Happy Mothers Day in Heaven Grandma!

I also want to recognize all the Grand Ma's on Mother's Day. Your mothers mother is usually somebody you are really close to. The person you can run to when your Mom was pissed and will protect you.

We all miss our Grandma's. On this day more than most others.

Over the hills and through the woods to Grandmothers House we go!

After we left the doctors on Amity Street we decided to take a walk and we went down Henry Street. I never get to walk down Henry St anymore because it is out of the way and we have no reason to go down there. So I haven't walked there in about ten years. But at one time I was there every day when I was a little kid.

You see my Grandma lived on Henry St between Degraw and Kane and everyday my dad would bring me there at 7 in the morning before work. Then at about 8:30 I would walk around the corner to Cheever Place to go to the schoolyard to line up to go into Sacred Hearts. So we kind of retraced my life as we were walking home.

We went past PS 29 and the site of my Grand Aunts vegetable store across the street from the school where she sold the jelly apples. Then we passed the old convent on the corner of Kane St that they sold to the Hari Khrisnas in 1972 or so. I remember when they started walking in the neighborhood with their tambourines and orange saffron robes. I remember how they started trying to talk to kids in the neighborhood to convert them and the Mafia went and beat the crap out of the head Khrisna and told him if they talked to any kids they would burn the fucking building down.

We went down the block to the front of Grandma's house. I used to go there every day before school. My Dad would bring me about 7 in the morning and I would stay there until I had to go around the corner to Cheever Place to line up in the schoolyard at Sacred Hearts. I would help my Grandma while she prepared the food for my uncles when they came home from the docks at lunchtime. That's where I learned to make fresh pasta and sausages with the grinder on the edge of the table and how to make pickled eggplant and fresh vinegar and all kinds of great stuff that I still make today. Every morning she would give me a couple of espressos to wake up from the battered pot she had on the stove. On particular cold days she would pour in a little anisette and go "Nowa donna tell the nuns what you had. Tella them I givea you the peppermint candy capeice?" I would go to the school yard all hepped up and take off my jacket and run around and the old Italian nuns would go " The Irishe....no blood...they don't feel the cold."

After looking at the old house we walked along Henry and turned on Degraw St. We passed Cheever place which used to filled with kids in their Catholic school uniforms playing and yelling and fighting and getting in trouble. We passed Tony's candy store that had a stove in the back where the old man would make the best sandwiches you ever had. Potato and sauce on a half a loaf of Italian bread for twenty five cents. Yummy.

We continued along Hicks passing where the chicken market used to be where you got the fresh killed and plucked birds. Past the old social club till Union St and down the block to Fernando's.

On the way home we walked over the Summit St bridge. We decided that this will be our new morning walk to exercise.

But I don't think I will get to eat rice balls and panale sandwiches every day.

I miss my Grandma.