Old Italians

The block I live on is cut up by alleys arranged like a capital I. The garage exits onto the long part of the I while one of the cross bars goes by the side of the house. This makes sitting out in the yard a fairly social event. All sorts of people go up and down the alley. Kids on bikes. Old folks on the way to the pharmacy. Families coming home from church. It's an oddity really anymore but the neighborhood is identifiably Italian. Even if there weren't Italian Festivals and Italian Restaurants, Italian cards in the card shop, a shop selling a plaster model of every saint in heaven, and green white and red striped parking meters and curbs you'd know it was Italian. It's the yards that give it away. Most have gardens, but even the ones that have been paved over are painted, and have a grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary in it, with or without a water feature. Strolling the neighborhood is serious business for some. There is a nightly circuit of old guys who casually stroll by to eyeball your garden. They peek to see if your tomatoes are blooming yet and glance to see if you've staked your peonies. No detail escapes them. If you walk past one of their gardens they watch you to see if you are checking out their efforts as well. Patsy is the neighborhood's lead gardener. He has no yard of his own but for a million years gardened a little plot behind the chapel across the street. When they tore the chapel down and put up a medical office building they fenced in a special area for Patsy's garden. Before we knew him well enough we got our gardening advice by looking out the front window to see what Patsy was doing. When he staked his tomatoes we staked our tomatoes and so on. Now that we've had one complete turn of the seasons and have exchanged produce and flowers more than a few times Patsy has become generous with his knowledge but not delicate with his advice. He generally starts out something like "Youa do it a' wrrrong!" but then you have to be ready for the stream of gardening pearls that follows. Despite our wrong-headedness, our efforts are duly noted. The new paint on the garage, the eager perennials sprouting willy-nilly all over the yard, the tomatoes and basil we so obviously enjoy have earned us approval. Yesterday our neighbor Bruno passed by and commented: "Youa keepa so nice."