Inseparable!💕

Inseparable:
* My father and sardines, which he ate straight from the tin over the big kitchen sink in our big kitchen in the Worcester slums. He’d bring a paper bag to our apartment, and it would be filled with these little flat rectangular cans covered with cool decorations. Flying fish, I think. Blue fish flying high above curly cue ocean waves. You opened a can by turning the key on top, and you rolled the top of the can all the way back. And behold! Stinky, shiny little fish no bigger than your pinky finger. Lined up like the dead in a coffin but their coffin was filled with oil not cheap satin.

* My dogs, Birdy and Lilac, though the love is all on Birdy’s side as far as I can tell. Like when he’s lying on my bed next to Lilac and raises his head several inches above the comforter and then lowers it softly onto Lilac’s gently rising and falling rib cage (the old girl is fast asleep) and sighs. Birdy, my rescue pup, my “Velcro dog” because he sticks to me like a Velcro strap. He was dumped twice by his previous owners who knew he was a prize but still made the forfeiture. (Why?) So now he’s a bit clingy. Besotted with Lilac who is sweet and easy.

* My late mother and her late mother, my Bapy, my grandma from Poland, Rosalia ...short, dumpling-shaped, very opinionated. Decades later and I see. It’s crystal clear to me: the love of my late mother Cecelia’s life was not my abusive, peripatetic father but Cecelia’s mother, Rosalia. Rosie. You could see the love, all entwined, in their hushed, kitchen-table talks about bills and rent checks and other worries. It was in the way my mother combed Bapy’s long, fine grey hair every Sunday afternoon, braiding it, then pinning it up in a circle at the nape of Bapy’s neck. A new bun for a new week ahead! The Polka Hour radio show would play on our little beige radio atop our old round-edged refrigerator as Ma braided Bapy’s hair. I’d watch Ma work her magic, and the three of us, three generations of an immigrant dream, would listen to the Polka tunes, sung in Bapy’s native tongue, and feel cozy and close. Sometimes Bapy knew a song and would sing it in her cracked, off-key little voice that was always tinged with sadness.

* My father and itchy groin/bad behavior. My dad was very old school Italian, the son of Italian immigrants growing up in a small house in Worcester’s Summit neighborhood with nine brothers and sisters. Some of the sons, growing up in the 1930s, were sweet mama’s boys to my grandma, Maria. My Uncle “Leo” was so sweet to his Mama Maria. He grew up to be a sweet young husband who got a job in the City of Worcester sanitation department as a mechanic fixing those big City of Worcester garbage trucks. Uncle Leo used to call them “honey wagons”! Leo fell in love with Mary and was a wonderful husband to her for almost 45 years. Some young guys turned out like that. Not my father. He was a handsome ladies man from the get go - so exotic to the Irish and Polish and Lithuanian gals of WW II Worcester. Gals like my late mom. But Daddy had a temper, was vain, violent, insecure and fathered a few kids by a few women in Worcester. I have a Romanian half-sister somewhere ... The owner of a Worcester diner, a friend of my late father’s, once said to me as I was plopping my InCity Times on to his countertop (a new issue): “Your father is a hard man. There were many women. Many many women.”

THANKS FOR THE UPDATE, pal!

* Me and Green Island. Inseparable! My old Worcester childhood neighborhood is pretty much gone (gentrified), yet I can remember every piece of it! Every lanky, half-starved junkyard dog, every barroom brawl at Ben’s Cafe, right outside our kitchen window
... the beautiful little circus pony galloping down Lafayette Street, an escapee from the traveling circus up the road...the old Boston Beef cold storage warehouse on Lafayette Street and our downstairs neighbor girl who was raped there (she was 15!). ... The mean old guy with a stump for one arm and his big scrap metal trucks he’d drive, one hand and one stump on the steering wheel of his huge truck. ... The penny candy store across the street from our house with its epileptic owner who’d sometimes close his tiny shop in the middle of the afternoon, after school was let out, when we kids wanted to buy penny candy so bad! We knew that Freddy’s door was locked because he was in the back room “having a fit.” In an hour or so Freddy would be opening up again, and then we could walk in, stand before his 30 or so little penny candy cubbies filled with all kinds of penny candy and tell Freddy, who was holding our loot bag, a little brown paper bag, in his fat white hand, what exactly we wanted. A sour ball the size of a cat’s eye marble! A green gum ball. A pink paper straw filled with tiny pink grains of candy that tasted like strawberries. Tiny Tootsie Rolls. A little wax flute filled with purple “juice” - we’d bite the wax top off and gulp down this sugary grape drink. Red Hot pebbles. Cute gummy bears. Milk chocolate covered malted balls. All individually wrapped and ready for us! ... My family’s neighbors on Lafayette Street, Grosvenor Street, Sigel Street and Endicott Street - I still know the people’s names and what they were like. The bullies and the saints, the drunks and the loud mouths, the fun ones, the gabby ladies, the taciturn men. Everyone, even some little kids, smoked! I remember them all. “Seeing” them when I close my eyes, just thinking about them, makes me HAPPY. My classmates at Lamartine Street School...the cutest, sweetest little boy in our kindergarten class who shit his pants on a weekly basis. The old cement school yard - not even a basketball hoop for us, never mind padded jungle gym and swings. But we girls all brought our jump ropes (American and Chinese jump ropes), and one girl would always have her long long rope and she’d double it up and they’d be two jump ropes going in the air and we girls would take turns trying to jump into all that egg beater blur. Some of the athletes would run in, two at a time, and knees up to their chests, they’d start jumping, skipping those whipping whirling ropes! Double Dutch! Panting when they leapt out of those flying double ropes. On a cold autumn day. In cotton dresses and flimsy jackets that their moms bought for them at The Mart. Up by Meade Street. In my beloved Green Island. We dared everyone to try and best us!

Photo: Rose's mom and sister, back porch, Green Island, circa 1975.