excerpt
“Do you think Nonno and Nonna will let me borrow the… ukelele sometimes?”
“I think so, yes. But you’ll have to ask them.”
When he talks with his grandparents the next morning, Rick can feel that his question has made them sad. Something that doesn’t need to be said passes between them. Then Nonno Arsenio puts his thick, strong arm around Rick’s shoulders.
“We have give you Enrico’s name, caro. He would be glad you want to make music like him. Many years we save it, to keep him here, with us, but now we see, also, why. We don’t know all that time, but it was for you, too, that we save it. Maybe you play for us when you learn. Tomaso can teach you.”
For the rest of the summer, for a few hours almost every day, he sits with his father in the big front room, learning where to put his fingers, the chords, and the keys. In the fall, he takes it back with him to the city.
Year after year, through the long hot summers, cars come in from the city and park on the grass outside the fieldstone gateposts. Guests with smiling faces bring in their roasts and flowers and bottles of wine. There are hugs and handshakes, kisses, chatter and raillery and laughter.
In the shade of the swamp willow that leans from a corner of the guest bungalow, long trellis tables are set up and covered with white cloth. People in shirt sleeves and suit-pants, in summer dresses and bathing suits with pink, sun-warmed faces renew old intimacies, drink pineapple and cream soda punch or red wine spritzers with ice from frosty, sweating pitchers cruised by flies, smoking, exchanging gossipy tidbits, arguing politics or points of law, flirting outrageously, trading friendly insults, sharing stories and the latest jokes. Theresa, large and gregarious, cooks in the outdoor kitchen, or talks to everyone at once as she pours narrow glasses of homemade Strega, asking after the numerous god-children she mid-wifed into the world, making real estate deals; and Arsenio, round faced, red with exertion and sheer enjoyment, picks lettuce, tomatoes, green peppers, cicoria, dandelion leaves, cucumbers, and onions for the evening salad.
After the children are in bed, those who will stay overnight say good bye to those who are leaving and everyone moves to the arbour of grape leaves near the peach and cherry trees behind the big house.
Manolis Aligizakis 