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My father was in the Air Force for 20 years, so I grew up all over the world. Perhaps this is why other cultures are still exciting to me, rather than strange or frightening, as they are to many Americans. I started first grade at a school for English-speaking children in Naples, Italy, and finished 3 years there before we moved back to the States, to northeastern Montana. We lived out "on the economy" there in beautiful, sunny, Napoli, a city that mostly lived up to its picture- postcard image, in an apartment building at 498 Via Tasso - a cobblestone street that wound down the side of the steep hill toward the bay. I believe we were the only American family in the four-story apartment building, so communication with the neighbors was in broken Italian or English, or a little of both. Italians are as diverse as any other people, but the reputation of many Italian men as passionate and verbally assertive is not entirely undeserved. Neighbors or family members yelling about this or that at one another with appropriate hand signals was a part of the landscape. The noise dies down every afternoon though, since Italians honor the Latin custom of siesta. Workers stop and nap, and traffic diminishes, until everyone is rested a couple of hours later. My sister and I sometimes played with the neighbor kids in back of the apartment building, a narrow alleyway of cobbles that resembled a blind canyon, with an exit at only one end, with the apartment building on one side and a wall taller than the building on the other, rising to meet the street above as it wound its way up the hill. The narrow alley could be used by tenants to drive their cars to park in garages under the building at the far end. We were playing in that canyon that was our only playground one afternoon, jumping rope, when a man emerged from the building to get in his car. We may have interrupted his siesta, or we may have been too slow to stop our game, who knows, but he got in his car, backed out of the garage, then stopped and got out of the car. He came over, grabbed us, and shoved us up against the building, yelling something incomprehensible. We weren't really hurt, but we were frightened, and we ran into the building and up the three flights of stairs into our apartment, probably crying. As my sister and I began to tell what had happened, my father bolted out the door and down the steps, in search of the man who had dared to touch his children. He had driven out to the street in front of the building by now. We heard my father yelling below and went out on the front balcony to see him chasing the car down Via Tasso, running almost fast enough to catch it as it sped away, fortunately. It was so out of character to see my father, a gentle person by nature, ready to fight to defend us. In that moment, I knew that my father would keep the world safe for us, his children, and the mean man would never bother us again. Happy father's day, dad.
6/16/02 |
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Last Update 4/3/04 |