South Side Summer

April 12, 2019  Uncategorized

During that summer

when Chicago was still hog butcher to the world

and the sour of pyre wafted down the block

hanging like a heavy dank drape,

we lived upstairs from my grandpa

in a red brick four-flat building.

Grandpa came home from the stockyards

blood splatters on heavy boots

smelling of Palmolive soap and homemade wine

that he made

down in our basement where I knew

for

a

fact

that mice and rats ran wild.

On those summer evenings

I would sit beside my grandpa on our front stoop

my mom would play guitar

neighbors came to sit or chat or sing

in a mish-mash

of Croatian-Italian-Lithuanian-Spanish-Polish-English

and eventually my father would come home from the machine shop

reeking of sweat and smoking a Lucky

I would sit on my father’s lap

with the stink of sweat and cigarettes and stockyards and car exhaust

and steaming asphalt and hot cement and, too, the smell of

Mamie Casa’s garlicky

spaghetti sauce as she cooked with her windows wide open

in her apartment next door.

I could just barely hear the announcer from Sox Park and  just barely

see the fireworks exploding for a homer.

And I could not imagine a more beautiful, happy world.