“Yoo-Hoo! Anybody home?”

yelled our next door neighbor, Teresa Marino,

Mother of my buddies Pasquali (the Second), Georgio and Johnny.

She’d poke her head in our opened front door…

Nobody locked doors back then.

That would come a few years later when neighborhood Mom’s

started hearing worrisome stories

while sitting on the wood benches surrounding the play-grounds,

watching their children leg-swing on the monkey-bars

6 feet above the cement,

or playing handball against the concrete walls of the apartment buildings

or touch-football on parked-car-lined streets.

Besides, we lived on the 12th floor and crooks are lazy, right?

(But how did any of us reach puberty alive, anyway?)

Mrs. Marino would come over to cry havoc and worry

about her husband, Pasquali the First, a low level Mafia soldier

who would disappear, unannounced, now and then,

his pistol hidden in his shoulder holster under his suit jacket,

to hit the mattress when ever his Don called for war.

My Moms husband would, merely, just come home very late

or miss a night in her bed,

(not that she cared much by then anyway…)

but for less sanguine reasons than Mr. Marinos shoot-outs on Tremont Avenue..

Dads reasons were affairs of the balls in some apartment two flights up.

But, what the hell?!

This was the Bronx in the early 1950’s.

And too many guys like Mr. Marino had learned to kill in the Argonne forests

or, like my Dad, a sailor escorting convoys in a sub-chaser during North Atlantic winters,

who had learned to fuck willing Soviet maidens during Murmansk lay-overs

just a few years before.

And they all came home with habits…

So what did Mrs. Marino or Mom expect, anyway?

But… a shoulder to cry on,

some kind of neighborly commiseration,

are great healers,

almost as good as a cold Yoo-Hoo after supper,

way back then.

Some 45 years later, my wife orchestrated a surprise party for my 50th birthday….

(Jesus! That was 27 years ago! Where the hell did all those years go!!!???)

Anyways, a colleague in the Hudson Valley public school where we both taught

and who knew well my various predilections

gifted me with 50 bottles of Yoo-Hoo,

still my favorite drink like when I used to share

with Pasquali (The Second), Georgio and Johnny

in the Sound View Avenue projects where we were all

Bronx-boy-Yankee-fans.

I collected Yoo-Hoo bottle caps

because they had pictures of our Yankee baseball heroes on the bottoms.

Bobby Richardson,

Yogi,

Whitey,

and the King of Kings, Mantle.

(Maris may have rewritten the Home Run record, but never in our hearts or minds)

My Dad wasn’t much of a fan,

but his Odessa-born father was.

He took me to my first game at the Stadium when I was 5.

We sat in the bleachers where I puked too many franks and a sip of his beer

and had a great time,

Yeah! I remember!

Grandpa and I shared a business-mans interest in my bottle-top collection.

This year, Fathers Day was two weeks ago.

My daughter, Cathy, and her 18 year old daughter, Brenda,

a high-school graduate as of two weeks ago…

(Good timing, right?)

gave me a case of those plastic boxes of Yoo-Hoo,

still my favorite drink, (glass bottles and Yankee portraits or not!)

Besides, lately, only one in a hundred Yankee ball players are lifers…

Like The Captain, Derek Jeter!

(So who needs bottle tops?)

But still,

those Yoo-Hoo boxes or bottles

are Monuments to time-passing in a life

that is “Awash in the Nectar of the Gods”,

or so the ads on the trains said…

So, why complain, right?

There are still Mom’s, like my wife, now,

who always answer, “Come on in! We’re in the kitchen!”

And out of the fridge will slide another Yoo-Hoo!

It’s not a sin if you gluttonize on the good stuff,

like a large cheese pizza from Artie’s Pizza Joint up the street.

Or 5 franks in the bleachers…

Or two Yoo-Hoo’s with lunch at the corner Deli…

(Nah! Go ahead! Make it three! Ya got plenty, now, after Fathers Day!)

A good drink bracketing life memories.

A Mafia shoot-out

or a Yankee ball game at the Stadium.

Saint Louis Cardinals – 3

New York Yankees – 5

on a Mantle-Walk-Off-3-Run-Homer,

with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th!

A well played life, ya know!

“Anybody Home?’