Month: December 2020

My first Fourth of July was at the Lucas’s house that faced Washington Park. The field directly across from there was launch central for the Sunnyvale fireworks display. Sitting in their front yard, comfortably bunkered in lawn chairs or lounging on picnic blankets, my adult relations admired the colors almost directly overhead. I was three, and had no idea what to expect, and when the first sky rocket whistled into position and burst noisily above us, I wasted no time running, screaming, into the living room where I sought out furniture high enough off the floor for me to hide under. 

The bangs kept coming, muted only slightly by the walls and windows of my grandparents-on-loan’s tract house. But the capacity for humans to adapt is remarkable, even for three-year-old humans, and I apparently crawled out of hiding, watched the show through the front window, and eventually decided that the noise was not a threat, for I spent most of that evening’s festivities on a blanket. I don’t recall if parental intervention helped get me there or not. It was an intensely personal progression – abject terror to aesthetic appreciation – and even if adults seemed to help me through it, I was actually on my own.

My later attraction to acting caused me to face the same transition from terror to pleasure on purpose and regularly in both rehearsal and performance for decades thereafter.

I don’t know if the location of our pyrotechnic parties changed because the civic display was moved from Washington Park as the city grew, and other less crowded venues became available (which eventually was the case) or if it was a family event, like Grandpa Jess’s passing, that caused the Fourth to be celebrated elsewhere. But after those several years across from the park, my memories of fireworks are mostly set on the Lopin ranch in Cupertino.

My mother was the eldest of five children. They were raised on ten acres of fruit orchard their father planted around 1904 and in a house he put up in 1920 (and that replaced an earlier structure less modern). In the dining room hung formal portraits of my Lopin grandparents, pretty and handsome, my grandmother with a strange white mound on the top of her head that was identified by my Aunt Mary as a chrysanthemum, but only after years of my wondering what it was. My grandfather’s portrait revealed a face and upper body completely out of kilter; shoulders, ears, and eyes dislevel with each other in ways almost random, and nose out of alignment in the other direction. But he was nevertheless a pleasant looking man.

He died when I was six and my cousin Gail, his only other grandchild, was about ten, and I recall very little about him. The house was of a peculiar design that required passing through bedrooms to get to other bedrooms, and in which it never quite felt that any room, except kitchen and bath, was being used for its intended purpose. My grandfather lay dying in a small bedroom immediately off the kitchen – on the way to the bath, master bedroom, and other rooms of puzzling utility – and I remember clearly visiting him there. Gail did, too. She later told me that the day before he died, she came to see him and he kept pointing to the corner of the room.

“What are you pointing at, Grandpa?”

“He’s waiting there for me. What joy.” He wasn’t, by any report of his children, a religious man.

I was offered the opportunity to attend his funeral, but declined. When my mother returned home, she mentioned that Gail had asked after me, if I were okay, were going to come pay my respects. I felt a bit ashamed for not going.

“Gail cried.”

“She did? Why?”

“Because she missed Grandpa.”

“Oh.” I was too embarrassed to admit that I had thought she’d cried because I hadn’t come to the funeral. Always the center of the universe. Or maybe it was just a problem of syntax.

The yard behind the house was shaded by a huge pepper tree and two huge figs. The area beneath them was paved with concrete, and my uncle had built a rudimentary fire pit over which he grilled spicy sausage and chicken of his own production. It also served as a perfect staging ground for fireworks-stand pyrotechnics. They were simple confections – a little color, bright light, and sometimes a gentle whistle – but when Aunt Mary oo’ed, and Uncle Jack chuckled, and Dad said “that was a good one! Let’s see what this one’s like…” the Roman candles and sparklers took on epic proportions. They seemed in their simple, homey sincerity more than a fitting celebration of a nation’s bedrock principles.

But simple and homey didn’t come cheap, and the box I aspired to cost six dollars. It was worth it. It had Silver Fountains, and Vesuvius Volcanoes, Magic Serpents, Color Cones, and Cosmic Sparklers. So around Easter, my parents would start crediting my fireworks account ten cents for each time I did the dishes after supper, and if I was diligent, by July Fourth I could afford the six, maybe even the seven dollar collection.

Of course, although they pretended it was only for my amusement – those sparkly entertainments – and that was why I should earn the pleasure, I knew I was working for whoever showed up to share in shade and sausage while we waited for dark. And that was okay. Our collective enjoyment was always worth the suds and hot water. It brought us together, and the memories of those summer evenings of aromatic smoke and easy conviviality are priceless.

“And this is my grave. What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” I said admiringly of the sizable structure of polished stone.

“It’s big enough for the whole family. And look at the view.”

We turned together to admire the valley, rugged and dramatic. It was a fine panorama to lure and reward surviving family to come visit my cousin after he died.

I visited my living cousin twice in the 1970’s. He passed in the early eighties. Panorama notwithstanding, I never made it back to admire his grave once his body had taken up residence.

Pete Zarko was my father’s name. It was also the name of his first cousin who lived in California’s Santa Clara Valley for twenty years beginning in 1909. Both my father and his elder brother Tony adored Cousin Pete. In family circles, he was the stuff of legend.

Tony (aka Bill) and Marian, world travelers by disposition, went to Herzegovina in 1967, I think it was, to see Pete. Bill (aka Tony) could talk of almost nothing else for a year.

Petar Zarak – as he received his mail in Ravno – returned to Yugoslavia in 1929 to find a wife. The economic crash probably kept him there. He found a good partner in Stoja, however, and when I first met them in 1972, they radiated contentment. I had connected up with their son in Dubrovnik, and together we took the train to Ravno. The name of the town means “flat”. It’s a joke. The town clings to the side of a mountain.

In Ravno, we were invited to snack with other cousins, to whom I was related in ways too complicated for me to retain, then we went to a little park where a trail into the mountains began. The trail wound through the rocky landscape for about a kilometer, then it turned to a slightly beaten track, and finally it disappeared. At that point you had to have someone with you who knew the way, for no path could form on such terrain.

I had written Pete from the United States saying that I was going to visit “sometime after Easter”. It was now mid-July, I think. Technically, my estimated time of arrival was still correct, but there was no reason he should have been expecting me at that particular time. I had just contacted his son a couple of days before, and my cousins of unknown provenance had mentioned that Pete had not been to Ravno in almost a week. So it was that our group of three rounded the last bend in the invisible trail to the tiny village of Gaic, and there in its first of six houses, stood Pete in his front door and Stoja at the door to her summer kitchen.

“Well, now,” he said in perfect English, “who the devil might this be?” Stoja, to whom all English was jabber, and probably profane, wrapped me in an embrace made complex by the shawls and aprons she always wore. She smelled sweetly of wood smoke. She treated me to an embrace every few minutes the whole time I was there. By sunset I understood why Uncle Bill had made the trip, and why Pete was so adored.

Gaic nights were dark in 1972. There was no electricity, few people. The sky showed more stars than I thought were visible. The sound of silence was intense. Pete lit a lamp in the winter kitchen, and Stoja prepared a dinner of fried cheese preserved in olive oil, salad, and a kind of sausage. Pete sat with me on the sofa and asked questions.

“Is that vineyard still there, the one on Stevens Creek and Stelling?”

“No, that’s a community college now. In fact, I went there my freshman year.”

“That was the Beaulieu Winery, very beautiful place. I worked there sometime. Is Le Petit Trianon still there?”

“It needs restoration, but it’s still there. Behind the library.”

“Library?”

“It’s a college?”

“Oh yes. And there was Seven Springs Ranch, Bubb’s place, they’d hire me to prune. Wow, such a beautiful valley. Perfect conditions for agriculture. Spring water everywhere, rich soil, ideal climate. What a paradise.”

“Things have changed in the last twenty years.”

“That’s what Tony said. Hard for me to imagine.”

“For me, too.”

“And the winery on… what was it? They had a fire in October, 1923.”

And so it went every evening until we could remain awake no more. When he would run out of questions, he’d tell me stories from the Old Testament until a memory appeared, then ask more questions. Most I had no answers for. His knowledge of the valley was perfectly preserved from twenty years before I was born.

“Who do you speak English with? Someone else in Gaic, in Ravno?”

“I subscribe to Time Magazine. By the time it arrives, the news is a month old, but it tells me how the language changes, and helps me to remember it. Those were wonderful times. Your father and uncle, wonderful boys. Your grandmother, my goodness, the best cook in the world…” then, in case Stoja had somehow understood, “…except for my girlfriend, here,” and Stoja pretended to be annoyed and, in Croatian, accused him of swearing.

“Swearing! Hellfire and damnation! There, that’s your swearing!” and he laughed, and she laughed, and so did I.

I stayed four or five days that time. There are so many astonishing memories from that short visit, and I will parse a few out in subsequent posts. I returned in the spring of 1975 and stayed another few days. Electricity had arrived. There was a road in the village, vehicle-worthy, but a short way out of town it lost itself in the ruggedness of the terrain.

“They didn’t ask if we wanted to go anywhere,” mused Pete, “and they didn’t make it possible for us to go, even if we’d wanted to.”

My first trip to Europe in ’72 was largely by thumb, though I also took trains, planes, and boats when needed. My second in ’75 was spent mostly in Firenze, and I dropped down to visit family for a month towards the end. When I departed on that second journey, I left my Uncle Bill quite ill with cancer. He had been in the hospital for awhile, and when I saw him at home to say goodbye, I was convinced that we would not meet again in the flesh. As I was leaving, he called after me.

“You’ll see cousin Pete, won’t you?”

“I’m going to try.”

“See him. Tell him I said hello.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“And I want a hello back. Bring one back with you, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

I left home in late February, saw Pete and Stoja in May, returned to California in June. Uncle Bill called hours later.

“When you coming over to see me?”

“Tomorrow, maybe later today?”

“Right now, okay?” I could hear my aunt in the background, “He’s just off the plane, you know what that’s like, let him come tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll be right over.”

He looked good that day. He was dressed, and met me in the little unused, unfinished stump of Iowa Street that abutted their property to the north. The weather was beautiful. I imagined that he’d recovered. We shook hands, he smiled. “So, tell me all about cousin Pete,” and he took me into the backyard where we could sit, and I told him what I could remember while he asked questions.

A day or two later, he died.

Photo: amazingly a search on Gaic yielded a photo! The two levels of red roof to the far right was Petar and Stoja’s house. The road to nowhere was obviously extended and changes the look and connectedness of the entire village, but Gaic is essentially as I remember it.

My father build his own auto repair shop shortly after the war. It was quite a grand structure with an impressively engineered single barrel vault made of timber, and with room enough for six active repair bays. In front was an office, but as my mother performed official tasks and preferred to work at home, it was never used. Instead they rented it to Fred Brackenbury who repaired radios, then a bit later, televisions. Brackenbury had a sign painted over his entrance. Dad never painted a sign, but by the time I was about eight, I was pretty convinced that he was waiting to put one up that said “Zarko and Son”.

My parents bought the lot on the corner of Mathilda Avenue and El Camino Real in 1945. There was a house on it, built in 1925, and a large garden, probably a few fruit trees. They moved the house a half block away not long after to free the property for commercial use. My mother rode inside the breakfast room during the move, because as she said, “When else will I have the chance to ride a house?” She tried to get Dad to join her, but he thought that would be silly.

My father loved mechanics like I loved theatre. In about 1920, when they were in their teens, he and his brother, Tony (aka Bill) created a functioning motor vehicle out of discarded farm equipment. His first job was as a cleaner at Redwine Ford dealership in Mountain View. Maybe he couldn’t get his hands greasy pushing a broom, but at least he would be in the company of those who did.

By the end of the decade, he had formed a business partnership with a man named Frazier, and together they opened a Ford dealership of their own on Sunnyvale’s main street. Not bad for a farmer’s son. I’m sure that Frazier had a first name, but even though he was talked about regularly in our household, and years after the partnership dissolved in deference to performing war-essential work, I don’t remember ever hearing it. Willard! Okay, but hearing it was rare.

I suspect that being both a dealership and a repair shop encouraged a certain degree of order and cleanliness when there was a Frazier and Zarko, but once it was Pete Zarko’s Garage, he could revel in grease, and he did. I loved it, too, as a kid, all that caked, black goo. He’d put me to work scraping pans of some automotive purpose, and it was so satisfying to feel the thick resistance of a heavy layer of coagulated oil give way to the tool’s stout blade. Waste oil, and I believe even the goo, was stored in large cans and picked up weekly to be recycled. Oil was the gold of his enterprise, and he treated it with serious respect. He also thew the stuff that was too filled with particulate matter to be cleaned onto the ground behind the shop so he wouldn’t be bothered with weeds. I imagine that when the City turned the corner into a park, they had some serious environmental cleanup to do.

So, it was at about the age of eight that he first began inviting me to work with him when the family Ford needed mechanical attention. We started with simple things like cleaning spark plugs and distributors. Eventually, he taught me how to adjust timing, clean carburetors, change oil, and top off brake fluid. By the time I was twelve I was under the car with him when the clutch needed changing, adjusting brake drums, and doing other gloriously greasy work that I remember the fun of, but not the purpose.

Still, I knew in my gut that the sign Dad wanted to paint wasn’t going to happen. I enjoyed those times peering into engines and rolling around under a car. When he gave me clean up jobs, I did my best to exceed expectations, and tried my best to hide my disappointment at how quickly everything got messy again. And I admired the garage, loved my father, and was proud of his good reputation. But I didn’t relish mechanics. Didn’t even really like riding in a car all that much, let alone fixing one.

I started taking walks as soon as it was physically possible. I still remember exiting Grandma Zarko’s yard on the Waverly Street side, pushing open the white gate, and heading for parts unknown. A bemused neighbor asked where I was off to.

“I’m taking a walk,” I proclaimed. And I accomplished three houses before my mother discovered I was gone and came running after me. I walked to school in first grade. My grandmother’s house was a short distance from Adair Elementary, so it began with lunches, and quickly advanced to trooping home on my own, as well.

I vividly remember hiking after school – it had to have been first or second grade, because Mom was still driving the 1936 Ford Victoria – about to cross Iowa Street, when she pulled up, rolled down her window, and with a radiant smile offered me a ride.

“No! Can’t you see I’m walking!?” And I truculently crossed Iowa and stomped the few blocks home.

My love of walking is in my DNA, I guess. The same way that love of a humming engine was in Dad’s.

So, here we are, I’m maybe seventeen, and we’re giving the car a tune up. I am perhaps not pretending enthusiasm as strongly as I may have done a few years prior. I had been strongly lured by a theatrical siren, and grease was losing its charm. I harbored hopes that something besides my saying it would convince my father that I was not meant to follow in his footsteps.

We drain the oil pan. I take it to a waiting recycling barrel. Dad hands me the five-quart oil can to be filled from the new-oil barrel across the shop next to the restroom. I go. I fill it. The oil is transferred to the Ford engine. 

“Let’s top this sucker off just a little, I think it wants another half pint.” That’s his polite way of saying that I’d not filled the can. I sulk back to the new-oil barrel.

“Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!”

That was me. My Dad never got excited like that. However, this one time he did join me at trot.

I had left the tap open. There were now several gallons of liquid gold covering the floor from parts shelves to grease rack. Dad picked up two sheets of tin, inserted a funnel with a filter into the barrel, and without saying a word or casting blame, we scooped up as much oil as we could manage. The rest was sopped up under a layer of sawdust, and swept into a trash can.

I could see the sign saying Zarko and Son falling into a disorderly heap in front of my father’s garage. It wasn’t a sin, what I’d just done, but it sure as heck was a signal, and Dad read it as clearly as I had hoped it would.

There were still many hours spent together leaning over fenders and scooting under transmissions, but now we did it because… well, that’s what we did together. When Dad retired early so he could work on his antique autos, he sold the business to his longtime employee, Louie, and no sign of any kind was ever painted for Zarko’s Garage. When Louie retired, the City bought the land, and for a brief period before it was a bank (for a period even briefer) I imagined what an interesting theatre it would make.

I never knew my paternal grandfather, Vito. 

There is a tradition in the part of Croatia my family has its roots in. The first born son is named after his father’s father, the first born daughter after her mother’s mother, then you switch sides and do it again. Child number five’s name is therefore left up to the imaginations of the parents. My mother was first of five and duly named Ann. The youngest, unbound by tradition, was called Dragutin. He hated the name, and went by Martin from his high school days on. His siblings didn’t much care for it either and called him Babe until the day he died.

So, it was expected of my parents to name me Vito. My father suggested that if I were a boy I be called Marko, and if a girl, Zorka. He was joking, which was not very helpful. So, my nomination was basically up to my mother. She took this quandary into the hospital with her, gave birth to my nameless self, and remained undecided right to the last minute. Desperate for inspiration, she turned to her roommate who had also just given birth.

“What did you call yours? I just can’t come up with anything!”

“David Allen.”

“Oh, that’s nice. How many L’s?”

“Two. It’s my maiden name.”

It was thus I became known as David Allan.

A few days later, my parents were faced with the task of presenting me to my father’s mother, a strong woman and a traditionalist.

“What did you name him?”

“David,” my mother gulped.

“Good. I was afraid you’d break the rule.”

Something my folks had both missed growing up; Vito is the equivalent of Dave.

Vito, the elder, died a few months after my parents married. His widow was so distraught, she reportedly begged her usually pliant son to move in with her – oh, bring the wife with you – for a few months while she adjusted. Ten years, a depression, and a world war later they finally were able to move out. I believe it came down to my mother’s giving Dad a choice between her and her mother-in-law. 

Vito was, by all reports an exceptionally kind man. He was tall with flowing mustaches and wore a white ten-gallon hat. When his wife would deny one of his sons some spending money, the boy would find a gold coin in a shoe the next morning. I recently wonder if Dad moved Mom into enemy territory not because his mother need comforting, rather because he did. His younger brother already lived at home, my grandmother – who was a strong woman – had the company she needed. Many of us carry our parents with us long after their death, but I’m not sure he ever reconciled the grief he held for his father.

Another Croatian tradition; the man rarely marries before age 35, and his bride is usually about 20. In a rural society, this generational overlap works to everyone’s advantage. The man has a younger wife to help him in old age, the woman has grown children. My grandfather was 38 when he married, my grandmother was 18. Perhaps in asking my parents to move in with her, she was merely claiming her expected prerogative. Her twenty-seven year old childless son came with a wife who could be pressed into helping around the house. Her elder son already had two daughters. Her youngest son was in his early twenties and modern. She chose the most practical alternative. And the path of least resistance.

She seemed to have had a good instinct as to which son would be the most compliant, and which would feel Vito’s absence most keenly, which would do his best to fill the hole that was left behind by his father’s passing.

Or maybe Dad offered to move back in with his mother and represented it to his new wife as a request. And maybe he heard a request when it was no more than a widow’s lament – “I will be so lonely”. History is hard to unravel. Family history all the more so for everyone believes themselves to be primary source.

In 1910, while still working as a tenant farmer for the Willson family, Vito entered a contest and won a bicycle. His six-foot four frame and tall hat was enhanced in its romantic stature by state-of-the-art transportation. “He rode it until it wore out,” my father reported. “I was three when he won it, and still remember how proud he was.” Ten or twelve years later Dad and my uncle Tony created a motorized vehicle scrapped together from discarded farm equipment. I imagine Vito was proud of that, too, and that he provided his sons the cash to buy the few parts not rescued from a neighbor’s junk pile.

I wish I had known my namesake.

As a lad I was quite dedicated to the Blessed Mother. Even though I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, I still experience a devotion to her, it’s just different now.

My parents rarely went to a social function without me, and when they did, it rarely lasted beyond my bedtime, so a sitter, usually from the family, would be all that was necessary. On January 20, 1962 my parents went somewhere unusual or far away, I guess, and I was invited to spend the night with Aunt Marian and Uncle Bill. When I spent overnight time with relatives, it was almost always with Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack, so this was special. 

Their house was also special – or maybe all houses are when you’re a kid. It was a sprawling “U” shape of Marian’s design that embraced a courtyard with a brick barbecue and a hanging light fixture made from an old wagon wheel. There was a large living room with a grand stone fireplace and a picture window, an ample dining room, and a huge eat-in kitchen. The master bedroom was in front (the house was generously set back from the street) while Shirley and Linda’s bedroom was in back, and included a number of really cool builtins. My cousins were living on their own by then, so I got to stay in their room. I can still remember Marian tucking me in that night. I can still remember how happy I was to be there. And I can still remember praying to Mother Mary for snow. 

What prompted that particular plea, I don’t know for certain, though I do have a dim memory of Marian (who hailed from Indiana and knew about such things) saying to my folks as they departed on the front porch that the air felt like snow. But everyone had laughed, so that I took it at all seriously… Well, maybe it was just the idea; staying over in a special place, then to wake the next morning to a winter snowscape, well that would be just fine.

And so I prayed like I’d never prayed before that it would snow. In Sunnyvale, California that had not seen snow in thirty years.

I woke early, just as light was beginning to glow. The color of the dawn seeping through the shades was distinctive, odd, exciting. My pulse picked up. I wondered if anyone else were awake. Should I go into the living room, see what lay beyond the picture window? Would that disturb anyone? If my prayer had been answered, would it matter if I woke the rest of the household? I mean, that would be a very big deal. 

I was still debating the ethics of a guest being the one to herald the day, when my aunt cracked the door open.

“Are you awake?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, you might want to get up, now. There’s a surprise.”

I bounded out of bed and into my robe and probably almost knocked Marian over in the hall as I ran to look outside. There it was. Their vast lawn was a sea of sparkling white. The trees looked like a Christmas card. The street was still pure and untrammeled.

“Call Mommy and Daddy!”

“They called me. Your mother likes to be up early. She thought you’d want to see this.”

I crossed myself a dozen times once Marian left for the kitchen (she was Congregationalist, I wasn’t sure she would understand). 

Uncle Bill was already outside, sweeping down the driveway so when my folks got there, they’d have a place to park. Marian made hot chocolate. That morning was, like, the best a kid could ask for. 

Marian and Bill took regular trips – well, to all over the world, but that’s a future story – to Lake Tahoe, so even though Bill was a Sunnyvale boy, he knew about driving in icy conditions and such. For Mom and Dad it was the first time for snow since 1932.

I’ve since lived in the northeastern United States, lived there for thirty years. I imagine myself as being over the thrill of snow, though – especially from inside a warm house – I must admit it as one of the most extravagant events nature has to offer. And it’s good to remember being a kid, and what it was like for a meteorological anomaly to be so extraordinarily exhilarating.

We drove all over town. Everything was transformed. Marian pointed out houses with melted patches on their roofs. Their occupants were up and stirring; they had turned on the heat.

“Now see, how wonderful it is to have someone with us with experience of snow,” cooed my mother. Marian was a teacher, and a good one, too. Mom could not have issued a better invitation. We were, from that point, regaled with stories of horse-drawn sleighs and of skating on frozen ponds back in Indiana. The magic for this boy was thick.

It was still early when my folks and I got home. We lived across from the city hall, a modern complex of handsome, shed-like buildings surrounded by artificial hills and valleys of lawn. Snow sat untouched on all of it, except for one set of footprints that ran up the steepest hill and down again at an angle.

“Maryanne.”

Our neighbor’s granddaughter was about my age. We were old friends, and I liked her a lot. But she was so infuriatingly impulsive. Could she not have waited a few hours at least before she marred the pristine beauty of our view?

An hour later we were both on that lawn throwing snowballs at each other.

Photo: snow at the Lopin ranch, 1932

Even though Grandpa and Grandma Lucas were not blood relatives, it was clear to me as a child how they fit into the family. They were my cousins’ actual grandparents on loan. How Aunt Alice and Uncle Bert figured into the family was more mysterious, and still is. They were perhaps Aunt and Uncle to my Aunt Marian, therefore Alice may have been Mattie Lucas’s sister. I’m really shooting in the dark, here. But I felt pretty much the same about them as the Lucas’s, you can never have too many uncles and aunts.

Bert and Alice lived on the same block as we did, only on the other side. We walked down South Mathilda to Olive Street, turned right, and their house was on the corner of Taaffe. (I say walked, but despite the tiny distance, we often drove.) I loved that house. It was a California Mission bungalow, all rough troweled plaster and terra cotta roof. You entered from a small porch into a living room and directly opposite a wide arch that presented the dining room which had windows along the opposite wall onto a patio and a walled garden filled with fuchsias. To the left of the dining room was Bert’s drafting studio; more windows, tiled floors, triangles, Koh-i-nor pens, sharpeners, scale rulers, and velum. It led into the patio. To the right of the dining room was a long, narrow kitchen. There was a fancy-painted breakfast nook. Alice’s stove was several shades of green enamel, and had control knobs that were somehow in the shape of a pendant. (Don’t ask me how, it’s a memory.) Through the kitchen you could go down a set of aromatic wooden stairs to the basement where the men would gather for billiards.

It was a magical house.

I don’t remember having spent an actual holiday with Bert and Alice. But for some span of years, the family celebrated Leftovers Friday, when we all gathered again to finish off what we were too stuffed to finish on Thanksgiving. It was better than being stuck with a refrigerator of whatever it was we had provided for the actual feast, like four Tupperware containers of mashed yams. It allowed us to continue to enjoy a varied table in each other’s company. At least a couple of these day-afters were held at Bert and Alice’s, and I remember them being more convivial than the holiday itself. Some of the adults were there on lunch hour — extended to allow for pumpkin pie — and were delighted with the break in routine. The style of service was decidedly tin-foil and wax paper, so everyone was more relaxed. If the white meat was a bit on the dry side, we all knew it already, no one had to point it out, and no one had to be embarrassed about it either.

One year when I was seven or eight, Bert had for reasons forgotten set up a public address system. The speakers were in the dining room, the microphone in the front bedroom. He said a few words of welcome, everyone laughed, and some of the curious went up to examine the source. I was not among the curious. It seems that I’d heard the voice, paid little attention to the words, and assumed someone had turned on the radio. I wanted Dad to take me downstairs for a game of eight ball.

It was usually on a Tuesday. Uncle Bill would show up unannounced, and tease my father into doing his day-end bookwork a bit later than usual so we could go over to Bert’s for pool. I don’t know how Dad spared the time. His billings could take more than an hour, he seldom got home before 7:00, and was in bed by 10:30. But two or three times a month he agreed to join his brother for billiards.

There was a rotating group of regulars, and my uncle could always scare up one of them to round the group out to a regulation four; he and my dad, Bert, and another guy from the neighborhood. They played the real thing, billiards with two white balls and a red, cushion shots, elegant set ups, arcane terminology. There were pictures on the walls of dogs playing poker, of sylphs standing prettily in a bosky glade, of an old woman and her butcher weighing a chicken, both disrupting the scale. The men swore. My father almost always won. His background as a machinist fit nicely into the precision of the game.

After a few rounds with his friends, or if a second neighbor showed up to crowd him out, he’d come over to the pocket billiards table, colloquially known as pool, and combination play and teach me through one of several games. These were good tables – slate beds, oak gutters, thickly felted cushions. The balls made a wonderfully satisfying rumble as they returned from their pockets to the rack at table’s end.

That’s where I wanted to go while we waited for leftovers to be heated and served. But Dad enticed me to take a look at the microphone in the front bedroom. Bert followed. It was a splendid thing, this microphone; chrome and shining, hefty and complex. Bert turned on the amp and tested the mic with a tap.

“Say something.”

I was too shy.

“Try it. Have you never used a microphone before?”

“No,” I mumbled into my sweater.

“Well, I’ll leave it on in case you get the urge.”

I followed them back to the dining room. Not a word was uttered about pool or the basement. A few minutes later I gave in to the call of fate and retraced my steps.

“Hello.” My voice boomed back at me from twenty feet away in a most satisfactory manner. “Hello to everyone in the dining room.” That got a laugh. This felt dangerous. “And welcome to Leftover Thanksgiving hosted today by our favorite aunt and uncle, Alice and Bert! Let’s hear a round of applause!” They clapped. My future as a striving theatre professional was sealed in that moment. 

I have been justly accused of extending pre-show curtain speeches past the useful limit while functioning as artistic director at one theatre or the other; an indulgence with roots in that microphone. I couldn’t stop talking. I listed names of family and their imagined responsibilities for the day. I reviewed the dishes on order, complimented the cooks, anticipated who would have to leave early, who would get stuck with the dishes, who would get to take home the leftover, leftover stuffing.

After several minutes of my imagining a happily amused audience, rapt at my wit and sophistication, my father crept in.

“Just going to adjust the volume, here,” he said, masking the amp with his body.

“Not loud enough?”

“Something like that.”

He returned to the table, I kept right on going. Uncle Bill had to interrupt to let me know that I was missing the turkey. I imagined glowing faces and an enthusiastic welcome, the way you saw an audience greet its adored master of ceremonies on television.

There was none of that. Everyone was eating, laughing, talking. My cousin Shirley patted the chair next to her. My plate was already filled.

Photo: Bert is seated center, Alice is standing behind him.

When I was growing up, the farthest extent of living memory – that of my grandparents – involved high-button shoes and handlebar mustaches. The present day equivalent involves colorfully striped bell-bottom trousers and, well, handlebar mustaches, and I am of the generation that lives on those far fringes of living memory.

What will follow between now and January 6 – the traditional end of the Christmas season – will be my memories and those of my cousins. The specific holiday is not, to me, all that significant, and only some of the memories will be holiday related. That we gathered to celebrate our family in our family’s way is what ties me to these recollections, and, I hope, will stir reflective memories of your family’s way, in turn.

My dear friend Erika (click for her blog), an American who married Italian and has been living in Orvieto since 1958, observed that Christmas gifts are bulky, take up space, and are hard to carry while juggling a cane and a dog. This year, she would give memories. Memories have none of the aforementioned disadvantages. My aching feet had convinced me that gifting would not be possible this year. Pandemic-related restrictions convinced me further. Erika’s idea of giving memories changed my mind.

Let’s begin with my fifth Christmas Eve. I was the youngest among us, so it was deemed that I should be the one to personally meet Santa Claus. Being only four, I didn’t have a lot to draw on as to what was or was not traditional, but the family gathered at my parents’ house that year – 1953 – the only time I can bring to mind that we were not at my Aunt Marian and Uncle Bill’s. So, even with little precedent, I remember being excited that we were hosting the festivities.

What I don’t recall, but would bet was traditionally observed, was the pre-gift giving meal at my grandmother Zarko’s. The ancestral estate was a five-room farmhouse build in about 1908. It smelled of garlic year around, of quince candy during the winter months, and of Croatian strudel with apples and apricots in the fall. The Christmas smell was boiled cod. 

I don’t remember there ever being a Christmas tree, there was no room for one. There was a radio the size of a refrigerator from the 1920’s, a pump organ that no one knew how to play, a glass-fronted hutch filled with dishware extracted from boxes of detergent, china as prizes for choosing the proffered brand. There were butter-block chairs and a settee upholstered in crackling black leather and stuffed with horsehair on top of spiky, spindly springs. The kitchen was dominated by a round oak pedestal table that my mother had found for five dollars, second or third hand during the war, and which she brought home – my folks lived with my grandmother in those days – in the rumble seat of her Model A Ford. Warming the house was a combination wood and gas burning stove with a special tank for hot water. The phone in the hall had a call button that you pushed to gain an operator’s attention so you could vocally tell her the number of the person you wanted to reach, or if you couldn’t remember the number, the name.

On a back porch that always felt like it was about to slide into the vegetable garden behind the house, was a squat cast-iron wood burning stove, the oven door graced with a white porcelain panel that contained a temperature gauge with a black needle. The other half of the porch was glassed-in and home to a perplexing number of coleus plants, spilling over their shelves and onto the floor. There was always a gallon tin of extra virgin olive oil sitting on an oil-saturated side table, the hole poked into its lid stopped up with a bit of a twig. As a kid I imagined the twig was, logically, from an olive tree, but probably not.

Perhaps because they had lived there for so long, my parents always entered through the back porch. Everyone else came in through the front door, a narrow panel precariously placed at the top of four narrow, steep stairs, it sported no handrail, and the screen door opened out. For every festive occasion, lives were risked just to attend dinner.

And every Christmas Eve and Good Friday, Grandma Zarko cooked cod. And at every codfish dinner, my Uncle Bill would quip that to make the stuff eatable required dragging it behind a tractor for two hours, soaking it in acid, pounding it with a hammer, and boiling it overnight. He was exaggerating, but only slightly.

The meal Grandma Zarko always prepared was by design, tradition, or coincidence, blindingly white. There was a codfish stew with white onions followed by a plate of mashed potatoes, white cabbage, and cauliflower, garnished with a slice of Swiss cheese, everything saturated with garlic, sopped up with white bread, and washed down with your choice of white wine or white apple juice. The meal was served on white soap-box china on a white linen table cloth. We tidied our lips with white cloth napkins. For dessert, fried dough in various forms represented color for the evening, as it was a shade towards ivory, but just to make sure it didn’t offend the overall scheme, it was dusted with powdered sugar.

Then everyone would go to Aunt Marian and Uncle Bill’s to open presents, drink wassail and egg nog, and marvel at the decorations. Except when I was five.

Now most kids have only two sets of grandparents. I was lucky. I had three. There was my widowed Grandma Zarko, my mother’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Lopin, and Aunt Marian’s parents, Jess and Mattie Lucas, who I got to call Grandma and Grandpa Lucas, even though they’re were not blood relatives, and strictly speaking, not even related by marriage. But you cannot have too many grandparents, and I was a kid and couldn’t have cared less about strictly speaking.

It was decided in adult pre-Christmas convocation, that if they were to pre-empt my asking what happens when Santa Claus dies, they had better do it when I was four. They had decided that I might be too clever to sustain a belief in the Old Elf until I was six or seven. So it was that Santa Himself appeared in our living room that Christmas Eve in 1953, and in front of the whole family, too, and not just to score a plate of cookies while everyone was asleep, but to hand me my own Santa-made (and totally forgotten) present. Well, almost the whole family was there. Grandpa Lucas missed it completely! But I told him all about it when he got back.

One night, a year and a half later, I lay in bed wondering, and finally called to my mother to ask the burning question; what happens when Santa Claus dies? Does somebody elect a new one? Sort of like the Pope? My mother gently revealed the truth. I found it not at all calamitous. But I did have one question. If Santa Claus is made-up, who was it came to visit Christmas before last? She told me. 

“Oh!” said I, “I wondered how come he was wearing a mask…”

“If you asked, I was going to say; it’s cold in the North Pole.”

“…and why he had Grandpa Lucas’s watch on!”

Photo: Linda, me, and Shirley — cousins.