Cafe Leone

The bumper sticker explains it all. A simple white background with an Italian flag on the left and in big red font, The Lake on the right. Dean had seen a million of them. They were affixed to doors, red wagons, telephone poles, shop windows and sometimes…even a bumper. To anyone not from The Lake, with the capital T and capital L and all its ramifications, your mind’s thesaurus might picture an idyllic body of water where children launch themselves from a rope tied to a branch or a bucolic fishing hole or the halcyon days of skipping rocks. You would easily be forgiven for that. But to anyone not from The Lake, the staggering thing is that there is no lake. No water. No ropes or fish. The announcement so worthy of a bumper sticker was that you come from The Lake, whether or not there is water.
Dean grew up in the section of Newton Massachusetts, officially called Nonantum and even more officially called The Lake by the locals. Nonantum can be loosely translated from the Algonquin as “a place for rejoicing.” This followed a conversion to Christianity of a band of Indians by Reverend John Eliot. This is the end of the history lesson. Dean knew not much more about this village. To anyone this side of the Massachusetts Turnpike, this was forever to be known as The Lake.
The unspoken fact was this was not your typical village of Newton. Newton had a reputation, and only because it deserved it, of being an exclusive suburb of Boston. With its stately homes, and giant SUVs; old money and dot com riches; boutiques and soccer moms, Newton stank with money and the stench of entitlement permeated each blade of professionally coiffed grass. This exclusiveness was everywhere in Newton; everywhere except The Lake. Here, you could drive down Washington Street and once you took the right onto Adams Street you would be in Not Newton Massachusetts. Here, the homes were smaller and packed more closely together. Lawns were replaced by vegetable gardens and automatic sprinklers firing off precisely at four in the morning replaced by statues of the Virgin Mary protected by a half bathtub surrounded with perennial Christmas lights; large wooden Doric columns replaced by fancy brick work.
These bricks were placed one at a time, by the permanently calloused hands of the men of San Donato, Italy. No conversation of The Lake can exist without mentioning San Donato; a mountainside village usually described without description as being “South of Rome.” But somehow the migration happened. Somehow, there was a pioneer Sandonatese that left the village to seek that better life in America that everyone talks about. Perhaps he lied and told everyone that the streets of America were paved with gold and this enticed subsequent immigrants or more likely they were lured by the fact that the streets were paved at all. After all, post-war Italy was no one’s idea of a fantasy.
Why Newton? Who knows? Herd mentality or some deeper sociological need for like to remain with like. Whatever the case, Dean knew that he hated this place.

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