It all started with my mother. Most things back then seemed to anyway and this was no exception. The way it went was something like this: she was bored just looking after me and my father didn’t want her to work, some macho Italian pride thing with him, like I’m the man of the family and I’ll make enough to take care of us. My mother, though, like so many women during the war had learned to be independent of the men in their lives who were off in the armed services doing what men do in circumstances like that and she had worked in Grumman’s, a defense plant on Long Island, riveting airplanes together and taking care of my sister, my aunts who lived with my parents, and the house she bought on Long Island without consulting my father who did not, I repeat, did not want to leave…