The Age of Reason - Umberto Tosi

Probably due to my advanced age, assembling a memoir, among my various writing projects, throws me back to a childhood that I remember in a time that now seems more like history than recollection. 

 Original "Hollywoodland" sign, 1938

I was a pup before television, computeers, the internet, the polio vaccine, jet airliners, the cold war, social media and nuclear weapons. 

My boyhood memories blend with what my parents heard intently on our radio - a sleek, deco, maple-panelled, 1930s Philco cabinet in the living room that broadcast soap operas, the evening news, mysteries, variety shows and Franklin Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats." 

My memories span from America's post-WW2 rise to international hegemony to its Trumpian self-immolation, timorously chronicled by the once-free news media in which I once earned my living.

UT & father, 1942

As a bilingual boy, I remember air raid drills and hearing deep-voiced radio reports from chain-smoking Edward R. Murrow and other newscasters covering the June, 1944 D-day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. I heard my family speculating whether June 6's war news could actually be the long awaited landing or just another raid.

Following the Allies' hard-won Normandy invasion newscasters predicted that "the War" (that's World War 2) was closer to being won. It would would continue another year through half of 1945. 

1939 Philco radio

I sported a toy rifle, tin helmet and played soldier storming hillside vacent lots hurling hard dirt clods at other boys faked grisly deaths. Less than a decade later and I could well have been on the front lines myself, and in Korea, Vietnam and other or cold war "police actions." 

That year, I remember to the kids screaming at each other about whether some guy named "Dewey" would become President. My second grade teacher tearfully explained that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died. To those who loved and hated him, America's 32nd president (the country's longest serving), seemed as if he's always be with us - a man of towering oratory, made from a wheelchair, he had become a national demigod through more than a decade of Depression and world war. 

My uncles remained on active duty in Europe and the Pacific and eventually occupying Japan itself well after D-Day.

WW2 P 38 "Lightning"

We heard reports bloody battles continued over the radio flashed on newreels. My tough-guy, lanky father sidestepped the draft as a welder, asselembling twin-engined, P-38 fighter planes for Lockheed in Burbank, California, not far from where lived in Hollywood, 3000 miles from "home" across the continent  in Boston, Massachusetts - a 12-day drive, most of it via the legendary, two-lane Route 66, a trip I chronicled here in 2016 post.

My maternal grandmother, two aunts and a cousin lived with my parents and I in a sprawling, peeling, 1930s craftsman bungalow house in Hollywood   (the neighborhood) with an overgrown back yard, shaded by fruit trees and a massive, drooping feral Calfironia pepper tree. 

We could see the decrepit, then-pre-restoration, original, real estate development, "HOLLYWOODLAND" sign on Mt. Lee from our screened-in back porch. The whole property was destined for tear-down and redvelopment in the imminent, postwar California housing boom. 

The allies finally defeated fascism. My favorite uncle,Vinny was first of my uncles and cousins to be sent on his way home (Yes, I was an Italian-American boy with an uncle Vinny. I addressed other aunts and uncles as "zia" and "zio," mother's hip kid brother Vinny was always "uncle.") 

Uncle Vinnie stopped in Los Angeles on his way home from the Pacific theater, as did with several of my mother's first cousins, including Robbie, a Navy officer, a year later. Robbie had witnessed something terrifying that we'd only just glimpsed in movie theater newsreels, an experimental atomic bomb test that obliterated a South Pacific, Bikini Island atoll. 

 U.S. Bikini atoll test, 1946

Cousin Robbie and his fellow sailors and Marines, wore blackened glasses and protective gear to witness The Bomb light up the sky from Navy ships a few miles from ground zero. The Atomic Energy Commission announced that its tests proved nuclear war "survivable."  No one I knew believed this. Cousin Robbie died of cancer twenty years later, perhaps by chance.

Louis Prima big band, 1940s

Uncle Vinny was my hero, the coolest of the cool, a jazz dummer in Italian American trumpeter Louis Prima popular big swing band. Uncle Vinny was my young mother's kid brother, less than a dozen years older than I. 

Uncle Vinnie started getting work as a drummer and extended his stay with us, taking over a bedroom in which he practiced for hours, muting his drums but still making hour lives swing.

Once discharged, he traded his U.S. Army uniform for a shimmering, exquistely fitted, charcoal gray zoot suit, and pompedoured hairdo. He let a polished nail in his little finger grow impossibly long in the jazzman style for guitar picking.

He practiced wildly on his mother-of-pearl jazz drum set while my nonna rolled homemade pasta and simmered her magical ragu sauce in the kitchen. Meanwhile, my mother dubbed American films at nearby Paramount Studios for overseas Italian and Spanish audiences, while she rehearsed for her role as Mimi in La Boheme with a newly formed, local opera company hoping to garner support from studio executives and Pasadena's old-money donors. 

Southern California seemed like another planet to my first generation Italian American family back then. We were displaced immigrants in a strange land far from the North End and our old Boston neighborhood where the old folks could get along speaking Italian and minimal English. It seemed as if all the other kids I met in first grade hailed from Iowa and Oklahoma.

Boston remained "home" to me and my parents. Los Angeles was a smoggy, unstable world of strangers prone to earthquakes where it snowed at Christmas once in fifty years and I discovered there was no Santa Claus. 

W/bear 1940, Boston; novel: Chicago, 2020

My parents constant, bitter arguing over money, my father's abuse and skirt-chasing business trips and my mother's spite-affairs would lead to divorce court - scandalous in their families' Catholic world. I was convinced that my parents would burn in hell for the sin of divorce.

I took refuge under the spicy lime green dome of that tearful, gargantuan California pepper. Its branches towered above our the house and drooped down, willow-like, to the ground creating a circular sanctuary within which I could play, concealed from the sight of my grandmother from her kitchen windows. 

She told me - always in Italian - not to disappear into the pepper tree's lime green umbrella. I did so anyway, listening to a new, inner voice that arose from a sidewalk one day announcing cryptically, "Here I am..." 

I had just turned seven years old and my uncle Vinny - giving me drum lessons - had an explanation - as he did for everything. "You've reached the age of reason," he told me in somber tones. 

"At seven you become able to tell right from wrong," he told me as if it were revelation. 

"Right from wrong...?" All new to me... I could barely tell right from left. In my late 80s, I'm still working on it...

"That's what the Catholic Church teaches us," he told me. His gray eyes fixed me from under his pretty-boy Frank Sinatra pompadour designed to make saddle-shoed teens swoon.

My "wisdom" was tested one Saturday morning the following week in our backyard. It had started to rain. It doesn't rain much in Southern California, but when it does, you get downpours and mud slides. Plus, Los Angelenos are notoriously bad, wet weather drivers.

I had slipped inside the pepper tree's dome to avoid the deluge, also because it was forbidden.  Its  shadowy magic drew me in.

Faintly, I heard my nonna calling me through claps of thunder from her kitchen window. She was going to be mad, maybe chase me with her wooden cooking spoon.

I had a world of my own that needed tending inside the pepper tree dome - toy airplanes and weapons, drawings, tattered books, a cot, creations of my imagination. 

The tree's hard red clusters of peppercorns had matured and I was going to taste them to find out if they really tasted of pepper. They did, but hotter and grainier by the mouthful. 

It was dry inside the dome. Wicked gusts, lightning and thunder roared from the downpour outside the dome, punctuated by the patter of hail. Real weather - rare in Southern California, but fearsome and ever lurking nonetheless. 

Suddenly, I a storm gripped my tummy. Those hard little red peppers hit my bowels. But I didn't want to brave the storm. My grandmother probably would keep me in the house. 

Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger

What would the Lone Ranger do? I found a sharp stick and carved a shallow hole opposite my dome home base. Falling leaves and the spicy aroma of the tree could soon cover my sins. 

I pulled down my corduroys and made a deposit, finished with a handy chocolate Mars Bar wrapper, then covered the evidence with dirt and fern-like pepper-tree leaves. 

I knew right from wrong. I was seven! And this was wrong!

It was lunch time. Nonna would be worrying and about to brave the elements with her cane and painful arthritis to cross the yard for me. 

I parted the branches and ran inside the house to my nonna's Roman-accented Italian scolding as she served up a pranzo of gnocchi Alfredo, handmade from the previous night, with insalata, garlic bread and milk. 

It was a hearty meal to make up for my "Americana" breakfast of Cheerios (the Lone Ranger's radio sponsor). 

While I gulped my cold milk in fading hope of the squall's passing and my being allowed back outide. 

I nearly fell from my chair when a flash of lightning lit up the kitchen! A monstrous clap of thunder followed, as a bolt struck the pepper tree outside. I  still remember the smell of burnt peppers. 

The lightning tore back a section of the tree's weeping branches where I had been squatting only twenty minutes earlier. My special delivery message about right and wrong from the God of Reason.

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Umberto Tosi is the author of Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. He was a staff writing for Forbes magazine, covering the Silicon Valley 1995-2004. Prior to that, he was a section editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and Sunday magazine, West. He was also the editor of San Francisco Magazine and Diablo Magzine and a contributing writer for the San Francisco Examiner. He has written more than 500 articles and stories for newspapers and magazines, online and in print. He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult children. He resides in Chicago. (Umberto3000@gmail.com)