Hilarity Street

By Tom James

We’d rarely see them, the Chinese people who’d

moved in across the street from my grandparents.

It had been a mostly Italian neighborhood years ago,

with some English and Irish thrown in together.

The previous family who had lived there,

moved out when the mother died from lung cancer.

I remember her eldest son, my playmate whenever we would

come to visit, telling me of his sorrow from having lost his mother.

“I was always telling her to stop smoking, because I knew

it was bad for her, and it was,” he said with tears rising in his eyes.

Sitting there together, on the wood post fence under my grandfathers

maple tree, on a summer day with the heat starting to rise,

I didn’t know what to say at the age of eight. All I could do was to

look down at the ground with him, until he got up to leave.

Saying goodbye, I didn’t know I wouldn’t see him again.

I’ve forgotten his name now, but I can still see him

as a sad-young-boy, from all those years since past.

Now there were Chinamen in that house, and no one knew

what to do, because they were so different from us.

Recent immigrants we surmised, as there were so many of them

living together, inside a small, one family, two story house.

“What did they do in there besides eat and sleep?”

“Because they don’t seem to be there much anyway.”

Soon, a new car appeared in their driveway,

where previously there hadn’t been any cars at all.

As time began to pass, and we’d stopped

making false noses for ourselves

from the seed-wings that grew on the maple tree in lots,

a few more new cars appeared in their driveway.

Still, you didn’t see them much, but when you did,

they’d smile and wave hello, before going back into their house.

Sometime later, there were flyers showing up on car windshields,

announcing the grand opening of a new Chinese restaurant

down the street from the King’s Tap.

“How’d they do that?” one of us asked.

“Hard work” announced my grandfather.

“Yeah, but this is unfair,” someone retorted.

“Maybe, maybe not.” he replied.

“Remember, they saved a lot of money

by living together under the same roof.”

“Yeah, but who could stand to live like that?

With so many people, and no room to stretch out in.”

“Well it was probably a lot more roomy than that ship I was born on,

Mid-Atlantic, when my parents came over.”

They moved out a few years before my grandparents passed,

and I haven’t been by that way in a number of years,

so I don’t know who lives there now.

The last time I drove by, the neighborhood was mostly Spanish,

with storefront churches next to Guatemalan and Salvadoran restaurants.

The King’s Tap is gone now, but the Italian market my grandmother

walked to most days, to buy groceries that would become

that evening’s meal, remains there still.