Where do you live?

Great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, parents and siblings.

Life has high points and low ones. Times that we never want to forget and other times we hold out hope for selective memory loss.

Before my time, the story goes that my grandfather, Vito Bertolino would come out to this town to visit his cousin, Billy Caradonna, who would be his best man when he married my grandmother, Ella Pagano. That was my one glimpse of this town until 30 years ago, when I started my own story line visiting various Italian kitchens for a meal, listening, laughing, and learning.

Mostly this learning revolved about a warning, "Beware of the Red People," (complete with the pointed shaking of a crooked right index finger), the Sicilians... but being Sicilian, I would just smile. The rest of what I learned was a litany of names: Grandoni, Feranti, Ghilani, Falconi, Spinazola, (I am sure there were more.) Really the who's who of Coburnville, the old Italian neighborhood. But from those times my life moved on.

Now, fast forward to the present.

My friend and I are talking... She asks, "Where do you live?"

Nobscot

The snooty people live there.

Maybe, (I leave that comment alone.) Where are you from?

Coburnville.

Oh, do you know the Grandonis?

Maria, yes she lives on an extension near the cemetery.

Yes, she did -- Bridge St. And what about Aldo and Edo?

Yes, I know them. How do you know Maria?

She was a family friend. She was always warning me of the red people.

The Sicilians. My mother lived next door to them. She got along with them. Did you know the Caradonnas?

Yes, I met Billy Caradonna once. He came over for lunch. Did you know him? He was my grandfather's, Vito Bertolino's, cousin.

I knew him and the Bertolinos. I went to school with Susan Caradonna. I was a Ghilani.

I've heard of your family. Do you remember the Feranti family?

(And it goes on.)

--

The common ground builds. We exchange stories. My friend is reminded of her childhood, but mostly it is me hanging on to lifelong facts and stories of a town and it's immigrant Italian families and being amazed at the circular nature of life.