Nick DiChario
Coffee and Donuts
As if I didn’t know
what was in store for me
during my college summer vacations
Pop would remind me each morning
“Your job is to mix the mud,”
and I would set to shoveling sand
and dumping buckets of water
and bags of Portland
into the cement box
dragging my hoe back and forth
hour after hour
sweating like a horse
mixing the gloppy manure
the masons needed to lay brick
my dad and uncle
building foundations and walls
like their father before them
with their hands and muscles
and bent backs
course after course
troweling mud from their mortar boards
onto red and yellow bricks or
gray blocks of cast concrete
their sleeveless t-shirts soaking
wet by mid-morning
the sound of their steel trowels
singing like tuning forks
across the face of the wall
as I watched the buildings grow
one cinder block at a time
up and across, up and across
tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap
gently nudging thirty-pound
cement slabs this way and that way
like musicians, artisans
with wooden mallets
eyeballing the strike line
checking their levels
reaching for the next block that
I’d set on the scaffolding
for them to lift and lay.
In the beginning of summer
the worn out work gloves
I wore could not keep
the tender skin on my hands
from scratching and bleeding
but by the end of August
my bare hands were so rough
I could sand a 2×4 with my palms
my body as lean and strong
as a jackal’s and my face as
brown as the stogies
my dad and uncle smoked
during the ten-minute breather
they called a coffee break
all of us standing beside the
newly minted wall
enveloped in the smells
of wet stone
and mortar
and cigar smoke
for a few precious moments of shade
in the ninety-degree heat
of Rochester, New York.
“Go get us some coffee and donuts,”
my uncle would say
peeling a twenty off the fat roll of bills
he kept wadded in his pocket
laying brick was a cash business back then
everything under the table
no union but the family union
I felt rich at the end of the day
at the end of the week
at the end of summer
my own roll of twenties
stuffed in my pocket
for books and beer
for movies and girls
for coffee and donuts
hard earned cash money
working class Italian money
which meant something
back in the day.
Four decades later
I drive down the streets of
the old neighborhood
and gaze up at the structures
my dad and uncle built
and I think,
what have I built?
what have I done with my life?
nothing like this
no monument or edifice
that I can lay my hands on
or stand beside and look up
and say this will survive me
this will live long after I’m gone
what have I built?
what have I done?
here in this land of opportunity
words across a printed page
ideas
thoughts
intellectual property
no children to call my own
to live and die for
what would my ancestors
from Sicily
from Naples
who sacrificed everything
to give me this chance at life
have made of me?
God help me
I just don’t know.
Bio:
Nick DiChario’s writing has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. He’s written two novels, A Small and Remarkable Life and Valley of Day-Glo, and guest-edited a special issue of Voices in Italian-Americana dedicated to Italian folktales (V28, 2, 2017). He is currently working on a collection of his own original Italian folktales.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 