“A Little Bit of Italy” from HOW I LEARNED TO TRAVEL

 “I’m going build a swimming,” my father announced.  “New neighbors plan to build a house next door.  When that happens, we won’t be able to get a bulldozer onto our property, so it’s now or never.”

Even before meeting the new neighbors, they had secured a place in my heart.  After all, they were partially responsible for a swimming pool at my house. Why wouldn’t I like them!

One afternoon months later, I was riding my sky blue three speed Schwinn bike past the just finished new house.  A small, stick figure-like woman hopped out of a car parked in the driveway.  She waved and called out to me,

“Where do you live?”

I pointed to the house next door.   Then she continued with her questions:  how old are you?  Where do you go to school?  What grade are you in?  Finally, she pronounced

“Well, you’re going to have new neighbors in just a few weeks, and one is my daughter, Barbara.  She’s nine.”

The news made a bubble of expectations in my tummy.   Not only were the new neighbors bringing us a swimming pool, but they were bringing me a playmate.  Playmates were in scarce supply in the sparsely built foothills of west Pasadena where we lived.

The particular thing I noticed about the woman, Mrs. Valli, besides her slight stature was her accented voice.  Too young to discern what kind of accent, I simply noticed that her English, while completely fluent and understandable, had a melodic quality with each word ending with special emphasis and her “th’s” sounding a bit more like “z’s” than “th’s”.

When the Vallis moved in the following month, I met Barbara for the first time as I was walking up the hill from the school bus stop.  I remember calling out to her, “Hi I’m Sherry” and hearing her reply,

“Hi, I’m Barbara.”

Barbara was slightly shorter than I.  She had dark brown hair that glinted in the sun, a few freckles scattered across her straight nose and   warm brown eyes.  Just as we started talking, an older man with kind eyes emerged from front door.  He spoke quietly to Barbara, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying because he wasn’t speaking English.

“My father says why don’t you come into our house and play?”

“Come on in,” Barbara beckoned, while her father, smiled, opening the door and motioning me inside.  I would soon learn that Natale, Barbara’s father was the parent usually at home; that he was already retired and indeed twenty years his wife’s, Carmela, senior.      Without hesitation and much curiosity., I stepped inside.

The house smelled new but not like my own house smelled when we first moved there.  As we walked into the kitchen strange things began jumping out at me.  A large gallon glass bottle partially filled with dark, purple red liquid sat prominently on the table.    Then a basket of bread rolls beside the wine jug caught my eye.  Clustered in the center were salt and pepper shakers flanking two small bulbous bottles sealed with corks.  One bottle contained red wine vinegar; the other held a shimmering green golden translucent oil, something I hadn’t seen at home.  As we walked through the kitchen there were strange aromas, I couldn’t identify.

Barbara lead me through the house to her bedroom, then asked

“You wanna play jacks? “    motioning us into the bathroom with a gold flaked linoleum floor.  The bathroom? An odd place to play jacks, I thought, but then realized that rest of the floors throughout the house were carpeted.

Our friendship began with jacks that day and developed organically over a repertoire of  shared past-times:  swimming in my pool and hers ;  hiking around the scrub covered hills where we lived,  riding bikes and hanging out watching TV in the Valli’s family room during the day time, something not permitted  at  my  house.  Quickly, I was spending more and more time at the Vallis.

Much more than unlimited TV, the Vallis introduced me to polenta, garlic as an omnipotent seasoning, daily fresh baked bread, green-gold olive oil and a constant banter in Italian.  I loved listening to the tuneful sounds rolling off their tongues, the intensity with which they spoke, their warmth and the continuous merriment.  They were loose, much looser than my WASP-ish family.  They were playful:  they drank, smoked and caroused, not excessively, but enough to create the feeling of being at an a neverending party.   I even began learning a bit of Italian as well as how to sip Chianti .   A day rarely passed that I went to play at Barbara’s where Mario Lanza sang “Volare” and Frank Sinatra crooned everything from “April in Paris” to “The Road to Mandalay”.

Occasionally, I was invited to go with Barbara and her mother to the community they’d left behind, but still frequented.   Sandwiched between Highland Park and the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, the neighborhood comprised of small, not terribly well-tended, houses, lots of people speaking Spanish-with whom Carmela could communicate because Italian melded easily with other romance languages.  Here she managed the family businesses including a liquor store, restaurant and bar.

The best part of these excursions was visiting the bar filled with old Italian men where Natale played bocce ball on the hard pack, dusty earth court in a garden shaded by large oak trees.   Little café tables were scattered around where the men sat casually drinking, smoking and conversing as the bocce games stretched across long warm Southern California afternoons.  Natale and his friends always gave Barbara and me a turn to play bocce, and I grew to like bocce better than bowling with its intolerably heavy balls.

As I grew older, my appetite for travel extended beyond, as my father called them, “trips to little Italy”.  Not only were my bedroom walls decorated with pictures of Rome and Venice, but also with travel posters of more “exotic” places such as Peru and India. At twenty, I would make my first trip “abroad” to Europe.   It was wonderful, and  the trips to little Italy were only where it all began.