Odds and Ends

Jackhammer

The jackhammer team arrived at our courtyard to break out a portion of our cracked sidewalk.  The sidewalk didn’t look that bad but the front office is touchy about our appearance.  

I opened my front door to greet them.  Two young men were lowering the heavy  jackhammer from the backend of a flatbed truck. The truck drove off,  leaving a generator off to the side and the two men standing by the hammer.  My sudden appearance at the door surprised them. (I cannot resist the sight – and sound – of heavy duty equipment in action.)   “Good Morning,” I said.  I decided to speak English, at the last instant.                     

The two young men turned to face me: Mexicans, about twenty five years old.  I never learned their names. One held a heavy broom and a wide-mouthed shovel.   He said good morning and we spoke briefly, in English, his speech lightly accented.   The jackhammer man nodded and said a word which I lost,  He wore  a light scarf. They had a long day ahead of them and I let them at it. The jackhammer soon roared.

He stopped the jackhammer the moment I opened the door to leave my apartment. Their faces and clothes were already white with concrete dust. The man with the broom collected the broken concrete and the dust, loaded the wheelbarrow and he dumped the contents of the barrow into the waiting truck.  They were still at it when I returned two hours later. 

By now they looked like white sculptures. Their eyes were shiny black holes; their nostrils dull black ; their wet pink mouths seemed obscene. I slipped by, unsettled by  these stark white statues. These were not boys playing games.

They were still at it when I emerged in mid-afternoon.  They had washed their hands and faces and had smacked their clothes clean, but a new layer of dust was already spreading across their bodies. 

      “Hola, che tal, che pasa,” I said, straight out of my high school Spanish grammar. 

      “Hola”,  the broom man answered. 

Off to the side, the jackhammer man, a twenty year old, really, lifted the lower front edge of his T- shirt, stretched it between his hands and he wiped the sweat from his brow, from his face, from his chest and from the bronze flesh of his belly.

Love for sale

They’re playing it again, not that they’ve ever stopped playing it.  WRTI Radio Philadelphia, plays it regularly, even after my exchange of letters with the stationmaster (a woman). She  agreed that the lyrics to Love for Sale are despicable. Would she, I asked, consider banning the worded versions of the song from her station? No reply. The song has been a jazz standard since Cole Porter wrote it in 1930.  No need to warn your young ones about the “dangerous” lyrics; they’ll laugh aloud.   Here they are:

Love for Sale

Appetizing young love for sale
Love that's fresh and still unspoiled
Love that's only slightly soiled
Love for sale.  

Who will buy?
Who would like to sample her supply
Who's prepared to pay the price
For a trip to paradise
Love for sale

Let the poets speak of love
In their childish way
I know every type of love
Better far than they
If you want the thrill of love
She's been through the mill of love
Old love. new love
Every love but true love

Appetizing young love for sale
If you want to buy her wares
Follow me and climb the stairs
Love for sale

Italian Election

Last week  I received a fat envelope from the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia. It was addressed to Il Signore Calogero Perrone. That’s me. The envelope contained “una votazione per assente”,  (an absentee election ballot).   The purpose of the vote was whether or not  to give the right to vote to Italian prison convicts, and to ex-convicts. 

Of course!  It’s about time!  

I filled in “SI” (for Yes block) with a neat X and I mailed the ballot to the Italian Consulate in Philadelphia in the envelope they supplied. 

Stephen called this evening from California to tell me that he, Il Signor Stefano Perrone, had received his Italian absentee ballot.  “What’s it all about?” he asked.   

He knows little Italian but he has voted before. I explained the issue;  to give Italian prison convicts the right to vote..  “Got it,” he said.  He traced an X in the Yes block, the SI block, that is, and he returned his ballot to the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.  

Hunchback 

My son was home for Christmas.  He gave me a big hug, massaging my back with his strong fingers. 

     “You’re touching my humpback for good luck!”,  I said quietly.

     “What are you talking about?” 

My hump has come on slowly.  I’m reminded of it only when I sit in a straight-backed chair or when I lie on my back. Has my sweater, has my pajama top bunched up? Has that little pillow I place between my knees when I sleep wandered up to my back?  I reach back (no easy maneuver) to confirm the hump.  It’s there, I think. 

I’ve known for years that the hump was coming– a family thing. Aunt Jennie was bent in two, her nose to the ground. Who in the family was next?  My mother escaped.  My brothers escaped. No escape for me. 

By my mid-seventies, the upper tip of my spine had drifted an inch from vertical.  X rays of my back since then look like aerial photographs of a curving river – my spine – whose looping descent has stolen inches from my height; well, maybe an inch.

But my curving spine, a hitherto irresistible force, met an immovable object, my coccyx. The spine, thwarted in its twisting descent, has pressed outwards, forming a hump.

     “Dad, are you sure about that?”

      “Not yet.  I’m not a doctor.  But it is, after all, my spine .”

Gobbo

Hunchbacks and their humps, have been revered and reviled ever since the days of the Pharaohs. Here’s The Encyclopedia of Superstition, p.136:  “To play a hunch means to act on your gut feelings or intuition.  Originally it meant to touch a hunchback to ward off  evil or bad luck. This derives from an ancient belief that anything deformed …. is potentially evil.  Consequently when you touch anything “evil” you are transferring any possibility of bad things happening to you onto the object you touch.  For best results, it was important to touch the hunchback’s hump without his realizing it.

In Italy, small plastic figurines of hunchbacks, called gobbos, are sold as luck charms.  (Gobbo is also the Italian word for hunchback.) Rubbing a gobbo’s back is believed to provide luck whenever needed”