Some of the most pleasurable
moments in my life have been those enjoyed during quiet evenings alone wrapped
around a good book. No sounds except for occasional soothing background music. After
a while of relaxed reading the seductiveness of the evening often eases me into
a reflective mood and some late-night thoughts.
I had just finished reading the
last page of Philip Roth’s recent novel “The Human Stain,” a riveting tale of
the amazing life and experiences of its leading character Coleman Silk. A life odyssey full of surprising twists and turns, heights and
troughs. I was particularly stirred by the stark yet tranquil
word-portrait with which the book ended of a man set off against the sound and
fury of his past and of the outside world:
Only rarely, at the
end of our century, does life offer a vision as
pure and peaceful as this one; a solitary man on a bucket, fishing
through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning
over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America.
After reading this passage and
reflecting on its overtones my thoughts drifted back to my Beech
Street years and a particular scene. When I was
around ten or eleven years young three of my friends
and I occasionally went into the woods adjacent to the granite quarry behind my
house to do some open-air cooking. Frankfurters, buns and mustard
– occasionally joined by potatoes. Each of us would, through the actual
or assumed generosity of his mother, make a contribution to these provisions. Oh
yes, since none of us had been boy scouts we also brought matches and paper
along.
Finding a suitable spot we
gathered up dry branches and twigs placed them over the paper and started our
fire. As it took hold we threw increasingly larger pieces of wood into it until
we had a strong sustainable combustion. If we had potatoes we would place them
in the ashes at the bottom of the fire, occasionally turning them over to brown
or sometimes blacken them evenly, producing the most delicious, natural-flavor
potatoes known to humankind. Each of us would find his own green branch, not
too thick and not too thin, and with our pocket knives whittle down one end
into a sharp point with which to pierce his frankfurter.
We sat around the fire extending
the frankfurters-soon-to-become hot-dogs, just the right distance above the
flames, a distance determined not from a cookbook but empirically from trial
and error. At first there was quiet conversation then gradually as bubbles
formed on the hot dogs and drops of juices began hissing into the flames a
peaceful quietness enveloped the scene, the only sound that of crackling
firewood. While this was occurring the outside world was restless about an
eminent war in Europe and suffering the ravages of the
Depression
Both of these scenes speak to me
of what in the end and after all is said and done is
the solitariness of the individual as he stands naked before the Cosmic
Infinity. Not visible on the map of the earth as it spins around at a thousand
miles per hour and circles the sun at a velocity of sixty-six thousand miles
per hour, occurring in an unending void, nothing more than a globe of cooling
gas, located among billions of stars in one galaxy out of countless other
galaxies, sits a solitary man on a bucket fishing in ice eighteen inches thick
atop an Arcadian mountain and four silent youngsters sit around a fire in the
soundless woods of Fitchburg holding hot dogs over its flames each wrapped in
his private world.
We learned to be resourceful in
coming up with ways to entertain ourselves.
Stick-ball on the street, swimming at Parkhill Pond, Cowboys and Indians up in the Quarry.
Then there was the B.A.B. (Bare Ass
Beach) up on the Quarry, a pool of
crystal clear water of unknown origin that formed between towering rock
formations. We guys swam naked. At times
we knew there were girls hiding behind boulders at a safe distance who got a
giggling kick out of watching us. They
would hurriedly disperse whenever we pretended to run in their direction. We stopped going to the B.A.B. after we found
a dead cat in the water.
We formed a club and actually
built a club-house mid-way up a sturdy tree in the Palozzi
yard on Beech Street
Lane where we had meetings of a sort. Experiences in the club showed that two
traits of Italian character remained alive and well among the offspring of the
immigrants. The first was the historical
fact Italians – unlike the other European countries – had never mastered the
art of political stability and orderly self-rule. Every once in a while someone
would bring up the subject of having club officers or leaders just as everyone
else had in America.
There was a general consensus that this should be done but being young we
didn’t know much about what officers a club should have. All we knew was that we had to have a
President. It was agreed that Alfred be
given the job of finding out what officers a club should have. He reported back
that besides the President we needed a Vice President, a Secretary of State,
Secretary of Treasury and a Defense Secretary.
That’s what the book he read said that the United
States had.
That’s when arguments broke out. Jasper said he wanted to be the
Secretary of the Treasury because he had always dreamed about finding
treasures, as a matter of fact he had read more treasure books that anyone
else. Everyone wanted to be the
Secretary of the Treasury so we were stymied as to that position. Rudy said he didn’t care what the others
wanted and that since he was the toughest of all of us, he said he should be
the Secretary of Defense, that way he could defend the club-house. He was booed
down. There was agreement only on one point, a Vice President was a no-no
because we had all been told by Sister Angela in our catechism classes that vices were what bad
people had and that they were the ones who would burn in the fires of
hell. In the end we threw out the whole
idea