"The lazy birds and the clouds painted on the sky and the tops of pine trees -and this night which is now moving quickly towards you- all these things bring back this memory. Of the day you simply got up and left and went in search of something else. A bell swinging and loudly echoing, perhaps. Something with a voice you could recognize. Afterwards, as I already said, you discovered that you’d never gone anywhere at all. That you were only walking across your yard, and going inside your small house."


two women      When Maddy was four years old, Little Pete arrived. Pete was born in early July, and Maddy turned four in the beginning of August. We now had our complete family. Anna was nine and a half years old, and Nick was six. I had my first software job. I had gone from bar bouncer to truck driver to software developer. Like it or not I was now in the corporate world. When Pete showed up in the house on that summer day, it meant that Maddy was no longer the baby. She had been de-throned by this new creature. It’s not easy when you’re a diva to be suddenly demoted to the regular troupe. I remember having Maddy on my lap and then putting her down because my wife was handing me the baby. My parents were visiting. I sat at my place at the end of the table, behind me the windows looking out at the back yard, and my Dad was sitting at his place at the other end of the table, and behind him were the front windows looking out at the porch and the trees in the yard and then, past the trees, the road. My Mom was keeping herself busy helping the new mother do chores. My Dad was happy because we had named the child after him. My Dad was named Peter, my younger brother was Peter Junior, and now we had Little Pete. By naming my new son Pete, I had atoned in my Dad’s eyes for my previous sin, when I had failed to name my first son after him. I had named my first son Nicholas and not, as custom demanded, Peter, which was the grandfather’s name. My Dad had often told me the story about when I, his first son, was born, how he went to his father and said to him, “Well Dad, there’s another Joe Scuderi in the family.” My Grandfather had cried. He was a gentle man, easily moved to tears. Now there was another Pete Scuderi in the family.

I put Maddy down and told her to run off and play with the other kids, and then I took the baby in my arms. A rite of passage was completed. Maddy ran off to join Anna and Nick, who were in the living room behind where my Dad was sitting. They lined up, Anna first, then Nick, and lastly Maddy. Anna was leading the pack, and they all took off at a run down the hall, and disappeared out of sight. But before Maddy followed the others, she gave me one last look. She was not angry with me or accusing me of hurting her feelings. I didn’t see any bitterness in her eyes, and yet we both knew, with that one look, that something very definite had changed between us. Then she ran off with the others. When I was maybe eight years old I remember two women who came to visit my Grandmom Scuderi in her house on Jackson Street. Grandmom’s house was a large row house. You walked in and that was the living room with lots of light coming in through the two big front windows. The stairs were to your right. The next room, which was really the same room with only a hint of an archway separating it from the living room, was a formal dining room only used on special occasions. Then there was a real archway and that was the big kitchen where everybody ate. This room had windows on the left because the houses were separated at this point to create a small alley between them, but the sunlight didn’t shine brightly in this room, in fact it was always a little dark. Then past this big kitchen was the small kitchen where Grandmom cooked, with windows looking out at the little concrete yard, and the alley behind it, and then the backs of the smaller row houses which fronted the little street behind our Jackson Street, which was a main street.

When these two women arrived I was standing in the big kitchen, and it’s the darkness of this big kitchen, though daylight was coming in through its side windows, which I especially remember, because my Grandmom stood with the two women in the doorway of this big kitchen and they were lit up by all the sunlight from the front of the house. They were very old women, dressed in black as was the custom for Italian women in those days, and they spoke with my Grandmom in the Italian language. They stood beside her and they looked at me with great affection. My Grandmom called me over to meet them and I felt how proud she was of me, and taking my cue from her, I treated the women with respect and greeted them as I had been taught to do. I had never known my Grandmom in any capacity other than as the eldest of our tribe. And yet here she was, clearly paying deference to these two old Italian women. I had the idea that these two women were sisters. But in later years when I remembered them and tried to figure out who they might have been, I was never able to get a definite answer. Something inside me wanted them to remain a mystery. Because the two women were for me a link to another world. They stood in that doorway, two mysterious old women in black speaking our ancient language, and beside them, my Grandmother, smiling, proud, respectful, telling me to come near and greet them, and they put their hands upon my head, as old ladies used to do, and told me I was a good boy. And by accepting their blessings I felt like I entered into something much greater than myself.

This something greater is something very wonderful. It’s the past which lives forever in the present, the timeless quality which all time has. But nobody seems to care about it. It’s like litter on the pavements, like bits of windblown trash which brush past you when you walk down city streets. Those who seek treasure search elsewhere, and pass it by. But it’s right here, even in the most ordinary stuff. Especially in the most ordinary stuff. The look which four year old Maddy gave me just before she turned and ran off with her older siblings was like a distant church bell ringing out, and as it rang those two mysterious old women from my past were summoned into the present. For a moment Maddy stopped, and the three windows behind her were full of afternoon light, and through the windows, there was the front porch, so familiar, and then the trees heavy with summer leaves. In that moment we shared something. I had lifted her from my lap and told her to run off with the other children, it’s true, but now I gave her something as well. In the moment before she ran off, when our eyes met across the room, just before she turned and ran away in pursuit of Anna and Nick, that’s when I believe she saw in me the two women who lived in my imagination. I gave them to her, she saw them in me when we shared our look across the living room, down the long kitchen table, my father with his back to her, intent upon the baby in my arms, my mother off to the right, helping my wife in the kitchen. Someday maybe Maddy will do the same, share those two women with a child of her own, pass them on to the next generation, and it will all happen in this reality we call the Imagination.