a half years later, on February 1, 1941, I was born. My brother, Bill, came along four and a half years after that, on July 29, 1945. My mother’s wedding-day prize, the framed portrait from Davis Studio, stands today on her bedroom dresser, the center of a triptych flanked by photo portraits of toddlers Bill and me.
And Jerry makes three. Here I am at three months (1941).
Mothers can get short-changed by memory. My recollections, for example, begin somewhere in my third year. By then some of my best experiences with my mother, some three years’ worth of constant daily interaction, were already over. When my mind’s recorder finally turned on, it was moments with my father that made the more memorable impressions: trips to high school ball games, backyard baseball, setting up the Christmas crèche. My mother’s attentions continued, of course, but they tended to be less obvious, less noticed. They were the background of my life, the everyday care and support that at last came into full recognition when I acquired a family of my own.
* * *
The marriage of Louis Anthony Spinelli and Lorna Mae Bigler brought together two heritages: Italian (my father) and Pennsylvania Dutch (my mother).
When I think of my Italian side, I think first of Sundays after church. The four of us would walk—or after 1954, when we got our first car, ride—the four blocks from First Presbyterian to my grandparents’ home at 226 Chestnut. It was a row house with porches front and back and a rose arbor and dark polished furniture that made the living and dining rooms feel gloomy to me. The kitchen was where the light and the people and the food were.
Around the kitchen table sat aunts and uncles and cousins and, always at the head, my grandfather, Alessandro “Alex” Spinelli. In front of him was a small glass pitcher of red wine. Before each meal, including a breakfast of cold spaghetti, he drew the wine from his own barrel in the cellar. He was bald and he did not speak English very well and his breath always smelled of garlic and he smoked thin black wicked stogies and his fingers were as thick as sausages. He had labored many years for the Pennsylvania Department of Highways. Later the Borough of Norristown employed him as a street sweeper. Sometimes, riding my bike, I would see him with other old men, pushing a broom along a curb.
That was his job. His love was the “farm,” a small patch of vacant land that he rented in the East End.During the growing months, every day after work, he went to the farm to tend his vegetables. I like to think that, as he put hoe to earth, he sometimes reflected on what to me was the remarkable central fact of his life:
“He came over on a boat all by himself when he was only fourteen years old.”
That’s how I say it, even now, when describing my grandfather’s coming to this country. He was an orphan in Italy. He worked in the olive groves around Naples. An aunt arranged for relatives to meet him in New York, handed him a one-way ticket on a steamship, and off he went, across the Atlantic Ocean, a black-haired teenager, alone,
solo.
Fifty years later I, a nine-year-old American-born boy, sat at his kitchen table, eating the roast chicken with my fingers because that’s how he did it, trying to imagine the bald old man at the head of the table with black hair.
The first course was always salad, as simple as salad gets: lettuce with oil and vinegar. Then came the chicken, then spaghetti and meatballs. My grandmother often made her own spaghetti, rolling out the dough and slicing it into strands with a device that reminded me of a harp. She would spend a whole day nursing the gravy at the stove. (To many Italians, spaghetti sauce is “gravy.”) The dessert was often hot chestnuts, roasted on a second stove in the cellar.
As with the Spinellis, a table stands in the center ofmy memory of the maternal relatives. In this case the table is not in a kitchen but on a sloping lawn under a
And Jerry makes three. Here I am at three months (1941).
Mothers can get short-changed by memory. My recollections, for example, begin somewhere in my third year. By then some of my best experiences with my mother, some three years’ worth of constant daily interaction, were already over. When my mind’s recorder finally turned on, it was moments with my father that made the more memorable impressions: trips to high school ball games, backyard baseball, setting up the Christmas crèche. My mother’s attentions continued, of course, but they tended to be less obvious, less noticed. They were the background of my life, the everyday care and support that at last came into full recognition when I acquired a family of my own.
* * *
The marriage of Louis Anthony Spinelli and Lorna Mae Bigler brought together two heritages: Italian (my father) and Pennsylvania Dutch (my mother).
When I think of my Italian side, I think first of Sundays after church. The four of us would walk—or after 1954, when we got our first car, ride—the four blocks from First Presbyterian to my grandparents’ home at 226 Chestnut. It was a row house with porches front and back and a rose arbor and dark polished furniture that made the living and dining rooms feel gloomy to me. The kitchen was where the light and the people and the food were.
Around the kitchen table sat aunts and uncles and cousins and, always at the head, my grandfather, Alessandro “Alex” Spinelli. In front of him was a small glass pitcher of red wine. Before each meal, including a breakfast of cold spaghetti, he drew the wine from his own barrel in the cellar. He was bald and he did not speak English very well and his breath always smelled of garlic and he smoked thin black wicked stogies and his fingers were as thick as sausages. He had labored many years for the Pennsylvania Department of Highways. Later the Borough of Norristown employed him as a street sweeper. Sometimes, riding my bike, I would see him with other old men, pushing a broom along a curb.
That was his job. His love was the “farm,” a small patch of vacant land that he rented in the East End.During the growing months, every day after work, he went to the farm to tend his vegetables. I like to think that, as he put hoe to earth, he sometimes reflected on what to me was the remarkable central fact of his life:
“He came over on a boat all by himself when he was only fourteen years old.”
That’s how I say it, even now, when describing my grandfather’s coming to this country. He was an orphan in Italy. He worked in the olive groves around Naples. An aunt arranged for relatives to meet him in New York, handed him a one-way ticket on a steamship, and off he went, across the Atlantic Ocean, a black-haired teenager, alone,
solo.
Fifty years later I, a nine-year-old American-born boy, sat at his kitchen table, eating the roast chicken with my fingers because that’s how he did it, trying to imagine the bald old man at the head of the table with black hair.
The first course was always salad, as simple as salad gets: lettuce with oil and vinegar. Then came the chicken, then spaghetti and meatballs. My grandmother often made her own spaghetti, rolling out the dough and slicing it into strands with a device that reminded me of a harp. She would spend a whole day nursing the gravy at the stove. (To many Italians, spaghetti sauce is “gravy.”) The dessert was often hot chestnuts, roasted on a second stove in the cellar.
As with the Spinellis, a table stands in the center ofmy memory of the maternal relatives. In this case the table is not in a kitchen but on a sloping lawn under a
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