It seemed like only yesterday that I sat inside my armoire in my second floor back bedroom listening to the rainstorm rattle on the tin roof of my south Philadelphia row house. It was 1947, two years after the end of the war, my dog Gem nestled at the foot of my bed, room dark, rain poured down, the light of the far away refinery torch flared up and down. I was seven.
I pushed my kid sister down the front lawn covered in snow. She shot out on the street right under an oil truck. Thanks God, she was unhurt. The driver had a heart attack, Mom cried, I died, we all had hot cocoa, and sis and I joked about that until a week before she died in Yuma, Arizona 60 years later.
Pat had a career of helping kids, probably because she had no help from mom or dad. Teaching school, she gave back a hundred fold, they loved her. Her children eventually became governors, launched rockets from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, became teachers, doctors, had families, heroes, went to war and died.
And me? I lived a life that took me from south Philadelphia around the world. I cleaned fish in Portugal, had dinner at a castle in Faro, Portugal where El Cid was killed, made it to the Vatican twice, stood on the grave of TS Eliot in Westminster and sat quietly in the apartment of Percy Bythe Shelley in Rome where his wife, Mary wrote Frankenstein.
I did other stuff, too. And still, I feel unfulfilled.
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