Article: Down the Years

By Edward Curtin

Cristoforo Stati aka Cristofano da Bracciano (1556-1619) - Orpheus (c1600) back, colour and contrast adjusted
(Image by ketrin1407) Details DMCA

I was born and grew up in the Bronx an Irish-Catholic lad and prefer Italian food to any other and my favorite NYC restaurant is Dominick's in Little Italy the Bronx not far from my childhood home where there are no menus or prices and Italian men waiters who ask you what you want and the chef will cook anything and everyone sits at long communal tables with people you never knew but get to know and everyone drinks red wine from little glasses and gets a little drunk in a camaraderie high and sucks pasta with gusto and talks about the Yankees who are often at the next table and when you're finished you cross the street to the pastry shop and have an espresso and pastry and then walk down to the cigar shop where you buy a "Short Story" and puff it as you saunter around past the butcher shop with the rabbits hanging on hooks and remember the Italian girls from your teen years who were "easier" than the Bronx Irish Catholic girls and let you do some things while Dion and the Belmonts from Belmont Avenue the next street over were crooning In the Still of the Night on the corner and Robert DeNiro was acting out on the next street and the world was very very different and JFK was still alive and we were young and even Irish guys were Italian and still are since certain truths remain true but Guinness ain't bad either and Irish rebels also flourished in the neighborhood together with Jewish Communists who held their meetings in the tenements and everyone played handball or hoops in the playgrounds or sat on park benches discussing world events with six newspapers on their laps and there was a sense of community that has disappeared so we email our hearts to each other in lieu of physical presence and an ache opens in our breasts as we send messages through the ether while the past disappears out the backdoor of our lives and we walk out the front into our futures wondering.