The Good Old Days

THE GOOD OLD DAYS
By: d. Glorso
As we age little things change. Not too important we think, but each day we are a little closer to death. Our body’s clock, is still ticking while the mind tries desperately to hold it all together. Now at the age of 72 we come to the realization, the end is near. Funny, 72 is considered a good pulse rate.

Healthy most of life but 2020 has been a wake-up call. Actually we have been dying since the day of birth. But thankfully, most humans call it “living”.

“This is really living”, my Dad Sam Glorso would always say as he sat with a fishing pole in hand. He relaxed at the edge of Mallard Lake in Keeneyville, Illinois. Dad gazed across the blue clear waters toward the green weeping willows on the other side of the pond.

He loved that little lake. Pete Moss and/or gravel loaded in his dump truck. He brought a little piece of Mallard Lake to his clients living in the city, where immigrant families grew their lovely gardens along the concrete alley-ways of Chicago. Beautiful, the smell of fresh tomatoes for the pasta sauces were simmering on the stoves of Italian immigrant kitchens.

They’re sweet smelling gardens brought to you by Sam Glorso, a coal-man in the winter and a dirt-man in the spring. As a boy I watched him enjoy his toil to make life better for those Italian country folks trapped in the city. Who could not love a man with a generous heart for his older generation? He delivered a piece of the old country to the Brown Chicago “Daygoes” who crossed those oceans for a better life in America.

How often do we forget their sacrifice and boldness? They managed an often painful trip to the “New World” for the good of the family. Then in his broken prime, Sam Glorso hauled his family across the continent to the California Coast. Where the climate is more like the Sicilian shores, where our ancestors began their arduous journey. They came to America from a place only known to us as “the old country”.

Imagine now; why do we suffer so over these Covid-19 times? It is a sign of a new beginning. Like our assessors, embrace the transition. More people will someday be in the happiest life they know, recalling these as the good old days. Where, loving families cared dearly for one another.