Chapter 1 – The Lake

Please allow me the luxury of reposting Chapter 1 of a book I am pretending to write. Everyone so often I feel the urge to post chapter 1 in a feeble attempt to convince both of you, and mostly myself, that I am writing a book at all. There are 15 more chapters of feeble attempts, but I always post Chapter 1. Oh, I am not so vain as to keep posting the same chapter over and over again. No, sir. I typically change a couple of words, usually be making liberal use of an online thesaurus. So, without further ado, I give you, once again, Chapter 1 of The Son of His Father. If either of you are awake at the end of the chapter, I will offer a bit of insight into the story.
Chapter 1

The bumper sticker said it all; a white background, an Italian flag and in large red font, the words The Lake. Dean had seen a million of them affixed to screen doors, telephone poles, shop windows and sometimes even on a bumper. The announcement so worthy of a bumper sticker was that you were from The Lake; not the lake, no caps, or that you lived around some body of water larger than a pond. But from The Lake; capital T, capital L and all its ramifications.

Dean grew up in the Nonantum section of Newton as every Cedrone did. Nonantum was named after the Algonquin Indian word for “place of rejoicing” following a conversion to Christianity of a band of Indians by the Rev John Eliot. This is the end of the history lesson. That was all Dean ever knew about the story of this small village. But to anyone this side of the Mass Pike, this will forever be The Lake.

If the image painted in your head is one of a body of water; if your mind’s eye pictures boys fishing along the banks or launching themselves off a rope swing, you would easily be forgiven. You see, in The Lake, there was no lake. Few people even knew why it was called The Lake. The assumption was that a longer time ago than anyone living could remember, there was in fact a lake to be jumped into or fished from.

The inescapable fact was that this was not your typical “village” of Newton. Newton had a reputation, and only because it deserved it, of being a moneyed suburb of Boston. With its stately homes and SUVs; old money and the nouveau riche; 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 instantly transported to 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 irreversibly calloused hands of the men of San Donato, Italy. No conversation of The Lake can exist without mentioning San Donato; a mountain-side village usually described without description as being “South of Rome.” But somehow the migration began. 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? Why The Lake? Who knows? Herd mentality or some deep sociological need for like to remain with like. Dean didn’t care. All he knew was that he hated this place.

The story is fictional, inasmuch as any story is completely fictional. The location is entirely real and is based on the area of Newton that I grew up in. Dean, an Italian American has spent the last 30 years of his life running away from his “Italian-ism” but the death of his father forces him to return home. The story is an unapologetically sentimental journey home.

Question for BoMR (Both of My Readers): Did you stay awake?