MEMORIES OF LITTLE ITALY
                 Frank Cossentino

     The house on Eastern Ave. (913 of course) was a treasure trove. In no particular order I remember different patches of stories laid out in a wonderful quilt of childhood.

     Let's talk about food. My grandmother Susie made the gravy (spaghetti sauce now) for the Sunday dinner or my mother did. No doubt they were both very, very good. But there was a ten when grandma made it and a nine and one half when mother did. The spaghetti or rigatoni or whatever pasta fed was accompanied by a beef roasted with white potatoes fried sweet potatoes, meatballs, and a salad with vinegar and oil. It was hard even as a kid to rise up after Sunday dinner.

     Holidays gave the reward of homemade ravioli with the family filling of spinach, ricotta cheese, and parmesan cheese .No fancy chef could duplicate their wonderful taste. Restaurants serve six ravioli for an entree today. At our house that was a sampler. Sundays also brought my mother's homemade layer cake, made from scratch with no measurements needed. It always turned out the same. The icing was also made from scratch and could not have been better. The cake always had weight to it; you could dunk it and not worry about it coming apart. Maybe the cup would, but not the cake. But, oh it was so good.

      There was one bathroom in modern times at the house .It proved to be a point of contention on Sunday mornings. Daddy would be in there for at least forty-five minutes to an hour. Susie would be complaining to mother that Daddy was keeping her from getting ready for mass. Mother would rap on the door and my father would say he'd only been in there for fifteen minutes. They would go back and forth; the door would open shortly thereafter and Susie would mutter and march in while Daddy muttered in return and marched out.

      My father's descriptive adjective was goddamn. That basically was the harshest cussword I ever heard him say. He sometimes would tell me that these goddamn women were trying to get him mad, but be was going to outlive them all. In fact he was going to live until he was one hundred twenty five. After I married and he was retired, he would call me and say, "This goddamn woman is driving me crazy." I often told my mother I didn't know she was my mother; I thought she was the goddamn woman

      Daddy worked at Druid Hill Park in the conservatory - hot work and hard work. He worked there until be was seventy eight and stricken with heart failure. Being a gardener now I realize how good a gardener he was - everything kept neatly, no weeds, and rapt attention to detail in growing all his vegetables. After he hooked me on gardening (my specialty before that was playing pinochle), we worked our garden together. He told me if I kept pointing out all the time how the plants were growing 1'd give them a headache

     My father's favorite story concerned my grandmother and when he and my mother were to buy their own house When my parents married, Susie was fifty-nine and my mother was twenty and the last child living at home. My mother said they would live with Susie until she passed on. When Susie hit ninety-five and my parents still lived at Gram's I received a call from my father who told me about the house buying plan of my mother's. He then told me he was trapped because it looked like this goddamn woman (Susie) was going to live forever. Susie sat down in the upstairs bathroom, with Aunt Liz helping her to get ready for bed and passed on to heaven at age ninety-eight. Born in 1866, she lived to see electricity, the airplane, the World Wars, television, and all else until October 1964.

     While we're remembering Gram's we note she had eleven children All of them lived to late ages, except Rose who died as an infant and Aunt Rena who was in her late forties and passed away from breast cancer in 1954. As of today one child survives, Aunt Liz, who is eighty-nine years old and a firebrand. Susie's father was born in 1814 and lived until 1912. It must be the genes, not the jeans. Theodore Votta lived until age ninety-four, carrying out the family tradition. All the other children lived into their seventies and late eighties. My mother rolled into heaven at age eighty-nine, three months short of ninety. She's probably dealing with the bathroom problem up there between Susie and my father.

     I've saved the best wine until last. Mother - whatever the word was meant to describe - she was it. Name any quality of good and it could be found in my mother. Her family was first, her Catholic Church a close second. God and the Saints must have had headaches from all the prayers she sent up to them. They probably said "Its that Cossentino woman again and she wants more blessings for her family and friends."

     Her answer to any problem you had was for you to pray and all would be okay. That covered anything from headaches to major surgery. She was the recipient of an eighth grade education from St. Leo's, then on to work at home and elsewhere. She taught me that you could be humble, of modest means, and be genuinely loved by others even though you're not famous in this world. Anyone who came to her home was welcomed warmly and always fed, whether hungry or not. She spoke no evil of anyone, and only looked at the bright side. Grandchildren were like precious gems to her; she bad a deep love for all of them, "No favorites,"she said. Sometimes we doubted that when it came to the last granddaughter, Andrea, who, I believed, filled that role.

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