These aren’t the days of wine and stories,
or half-eaten merendas under the sycamores,
watching the kids hang from monkey bars,
the old italianos roll bocce balls.
Your game was “malhas” on Sunday afternoons
with the other rapazes at the old horseshoe pits,
to see who had the mettle to strike
the iron rod with well-aimed disks,
those tokens you’d afterwards drop
with the stray cents and odd rusted screws
you and grandma kept for no apparent use
in a Hellman's jar behind the door.
I now keep this tradition myself
to hold the down the corners of my house.
After mass she cleaned and complained to herself,
loud enough that the polacos still kneeling in St. Casimir's could hear,
about ‘that husband’ of hers, out with the boys,
men of 60 and more—most who made a good $3.30 an hour by then
at the metal works,
nothing compared to Independence Park.
He saved the die cuts from discarded lots,
threw them like dollars into a pail to sort at lunch
for the perfect ones.
He polished and pocketed them and went whistling home,
eager for Sunday, his boys and the sun.
On days he was late, especially if it rained,
she prayed that lightning hadn’t struck him,
that the machines hadn’t crushed his hand or his foot,
like his cousin Ramiro, gone on disability
(though sometimes she wondered what would happen if he did),
like Senhor Serafim, also collecting,
and happy back in his life no doubt,
sitting in a clearing of pine and eucalyptus,
drinking the first of the Baga with good cheese and sausage.
But these aren’t the days of wine and gossip.
Lately, he cuts through the park and imagines the glint
off the disk as it flies to the target,
a spark that makes the 4th of July look like
the itinerant pop of illegal fireworks,
instead of the prescience already in their faces
years before the last factory moved.
She cuts up the chuck after piecework at Ford;
he comes home all wet, hangs his hat near the door,
checks his quarters for Social Security on a calendar there.
They both sit with me, kid on holiday,
for the 5 o’clock meal.
She doesn’t ask him how his day was.
Their silence speaks about the time when…and life is as it is
to start over tomorrow, work and look forward
to chartered vacations too soon over.
Paula Neves is a graduate student in English at Rutgers-Newark and editor of the Website Itinerant Muse at www.itinerantmuse.com. Posted January 2008.
