My family had stories. I had memories.
Woven together, they became the tale
of an immigrant's struggle for dignity
in the experience of raising a family
in America.
I knew my grandfather's,
my Nonno's footsteps,
echoing in the stairwell at Sackman Street,
three flights to his apartment door.
The parcel under his arm,
palpable: shoes.
My grandmother waiting to receive them
with the bread, the fish.
His skill, his passport,
his contract, his insurance,
his vessel, his ship to America.
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Hard, dark soles. Soles hard enough to float. In the village where he was born, in Canicatti--in a landscape of gashes, of sulphur, chalk, and gypsum and treeless brown dunes, Salvatore had worked making shoes. In his father's small shop: good shoes, right shoes.
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