We always had company on the weekends when my father was alive, especially his family, but after he died, they stopped coming and things grew quieter at home. It was also difficult financially which is why my Aunt Mary and my grandmother gave up their apartment in Brooklyn and came to live with us so that they could contribute to maintaining the house and helping my mother. Also, visits from relatives changed during that time and Saturday night was when we saw an influx of my mother’s family coming around. Sometimes it was my mother’s youngest brother Mike, his wife Vivian, and three of their four children, my cousins Theresa, Phyllis, and Michael. My older cousin Joe was married to his first wife by then and though they visited, too, it was generally on holidays. Saturday nights, though, became poker night as I mentioned in an earlier post and dominated…

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…