One of the last great newspapermen, my brother-in-ink and escaped monkeys, Jerry Manley is dead ... and I'm pretty damned sad and lonely

 

Jerry Manley was a devoted newspapermen. He was a brother to me for 50 years. Here is the eulogy I delivered at his memorial service July 16:

First, I need to apologize for the fact I’ll be using the name “Jerry” – which was how I knew him for his half-century as my best friend. Most of his family knew him as Dale.

He had other names, too.

As one of four charter members of a group of rascally newspapermen, he was known as “Chuckles.” (Full disclosure, I was “Flapjacks” and others were nicknamed “Death” and “Flash.” There even was a “Dumbo”).

Growing up, Jerry Dale’s schoolfriends called him “Prof.”

By whatever name, he was one of the last, great newspapermen.

Jerry was the best line editor I worked with in the half-century we spent together as ink-stained brothers. Delivering the news accurately, ethically and honestly was our goal.

A young Jerry quickly proved himself to be a skilled reporter and was promoted into management, mostly on the copy desk. His reporting chops stayed with him, though. When it was his job to edit the work of others, he quickly recognized the holes in stories. He knew the right questions to ask the reporters as he edited their copy.

He knew the Associated Press Stylebook – the old newspaper bible -- front to back.

He was among the last of a breed of newspapermen and newspaperwomen who sacrificed fortune, family time and, too often, health for what we considered an almost-sacred calling.

To me, he was more than a partner in this calling. He was my brother inside and outside the newsroom.

Let’s go back to the second week of November 1981, when Jerry and I threw our own 30th birthday party.

He was born November 9, 1951. Me November 18.

Even at 30, we were two relics, devoted newspapermen who had stayed at The Leaf-Chronicle while most of our contemporaries had moved on to larger markets, public relations or law school.

Younger folks were hired to fill those jobs, but we really didn’t know them and figured none of them would care enough to host a party for two grizzled, old – as we viewed ourselves – newspapermen.

Jerry reserved the party room at his apartments, and I called a friend to get a cut rate on a keg.

Jerry, who was news editor, and I, associate editor, generally went to work at 5 or 5:30 a.m. and stayed until mid-afternoon on weekdays, noon to at least midnight Saturdays. On party Friday, we left the newsroom at noon.

Jerry went to set up his stereo in the party room, so we could play the 30th birthday eight-track mixtapes we’d recorded.

I went to get chips, snacks, soft drinks, ice, paper plates, plastic cups and the keg.

The total was around $100, a lot of money 45 years ago.

“I’ll pay you after the next payday,” Jerry said. I told him recently, we’d apply that debt to our 75th birthday party.

Once we had everything set up for our 30th, Jerry and I started worrying.

“What if the beer is too foamy or doesn’t taste good?”

It was about 3 in the afternoon, and the party began at 6.

We decided that, to protect our younger newsroom guests, we needed to drink the foam off and test the keg.

It took us a couple hours of serious study to feel assured the beer was safe.

I’ll not go into the details of the party, other than to say that young staffers were amazed by the energy of the two old geezers.

Jerry became my best buddy quickly after he moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, sometime in the mid-1970s.

He was hired by the state’s oldest newspaper, The Leaf-Chronicle, to cover the City Council and County Commission.

I had met him earlier, when he was editor of the Gallatin newspaper, a weekly in our chain, and he came to Clarksville on Saturdays to lay out and paste-up his pages.

After he was brought to the daily newspaper, our bond grew unbreakable, until now.

When I was associate editor, news editor Jerry was on my staff.

But it was a team, especially on Saturdays, as we prepared our Sunday newspaper. Cops reporter Rob Dollar – one of the youngsters we’d befriended at our birthday party – would often carry the day with tales of death, destruction and DUIs.

Our front pages were filled with stories about murders, wrecks, a drunken mayor, a back-shooting cop (who was our friend), taxes, asbestos in the schools and deployments from nearby Fort Campbell.

Jerry had the final edit on the horrid weeks of stories about the concurrent but unrelated abductions and murders of two local teenagers.

I organized the coverage, did the first edit and wrote about the human element. Reporter Dollar provided most of the breaking news.

Often our writing was done on deadline, or even past it. If I told Jerry we were running late or we had a new piece of information and had to redo the stories, he’d not get upset. He’d begin composing the new headline, fire up a cigarette – all newspapermen smoked back then -- and wait.

Then he’d edit the stories with a critical eye, quick mind and reporter’s skill.

Adrenaline and sense of duty saved us when we were putting out these newspapers chronicling the two abductions and murders that traumatized the city.

But after the presses rolled and we stopped to absorb these horrible tales, melancholy settled in. The mental cost was high and unshakeable.

To paraphrase The Beatles, “And though the news was rather sad, we just had to laugh ….”

To deal with the weight of the horror, a small fraternity – The News Brothers—was born. Coping with the darkness through laughter and for charity.

One of the things Chuckles, Flapjacks, Death and Flash did was make a Hard Day’s Night-style movie that mocked society, the media and, especially, ourselves.

“Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” was screened November 12, 1982, in an abandoned movie theater, with proceeds going to local charities.

In his long decline, Jerry couldn’t remember a lot about his life in newspapers.

“I remember being silly with you. Making movies… Rolling around on the ground.” His laughter was weak, but sure.

I often reminded him how much I missed the vegetables from his massive gardens. He was generous in bringing the produce to the newsroom. Unfortunately, at least for my taste, he also was generous with his pickles.

“Want some more, man?”

“No,” I’d answer. “Better share with the others.”

The guy high school pals called “Prof” was a brilliant, inquisitive man. He loved to read – especially hard-boiled detective yarns. If you had an opinion about anything from weather to politics, he didn’t always argue, but he might ask “who, what, when, where, why and how,” the age-old formula for good journalism.

Over the phone or at his bedside in various facilities in recent years, I would regale him with replays of two newspapermen’s shared life adventures.

Recently, I was sitting by his bed retelling those stories when I was interrupted by the nursing home social worker, who came in to ask him a few questions. I am not sure why, but I guess she was checking out his awareness in his hours of darkness.

He knew the answers, birth date, marital status, power of attorney, funeral plans. Then she asked “what is most important to you?” He tried to tilt his head toward me as he said, quietly, “Friendship.”

There’s no one left now to laugh with me about Sunday all-night record-listening sessions we shared for years. I laugh when I think about us, standing arm-in-arm singing along with Kristofferson’s “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I.” We were our best audience.

But our best times were in the newsroom.

One Saturday night, cops reporter Dollar came back from the sheriff’s office and city police department. He had information on wrecks and murders that he’d offer to me as stories for Sunday. I’d pick and choose which ones he should work on.

He didn’t have to go any farther than the report he’d scribbled out detailing the deputies’ frenzied pursuit of an escaped pet monkey named Chico.

Jerry and I smiled at each other. In many newsrooms this would be a brief, if that.

Not if it’s a quiet Saturday night in Clarksville. Not if you are a News Brother.

“Let’s make Chico the Monkey our lead story,” Jerry and I agreed.

Rob turned up the volume on the police scanner, and we all listened to the frenzied radio traffic of deputies in hot pursuit of Chico.

After Rob’s story was finished, Jerry and I inserted as many monkey cliches as we could come up with on deadline.

“Deputies go bananas: Monkey at Large!” screamed the headline, stripped across the top of the Sunday newspaper.

The publisher called me into his office first thing Monday.

“I wouldn’t have done the monkey story that way,” he scolded in what was neither the first nor last time we had heart-to-hearts over decisions I’d made with my lifelong accomplice.

Our careers went full circle. Jerry had been the top person on my staff in Clarksville. Decades later, he was my last boss at The Tennessean.

Hoping to get me to resign for bottom-line reasons, the bosses busted me down from entertainment editor and then senior writer to night cops, the entry-level position in any newsroom.

My boss was night editor Jerry Manley.

Instead of quitting, I embraced my job as Jerry’s reporter. I went on vice raids, wrote about the capture of a teamster serial killer, helicopter crashes and bodies found in vacant warehouses.

Eventually, I was told to take “a voluntary buyout.”

On my last night as a newspaperman, I cranked out a batch of cop stories for my boss. A news team one last time.

As the shift ended, Jerry and I hugged, long and hard. There were tears. He may have tried to give me a jar of pickled peppers.

I’ve seen Jerry a fair amount in recent years. For most of one year, he was in a memory care facility near my house. Once or twice a week I was there. Sometimes he remembered me, sometimes he was lost in the TV or in his head. He particularly enjoyed science fiction movies, although he also was a fan of Westerns like “The Rifleman” and “Gunsmoke.” His favorite old movie was “The Wizard of Oz.”

He told me he missed junk food, especially cheese crackers and Diet SunDrop, so I smuggled that contraband in on every visit.

Jerry was able to live his last couple of years at the home he shared with his beloved nephew and caregiver Steven, “Ghost,” the white dog and ‘Cat,” the black cat.

Steven answered most of my phone calls. Jerry was sleeping or lost in some science fiction movie.

But when he was able to talk, I would remind him of our adventures.

When he was in hospice care, I told him he needed to stick around until November for our 75th birthday party.

“We’ll have to do it here in Lewisburg,” he said, though we both knew it wouldn’t happen.

On my last visit he told me: “Don’t reckon I’ll make that party. I’m really sorry, man.”

Me, too.

I’m proud to be here celebrating this great newspaperman, News Brother, savvy editor, best pal. He was a kind man, a good dad and a fine uncle and brother.

But I’d much rather be looking forward to drinking the foam off a keg in November.

“I love you, man,” we told each other at the end of our last conversation.

Just a couple old geezers, newspapermen, saying goodbye.

Sadly, there is now time enough for countin' the achievements and the kindness of one of Music City's most-iconic songwriters and nice guys

“Dammit, Don, the dealin’s done,” was what sprang into my head this morning when I learned that Country Music Hall of Famer and much-honored songwriter Don Schlitz had died.   He was, to me, anyway, a lot more than that song. He was a damn nice guy.

“The Gambler” cued up in my brain. I usually have a song that hits my brain every morning and it stays with me all day, no matter how many other songs I listen to…… Most often it’s a Beatles or Petty or Kristofferson song. Maybe Dylan. Or Bare. Tom T. has somethin’ to do with it, too. Jagger and Richards. ….

Death made today’s mental jukebox choice clear.

Today, “The Gambler” will accompany my thoughts from my daily workout until my head hits the pillow. And I have images to accompany the song.

The guy with the light, wavy hair and well-trimmed beard pulled his chair up next to the bed of the much-loved dying man.

Don Schlitz picked up his guitar, strummed it slightly, then began to sing. Softly, not to wake up the dead. But to offer comfort.

“You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run ….

“You never count your money, when you’re sittin’ at the table, there'll be time enough for countin', when the dealing′s done ………”

It was December 4 or 5, 2022, and the guy with the mournfully beautiful voice and delicate touch on the guitar was singing a few songs at the deathbed of my great friend, almost baby brother or son, the writer and musician Peter Cooper.

Actually, I can’t swear that Don Schlitz sang his signature song at the bedside on that day preceding Peter’s December 6 death.

It was a horrible time, a deathwatch I’d shared for a few days with Peter’s family and many friends.  

Don had pushed the door to the ICU room shut, so he could have personal time with his old friend. On the other side of that glass wall, we could only hear him slightly. It wouldn’t have mattered.  So much of that time blurs.

He could have picked from among an arsenal of Grammy-winners and chart-toppers.  For example, he co-wrote -- with Paul Overstreet -- Randy Travis’ signature song, “Forever and Ever, Amen” and “When You Say Nothing at All,” a classic by the tragically lost Keith Whitley.

But even Don knew that his masterwork, much of his livelihood I’m sure, came from “The Gambler,” which he wrote 50 years ago.

That song, made into a worldwide sensation and an enduring classic by Country Music Hall of Famer Kenny Rogers, had been the hard and explosive launch of Don’s chart-topping writing career, in which he fashioned more than a score of Top Tens.

Of course, “The Gambler” is framed in the symbolism of gambling, poker on the train, high cards and good hands and losing ones.  Image reinforced by Kenny’s TV movies.

But it really is about life. The train we all take from birth to grave, the train bound for nowhere and the wisdom to keep moving, savoring life while not resting on laurels and choosing not to focus on life’s losses.

There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done……

That song has, of course, been on everyone’s mental soundtrack since 1978 or so when Kenny turned it into a massive hit. My friend, Bobby Bare, already had cut it … I believe at the urging of his best friend, songwriter and raconteur Shel Silverstein.

The best version I ever heard though was during a long day I spent with Don in his writing room.  It was to yield a story for publication about one of the kindest and most prolifically humble geniuses I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with during my half-century-plus as a journalist.

I looked for that story today, but I lost many of my writings in the 2010 flood, and I could not find the story on the internet. If anyone has a copy of that story, email it to timothy.ghianni@comcast.net, by the way. I’d appreciate it.

Anyway, Don and I spent several hours together in his songwriting space and office, talking about music and about life. I was amazed by the atrium that his desk faced.

I don’t know what you call a huge group of goldfinches, a flock I suppose. The atrium was filled with Nyjer- and thistle-seed-filled feeders and those heart-lifting birds came and went all afternoon.  He told me a few years ago when my son, Joe, and I sat near Don and his wife, Stacey, at Station Inn – where we were to enjoy the songs of Peter and his comrades, Eric Brace and Thomm Jutz – that the bird atrium eventually got too messy, so they cleaned it out.

Still, I’ll forever have images of Don, when he picked up his guitar and, sitting on the corner of his desk, perhaps three feet at the most from me and sang “The Gambler.”  Yellow birds flitting in and out of the atrium added a bit of punctuation. Tom T. Hall had once told me “they look like little bandits, with their black facemasks.” (I put him in this story, because I miss his company.)

Don leaned into his song, the first time I’d ever heard a slow, acoustic version of the great hit. Its melancholy flavoring and meaning struck me full on. Oh, I had understood from the beginning the meaning of the lyrics, but when Don sang it, I almost cried. Then I applauded. Just a one-man audience for one of Nashville’s very best damn nice guys.

“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you,” is how Satchel Paige described that same sentiment.  Plenty of time to focus on the past when the dealing’s done.

Don sang other songs. Like I said earlier, he had tons of them.  He gave me a couple of treasured CDs of him singing many classics from his repertoire.

I thought again about that visit, and how it had begun.  Don and Stacey lived in a relatively new and quite comfortable development, I believe near where Williamson and Davidson counties collide, not far from U.S. 431. This was pretty much before GPS days and Siri, so he had given me directions on the telephone.

About 15 minutes later, I topped the hill into the subdivision and saw the great songwriter standing at a corner, looking for me, smiling at me and then, when I opened my window, telling me which was his house and where to park.

“I was afraid you might get lost,” he said, before opening my driver’s side door and escorting me into the house.

I guess that’s about where I should end this recollection, this salute.

Don was a helluva guy and he should not have died, as he’s just a year younger than me.

The memories, like the music, will forever and ever live on.

But the dealin’s done.         

  

 

Celebrating Dago Red, rat cheese, sizzling sausage and love in a world where everyone's name ends with a vowel and where I wish I could visit again

I’d guess I was 14 or 15 when Mr. Conte lifted the gallon bottle of Dago Red from beneath the kitchen table, set it on the plastic, red-checkered tablecloth and filled up a milk glass, pushing it over to me.

He quickly turned to the portable frying pan on the tabletop. Trying his best to avoid the hot spatters of fat that flavored the air, he fished out an Italian sausage and put it on a floral plate.

Then three more were offered to the plate in the middle of the crowded table. He slowly added another batch of sausage to the fryer, with accompanying pops and sizzles while he smiled, probably because the hot spatter didn’t touch him.

He filled up another milk glass with Dago Red for my brother, Eric, and his own grandsons Ronnie and Robbie Conte, who lived with my Aunt Frances and Uncle Al in the white house just across the side yard from Mr. Conte’s house in Lackawanna, New York.

Well, to most people this would be called “Buffalo,” as Mr. Conte and his older son, my Godfather Al Conte, had houses in a quiet section off Abbott Road (I may have this wrong) that led straight from their suburban homes into the city that everyone nowadays thinks of as the home of hot chicken wings.

For me, well, it’s forever a city of love, home-pressed wine, “meataballs” (the correct local pronunciation) and pasta.  “Spaghett…”

It was Easter time in Buffalo when the four cousins feasted and drank thanks to Mr. Conte. Of course, it was Easter everywhere, but my Mom and Dad annually brought us to Buffalo for Easter.  We also generally came at least once during the summer, and I do remember a few Thanksgivings.

I don't have photos of everyone in this tale, but here are two of my heroes: My Dad, the underfed "Emmy", with a gangland fedora, and my Uncle Al, my Godfather. Though good and quiet and mostly peaceful guys, they knew how to dress to kill. By the way, I can talk about Dago Red and that population in general, because I am one. Don't call me "Dago," though. I might become offended.

But the Easters were our holiday to be in this old steel mill city --  I remember as a kid that the sky was a yellow-brown and smelled like rotten eggs, day and night, as the mills belched their exhaust from the smokestacks that filled the landscape on the eastern edge of Lake Erie.

Next to the plate where the steaming sausages landed that afternoon was another plate covered with pieces of what my Aunt Frances called “rat cheese.”  It was gorgonzola, kin of blue cheese, but much stronger and not as brittle. Great with Dago Red. The wine, I should note, always was stored in the refrigerator, as Italians take their wine chilled.

A loaf of Italian Pane Francese – French bread with an Italian accent – lay on the table, inviting us to grab a hunk and bite into it after a mouthful of sausage or before our next sip of the Dago Red.

No matter where we lived – Sylvan Lake or Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Deerfield, Illinois, in the Chicago suburbs, Dad piled us into his car and drove us to Buffalo every Easter until I was out of high school.

There were traditions just in the journey. Every trip paused, almost at the very end, to roll up to Niagara Falls. If it was still winter, large chunks of the falls were frozen, mammoth ice chunks, as the water roared around them.  If the cold weather had ended, then we’d just watch. In either case, the falls at night were illuminated by a rainbow of colored spotlights. I don’t know if they still do it.  I’ve not been back since everybody died.

My Buffalo Easters were in the 1950s and 1960s. I do believe the Falls remain, but I don’t know about the lighting customs.  Probably fancier than colored spotlights in this digital age. Surely computerized LED color prevails, and no park ranger has to flip the switch at night.

The pause at the Falls for us always was anticipated and we would get out of the car, regardless of the temperature, to look in awe at the colored display of natural fury and glory.

Then Dad would load us back up, Mom, me and my brother, Eric, and drive to the second-story flat where Gramma Ghianni and Aunt Rita lived.  Grandpa Ghianni had already flown the coop to live in Long Beach, California, surrounded by similarly minded Dagos.  Rita, who had been a saloon singer, did marry once, or so the unspoken story goes. We didn’t talk about it. He probably was the guy in the pinstripe suit who flipped me and Eric silver dollars to appease and silence us when we were elementary school students and Rita was a blonde showgirl. The dollar-flipping gent looked like an extra on “The Untouchables.”

Anyway, that left Uncle Al with the task of dealing, lovingly, with three hard-headed Italian women, Gramma, Rita and his wife, Fran. God, I loved them all. Loved Al most.

The stairway to Gramma and Rita’s large flat at 158 Folger (I may have the address wrong, as it has been more than a half-century ago, so give me a break) was filled with the aromas of Easter.

Well, for most folks, we’d be talking ham and scalloped potatoes here. But what we could smell were the “meataballs” (again, the proper pronunciation) that Gramma and Aunt Rita were fashioning for the holy feast a day or two later.

“Eat. Eat. Mangia. Mangia,” Gramma would say, just after we all exchanged hugs and she began walking around the room with a plate filled with meataballs.

“Oh, Emmy, you look so skinny,” she’d say to my Dad, who, as far as I knew, was regarded as almost a god in that household. “Dotty notta feeda you?”  My mother’s sharp eyes held her reply.

Dad was the oldest child. Rita was the second-youngest. Baby Sam, who lived in Placentia, California, did not make it home for the Easter feasts.  Frances, the one in age closest to my Dad. would come by the next day to join in the marathon cooking sessions.

That next day was turned over to cooking and meataball sandwiches. Mom (who was not Italian, but who had learned the recipes from her mother-in-law and actually was a better cook) would join in with Frances, Gramma and Rita in getting the big meal ready. “Dotty, you notta feeda my Emmy?” Gramma would “tease.”

For Dad and Uncle Al, who was my Godfather and the nicest man I’ve ever known, it was a day of errands and reminiscing.  They’d drive around Buffalo and talk about high school football glory and life in general. Bloody adventures in WWII that they could and would only share with others who had been embraced by that bloody horror that they shared in the Pacific Theater.

That day likely came with a stop, go to the end of Folger and take a right, at the Como Bar, where the barkeeps would give me and Eric ginger ale. And there were stops at 158 Folger, where the men and the boys would grab stray meataballs from the platter in the kitchen and disappear back down the stairs.

Easter, of course, would begin with mass at Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica or at St. Joe’s Cathedral. I honestly don’t remember much about them, other than that they were ornate.  Later in life, I’d visit the cathedral or basilica again for funerals of many of the people in this remembrance.

On Easter, this year, all years, I mentally revisit those holidays, when everyone was alive and happy and the food plentiful. My favorite was the beef braciole. But ravioli, spaghetti, meataballs, bread, rat cheese and other forms and flavors of cheeses, peppers and I’m sure some other vegetables were on the table.  Oh yeah, and the huge bowl and ladle for the gravy (what you Americans call “sauce.”)  

And a fat bottle of all-ages wine. Kidding. Gramma didn’t let the kids enjoy the wine, though she knew Mr. Conte likely had when we visited him. By the way, I may have my age wrong in the anecdote about the wine and sausage fest with Mr. Conte, but I definitely was not legal age to be consuming alcohol anywhere other than in the Italian sections of Buffalo and Lackawanna.

Someplace in photos and Kodak movie film that I don’t possess, there are pictures of my brother and me after mass.  Dressed in overcoats and little fedoras, we were two gangster slicks at a park in the city that had a lake or a reservoir. Our parents were just letting us work off some energy after we saw the Easter Bunny, so we each got sticks and began flailing away at each other, like 6-year-old and 8-year-old Zorros or Errol Flynns.

All things must pass, and these dueling matches usually ended with my brother, getting pissed off at my swordplay, chasing me and attempting to beat me. My mother decided we’d worked off enough energy and took the swords away and broke them over her knee. We all got back into the car and went back to Folger Street.

Perhaps Dad would then take Eric and me to his Uncle Johnny’s house, where the kind, old gent would give us shot glasses of brown whiskey.  Dad and his Uncle would laugh at our gasping reactions and pour themselves another. “You boys-a wanta another?” Uncle Johnny Ghianni would laugh. I, at 10 or 12, had not developed the taste for whiskey that could have killed me in my own 30s or thereabouts. Should have, I’d wager.

One of our pre-Easter days was the one mentioned at the top, when Dad and my Godfather drove us out Abbott Road from Buffalo’s Folger Street to Lackawanna, where they parked at Uncle Al’s house. Then he and Al led us across the side yard to the house next door.  We could smell the frying sausages from the back door.

Uncle Al, who was a mechanic on the railroad, hugged his dad and said “Emmy (my dad) and I will be back in a while.” I sense they needed some bar time. Or just wanted to get away from all the damn children and women.

Me, Eric, Ronnie and Robbie then sat down on chairs near the table where Mr. Conte was frying sausage and filling up our milk glasses with Dago Red. He may have made this magic elixir. I know his brother, my grandfather Sabatino Ghianni used to make 30 gallons at a time. More than likely, though, Mr. Conte got it at the liquor store or from a neighbor.

If I remember correctly, wine and age make that unlikely, my Uncle Al’s brother, also named Al Conte, dropped by. A mechanic by trade and just about as nice as his brother, he was either Albert or Alfred and Uncle Al the other. Alberto and Alfredo?

But everyone calls my uncle’s brother Nini. I say “calls,” because he is a Facebook friend. I think he’s still with us. I’ve only seen him a couple of times in my life, but he has commented on posts I made on Facebook about his dead brother or about his late nephew, Ronnie, who died too young of a heart flaw. I always told Ronnie he was my favorite cousin. I have to admit I’ve used that same line with other cousins. It always was true when I said it.

Late in Ron’s life, I remember visiting Buffalo and smoking and drinking Scotch with him. He was a helluva guy.

Al and Fran didn’t stay in the house next to his dad forever.  They left the cottage in a grove of cherry trees and above-ground pool in back and moved farther into the suburbs to a split level. Aunt Fran liked her new house with the plastic-covered furniture. And she was proud to tell me that her neighbors, a few doors down and on the other side of the hedge, were members of the Bonnano Crime Family.   Good people, as long as you kept extra cannoli in the house. I would guess there was no need for Neighborhood Watch. Block parties could get out of control with all the gunfire, I reckoned. Leave the gun, take the cannoli … or something like that.

Of course, on Easter, we all enjoyed each other, with Gramma’s dining room table spread as far as it could go and card tables at the end.

Every Easter I think of those holidays. Oh, that sword-fighting in the park with the reservoir. My Gramma and her unbroken love and badly broken English.  The Italian cheese-a-cake or cannoli after the pasta plates were cleared.  That cheese-a-cake was different than what you’d expect. It actually was like a bundt cake baked around a cheesy, ricotta center.

I still mourn that all of the people around that table, except for me and Robbie, are gone. 

Robbie actually escaped Buffalo and moved to Houston many decades ago to be a teacher. He and Noreen raised their family there and now have a string of grandchildren, I think.  We have spoken each time someone from those Easter tables has died.  

And I always think about Mr. Conte pouring me my third glass of Dago Red and using a fork to put another sausage on the plate.    

My brother, Eric, and Ronnie finish off their glasses and wait their turn while Robbie grabs a piece of rat cheese.

I hold out my glass for a refill.