I am between 10 to 13 years old, a chubby, soft boy during my summer holidays. This time I’m in Gippsland, Victoria, on a dairy farm owned by the Cascone family who comes from the same small village in Sicily as my family. We’re Paesani.
“Joe, it’s so cold this morning. Will you be okay?” My mother is still in her nightgown. It is dark in the bedroom I share with my brother, the only light in the room sneaks in from the hallway and throws long shadows against the walls. I can feel the cold under my pyjamas as […]
On the way home, as usual, I hide under my mother’s large ankle-length coat for as long as I can. It engulfs us both in its woollen warmth. The only way to tell there are two humans inside this cavernous piece of clothing is if you look down where two pairs of shoes stick out.
The ground we played on was always the same. It existed on a sad patch of asphalt we called our street at Victoria Grove Brunswick. The patch we played on mostly ran between my house on the left side of Victoria Grove and Chris’s house on the right side of the road.
“Teresa, is this your boy?” A large lady in her late 30s bends down to take a piece of my cheek between thumb and forefinger, giving me a slightly awkward squeeze and tweak. “Yes,” says my mother. “Joe, say hello to Signora Concettina.” “Hello”, I say, burying my face shyly into my mother’s coat. I […]
Just imagine, for seven years, you are the sole consumer of your parent’s love and attention, plus the unconditional love of your grandparents. (And then I come along. What hope did he have?)
“Here”, is Mr Walter’s office. Blank walls, denuded desk, overly tiny chair struggling with Mr Walter’s heft. He is a plump man. As my mother would say later: “he must be eight months pregnant with a stomach like that. The baby would come out smelling of beer.”
Somewhere, I see him playing with his grandchildren, on a playground, or in a room full of toys. One of them is tearing off the head of a Marvel figurine.
This memory had been lost in layers of time. I only recently remembered it. I would have been around 7 – 8 years old. We had driven to a house somewhere in the country. It was day. Probably late summer. The sky was intensely blue, and the light was bright and squint-inducing. “Okay, Joe and […]
My father, like my mother, died in 2016. My father died nine months after my mother passed. Having already spoken to my mother, I thought it would also be valuable to speak with Pietro.
citizenjoe 