FRANKLY SPEAKING
by Frank Crocitto

illustration by leslie bender

Now that Christmas has come around again, my mind goes back to Christmas as it was then, when I was a boy, a little boy watching the world making merry around me. And how each year my grandmother and grandfather, despite their bickering, managed to start the whole season going and keep it going, blowing warmth into it and light into it through the darkest time of the year.

My grandfather rarely took the initiative. My grandmother took so much of it there wasn’t a whole lot left over. But he was the one that got the season rolling. I knew we were headed Christmasward when I heard him rummaging in the tool room. He was taking boxes off of the back of the big white whale of an oil tank. The boxes held our “outside lights,” the ones we used to garnish the street-side of the house, bordering the windows with them and the front door and the mulberry tree in the front yard.

He let me help him, most of the time, always with the warning to “Watch, Frankie, watch,” a word of caution that still echoes down the corridors of my life.

We set ourselves up in the big basement room where our family ate and argued its way through all our holiday meals. Enthroned in his favorite armchair, surrounded by a tangle of wires, he looked like a Buddha delivering a gentle lesson to a schoolful of snakes.

Patiently, as he extricated each string of lights from the snag, he explained that though he wound up each string and set them to sleep “nice-a-nice” at the end of the season, they had been “loose-a” in their boxes all year with no one to watch them, so they had twisted into “troub-la.”

Then he’d wink archly and his big belly, which was the size of a bushel basket, began to vibrate gleefully.
When all the lights were in working order we bore them like holy relics to the front of the house, and, laboriously—which was my grandfather’s pace—we brought the colors of the season in—first on the block!
Usually, near the end of our heroic effort to fling a fistful of brightness into the face of a dingy world my grandmother would come sailing out.

“What do we need with these stupid lights?” she’d grouch melodramatically.

Grandma’s English was far from broken; she had gone to night school and become the mouthpiece for the family, in-season and out.
“Go back-a inside,” Grandpa grumbled, “before you catch-a you cold.”

“I never catch nothing,” she scoffed majestically. “But you, jedrool (which means cucumber), you’re gonna make Frankie sick out here.”

Grandma, bless her, was always worried about my getting sick, which is no doubt why I got sick so much.
Grandpa grabbed my arm with his iceman’s vice-grip. “Listen, I need-a you help. I need-a his help-a!” Grandpa proclaimed with rumbling finality.

Grandma stood there a moment holding her old unbuttoned mold-green sweater tightly clasped like a miserable peasant on a wind-swept heath. Then with a grand swish of the back of her hand, her characteristic gesture of disgust, she went off grumbling something about how “wehavetomaketheelectriccompanyrich—”. Before vanishing she would throw her eyes up to the gray, indifferent skies and send some inscrutable thing or two heavenward into the ears of the Madonna.

Yet Grandma liked the lights, no matter what she said. Grandpa knew that, and so did I. Moreover Grandpa’s lights were a signal to Grandma to get her side of the holiday going.

Once she knew that Christmas was upon us, she began clattering in her basement kitchen, and before the day was out she was baking some ineffable. Grandma’s cooking and baking could bring the wolves out of the woods, make barbarians civil, and turn proud, adventurous men away from all high endeavor. Once her multifarious fragrances had bushwhacked me on the top floor, they’d pick me up, and send me bounding like twinkle-toes downstairs, two at a time.

She was in her faded blue apron with the pink flowers on it and she was moving about like a field marshal. She had my grandfather hand-rolling batches of “stroofula”, little doughballs that were deep-fried and soaked in honey and glorified with colorful sprinkles. She had my mother and Aunt Grace working at the main sweet of the season, a pastry that went by the ominous-sounding name of “een-gart-a-debt.”

The creation of “een-gart-a-debt” was a challenging affair. I remember the dough being rolled out on wide gray slabs of marble by mighty rolling pins with painted red handles. Yellow warmish dough that tasted good just as it was. The dough was cut into parallelograms, given a twist and skittled into hot oil. Adroitly, when they’d reached a golden brown, my mother would pluck them out with a long fork, and when they were cool, some were jumbled in powdered sugar and some soaked in a dark, delectable juice made from honey and prunes and raisins. The ones soaked in juice turned purple and delicate as iris petals, becoming more succulent as the days cakewalked toward the New Year.

We always had lots of visitors around Christmastime, which I suspect was due mostly to the lure of Grandma’s magnificent “een-gart-a-debt.” She was relentless, my grandmother. She held the whole holiday and the whole family together. When she died at 92 the glue came undone and the family fell into pieces. While she was alive she carried us through good times and bad. But it was in the bad times that she really showed her stuff.

She was the one who took the train to “the city” to get the goods for the family to do “homework”. In those days many an Italian immigrant, not yet Americanized and afraid of work, brought projects home from the local factories, and whole families labored together into the wee hours. Grandma kept us all at it. Even me. And when we met our quota she’d lug it back to the city in two stout shopping bags.

Without her at the helm, the family would never have weathered the Depression as well as it did. My grandfather, originally a farmer, sold ice, and later coal, but he never made a decent buck. She pulled us through, her and her homework.
They’re both gone now. They’ve been gone a long time. But I can’t pass a Christmas tree or see holiday lights sparkling or smell cookies or bread baking without remembering them and seasons we spent together.