Giancarlo slowly ascended the staircase into the July air, leaving the sweltering humidity of the subway behind him like he had risen from the very depths of hell. Now a feeble old man, this would surely be his last pilgrimage to the neighborhood he had immigrated to in his childhood.
Baptized in the fresh air, Giancarlo took a look around from the top of the staircase. Everything had changed. The salumerie and mercati he used to know had long since been replaced by quirky coffee shops and vegan restaurants advertising gluten-free menus. Storefronts once rustic and homey had been mutilated by the instillation of giant square windows and glossy hardwood finish. The people that once dotted the streets in their grey suits now sported tattoos from head to foot. “This is an alien world,” Giancarlo thought to himself. But he was the alien, the stranger; a vestige of a time long past.
Giancarlo began walking along the path he knew like the back of his hand. Despite the new façade, it was still the same neighborhood he grew up in. The first stop on his journey was the old church. As Giancarlo took in the sight of the old building, now even more decrepit than when he had first laid eyes on it, the memories came flooding back.
He was nine, and had just moved to New York with his parents. Giancarlo rather timidly accompanied his father up the steps of the tiny church, gently running his hand along the rough stone railing. At the doorway stood an old, friendly looking priest. “Benvenuto mio figlio,” the priest said, wearing a beckoning smile. Giancarlo exchanged a glance with his father, and they both followed the priest inside.
When the service ended, he recalled, the congregation filed out and Giancarlo found himself standing in the same spot he was in at this very moment. He smiled, wistfully remembering both the first time he felt like he was a part of something in America, and one of the last memories he had of his father. Giancarlo placed his hand on the old stone railing one last time, felt its cold, rough texture on the palm of his wrinkled hand, and continued on his way.
Giancarlo rounded the corner and walked down the street, marching as swiftly as he could past a food truck that used to be a street vendor. He passed a pack of school children, all silently playing on their cellphones and ignoring one another. Giancarlo had never owned a cellphone, and he remembered a time when no one did. Suddenly the children’s laughter prompted Giancarlo to turn around. But the children were no longer there. In their place, a teenage Giancarlo stood with his friends preparing for a game of baseball.
“Pitch the ball already,” yelled Vinnie, the batter. The troop of teenagers had a non-verbal agreement to refer to the bottle cap as a ball, and the broomstick as a bat. Giancarlo wound up and flicked the bottle cap past the batter. Strike one. “I wasn’t ready,” Vinnie grinned. With a knowing smile, Giancarlo wound up again—and threw the pitch deceptively slowly. A swing and a miss, strike two. “Last chance!” Giancarlo said. “Yea, yea,” Vinnie replied, “just throw the damn ball.” Giancarlo closed his eyes. He was in the last game of the World Series. Two outs, full count. He team was leading by one run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Giancarlo opened his eyes, wound up and flung the bottle cap. SMACK! Vinnie’s broomstick made contact, sending the cap flying across the street where it ricocheted off of a window before falling back to earth; a homerun. “You’ve lost!” Vinnie yelled as he gleefully rounded the bases.
“Are you lost?” Said a tall man with thick-rimmed glasses, a beret, and a tattoo of a swallow on his neck. Surprised, Giancarlo shook his head, casting off the final fragments of the memory. As Giancarlo continued on his way, he wondered what had happened to the old gang. Vinnie, he knew, had been killed in the war. As for the rest of them, he did not know. They gradually lost contact with the passage of time.
The nights were long; he remembered staying out late with the old gang, playing baseball and hanging out on the stoop drinking soda pop, coming home late at night trying not to wake his mother. But he always did, and she would always beat him with a shoe and then make him fresh gnocchi with olive oil and cheese, a midnight snack. The years, however, were short; the baseball games, the war, the death of his mother, the events of the past seemed still seemed fresh in his memory. “Where has the time gone,” Giancarlo thought to himself, walking passed a store advertising electronic cigarette vapor (whatever that meant) “what has happened to the world?”
With the wistful melancholy that often accompanies memory weighing heavy on his heart, Giancarlo arrived at his destination. Il Fornino was a quaint little restaurant, a relic of the past that had stood in the same location for as long as Giancarlo could remember. Fortunately the restaurant, Il Fornino had been revitalized by the patronage of customers longing for its vintage, old world charm. Giancarlo sat alone, and ordered the regular meal he had ordered hundreds of times before.
The waitress came and left, and Giancarlo looked down at his bowl of gnocchi with olive oil and Parmesan cheese. “This will be the last time,” He somberly reflected. After a long breath, he took a forkful of the potato-pasta and with a trembling hand placed it into his mouth. As he closed his eyes and turned the soft, subtly sweet gnocchi around in his mouth, he was transported back into the past; back to his mother’s kitchen.
“Ti voglio bene, mamma,” Giancarlo said, after eating a bowl of his mother’s gnocchi. She was too old now to beat him with a shoe, but she would never be too old to cook for her son. “I just wanted to thank you ma. For leaving you life in Italy behind to raise me. For taking on a second job after dad died. For always having food on the table. I love you.” Tears welled in the old woman’s eyes. “Ti voglio ben’assai anche figlio,” she said.
