Saving Graces Read Online Free PDF Page A

waiting in the Carriage Room” drifted across the park and invited us in. I could, and did, fill my children with the stories of Pistol Pete Maravich when we passed by his high school on the way to basketball at the YMCA in Raleigh, how he’d averaged thirty-two points a game and no one could stop him.
    But the truth is, I was in those places, but they weren’t in me, not like a hometown is. I didn’t watch them change as I grew, and I cannot measure the changes in my life by the evolution of a place. When I date an event, I don’t ask, “Was the new high school built then?” but rather, “Where were we stationed?” Things happened in a place, but eventually I moved away, and one place was replaced by another and then another. James in front of Morrison’s was replaced by the wooden backstop at Bandy Field in Atsugi, Japan, which was replaced by the red metal roof of the Topps Drive-In. My life is measured by which air station, which town, which country I lived in. And the cast of characters changed with each move. I don’t have a house that was always home or neighbors I have known all my life. My only constant is my family. And for me, describing them is like describing my hometown: it’s where I come from.
                      

                      
    My father spent his career as a pilot in the U.S. Navy. It was a dream for my dad and his family. Although Dad was born in America, his parents had both been born in Italy. The Navy meant that you were really part of this country, the credential of a real American that no one could dispute. But it didn’t come easily.
    The one-hundred-year-old, three-story home in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, in which my father grew up might have been grand had it not also been the factory where his father, Flores, made and sold his potions and ointments and where his mother, Mary, made soaps in the kitchen. The neighborhood was all that way: family homes and family businesses under one roof. Next door the Silvers ran a dry-goods and novelties business from their house. All the houses are gone now, lost to the cloverleaf for the Lane-Bane Bridge that solved a lot of traffic problems in Brownsville but took histories, and my family’s history, with it. Still, that house on Market Street, from which he could look down on the Monongahela River, was probably the grandest house my father ever lived in, even if the upper floors were rented to roomers. It was there that my grandfather, Dr. Flores Anania, supported his growing family as a pharmacist and chemist, and from there, in 1931, he left to be sworn in as an American citizen.
    At Brownsville High School, my father was as dapper as his father, but taller. Sports consumed the time left over after he helped his father or worked the several jobs he had in high school. When I look at the pictures of my father from those days, I can imagine him serving dinner in a supper club he had once described, where his wealthiest customer tipped only on the dinner but never on the drinks that kept my father running to the bar throughout the evening. In photographs, I see him dressed in a double-breasted suit, with thick wavy hair and an open handsome face, and I can imagine the girls swooning over him, as two lovely eighty-year-old twins told me they had, sixty-plus years before, when I met them on a campaign visit to Brownsville in 2004.
    And although I never met my grandfather, I can picture him as the Italian father in control. He died before my parents even met, but I’ve heard the stories all my life. How he would sell one of his formulas to a company, make a small fortune, and spend it on fancy clothes, or an automobile. It may even explain that grand house on Market Street. Then times would be lean again, and my grandmother—Nana, we called her—would be in the basement making soap in a dress that had been custom-ordered from France. One of our favorite stories, told enough times that it might even be true,