Christmas Eve, 1966….It was a cold and snowy Saturday…..so snowy in fact that there were near blizzard conditions, and “thunder snow”…..something I’d never seen before. I was out delivering bread that day with my godfather, Uncle Frankie, and looking forward to the eventual evening’s feast of fish…..which, since I was only 15 at the time, still hadn’t grown to appreciate. In fact, I still don’t. It never made any sense to me how anyone could make a salad out of seafood that gave off an odor so foul that it lingered in the house for days! But…well, that’s neither here nor there!

Part of the evening’s tradition involved the eventual visit from Santa Claus. Now, you’re probably thinking, “….if you’re 15 at the time, you can’t possibly still believe in Santa?” Well no, I didn’t….but I still had my kid sister and my cousin that did…..and even if they didn’t, it was still something of an event when Santa came to the house. A cowbell would clang, someone would rush in screaming, “…I hear banging on the roof….I think he’s here…..it’s Santa”…and then Santa himself, or someone in a Santa outfit would scurry in…bellowing in his best “ho ho ho”….practically throwing our gifts at us so as not to be identified by us wiseass kids. After all, you didn’t want the kids to identify which of the older cousins was playing Santa…that would spoil the fun! Besides, everyone by then knew it was either one of my uncle’s nephews Tommy or Joey. C’mon, who where they kidding? You couldn’t pull anything over on the wiseass kids from East 4th St.!

But that year, Tommy and Joey, and my Uncle….collectively known at the “Reindeer Club”…were all snowed in! Uncle Frankie had the Santa outfit in a closet a block away…Tommy and Joey….well, who the hell knew where they were, and that night it was still snowing so hard, they would never have made it out anyway. This presented a problem…..who was left to distribute the toys to the kids? You guessed it…..me….all of 115 lbs soakin’ wet! And the real cool thing was that now I’d get to be a part of that elite group known as the “Reindeer Club”. Not that it had any special privileges or anything….it was sort of a “coming of age”…..like a bar mitzvah, only for goyim! “Today you are a man…..just don’t tell your cousins who’s playing Santa!” That was the initiation….I think they do something like this when they initiate you into the mob!

Anyway, once we trudged through the snow, and made it to my Uncle’s apartment, I was outfitted with the Santa suit. 4 pillows later and a lot of eye makeup to make me look scary enough so that the kids wouldn’t get too close to me…and we were off! Dashing through the snow….without the one horse open sleigh….exposed to the elements…and the Ave U wiseasses who took the opportunity to bust my chops wanting to know what Santa had in the bag for them. I could have said something like “o’gotz”, but that wouldn’t have been too Santa-like…so I let Uncle Frankie handle it.

First stop was Grandma’s apartment over the bakery. The usual characters were there… aunts, uncles, cousins, and my biggest pain in the ass cousin….Dominick, who I thought was gonna heave up a lung when he saw me….that’s how loud he laughed! But the best reaction was the one Grandma had...sheer terror, as she cowered in her chair gazing up at this figure that, to her, looked like the grim reaper, all the while saying in Italian….”chi e’ sandi claus?" (Who is Santa Claus?) There was no way I was going to convince her it was me.

It was easy to convince the group in the next round…..they were a little bit older…..my Aunt Grace, and O’ Zi’ who lived upstairs from us. Aunt Grace had a voice like sheet metal being ripped…..”ohhh, is that Ray Ray”…..she kept saying over and over between puffs of a Pall Mall.

But the real acid test came next…..downstairs….the Rossi house….and this was “showtime”, because here is where the kids were! One bad move and Santa would have been outted. Uncle Frankie kept going over the line with me……..”no, it’s ho, ho, ho (deeper), and whatever you do, don’t look at any of the kids, ‘cause they’ll know who you are.”

So in we go, Uncle Frankie ringing the cowbell, somebody else screaming, “...he’s here, he’s here”, and in I go. Chrissy, Frankie Boy, who gets a bike, who gets a doll, bam, bam, bam….who’s laughing, and all the while I’m worrying that my “ho ho hos” would be adequate. I’d say we were in and out in 2 minutes! We had thieves in the neighborhood that would have stayed longer!

I’d like to tell you that Santa would have hung around for the traditional milk and cookies before being whisked away by the reindeer and the sleigh….but that wasn’t to be. It was a 63 Pontiac that took him away….ever so slowly back to Uncle Frankie’s and Aunt Fran’s to shed the Santa suit…so that I could return to my life as a 15 year old and maybe get a piece of my mother “migliaccio” (cheese cake) before everyone else glommed it!

Erasmo doesn’t live here anymore!

When my grandmother was still alive, it didn’t take much for us kids to get under her skin. And whenever she was at the breaking point, her favorite refrain would be said in her best broken English, “…..I go Eetaleee eh no comma backa no mo’”, or loosely translated, “I’m going back to Italy and the hell with all of you”….or words to that effect.

Well, were she to go back, (and she did for a short vacation back in 1963), she’d have found a vastly different place than the one she left behind in 1928!

I too have had that same feeling…..I’ve been there too…..although I didn’t have to go to “Eetaleeee”as she would have put it, but to “Brook-ah-leen”, which is a short ride from Manalapan, but may as well be a world away!

Not long ago, when visiting the eye doctor, just to satisfy my curiosity, I passed through what I lovingly refer to as “the neighborhood”….that place I left behind 21 years ago to raise my little girl in the bucolic setting of Central Jersey. I look for the people I left behind, the little kid I used to take to Pizza Park…the guy who used to work long hours in the bakery…the wannabe wise guys hanging out by the social club. Kids hanging out on the “corner”. Pizza Park’s still there, but there’s no sign of the wise guys…the kids…..nothing! I guess I should have known….even the Sopranos moved to suburbia!

Actually, I knew I was in a different place when I came upon 3 kids hanging out on a street corner…..members of a “rainbow coalition” if you will…..2 African-American youths and a white boy. How odd it all seemed! Because that coalition on that very street corner would have gotten someone killed just 25 short years ago! "Yes, the neighborhood’s not the same"…..I said to myself with a chuckle!

So now I’m thinking, “there has to be somebody left….” sort of like the ‘last of the Mohecans”. Ahh, no such luck……no “Jimmy the Butcher”, “Charlie the Barber”..gone, replaced by an Israeli fruit vendor….Bennie the Bum, Peg Leg Artie, all having a cup of coffee in that great candy store in the sky...and the candy store itself is now a “cheap charlie’s” kind of a place! Jeez! And our bakery? Well, that didn’t make the cut either! It’s now an upscale clothing store! Well, we knew it wasn’t gonna last anyway. The only thing the new arrivals bought was an occasional piece of yeast to make their own bread. You gotta figure that went over well with my grandmother, as she'd get up from her chair, lumbering over to the counter….cursing under her breath in Italian. “What, they can’t they at least buy a couple of rolls?”

No, it’s pretty much all gone….except for the memory. And even though there’s a bit of melancholy whenever I go there, I always take some delight in the knowledge that it will always be a big part of who I am….despite the luxury condos and upscale clothing stores! Come to think of it, even the place that’s become my adopted hometown has grown beyond anything I would ever have thought it would.

Who knows. Eventually when I become a North Carolina guy, New Hampshire guy, Delaware guy, or God forbid, even a Florida guy, I know that when I make the trip to my new old haunt, I’ll bemoan the fact that Gordon’s Corner Road has become Interstate 395!

The Little Girl is Gone

I talk to a lot of dads of little girls and listen to them tell me stories of how they’re the “man” in their little girls’ lives. And there’s no better feeling than being just that.
But there eventually comes a day when you as the “man” are replaced by the man who will ultimately take her hand and (hopefully) spend the rest of his life with her. That day came this past week.

Actually it started during the Giants/Cardinals game during a commercial. What better way is there for men to bond than during a football game….and what better time is there to pop the question than during a “time out”. When I was asked by my daughter’s boyfriend, “…I need to ask you something when the ladies aren’t around”, I guess you could say I saw it coming. And what was that thing that I saw?

All those years flashed before my eyes. Like when I remember my daughter’s birth..and how in shock I was at witnessing it….and how, when I had my mother-in-law on the phone, I said to her, “…and she looks just like you!” Ok, I was in shock, what do you want from me?
There was the time, when she was one year old and I thought she could brave one of the water slides at Busch Gardens down in Tampa. I held her on my chest as we went barreling down the slide thinking all the while, “…oh boy, I’m gonna wind up drowning this kid”….only to hit the water and have my daughter squeal with glee! I could never forget her chasing after seagulls on Clearwater Beach, and her fascination with them…calling out to them, “buhd…buhd”…which was her way of saying “bird”.

Too many other things flood my mind. Taking her to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, “Tire Park” on Shore Road, bringing her to school in the morning with her friends, checking out colleges, and finally her moving into her own place in Hoboken.

I look for that kid, and all I see is the woman she’s become….and the lucky guy that will have her as part of his family in the very near future.

If you happen to be one of those dads…..you’ll never need a camera, a diary, or anything like that to document any of it. It will be embedded in your brain….just like all of those moments are embedded in my brain. It’s a great feeling to live through all of them….and if you’re lucky, you’ll recognize them for what they are and appreciate the fact that you too will be wondering, one day, where did that little girl go?