LITMIR.BIZ

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returned to the kitchen table, where I had begun whittling down the bare essentials for the trip. Camera, tubes, tires, wrench set, patch kit, and a myriad of other items were scattered along the table. “What’s that?” Jenny asked, pointing to a couple of little orange baggies.

      “Oh, those are emergency sleeping bags,” I said. “Just in case we get caught out in the middle of nowhere for the night.”

      She shot me a look. “You’re kidding me, right?”

      I snickered. “You never know.”

      “Yeah, I don’t even want to know,” she said, shaking her head. “You guys are crazy.”

      Emergency sleeping bags aside, Jenny had supported this trip since the beginning, even when the initial idea was for a monthlong cross-country tour. She wasn’t looking to get rid of me; rather, she viewed this trip as an opportunity for me to shake out the last bits of my restlessness, a chance to finally hang up my bachelor boots. For most of our relationship, I’d been a flight risk, jetting off for weeks or months at a time to hunt writing projects around the world. We’d been dating on and off for five years, and with both of us wanting a family, we needed to get started soon. Jenny hoped this time away would sufficiently scratch my adventure itch and allow me to finally settle down and get married.

      As I giddily checked the emergency sleeping bags off on my packing list, I wondered if that would ever be possible.

      CHAPTER 4

      Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

      Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!

      —Goethe

      Papa was sitting in his recliner when I arrived. The volume to the television was cranked, booming the murmurs of a golf analyst through the house like the voice of God. Papa was as good as deaf. A lifetime of pushing lawn mowers without ear protection had left him with tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears that at one point was so maddening he considered “buying a gun,” as he put it. Thankfully, my uncle Joe finally convinced Papa to get hearing aids, which mercifully reduced the tinnitus. And yet the TV remained loud enough to drive a terrorist out of hiding.

      “Hey, Papa!” I called out.

      He turned to me and his face lit up. “Hey, guy! How ya doin’?” He fumbled with the remote. “Let me turn this damn thing down.”

      He looked painfully frail. His skinny legs were crossed, and even in baggy sweatpants I saw how bony they’d become. He looked as wispy as old grass clippings, a shell of his former self. All that was left was his big head and catcher’s mitt hands.

      “How you doin’, Papa?” I asked, plopping down on the couch across from him.

      “I’m still here,” he said.

      “Well, that’s good.”

      “It’s like I told the nurse the other day. I says, ‘I feel very fortunate. I’m eighty-six years old. I’ve lived the better part of my life. I’m beyond expectancy. The only thing is that if I would happen to go all of a sudden, I would miss my family . . . ’”

      “How’s the nurse?”

      “Oh, she’s a big girl. Probably throws manhole covers around like they’re nickels. Gave me a shower the other day. Oh, was she rough! For Chrissakes, you’d think she was washing down a mule or something.”

      His comedic timing was still impeccable. “You look good, Papa.”

      “Well, I’m down to 175 now. I’m trying to put a few pounds back on, but I just can’t do it . . . With the medication I’m taking, everything tastes like sawdust. I can’t get the food down. Outside of soups and cereal. Ah well, what can you do?”

      That seemed like the greatest indignity of Papa’s decline. As if his physical deterioration wasn’t enough, the cancer had also robbed him of the simple satisfaction of eating with his family. While we gorged on my grandmother’s legendary eggplant parmesan, stuffed peppers, heaping plates of pasta, and antipasti, Papa spooned mouthfuls of cold, soggy cereal that he could barely choke down.

      For the past five or so years, I’d flipped on my voice recorder whenever my family sat down at the dinner table with my grandfather. He was the consummate storyteller, and I had hours of tapes of him regaling us about his Italian neighborhood in Boston called Buggs Village. The neighborhood originally got its name from an Irish contractor, John “Buggs” Behan, who gave masonry and bricklaying jobs to Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. Over the years, discrimination toward Italians caused people to forget about the neighborhood’s namesake, and they assumed that the area might as well have been called something equally vulgar, such as “Guinea Town” or “Wop City.”

      The vast majority of the Italians who came to Buggs Village, including my grandfather’s family, were from the remote village of San Donato. Papa’s grandfather, Giuseppe, immigrated to the States with his eldest son, Loreto (Papa’s father), and got a job as a dynamiter. Blowing up tunnels for highways and railroads in Boston, Giuseppe saved up eleven thousand dollars to buy a small plot in the neighborhood and built a compound of triple-deckers that became known as “Cook’s Yard,” where his entire extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins—lived together. Papa was the eldest child in his family of five, but often told me he didn’t enjoy any of the special treatment typically reserved for the first born. He didn’t even have his own bed growing up—he slept on the living room couch. There was never enough money, so Papa would collect his father’s empty wine bottles and return them to the store for a penny a piece.

      His mother was a fashionable lady who dressed with the flair of a Roaring Twenties flapper. She wore high heels and red lipstick while tending to her house and baking Italian pastries. She and Papa’s father were known to squabble when he got home from work, and occasionally she would hurl one of her pies at him from across the room. Although she adored her eldest son, whom she called “Joe-Joe,” she rarely hugged or kissed him because his father forbade it.

      What companionship he did find was in the streets of Brighton, running around with a terrific cast of characters who went by names like Jumbo, Jingles, Jopa, and Fats. Every afternoon they’d line up outside Pew’s Soda Shop, smoking cigarettes, talking about cars, and catcalling women, one of whom became my grandmother. Although she made eyes with him outside the shop, my grandmother formally met my grandfather when her family ordered a couch that he delivered to her house. Papa came wearing a leather jacket and his olive-black hair perfectly coiffed. They married a few years later and moved into the Yard to start their family. My father, their firstborn, was gleefully passed around by the extended family, where love was expressed in food. When my father became tubby from all the cannoli and pasta, my grandmother draped a sign around his neck that read: Non darmi da mangiare. (“Don’t feed me.”)

      My grandmother joined the ladies kibitzing beneath the grapevine in the Yard, while the men worked as mechanics, masons, and landscapers. Papa went into the landscaping business with his uncle, maintaining properties in the surrounding towns. At the end of each day, he and his neighborhood cronies funneled into the Brighton Elks Lodge, where Papa was a charter member and pulled beers behind the bar. The guys would play poker, drink Canadian Club, smoke cigars, and talk about the Old Country. The lodge was converted from the old Egyptian Theater on Washington Street in Brighton Center. To commemorate the opening, someone had the bright idea of bringing in the circus to perform during the week of Thanksgiving. “circus coming to brighton,” the headline read in the local newspaper. “Lions ‘n’ everything.”

      Indeed, the show boasted five lions, five elephants, and a famous clown named Balloono. Everything was going to plan when suddenly one of the lions, a five-hundred-pounder named Eloise, broke out of her cage and rushed the crowd. Four hundred men, women, and children screamed to the exits, trampling a few unlucky souls. Papa and five of his buddies crammed into a phone booth. One woman locked herself in the ticket counter and refused to let anyone else join her. With the crowd funneling out the exits, the lion turned her attention to the elephants. She leapt onto

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