A boy grows up in a New York City Greek-American Household
As young Petros maneuvers the hallways of the Hellenic American School for the Arts, it’s the ice cream man, who stops by at recess, from whom he learns the most. Just one year shy of making it into high school, Petros challenges the strict rules of his school while also trying to follow the strict rules of his traditional Greek home in a tough neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens.
When he finally gets the chance to go to the specialized high school his brother now attends, his hopes and efforts are challenged by all the authority figures around him, except for his new found friend, Mulvaney.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Blue blazer and pants, white shirt and blue tie; school emblem sewn on the right vestpocket. Underneath, a cloth “filakto” pinned to a tee shirt to ward off any evil spirits.
And so I began another day in the South
Bronx.
My buddy, Alex, was always the
first one to dive in to his lunch. It didn’t matter what the chef in the back room cooked up that day, Alex would find a way to cram a little less than half a stick of butter in his mouth just before our school cafeteria
offering landed on the table.
“Hmmmm. Good, no?” Alex would say, his mouth stuffed with yellow, slimy mush. Earlier in the day, on the way to school, Alex would let out a
moan from the back of the school bus as we crossed the Triborough Bridge and the smell of a nearby
bread factory wafted through the windows.
“Hmmmm, French toast.” The smell would last as long as it took for the Hell Gate Bridge to vanish from our site, almost to the bridge tolls. There was a rumor that, if you could hit the Hell Gate with a paper wad just right, it would collapse into the East River, but no one ever tried.
Alex grossed us out, but that was not what weighed heavily on our little minds at the Hellenic
American School for the Arts. Awkwardly located in one of the worst sections of the Bronx, it took those of us who lived in Queens two hours to get there and two hours to return home.
Rosetta was born in 1909 as the youngest of ten children. The family had more laughter than money and neighbors would knock on their door to ask, "Can we come in and laugh, too?"
She never felt safe at home as a young girl, and didn't understand why when she finally escaped she wasn't safe in the big wide world either ...effectively jumping out of the frying pan into the fire!
