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 That's a picture of my dad when he was five years old. He's sitting at his kindergarten desk. The folded hands bit is an act. Dad's playing sweetheart for the camera.The devil inside the cute kid's eyes is no act. The man I knew never lost his imp. He loved to laugh, and he was easy to tickle. Can you see the grin he's holding back? My dad smiled his way through grammar school. At the time this photo was taken he couldn't understand or speak much English. Like a lot of other immigrant students, with benefit of time and childhood conversation, he acquired a broken version of the New World's tongue, in his case a mixture of Sicilian dialect and street inglese. In later years I helped the man to make sense of his birthday cards and to browse the morning newspaper. I wrote his checks and I penned his business letters; and I promised to keep his illiteracy a secret for as long as he lived. The public school authorities sent my dad to vocational school when he was fourteen years old. He couldn't read well enough to meet high school entrance requirements, so the grey suits handed him a wood saw and told him to become a carpenter. Dad worked hard. He learned to cut corners and to drive a nail straight through. He earned his certificate, and then he went to war. There weren't many jobs for carpenters that year anyway. The housing boom came when the gory battle ended, but Dad felt afraid to fill out the employment applications that the companies and unions required. He couldn't make sense of the questions, and his spelling wasn't so good. The railroad, though, didn't care much for literate laborers. They needed men to lay track and to shovel coal, men who knew how to break a sweat without complaint, men who smiled their way through difficult days. My dad fit the bill. He became the comedian for his crew, a gang of eight men who travelled from town to town, from job to job, inside a boxcar. I think the war prepared these men for the life they led together. They loved each other. In one of those towns, not far from the railroad tracks, my dad met my mother. She worked the deli counter at a local five-and-dime. My dad sat down to lunch and he smiled at my mother. A few months later they married. A year after the wedding ceremony they had me. They taught me how to work hard, although to this day I cannot drive a nail straight through and I'm not easy to tickle. I worked hard today. That's why I thought about Dad. I took the day away from my nine-to-five. I stayed home and I labored in my garden. I uprooted two large, disobedient bushes. I broke a sweat. I used a shovel, a hatchet, a wood saw and a memory. *** Thanks for stopping by to visit us here at SpilledBeans.com. If you'd like to be notified whenever something new is posted to SpilledBeans.com, then please join the Spilled Beans notification list. -- Con affetto, Anthony V. Toscano, Editor SpilledBeans.com  |
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