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Hey it takes a Lotta Love!
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.
Off topic. But on menstruation. On the rag. (I got my "last" among all my friends.) But I had a friend who was as skinny as me, who mom didn't tell her anything. Who went to the beauty parlor to get her hair done. The hair on her head not the other one. You know not an Bolivia or whatever it is when they trim down south over the border. That ironpeter guy would have loved her.
And, she went to the bathroom. And, came out screaming ... because she was bleeding. All over the bathroom. And the floor when she ran out of the bathroom.
Of course, the women laughed. And pointed. And then they threw napkins at her. Not sanitary napkins. We didn't have them in 1932. They were regular napkins. And handkerchiefs. And a scarf. One lady even threw her a muff. For her bleeding muff. I mean it sounds right but it really wasn't.
But my friend had NO IDEA! Just like me. I never have an idea. But that doesn't stop me from telling you exactly how it is.
I wonder for how many women this would have been the truth? I mean they have to know that is why man are scared of us. We bleed all the time but we never die. Look at me. I am older than dirt.
And I don't look so bad.......do I boys?