Ernie: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

us got together we played baseball, we played football, we played everything except basketball. In those days it was considered a rather sissy game because after you sank a basket you walked away from the key and got back in line to do it again. It wasn’t anything like it is today, running around full-court. Besides, girls played it too, standing flat-footed in front of the hoop and throwing the ball from between their knees in an underhand toss.
    I never dated in my teenage years. For one thing, I rarely had enough money. I gave everything I earned to my parents. Also, I was too shy. You wouldn’t think so, because I was around my mother and sister and aunts and cousins all the time. But they didn’t look at me the way some of those other girls did. In fact, they didn’t look like some of those girls did! They caused strange stirrings that I didn’t understand. So I hung with the guys at a time when hanging with the guys meant nothing more than they were your buddies.
    Holidays in our home were always my favorite time of year. The big ones were the Fourth of July, when we got together with family and neighbors—even the Yardleys—and celebrated our great nation. I also remember Armistice Day—now Veterans Day—which was a little more solemn, when we honored our war heroes. And, of course there were my favorites: Christmas and Easter.
    Money was usually pretty tight, so Christmas was a time of homemade gifts. Except one year, when some guy came along with $14.00 that he owed my father. I was lucky enough to be the one who answered the door and pocketed the money. On Christmas morning I got out of bed very early, stole downstairs with two of my socks. I put $7.00 in one sock for my parents and $7.00 in the other for my sister and myself. Then I went upstairs and said to my parents, “Look! Santa Claus came!” My mother and father were crying, they were so happy. I never did find out what happened to that man, though. If my Dad ever found out where the money came from, he never let on to me.
    I’ll never forget when I got my first pair of good pants for Easter. I was fifteen or sixteen. When we got back from the clothing store I laid them across the bed and just looked at them, and said, “Boy, that’s a far cry from knickers.” I felt like a real gentleman, like a country squire back in Italy.
    It was the first time I felt like a man. And that wasn’t acting!
    I also liked Mother’s Day, when I’d bring Mom a great big bunch of flowers. I always told her I’d picked them in the woods. I didn’t dare tell her that I got them from the cemetery. It may not have been kosher, but I felt my mother would enjoy them more than the deceased did.
    In those days, my best buddy was a kid named Joey Simone. He was much shorter than me and my mother used to call us Mutt and Jeff, after the newspaper comic strip about two friends, one very tall and one very short.
    Joey was a young Italian boy whose family was from Sicily. They always spoke with a wonderful, thick Italian accent, a dialect of the Bareza region that had been their home. The mother and dad always used to work on a farm and you’d often see them in the fields hauling around these big bundles of grass they used to feed the animals. They worked hard, but they were always smiling. They seemed genuinely happy to be working together.
    Mrs. Simone was amazing. When she came home each night, around 6:30, she would not only prepare dinner but also do the wash—by hand. You always knew when she was doing that because you’d hear her singing. In fact, when I think back, my youth was filled with the sounds of community. Her folk songs, the mixture of different languages on the street corners, the sounds of chickens some of the residents kept in pens. Kids growing up today don’t have those sounds. They shut them out with cell phones and iPods. I think they’re missing something, a sense of roots and heritage, warm memories they would treasure in their older years.