Kimchi & Calamari(7)

“Do you know any details about where they found you or the time of day? The more specific, the better the chance I might uncover something.”

“I know nothing,” I replied, “but I’ll try to ask my parents and get back to you.”



“The old guy still has it!” Dad shouted as he sunk the ball into the hoop.

“The old guy got lucky,” I snapped back.

Ouch. The basketball slapped my palm as I blocked Dad’s next shot. Wrestling for the ball, he grabbed my waist and overpowered me. He used to box when he was young, and his arms are still thick and strong. I smacked his backside in a last-minute attempt to shake him, but he made the basket anyway.

The score was 5–2, and Dad was up. But I’m nothing if not persistent. A minute later, while Dad gushed in his greatness, I caught him off guard. I grabbed the ball, faked left, drove right, and made the layup.

“The hoop master scores!” I shouted, my fist raised to the sky.

“Not too bad for a young punk,” Dad shouted just before he swiped the ball back and nailed the equivalent of an NBA three-pointer.

“Anytime, senior citizen!” I said, though I was the one breathing heavy.

We took a break. The sun shone directly overhead, and a warm breeze blew on the blacktop of Campbell Park Elementary School. My old stomping grounds, where Gina and Sophie were now in the second grade. The air smelled of fresh-cut grass and tar from the resurfaced parking lot.

I guzzled from my water bottle. Our T-shirts lay balled up on the grass, soaked with sweat. A Little League game had started behind the school, and we heard cheering and clapping. Dad gazed toward the baseball fields. He gets quiet this time of year. Late spring is peak season for window washers. Mom says Dad is just exhausted from the long hours, but I don’t think that’s the only reason. I think he hates washing windows for a living, and it hits him more during the busy periods.

Mom told me that Dad didn’t have the chance to go to college. The sons of Italian immigrants back then were expected to pick up a trade and start making money right after high school, like generations going back all the way to the old country. That’s why New Jersey’s yellow pages are still full of masons, plumbers, and carpenters with Italian names. Grandpa learned that new housing developments in northern Jersey needed window washers, so when Dad turned eighteen, his parents bought him a used pickup truck and painted “Calderaro Window Washers” on the side. That was the only career counseling he ever got.

“How’s school going, Joseph?” Dad leaned back on the grass.

School made me think of my essay, but I decided to stick with good news first.

“I’m doing a drum solo for the concert next month,” I said. At the Christmas show I’d played “Carol of the Bells” in a quartet. Dad practically climbed onstage to videotape me double-timing it between the timpani and the bells.

“A solo? Way to go. I bet your grandparents will come up from Florida for that. Joseph the Drummer Boy, that’s what they call you.”

“Just make sure Nonno Calderaro doesn’t wear one of those loud orange shirts like he wore last year, okay?”

Dad laughed. “I’ll try. So, how are grades?”

“I got an A plus on my science lab this week, and an eighty-four on my social studies quiz. It should’ve been a ninety, but Mrs. Peroutka gave tricky multiple-choice questions.”

“No excuses, Joseph. You need top grades going into high school, and you’re an honor student. Good job in science, though.” He wiped his head with his T-shirt.

This was my first conversation with Dad lasting longer than thirty seconds since my birthday dinner. So far no one had drawn blood, so I figured I’d try him on the essay. Maybe he’d have an idea.

“Anything else you want to talk about?” he asked, as if he’d read my mind.

Call me Chicken Calderaro. Just thinking about this suddenly made me clammy. “I’ve got to write an essay, Dad, about my ancestry. Family roots from Korea, that sort of stuff.” I bounced the basketball as I spoke. “But I don’t know where to start.”

Dad scratched his back. “I could tell you plenty of stories about Nonna and Nonno Calderaro. How they came from Siena, just south of Florence, in August of 1947.”

I said nothing.

“New York City was an oven in the summertime back then,” he continued. “Nonno told me it hit a hundred and three degrees when he and Nonna arrived, and the water fountain broke, no kidding. The only valuable thing Nonno brought from Italy was a pair of silver shears his father gave him. Which his father’s father gave him.

“Both your grandparents worked in an upholstery factory in Brooklyn for three years, six days a week. They saved every nickel until they could open their own tailor shop.” Dad paused, then added, “A tailor shop that made custom suits for Wall Street bankers.”