoke used to protect citrus groves in the nearby San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys (Now, of course, all suburbs).


The Broadway Hollywood was one of those Belle Epoch-style buildings with ornate facade and ledges that curved outward from the roof. 


The Beav and Bob used to crawl out on the lip of those ledges, lay on our stomachs with our heads hanging over so that we could see people and cars far beneath us moving about on the boulevard. 


We would work up a lot of saliva and spit and giggle seeing if there was any reaction from the unwitting shoppers walking on the sidewalk below who may have thought they felt a raindrop, oddly on a perfectly sunny Southern California day.  Sometimes we spit gum or little pieces of hard candy.


One time, Bobby stood up, teetering right on the edge, unzipped his corduroys and pulled out his boy-thing. "What are you doing?" I yelled. "You're going to fall off. Your going to get us in big trouble.  He paid no attention and began to pee in a long arc out over the edge, his yellow stream dispersing into a spray of vaporous drops that fell below on the unsuspecting pedestrians.  At one point, a breeze blew the stream a bit sideways as it flew out into space and back at us.  I started laughing. So did he, causing his hosing to go even more awry.  


We kept laughing like hell and he almost lost his balance.  I tried to reach out to grab his pant-leg but almost went over myself. 


I kept looking nervously at the roof door, worried some Broadway guard or other employee would burst through it and discover us in flagrante dilicto. 


i gazed below again but didn't see anyone opening an umbrella or seeming to react, except one old man to paused a second and seemed to look up right at me.  I pulled in my head like an alarmed turtle. 


After a while, we quietly slipped back down from the roof and took an elevator back to the street level. 


 I noticed that Bobby had some droplets of wet on one leg of his trousers.  I grabbed sample bottles of perfume and sprayed him as we walked past the cosmetic department and he retaliated in kind, until we got dirty looks from a very pretty clerk there.  


Off we went on our bicycle, little disheveled devils smelling like Chanel No. 5, and Lilac perfumes. We repeated our Broadway adventure several times until it became too risky because the clerks started to recognize us and wonder what we were doing there alone. 
Besides, it got boring after a while. We moved on to other mischievous pastimes.   (What anti-social, nasty little buggers we were!!!) 


Indolently we rode our fat-tire Schwins for miles along the right side of streets next to parked cars. And as we rode, we'd reach over every once in a while to slap a side view mirror out of line so the driver would have to re-adjust it when he or she returned to their autos. 


As an adult, I've  often wondered if some boy is spitting or pissing on me from tall buildings when I walk downtown.  Sometime a feel a raindrop, and look up, seeing nothing but blue sky and the sides of the buildings that don't have ledges anymore. I wonder.

Sunday in Boston With Gnocchi

In my pale blue, cotton flannel pajamas and cotton socks, I could ice skate the polished hardwood floors, around the sides of the oriental rugs. It was very early, but I didn’t pay attention to clocks. I only remember that my grandmother’s large third floor flat on a bluff overlooking a frozen Mystic River in Somerville, Massachusetts was quiet, with winter sun slanting under pulled shades and between drapes, and it seemed magical.

I could skate my stocking feet along the side of the runner down the hall past the bedrooms of my mother and aunt Nina, her elder sister who really ran the family, not my grandmother.

But my grandmother – Nonna Rosa, we called her – had been out of bed already for hours. The hallway led to bathrooms on one side, and past sliding double doors that opened into a dining room, that was closed at the moment. At the far end of the long hallway, was a swinging door that led into Nonna’s large, generous kitchen.

I could see the light under the door and I knew Nonna was up and already cooking for the big Sunday, Alessandrini family dinner, with which I was already familiar…I pushed the swinging door open and walked through to see my Nonna chopping onions on a big wooden block. She looked up at me and beamed, and greeted me in Italian. I answered in Italian, which somehow, I could speak, but don’t remember how.

Today, I remember this as in a dream in which one suddenly speaks in a foreign tongue he’d never heard before…I didn’t speak Italian to my parents, only English. It was as if my fluency in Italian was a secret I shared only with my grandmother, who spoke, actually, in the playful, modulated dialect of her native Rome…

She put the chopped onions into a large, black, cast iron skillet atop the stove and sautéed it in olive oil. I wandered out onto a glassed in sun porch that led off from the kitchen and looked out onto the towering, green-painted iron of the Mystic River bridge with ships passing underneath looking like toys,

A hinged storm window opened onto a small section of roof that covered the downstairs sun deck…the small area was littered with crusts of stale, white Italian bread. The work of my Nonna who loved feeding the blackbirds and sparrows to endured the winter here each year.

I found more bread on a table and threw it out the window to help in the feeding. “Poveracci, poor things, had hava tough time all-a winter,” she would say in her broken English and tossed them pieces of bread. The birds would show up almost immediately.

I was too young to realize that her affinity with wintering birds stemmed form more than a few hard cold winters she’d endured working at a Boston shoe factory supporting four kids, during the just-past, Great Depression, lucking to have any job at all. Things were better now – a little.

As i remember everyone saying, "There's a war on." I wasn't sure what that really meant except that it was something all the adult took very seriously with grim, sometimes frightened, often scared looks on their faces. It also meant a couple of uncles now were gone away and showed up on holidays wearing khaki uniforms with brass buttons and some medals.

Mostly it meant one of my uncles who was in the service, gave me a toy "Flying Tiger" tiny fighter plane with a snarly pointy toothed face painted on its nose, giving it a comic ferocity. It became my favorite toy and i “flew” it everywhere, by holding it up and making propeller noises with my mouth…The little plan was there where I’d left it the day before, on a window sill.

I picked it up and flew it along the windows, silhouetted in early morning sun as it began to rise, I put it in diving mode, swooping along the linoleum and strafed my grandmother’s fuzzy slippers.

Then, buzzing with my pursed lips, I climbed to high altitude along he side of the stove. It was a gigantic cooking stove with one half in black cast iron with a furnace to burn wood or coal, a flat top with flat round tops that could be lifted off with a special long-handled tool that fitted a slot in the round stove top unit, to reveal flames leaving inside…A wide, metal smoke stack ran from the back of the stove up through the ceiling. The other half was a more conventional gas stove with four burners and an oven.

The experience hangs dreamlike and vivid, preserved perfectly in my consciousness from scores of years past. The stove, the quiet of the kitchen the delicious smells of herbs, fresh garlic, sauted garlic and onions blending and filling the warm kitchen as the slanting morning sunlight brightened, fullfiling the promise the coming Sunday celebration.

It seemed a ritual that had come down to us thorugh the ages, from grandmas past and would always be held. Yet I didn't know that our many-course, feast that would be served, 2 p.m. to a dozen or so family members and friends, laughing, exchanging stories, teasing and enjoying music of their own making represented an era coming to a close as this close-knit, extended family with grow more and more affluent in the coming postwar period and spread out into suburbs and across the continent, thinning their connections accordingly.

My grandmother now was rolling out dough on a large table…stopping every few moments to check things on the stove. Instead of flattening out the dough as she usually did to make noodles, she rolled the dough lengthwise into long cylindrical tubes.

Then she cut the tubes into fat, little, equal, inch-long pieces. These were to be her fabled gnocchi. My job was to make a dent in each doughy gnocchi. This produced a little indentation as the gnocchi. When the gnocchi were dried, cooked and served, these little indentations would catch sauce and ground meat of the ragout sauce, along with the grated Parmesan cheese that would be sprinkled on each dish as it is served.

I remember making those dents as one of the happiest times of my life. Maybe my five-year-old finger wasn’t exactly sanitized, but the gnocchi would be boiled anyway. And they were plump, sweet, delightful when she served them covered with the robust, aromatic tomato sauce she sautéed and simmered for hours with pork, and beef and that tasted like you thought you'd dreamed it, and that I've tried to duplicate for decades and still only approached. Then sprinkle well with freshly grated Reggiano Parmiggiano cheese -- something you could never buy in anything but well-aged golden wedges sliced from the wheel by an Italian deli clerk in those days.

                                                                                                        

Cat a la Carte

In spite of naming me after my grandfather, and reminding me constantly that I the first-born of my generation on both sides of my parents' extended Italian families in Boston, I felt like an exotic from the earliest days I could remember. Not that I knew what the word meant botanically. I just knew I wasn’t a native plant, not in my family. and not in the gardens and sidewalks beyond our front door where our elegantly curved residential street led into broad Commonwealth Avenue where the trolley ran to downtown Boston.

I had no rationale for this feeling of apartness. No feeling of hostility from anyone. But I was the only child in each household where I found myself. Few couples were having children in that period since I had been born at the end of the Great Depression and ran about as a tot at the World War II broke out all over the world and became everyone’s preoccupation.

Besides, back then, children weren’t considered something of a breed all their own, little savages, not so much human, but cute little, human-like creatures all their own to be kept in place until ready for adulthood. Disney had made three of its first classic animated films – Snow White, Bambi and Pinocchio – plus Mickey cartoons, but hadn’t turned childhood into a multibillion-dollar industry yet.

There was no Dr. Spock to guide parents – struggling out of the Depression anyway – and we were Catholic in name, but not every Sunday, barely into the New Testament and certainly not into the tight-lipped sternness of the Old Testament about anything. Being Catholic signified identity, not so much Revelation. Being Italians who considered themselves of the high-culture, secular, worldly variety, both my father’s affluent family and my mother’s more artistic family looked at priests largely as social climbers not to be trusted much, and religiosity a hallmark of the toiling masses of “caffoni,” those half-literate country folk who made up the majority of fellow Italians who had made it to the land of the free and lived in places like South Boston and Jersey.

I wasn’t aware of any of this, of course, until many years later in retrospect. But looking back on these two families --- Tosi and Alessandrini, each patrician in its own way, one austere and affluent, the other warm and individualistic – I realize that despite their strained relations and contrasting attitudes about money – they had the one thing in common of considering themselves elite. They were different and raised me as “different,” and I felt different even from them.

Other accidents of history contributed to this rarified family atmosphere that I naively considered normal and universal at the time. It was a good time to be a child, really – though in some ways neglected. One didn’t “raise” children anymore than one “raised” lawns. At least that was the ethos of these two diverging, distinct Italian families, neither one of which was cozy with the other.

Being this little interplanetary visitor, it fell to me to play the expected role of prankster to indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles – mercilessly – in the process, getting away with murder from my too-young parents knowing they hesitated to come down hard on this adorable little bratty puppy who make their elders laugh and shake their heads.

The Tosi house at 3 Wallingford Road in Brighton near Boston College, a large, two-story urban, red brick New England townhouse, housed a live-in maid and cook named Anna, a tiny, energetic, hunchback woman who had been devoted to my grandmother Luisa Tosi for many years back before I was born.

She blended right in with witches good and bad of my fairy tales and, at age four, i remember having nothing else to do sometimes, i trailed her around the place talking and singing nonsensical songs while she went about her chores and i mimicked my grandmother giving her instructions in half-English, half-Italian to see if i could get her to crack up irreverently.

Poor old Anna put up with my pranks as well as my noise and general misbehavior. My grandmother's beloved black cat, Nero, would trot up and meow for a treat whenever Anna opened the refrigerator door. Anna wasn't supposed to be feeding Nero treats all the time, but I was on her side. Why not, I remember thinking, put Nero inside the refrigerator for a while so he could partake of as many treats as he wanted, especially a nice piece of leftover baked Boston Scrod that happened to be on the bottom shelf.

When Anna went down to the laundry room in the cellar, i cracked the refrigerator door, summoning Nero. I uncovered the backed Scrod, shiny white, sprinkled with bits of parsley, herbs and garlic, buttery and lemony, picked off a piece of the fillet to lure Nero in closer, then let the cat get up on its hind legs to have another bite.

Nero was a large, shorthair, cat with green eyes and a shiny coat, almost too heavy for my little four-year-old self to lift. But from this position it was easy to give him a little encouraging lift into the large bottom shelf space of the refrigerator while he purred and licked at the fish fillet. One step back and i swung the big door shut silently. Click. Oh, did that light stay on when the door closed? I didn't know. No matter, I'd heard that cats could see in the dark.

Now i wandered around the house, looking at the big grandfather clock in the hallway, pondering whether or not to open the glass door, get up on my tiptoes and change the time on it. Instead, i think i went upstairs several times to slide down the fat, curving tubular mahogany banister.

Through the sliding polished wooden doors of the conservatory at the front of the first floor, I could hear my grandmother, Luisa, playing the baby grand and coaching her last student of the day -- a reedy tenor - through his scales and exercises.

The young, rotund student came out, carrying his music in a brief case, took his coat and hat from a rack in the atrium and exited the front door, silently, seemingly lost in his lesson. Then my grandmother emerged, cane in hand, giving me a glance and that smile that made me want to do a little gig in front of her.

I followed her back to the kitchen, watching her severely arthritic limp. And how she worked her polished wooden cane work, and imitating her gait slightly, not in mockery, but being the Grand Old Diva myself.

I fixated on her swaying, dark silky dress, her ornate beads, rings, silver and gold bracelets and her gray hair pulled into a large bun atop her head, like the great ladies in those 19th century photos, exposing the richly olive skin on the back of her neck. I puzzled at her thick, almost opaque silk stockings and her polished, lace up shoes, one medium heel longer than the other to compensate for the list caused by an old back and hip injury sustained, i had heard, in an onstage accident during rehearsal at the Teatro Colon opera house in Buenos Aires, mysterious land of gauchos where my father had been born that i liked to gaze at on the big globe in my grandfather's stud

I caught the beguiling musky lavender scent of her perfume, and she pulled me along like a siren does a sailor with her always placed, rich, mezzo voice that seemed to turn her everyday talking in to recitative between opera arias. She and Anna didn't look or act like anyone else I saw, and seem to me even now as much storybook incarnations as real.

"Ai, beng, beng, ti sento li, birrichino," she'd say in semi-Bolognese dialect, hearing me behind her, ("Ah ha, I hear you back there, little dickens...”)

Each weekday afternoon at this time, she would go to the kitchen, wash her hands in the utility sink next to the pantry, and summon Anna to organize preparations for dinner. I came through the swinging kitchen door and sidled into the pantry for a good view of the proceeding. I'd half forgotten about the cat.

Then pandemonium! My grandmother opened the refrigerator door for a look at the fish and other provisions. Out shot Nero like a jet-black cannon ball, screeching, sending half the contents of the refrigerator clattering out onto the floor with him.

My grandmother's full-throated, window-rattling scream blended with the Anna's shrill, hair-raising screech. I counter-pointed them with my own factory-whistle squeal, and hysterical high-pitched laughter as a ran away a step behind the cat. Neither my grandmother with her limp nor the hunchbacked Anna, of course could ever catch either one of us.

My father was on a sales trip up in Maine and my mother was out buying clothes downtown with her sister. It was left to my grandfather, Umberto, after whom I was named, to call me on the carpet in his study when he returned at 5 on the dot from his Back Bay, Tosi Trading Company office.

"Birrichino," he stared out, as i stood there in the mellow light next to the big globe. He lit a cigar and as always gave me the cigar ring to put on my finger as he shook out the kitchen match and dropped it into the massive amber-glass ashtray on his dark wooden desk. He smiled, and petted Nero, curled up purring on his lap. "I should give you a big spanking," he said.

I wasn't sure I knew what a spanking was, except what I’d see every Sunday in the final panel of the Katzenjammer Kids comic strip on the front page of the Sunday funnies that he would read to me. It showed either the Katzejammer Kids or their arch-enemy, Rollo, yelling as the guardian, the rotund, bearded Captain, puts them over his knee and smacks them soundly.

It always seemed some strange Sunday funnies ritual, performed by Germans or Dutch, or mainly those white bread people that everyone around me growing up almost exclusively with Italians and a few Jews, called simply, "Americans," or "gli Americani."

(Even though everyone was pro-American, patriotic and supportive of the WWII effort, with two of my uncles and several cousins overseas in the military.). Nobody used hyphenated ethnic designations back then. You were Irish, Italian, Mexican, black, Polish, Greek, Jew... or, in less polite company the appropriate pejorative term.

Instead of a spanking, I learned about metabolism. Cats, people and other mammals breath air, my grandfather told me. Our lungs take the oxygen from the air.

“What is oxygen?” I asked.

“Part of the air,” he said and breathed in deeply. I followed suit, filling my small chest. Then in breathed out and I copied him. We breathed in and out for a while in unison. He cracked a smile.

“Look. If Nero had to stay in the refrigerator for too long, he would use up all the air. He could die,” he said seriously. “The same thing could happen to you if you ever got inside one. So, my little birricchino, you must promise never to put another cat in a refrigerator, or a dog, or get I one yourself. Promise?”

I pictured a dead furry, frozen black Nero inside the refrigerator. “But the kitty didn’t die.” I said.

“No, but,” he switched to Italian, “non e una cosa bella, un gatto ghiacciato,” he laughed. (“A frozen cat isn’t a pretty thing,”)

Little Nino laughed at the thought.That's the way I remember the witty, elegant, gentile old man. My mother had another take, also laughing, privately, I overheard her more than once offering that my grandmother, Luisa, had hired and kept on Anna, not just because of her dilligence, but because she held no attraction for the old rue's roving eye. My mother should have know, having attested fairly often of having to step lively to keep from his pinching her on the ass when nobody was looking.

After his mini-lecture, I followed my grandfather upstairs and messed about while he washed up and changed for dinner. My grandmother actually rang a real, brass dinner bell when it was ready. "A tavola, a tovala," she would call out and you better stop what you were doing and come right to the table in the dining room, set with cloth napkins, silver and good china, with candles lit and a large, crystal bowl of fresh fruit in the middle that would provide us the normal weekday dessert with a plate of provolone and maybe asagio cheeses.

First came a clear chicken or beef minestrone with pastina, then the main courses. Then the fruit and cheeses washed down with a moderately decent dry wine, more often red than white. And along with my glass of milk, i would get a wine glass, filled with cool water, topped off by just enough of the wine to color it, make it slightly bitter and give it the bouquet of the wine. They never said grace, being too secular for that.

My mother showed up and joined us and the adults discussed news of the day, telling me occasionally, to finish my vegetables and not noticing that i was flicking bits of chicken down under the table, where Nero prowled like a panther.