My father drove a new Pontiac. The first Pontiac produced the first big argument of their married life. On the day of their marriage my father bought a new car without telling my mother he was going to. She was outraged because she thought it should be a joint decision. What he thought about it I have no idea. That first car I don’t remember, but he purchased a new car every two years on the odd year, always Pontiacs. I remember the '53 because it had chrome decorative circles on the dash over on the passenger side that a child could hold on to and pretend he was driving the car. In '53 I was nine, which , I suppose is a little old to be pretending to drive the car, but I was a slow child as I have said before. At the time Dad was driving the '53 Pontiac he was doing a route to collect the premiums for the insurance agency. Apparently back then payments were made monthly and the insurance salesmen went door to door collecting them. I was involved and so was my brother Jim, and my sister Suzy, as we were all in the back seat eating olives, provolone, pepperoni, and Italian bread. The bread was from DeVito’s Bakery, Uncle Tommy’s bakery that I keep mentioning. Several customers were friends and relatives, so these collection trips included stops at peoples' houses for coffee or conversation. As a consequence it seemed that my father knew everyone and was loved by everyone.
My father was very generous with his time and talents, and often these visits involved paper and pencil, and discussions about how to move a door or how to install a new bathroom by taking down a wall. As I mentioned before about my Aunt Mary’s ceiling, sometimes these projects were not just on paper but involved ripping parts of houses apart and rebuilding them. Several years after he died I was visiting his my Uncle Frank. We were in his kitchen and he was saying. “Nobody knew how to redo a kitchen like your father. He build all these cabinets, and moved the back door over to here so we could put the stove here. Who would have thought of that, moving the door like that?”
These trips to all these houses involved always a long stop at my grandfather’s house. One day we were all in the kitchen and my father took out the pencil and paper, but before starting to draw he said, “You kids, go out a play for a while.” Later I came back through the kitchen and I saw my father and my grandfather head to head at the kitchen table, deeply engrossed in some project. In the car I said, “What was that you were doing with Grandpa?” He wouldn’t say, and he ignored the question, but meanwhile he was thinking about it. At home, as we were getting out of the car he said, “I’m teaching your grandfather to add and subtract, but he doesn’t want anyone to know that he doesn’t know how.”
“Why does he need to know?”
“He makes and sells sausage, and he has to make up bills for the customers” was the reason.
To me, my grandfather was an absolute, like one might feel about a tree, or an old beautifully built building you pass every day, or a big black bull chained to a post in a farmer's field, that you admire for its tremendous strength and indifference. Why would a tree or that bull ever need to add and subtract? The fact that my grandfather couldn’t add made me wish that I couldn’t add, or read or write either.
But why should you respect my grandfather, after all I have not said one word about him. After he died and the family got together we would tell endless stories about him. Everyone had a story about him, all either touching or funny. Now all those stories are forgotten, and all the people who told them are dead. Our family had no storyteller; the storyteller, that would be me. I’m the one with the infallible memory who can describe things, but I was not doing my job, and now it is almost too late. Thanks to television, there is no need for this sort of sentimental garbage anymore, as we can watch every night REAL stories that take thousand of people and millions of dollars to produce.
As I said before, when my grandfather got off the boat the first thing he did was buy a house. The house was a tiny bungalow in the Italian section of Utica, directly across the street from his house was a small red brick building, which was the “Boy’s Club." One day my grandfather and his friends were sitting on the porch of his house and three girls come out of the Boy’s Club, and stopped on the sidewalk to talk. My grandfather said, “Do you see that girl there, the tall one? I am going to marry her.”
Her name was Elizabeth, and he did marry her.
That was the first of the forgotten stories about him.
At Christmas one time he wanted to buy her a bra. He went into a store and asked to see bras. The clerk said, “What size, sir?”
“Ha bout like deez” he said and he held up two hands together as if cupping the end of a watermelon.
Why would such a person want to learn to add and subtract?
He called my father every day on the phone. I would answer the phone and he would say, “Lemme speak a you Fatch.”
He never had a beard, and he was never shaved. He always kissed you hard on the cheek, and it felt like a wire brush that had been used to scrub stogie cigars.
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