Tag Archives: inner city kids and families

Poverty, Endicott Street. pics: R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

WORCESTER CITY COUNCILORS, PLEASE SUPPORT COUNCILOR Khrystian KING’S RESOLUTION Tuesday night (May 9) and VOTE YES to SUPPORT a STATE-WIDE MINIMUM WAGE of $15/hour!

By doing so, you will save Worcester’s inner-city neighborhoods/urban core.

If we continue on this road, if you do not show your support and VOTE YES to pay the working poor more than peanuts, Worcester will go the way of NYC and Boston: a city where the VERY RICH and VERY POOR live – but no “in-betweeners” because they are priced out of the city. The upper middle class and wealthy will go to their special schools, restaurants, venues in the city; the other class – really the underclass – will live in Section 8/govt subsidized housing and have its own world, sometimes just several blocks away. We see this happening in Worcester now – our urban core these days is not the urban core in which I grew up. The American dream no longer takes hold in places like lower Vernon Hill, Union Hill, Green Island. Our economy does not support it! Instead, we have Section 8 meccas filled not with the working stiffs and stiffettes of yesteryear (like my late mom) toiling their way on/up the economic ladder, raising their kids in a no-bull-shit manner, making them go to school because education was valued as one of the sure ways out of poverty. Instead, these days, our inner-city neighborhoods are brimming with people whose lives are played out somewhere far from the American Dream, a landscape filled with guns, drugs, anger, depression, morbidly obese women, scrawny kids (1 in 4 kids goes to bed hungry in Worcester). They are not part of a world that creates aware, healthy, educated, aspiring Americans.

These once amazing old neighborhoods … where the original owners have died and their kids, detached suburban dwellers who want no part of the inner-city scene, sell their inheritances for top dollar to absentee landlords and developers who buy the buildings and make them Section 8 so they can make steady, good money, courtesy of the federal govt. These new landlords do very little or nothing for their properties; they couldn’t care less about the situation – even the law breakers and drug dealers they often rent to. As long as they get their Section 8 checks – a lot of $$ – every month – like clockwork – from Uncle Sam.

Section 8 housing – Endicott Street

Their tenants? Well, the working poor are priced out of these places! If you work full-time at minimum wage, you can’t afford these apts! Instead, the places are rented to people who have a Section 8 voucher for LIFE. This guarantees the absentee landlord (or slumlord) top rental dollar for LIFE. The tenants add nothing to the economic or cultural or educational fabric of Worcester. They usually bring drugs, violence, ignorance and zero respect for teachers, police, the rules of society into their new abodes. It’s the world of the under class – an entire swath of our population that cannot function in civil society. They are, for the most part, unemployed folks who game the WELFARE system with a kind of insolence that stems from knowing they’ll never be called out and the gravy train just goes on and on. It’s not a lot of $$ but just enough to keep you afloat and in housing. Then you can abuse the system to get extra $$/perks. Folks have no desire to get off welfare and become self sufficient BECAUSE BEING ON WELFARE IS JUST AS OR MORE LUCRATIVE THAN WORKING A 40 HOUR MINIMUM WAGE JOB! For lots of folks, it’s a better deal!

Which is why we need to raise the state minimum wage to $15/hour.

WE NEED TO WIDEN THE $$$ GAP BETWEEN the working poor and the scammers. We need to make WORKING 40 HOURS A WEEK AT AN ACAP AUTO OR CVS worth more $$$ than sitting on your ass in your Section 8 apartment becoming depressed or agoraphobic or morbidly obese or a pot head or a junky – all the while collecting the welfare package: free or low low rent, free utilities, free food, free health care.

This federally subsidized package – which should be a temporary leg up and not a permanent hand out/way of life – should not be worth as much money as a PAY CHECK. From a 40 hour a week job – or from 2 or 3 part-time jobs.

WORKING FOR A LIVING – no matter what you do – should mean YOU CAN PAY FOR YOUR LIFE. Not a fancy one, but a stable, basic, healthy one – with a few perks thrown in, like a vacation at the shore, a jalopy that you drive around town to work etc – or to the Cineplex or the Olive Garden on a Saturday night. Certainly digs you can afford!

Welfare scammers should see that being a part of the legitimate American economy – on any level, even at Wal-Mart pushing a broom – IS VALUED by our society.

It gives folks pride and hope and spending money, which they WILL spend, boosting the economy, boosting neighborhood biz. Worth WAY MORE THAN SITTING ON YOUR ASS IN YOUR SECTION 8 APARTMENT SMOKING WEED, the way my downstairs neighbor does. Or renting a room out to a boarder and getting cash under the table and using your Section 8 apartment as a kind of business/rooming house – the way my downstairs neighbor does! Or bringing in your girlfriend, who collects welfare $$ because she had your baby and you do not marry her so she can move all her free govt benefits$$ into your apartment so you can afford to buy a shiny silver Acura! The one you zip around in with such absurd pomposity. I am describing the violent little tenant-turd at 48 1/2 Ward St. I guess that’s what babies are for!!

The madness must stop!

The cheating is almost universal in the urban core. The ingenious ways folks have of gaming the system here boggles the mind! And its done with TOTAL INSOLENCE. People feel it is OK to pull this crap – cheat the American taxpayers who are the ones SUBSIDIZING their lifestyle, if you wanna call acute dysfunction a “lifestyle.”

This is why Donald Trump was elected president. Lower middle class and working class resentment.

Enough is enough!

Time to support WORKING PEOPLE. In our hoods they used to and still do bring: a work ethic, stability, respect for property, respect for the rule of law, respect for teachers and public education, respect for all public servants. I grew up in a minimum-wage household years ago on Lafayette Street, in Green Island. I know first hand how tough it is to PLAY BY THE RULES and keep a family afloat on minimum wage. But my single working mom did it. She paid our bills by working for minimum wage at the dry cleaners down the street: 40 hours regular time, 20 hours under the table. Accounting for the cost of living/housing back then, minimum wage was worth about $10/hour in the 1970s. Still, my mom, my two kid sisters, “Bapy” and I lived hard lives: We never owned a car – or even a clothes dryer; vacations were the stuff of dreams (though we kids did have a lot of fun in the hood and cousins’ houses!); we – or at least I – wore a knit hat to bed during winter because our tenement was drafty and always cold in Jan and Feb, and we had to keep our gas bill down. Our only source of heat: the gas “log” in the kitchen stove. Meals were basic but healthful, Polish peasant food: lots of cabbage, potatoes, beets, onions and the cheapest cuts of beef – the meat more as a side dish or even a garnish. Looking back, my mom was feeding us well but, if you were a fussy eater, you might not like what was on the Mrs. Tirella menu. I was not a fussy eater – I was a little Hoover vacuum cleaner who sucked up all the food Ma put on my plate. My sisters were picky – and pretty skinny because of it.

Below: One of Rose’s kid sisters, goofin’ on their 3rd floor back porch, in Green Island. Many moons ago!

But we survived. It was rough and tumble, but we had good shoes, good to nice clothing, went to the movies, bought records and portable record players… I grew up adoring my amazing mother, valuing work, family and God, enjoying healthy competition, getting up with a bounce in the morning to go to Lamartine Street School to study hard and get those all-A report cards for Ma – a lady who admired resourcefulness, competence and drive because she had it all in spades.

“Ma” (left), sharing a laugh with her fave sister (and Rose’s fave Auntie) in the Lafayette Street flat.

Councilor King’s Worcester City Council colleagues – Konnie Lukes, Michael Gaffney, Gary Rosen, Moe Bergman and Tony Economu – should support his resolution just like Worcester City Councilors Candy Mero-Carlson, Kate Toomey, Sarai Rivera, (mayor) Jos Petty and George Russell have. We need more Mrs. Tirella’s. But we need to pay them a living wage because, without these urban stalwarts, our inner-city neighborhoods will never wholly rebound.

Where it all began: In “The Block,” on Bigelow Street, in Green Island. Rose’s fave Auntie💛 (again), with the beloved “Bapy.”💗💗💗

Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

Some thoughts on “Ma,” President Trump and his (my???!) America

January 23, 2017 admin

Rose and George. pics: R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

Tonight I’m holding tight my late mom’s George Washington calendar from the 1940s (above). Like many young poor folks of the Great Depression and World War II – kids who knew they were lucky if they were eating a square meal a day – my mom was resourceful. For example, she collected her own “art” from the free or inexpensive advertising lit all around her: With trusty scissors in hand she cut out and saved grainy black and white photos or colored illustrations (often muted – not very colorful at all!) from school and church calendars, Hollywood movie fan magazines and sheet music cover pages, church prayer cards – even Polish Christmas wafer wrapping paper – anything that captured her young imagination. My mother loved music and drawing. She was very good at sketching! She used to draw pictures for me and my sisters when we were little kids. We’d sit and watch Ma as she quietly created her art for us with an old number 2 pencil: a little girl with pigtails, a little kitten with ball of yarn, a cherub perched on a cloud … the cliches of her day, beautifully rendered. I remember in our Lafayette Street flat, in a closet – now lost forever! – the huge poster Ma drew in pencil of one of her beloved Boston Red Sox batters in mid-swing! She was 12 – a total baseball freak! – when she drew it and it was a fine sketch! But I have none of my mom’s big sketches – usually made for a St. Mary’s School project – only lots of her “clipped art” – all in pretty ok shape for gussied up scraps of paper three quarters of a century old!

Ma made good use of her finds, like the sleek, smart crow who weaves bits of shiny gold ribbon into her cozy nest … She taped some of the art to her bedroom walls, used some pieces as book marks for her prayer books and sent some pictures to friends, instead of store-bought greeting cards. But mostly she saved her paper jewels – a poor girl’s dreams – in a small, wooden brown chest in her family’s Green Island Bigelow Street tenement and later in our Lafayette Street flat. The contents became mine when Ma died. I gave the small painted brown chest (painted by my grandfather) to one of my sisters.

The chest, I believe, was a kind of hope chest for Ma, a love song to America in which she kept all her American dreams. America was new to her family – her parents were Polish immigrants who experienced the promise – and ugliness – of America. My grandfather worked like a slave in a textile mill in Douglas and, to relax once he got home, played the harmonica and smoked the unfiltered cigarettes he rolled for himself using his own little white square smoking papers and little cig rolling machine, a funny looking little contraption that Ma used to work in the mornings, to roll her Dad’s cigs before he went off to work. Cigs he could smoke during break … My mother’s mother, my “Bapy,” raised five kids, cooked everything from scratch, prayed every hour on the hour, went to mass EVERY day, but outside her Catholic faith and family, was lost in America. If not attending church or friends and relatives’ Polish weddings she stayed home. Praying and cooking.

Ma was the baby of the family, and the apple of Bapy’s eye. So she grew up an optimist and focused on the bright spots: special memories from her Polish immigrant church by Kelley Square, like her First Holy Communion prayer book which I have! (below), …

A photo of Rose’s mom with her First Holy Communion children’s prayer book! (Cece got a hold of its back cover and Lilac ate it!)

… postcards, prayer booklets and stamps from her 10-year stint in Springfield as a housekeeper for the Bishop of Springield, pretty little gifts that her big brother – my Uncle Mark – brought back from Japan after he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. I especially love the calendar cover my Uncle Mark gave Ma (from his ship – probably taped above his bunk): a sexy Miss America hanging from a huge American flag. A gorgeous but stern Lady Liberty wearing an oooh la la blue diaphonous robe that showed her perky little breasts and “mound”! My uncle was pretty good looking and a bit of a ladies’ man. Ma teased him when he came home from the war with blond hair. She believed he dyed it – he said the tropical sun bleached it. This Lady Liberty was right up his alley! – worth fighting for! I ended up with the picture and crudely framed it a few years back. Saint Lady Liberty – the patriotic pinup gal proudly wearing her Virgin Mary-blue sheer gown over shaved pussy! AMERICA = #1!!!😄

But I digress! Back to GW! My mom was a huge George Washington fan because she was born on his birthday – February 22! And because he was America’s first President – perfect to her – America’s God, back in the days when the ideas of America and God were entwined in complex, beautiful, dangerous ways. My mom, true to her generation, and I, like all Baby Boomers, grew up hearing the George Washington grade school lessons/myths, almost Biblical: George Washington at Valley Forge in the winter, leading his troops …they wore torn boots, their frozen feet wrapped in cloth…The young George Washington chopped down the cherry tree when he wasn’t supposed to but said: I CANNOT TELL I LIE! IT WAS I WHO CHOPPED DOWN THE CHERRY TREE!

Ma and I were getting the boiled-down-for-the-plebs American history lesson: George Washington had a TON OF INTEGRITY. What we didn’t know: When some of the colonists clamored for him to be King of America for years and years – because he was such an outstanding military leader and first President and the times were so chaotic – Washington said: No way! That’s not what this country is going to be about! There are no kings here!

At the bottom of my mom’s George Washington calendar picture, it reads: “The love of my country will be the ruling influence of my conduct.” – Washington

Wow.

Can you imagine these words coming out of the mouth of our new President, Donald Trump? Can you imagine the IDEA even blooming in that narcissistic, almost insane brain of his? (Neither can I!) He is someone who wants to buy America’s love, on his terms only. LOVE DONALD – OR ELSE!

For me, Trump’s inaugural speech was Hitler-esque. Dark, foreboding, fist-pumping, military might-extolling, self-aggrandizing, self-idolizing … maniacal. I’d never read or heard an inaugural speech where America, the land of George Washington and Mrs. Tirella!, was painted in such ugly terms – “American carnage” and “tombstones” stretching from sea to shining sea! No wonder wife Melania chooses to live in NYC – and keep her little boy safe by her side. To live with such a sick man always peering into the abyss (or is it just a pose, a con so that Trump can trash America only to lay claim that he saved her? ), a husband with such a soul-shrivelling world view, dipped in Trump gold!, is too much! I predict Mrs. Donald Trump will be a sexed-up version of the late Mrs. Harry Truman: No thanks, White House, I pass! I’ll live somewhere else. Mrs. Truman was the epitome of post-WW II frumpiness; Mrs. Trump is the epitome of 21st century foxiness. But they’re cut from the same cloth: at heart, small town girls freaked out by the prospect of living in the hub of the world’s Super Power. War. Peace. Laws of the land. It all begins with the stroke of the Presidential pen. Scary, for some people.

Funny, but here on Ward Street these past couple of days, it felt like the kind of America Donald Trump painted in his inaugural speech. Very different from the Ward Street my mom walked down as a young girl with her Polish mother as they made their way to their Polish church, Our Lady of Czetchowa, a church that still stands and which I can see from my kitchen window …

These days Ward Street is Heroin/drug Central of Worcester. Last year I wrote about the big drug bust next door (complete with confiscated cash – 40K! – and weapons – machine gun!!!) But we’ve got the low-level drug runners, too, here in our ‘hood: Kids (usually boys) 15 and 16 years old who hop on to their beat up bikes to pedal to our inner-city backyards to do drug deals. In like 5 seconds! These kids don’t live in our houses, just use our backyards as office space! – out of the way, hidden places to sell packets of heroin. A quick sale. Money exchanged for smack. Then they put their ear buds back into their ears and hop on to their bikes and pedal away wicked fast! The deal goes down in seconds!

A few days ago I saw such a speedy transaction occur in the yard adjacent to ours. The kids, both boys, about 16 or 17 years old, were there during school hours. They had come on their bikes and I had come upon them! They looked and acted hard and business-like in a way many of our neighborhood kids don’t look and act. Lots of kids in my neighborhood are sweet, skinny, sad, fun loving. They’ll smile at you and tell you about their little adventures or pets. But these two kids? Uh uh. It was so easy to see.

One of the kids looked surprised and miffed to notice me at the periphery of his deal. The other kid, scrawny and tall, looked frightening in his hardness. When he saw me, he unzipped the front of his thin jacket and his hand went to a shirt pocket. I thought: He’s going to shoot me now.

So I chatted him up. Played the un-hip, oblivious middle-aged lady. The box that society puts you in.

“Don’t be afraid of my dogs! They’re friendly!” I said, smiling.

With a cold, dead-already face, making perfect eye contact with me, he said, direct and serious: “I’m not afraid.”

Chilling.

A day later I saw the same kid, his pale ghoulish face smiling as he rode away lickety split on his bike, being chased by a police cruiser in the middle of our downtown. The cruiser’s siren was off because it was the middle of the afternoon, but all its lights were pulsating.

The kid was in the middle of a gang of kids – 20 or more youths – all on bicycles! Three or four of them wore Halloween masks, pale, scowling ghost masks that covered their entire faces. Lurid and other worldy… Four or five of them wore cotton bandanas over their faces – right up to their eyes – so you couldn’t see their features. They looked like they had rolled straight out of some sci-fi Western! But they weren’t galloping through Dodge on horses – instead they were riding, herd-like and hard, on our Main Street, yards away from Worcester City Hall, on ramshackle bikes! Laughing! Free! Most likely – at least a few of them – armed!

I was mesmerized by this dystopian image coming straight at me (I was in my car driving by the Hanover Theatre), straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. I pulled over and the group of kids – they filled the entire street – rode past me. They were laughing and talking easily among themselves, as the police cruiser chased them. I saw and heard my ghoulish kid barking out something to the other youths. He was smiling. High on an adrenalin high. He felt safe – and cocky – in the herd.

Had they just robbed somebody? Mixed it up with another bandana-, mask-wearing group of kids? Or were the cops just pursuing one kid? – a definite challenge when he’s in a large pack of kids, all on bicycles. Bikes are the perfect getaway vehicle – they can easily go up and down one-way streets, go off and on sidewalks, sail through back yards and city parks, be carried up flights of stairs and stashed in apartments …

As I watched this wild little spectacle, I saw how these kids showed ZERO fear. They acted like outlaws! And like their Wild West counterparts, they were indeed misfits – unhealthy outsiders, bedraggled and maybe unloved – still riding to their next adventure. With a few firearms thrown in for good measure.

The herd sailed right by me, then the police cruiser.

I found myself rooting for the kids. Their nihilism was so honest! They were America … America’s underbelly. Her lack of love for her poor, especially her poor children. One in five kids go hungry in America! That means Worcester, too. … The Worcester factory jobs are gone for their un-skilled parents – men and women who read at the third or fourth grade level. Minimum wage jobs don’t begin to pay all the bills. Parents feel trapped, go MIA. Our public schools sometimes become holding pens for these kids, a safe place to eat govt funded, free breakfast and lunch and, sometimes, a place to rest or sleep, if there’s violence/drugs in the family.

Trump’s America! The one he says he wants to save! Here in Worcester! Here on our Ward Street and Main Street!

His solution to a deep, generation-spanning societal ill, often sealed with depression, PTSD or other mental illnesses? More police. Good paying jobs.

I don’t think two – or even three – Worcester police cruisers chasing the masked kids through our downtown would have changed the narrative. Saved the kids.

Maybe good paying, WPA type infrastructure jobs would help. Young people or their parents working on rebuilding our bridges and highways a la Franklin D. Roosevelt for good pay … Yes, that may make things better. So that our families, instead of developers or investors, can buy and live in the three deckers in our old blue collar neighborhoods. Like it used to be on Ward Street, Perry Ave, Endicott and Sterling streets – all over lower Veron Hill and Green Island! Homeownership 101. The rhythm in all our Gateway Cities for most of the 20th century. The American Dream!

Trump is right: The global economy has left behind thousands and thousands of neighborhoods like mine. Millions of working-age adults who live in them! I don’t believe in all the Moral Majority crap: poor families are Godless and gone to pot – that’s why their neighborhoods are “bad.” Most parents in my neighborhood try to love their kids – I see their love displayed daily, despite the harsh circumstances! – but the pressures keep mounting on them – from all sides… . Families implode.

Good paying jobs for our people will help. Tremendously, to use a Trumpian word!

Maybe the Donald is onto something. If only he’d drop all his nefarious baggage…

Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

New gym at Friendly House! 3 cheers for city kids and sports!

January 20, 2017 admin

So beautiful! Thanks to all the wonderful volunteers and donors!

pics: Friendly House

InCity Voices, Rosalie's Blog

Cece!

December 28, 2016 admin

Rose’s late mom’s creche – just waiting for the swipe of Cece’s paw. pics: R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

So, it’s been two months of Cece, the homeless, half-starved kitten I was given as a (dubious?) reward for helping find homes for a pitbull mix, two cats, an assortment of hens and one elusive, hiding-in-the-nearby- woods rooster.

This has translated into:

… my Polish immigrant granny’s Christmas creche she brought to America almost 90 years ago, along with all her hopes and dreams, SMASHED beyond Elmer’s help …

Most of my pretty potted plants that I nurtured and loved all spring, summer and fall …

Dug up and dug into … possible peed into…

And here lies the culprit, on my chest, giving my boobies a good clawing if she feels herself slipping off …

… She’s washing herself with that endearing little pink sandpaper tongue of hers while purring loudly …

The havoc that this 7-ounce feline creates wherever she sets her dainty little black paws – which is everywhere in my apartment, including refrigerator shelves after I shut the door! – is forgiven by her smitten owner …

…ME!

What is it about this furry little demolition derby that sets my heart a flutter?

Is it because Cece looks like the little Black kitten – “Blackie” – that my mom and her two sisters (now all deceased) took in off the mean streets of Springfield during World War II when they were farmed out by my grandparents to work as maids for the Bishop of Springfield? (My mom left their Green Island tenement when she was 14 1/2 years old). They were the original cat ladies – but also pup lovers. Soft hearted and crazy cuz they were young and didn’t know any better, they convinced the good Bishop to buy them two Doberman pinschers – the pitbulls of their day. Which my mom and her sisters adored. Powerful dogs that you’d think would make dessert out of Blackie the kitten. But that never happened. The dogs – Rocky and Bridgette – loved my mom and her two sisters – and, like all dogs, lived to please their mistresses – and, like all good Dobbies, protect them to the max. Rocky jumped on a visiting nun and broke her arm. He also bit a few people – a scary and acutely painful experience for the person at the end of the large canine’s large canines – getting his mistresses into big trouble. They were forced to give Rocky, to whom they fed horsemeat they bought at the butchers, to a farmer in the country. But Rocky loved them and escaped and weeks later came to their doorstep, haggard and bleeding at the tongue. He had cut himself bad trying to get at the milk in milk bottles – and died at my auntie’s ( his fave mistress) feet.

Here’s one of my aunts with Blackie:

I love how she holds Blackie’s paw! In most of my late mom’s Sprinfield photos my mom and aunts are always holding some pet’s paw! Such sweet Catholic girls! So unprepared for my dad and uncles, all (except one!) killers.

So my Cece makes me think of my late mom and my two aunts during happy days of their lives – housekeeping but also dancing to Tommy Dorsey music in Springfield dance halls when big band music was the craze and dance halls were ubiquitous in this huge country of ours and all Americans – every last one! – could dance. I mean REALLY DANCE. They knew and got rhythm. They bought sheet music and learned how to play the songs if they were musicians or learned ALL the lyrics, if they werent. … My mom and aunts were no different. They had a Victrola – which I now have in my kitchen – and 33s that played Doris Day, even AL Jolson ( “Hallelujah! I’m a bum again!”) …

When Cece first came into my life I burst into tears as she ran sideways into Lilac, my hound/shepherd mix! Not because I feared for her life (she could fit into the palm of my hand she was so small – not even weened!) but because of her just born-ness. Her newness in this mean old world. Her innocent recklessness in a world that could squelch her in a second. Her beautiful virgin confusion. I ran to her, scooped her up, still crying and thrust her to my chest! THERE THERE BABY GIRL! I blubbered. I’LL TAKE CARE OF YOU! I LOVE YOU!

And so I did and so I have. I taught my Cece (named after my late mom) how to lick drops of canned kittens milk from my finger tip – and then how to lap it from a tiny bowl I made for her out of an upside down instant coffee cover.

I scooped her up and kissed her little face when the dogs got too rough with her – and scolded the dogs for treating her like a chew toy with an edge they’d never seen in me. To their chagrin Cece liked their big dog water bowl better than her teeny one! And Mommy did nothing to keep her from defiling the waters!!

The pure joy with which Cece attacks life moves me! Makes me forget our mortally dangerous soon to be President Donald Trump. The pain and hatred he’ll create fall to the wayside as Cece races through my kitchen. Guns pop out daisies as Cece makes a virgin dive from the table in my bedroom to my bed! And low and behold!!! I am young again! Tying a long strip of peach ribbon to notebook paper I’ve crumpled into a ball I run like a teenager in my apartment, yelling IT’S CECE! IT’S CECE! HERE COMES CECE AROUND THE BEND!!! And my little kitten is under foot going wild with the paper ball, pouncing on my ankles and giving them some good little bites. Ouch!!!

All babes do the same! Make joy out of nothing. Just last week I saw a poor family walking down a Worcester inner-city street. Mom had the usual clear plastic covering zippered up over the baby stroller she was pushing. Sometimes you just see cheap blankets thrown over the stroller giving warmth and protection to months-old babies in freezing New England weather. You worry about the babies’ little toes and fingers. You stare at the pain…no room at the inn. It’s still true, so many Christmases later! But then you see the Christmas miracle – or Christ himself – the six-year-old girl in her cheap autumn jacket that is out of season but mom wisely undergirds with sweater and shirt. Then there are her mittens and jaunty little yellow knit cap. So little girl is playful – pulls a Cece! As they cross the street, the little girl walks on tip toes – only in the white lines in the cross walk! Stretching her little jean clad legs so her feet won’t touch the gray cement of the street – just the white painted lines of the crosswalk. She is smiling to herself. Her secret game with rules she made all by herself for herself!

A month before, in South Worcester, I saw another little girl doing pretty much the same thing in her cross walk but adding a little dance to the game. Then the little boy in Main South who did the same in his crosswalk – only he would clap his hands every time he stepped onto a yellow painted line! And he’d smile! Tickled at his trick. Poverty was something to be leapt over, clapped to, danced along…

Then you remember how you, as a little girl walked these same Worcester city streets, behind your sweet, very poor single mom. It was wintertime. Ma was always carless – didn’t even know how to drive. … You’re walking home on Lafayette Street after Ma and you and your two kid sisters have gone grocery shopping at Supreme Market on Millbury Street. It’s after a big snowstorm, and the snow plows get to the poor neighborhoods last. No matter! Your mother walks in Lafayette Street, against traffic, against and into the dirty soft snow. She’s pulling her grocery wagon behind her. It’s filled with groceries covered with plastic wrap that she got from the drycleaners she works at 60 hours a week – 40 for minimum wage, 20 under the table. She just got paid this Friday night. You giggle along with your sisters cuz you found the big tire tracks made by the big trucks going down Lafyette Street and now you have a game going home! You’re trying to walk only inside the tire tracks the big 18 wheelers have made in the snow! The tracks are wide and long. Be careful! It’s slippery! You and your sisters are trying to slide inside the thick tire tracks! The street lights give the Green Island night a pleasant yellow glow from above and make the darkened snow sparkle diamonds. Stay inside the lines! you yell to Pat and Joannie.

You don’t want to slip and lose the game – even though you do. But that’s ok because you don’t have far to go if you fall! You see it all! The snowflakes in the snow, the flowers in the dirt! Whoppee! What a game! In the snow! With Ma!!!!!!

Cece joy! If she were human – a little girl and not a little kitten – she’d join in! Back home in our third floor flat we have our own tabby kitten – Rajah! She likes to play, too! And drink from the saucer of milk our Polish granny, Bapy, sets on the floor for her. Bapy feeds her yellow pound cake, too, even though Ma scolds her and tells her not to! The cake will make Rajah sick! But it never does.

I know there are three little bags of cashews Ma bought for me and for each of my two kid sisters in Ma’s purse. Lightly salted. I smiled at the rummies at McGovern’s Package Store on Millbury Street as Ma paid for our bags of cashews. She looks so pretty in her blue wool coat and red lipstick! Just like a princess!

So lucky to be a little girl, a little kid – a Cece in this world!

Rose and her mom under the Christmas tree, many years ago.

*****

One of my late mom’s fave tunes! She used to dance to it in our Green Island kitchen! (I love the video!)

InCity Voices

This Sunday! Friendly House Annual Christmas Party!!!

December 16, 2016 admin

Friendly House Annual Christmas Party!

36 Wall St.

This Sunday, December 18

2 pm – 4 pm

For children ages 0-12 – must be accompanied by an adult

Raffles!

Gifts for all children ages 0-12 in attendance!

Music!

Dance performances!

Entertainment!

First come, first served!

Volunteers, gifts for tweens still needed … if you can help in any way! Cheers, inner-city Woo!

THANK YOU, GORDON AND SANTA!!! You’re the best!!😄😄😊☺😁😃🎄🎅💝

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Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

Good bye, Tony ol’ pal!

December 8, 2016 admin

Tony Hmura in his bomber jacket, circa 2002. ICT file photo

By Rosalie Tirella

My old pal Tony Hmura died a few weeks ago at the very ripe old age of 93. To many InCity Times readers the Polish guy from Green Island and then Canterbury Street, where he ran his sign company Leader Signs for 50+ years, was a strange pal for me to hang with. He was a familiar – and controversial – face on these pages, too. He had wild opinions about EVERYTHING – mostly stemming from a horrific Green Island childhood and gleaned from horrific, politically right-wing-nut books that he sent away for and kept on shelves he built by his toilet in his bathroom in his Auburn home. Books that, in his early years, probably got him on some FBI watch lists.

Tony began his crusade for getting money from our private colleges. – PILOT – payment in lieu of taxes – on these pages. Fifteen years ago he got the PILOT ball rolling in ICT! Something, he said, he’d never get credit for. And he was right! Tony lashed out at all our private colleges, I think, because he was wicked smart and always hungry for all knowledge but his hardscrabble youth kept him from books, writing, drawing – the things he really loved. His immigrant family’s poverty kept him out of Holy Cross’s ivy-covered buildings studying Plato and Socrates – and selling earth worms from a little red wagon Tony pulled around the neighborhood to make money for his mother, whom he adored. Tony was also working full time (illegally) in a Worcester factory. He was an adolescent money making machine! Because he had to be! It was during the Great Depression and his father from Poland couldn’t handle life in America and had a nervous breakdown – useless to the family. Tony’s Pa was lost – stayed helpless in a back room in the Hmura Lamartine Street tenement – a kind of emotional invalid the family cared for and loved but on whom the clan couldn’t depend. For anything – even love. Tony, at 7, stepped into the breach. There was no welfare or Medicaid or Section 8 back then. So Tony had to hustle to keep his family afloat! He would go with his mother to the places where all the ragged people went to get cans of food; he would dig for mushrooms in the good Woo earth; he’d pick wild blueberries too and sell the earth worms he dug out of the dirt and threw all squiggly and entwined with each other into his red wagon, walking all over kingdom come, a runty, sad kid with the world on his skinny shoulders. He used to tell me that on cold winter nights he would wrap a hot brick with cloth and place it at the foot of his bed then get under his blankets to stay warm. In the morning he’d hit the Worcester streets and begin work.

Tony worked (pretty much to the day he died) with a feisty, jaunty attitude. He worked at break neck speed – unbelievably strong for a little guy. He hauled big signs, scaled walls, strutted on roofs, blew neon sign letters without masks or filters, inhaling chemicals and dust and dirt.

Even as a teen Tony kicked butt! Was full of himself! He used to like to tell me the story of how at the old Commerce High School he went up to his teacher and said: I MAKE MORE MONEY THEN YOU DO!

The teacher laughed at Tony’s boldness.

The next week Tony brought in his factory paycheck ( he asked his boss for overtime to fatten it up!) and his earth worm biz money and showed the wad to his teacher.

His teacher was stunned! The poor skinny kid from the Polish ghetto did infact make more money than he did! Tony was reported to the principal – a kid working like a man was not allowed. Plus he was missing lots of school days. Tony’s mom had to walk to Commerce to explain to the authorities that Tony missed classes because he supported the family. Tony’s teacher and principal didn’t say much. Didn’t do much for Tony or his Ma, either. Tony always claimed that if he had been born Irish instead of Polish in Worcester things would have been different – easier for him and his family. Culturally, the Hmuras were outsiders, even though his mom was a devout Catholic and went to Our Lady of Czetchowa church every Sunday, buxom and stout, her long hair braided and wrapped in a bun at the nape of her neck. Not enough, Tony believes, in an Irish immigrant (as well as WASP) city.

His go getter style and energy propelled Tony to blue collar heights in Worcester. His ambition … his eventual greed … got him tons of rental property (which he relinquished in time cuz he didn’t have the people skills to be a landlord); stocks and bonds, a cool Brady Bunch!! look alike home in Auburn; a little hole in the wall night club; trips all over America the land he loved with his whole body and soul; women, women, women; even solid bars of gold that he kept in his attic, which his wife wrapped in towels and dragged down the stairs and out of the house during their divorce. Tony never held the move against his ex – he almost admired her for the feat – she was so petite!, weighed 90 pounds! How the hell did she steal all his solid gold bars??!!

By reading ICT you all learned Tony was against fluoridation of Woo water. To me he railed against what he considered Congressman McGovern’s political machine, though he liked Jim immensely and pretty much everyone in the “machine,” making donations, putting their political signs on his biz property every election cycle. Sometimes Leader Signs would make the signs!

Tony was filled with contradictions. He was against government hand outs and called for the end of “sucking off the political teat” – whatever that meant – but every Monday morning he’d give 10 bucks to each lost soul – often hookers or junkies or alcoholics – who was lined up at the door of Leader Sign company. He felt sorry for them, but didn’t know the right way to help them. They needed money, asked him for money. So he gave it to them – knowing they’d spend it on booze or junk. He would dole out about 60 bucks. That was just on Monday. The rest of the week moms in need or old workers in need came to Leader Sign and Tony would give them 20 or 30 quid, bitching about it later but unable to turn his back on people who needed help. He once claimed their addictions were part of a liberal govt plot to destroy America. His America. Plus, Tony believed America was a tough place if you were poor and had zero resources. He ran a kind of nutty social service agency out of Leader Signs pretty much until the day he died.

I wonder how all his old friends are doing without Tony’s donations and goofy chit chat.

Tony walked with a hitch, from a wound he suffered when he was shot down out of his bomber plane during World War II. Tony was a little guy so Uncle Sam made him a gunner, put him in the small end of the plane and told him KEEP FIRING!!!! Tony was in a ton of fights, was shot down two or three times. Each time he thought he died to discover: FUCK! I’M STILL ALIVE! I believe Tony always felt guilty for surviving the war while most of his mates died in combat. I also believe he left WW II shell shocked – and stayed that way for the rest of his life. He didn’t believe in PTSD or psychotherapy or psychiatric meds. The old gunner just toughed it out – for 70+ years. He did go to a weekly WW II veterans support group, where he said nothing, but just hung out and listened. I always believed Tony loved this group of guys even though he whined about what he felt was their belly aching! I believe he ached too – right there with them.

For a little guy, Tony had an ego as big as the continental USA. So he loved to regale me with stories of his WW II heroics. There were plenty of Tony Hmura ads with photos of him during World War II looking so young and cute: Tony in his bomber uniform, Tony in his dress uniform and cap, Tony with his bomber mates, a fellow gunner with his arm draped over his shoulder, everyone smiling and proud! Of their country! Of themselves! They were all about 18 or 19. They were right along side their captain – actor JIMMY STEWART!! Yes! No lie! Stewart was Tony’s squad’s chief pilot. He hung out with his boys, gave them their orders and, according to Tony, “was a regular guy.”

Tony, too, was a regular guy. But like his hero, Jimmy Stewart, he was so much more! I know what you all are thinking – that Tony was a bad man: sexist, racist, a hater. And that I hung out with this kind of guy. But I never saw Tony that way. Yes, he said the evil shit that all men of his time said. But when you got to know him you realized he did the exact opposite. That he taught that Hispanic artist who used to visit Leader Sign how to blow neon glass – it’s an art and Tony took pride in passing on his knowledge to the next generation. That he charged that black church next to nothing for a sign he made for them. That during the war when a gay combat gunner was being harassed by his mates, Tony beat them up! “He was a good guy,” Tony said. Tony, when I first knew him, had classrooms of kids and their teachers visit the shop to learn about signs and sign making. He didn’t care if the classroom was majority-minority!

Tony Hmura was an American original. He was part of the violent, old, weird America that many of us are ashamed of but an America that we should never stop examining … to see … the good in it. A ghastly, beautiful mystery.

Good bye, Tony, my old friend!

Green Island Grrrl, Rosalie's Blog

Worcester City Council inspired! Yes, to WPD Mounted Police Unit!

November 10, 2016 admin

By Rosalie Tirella

Their official title: Mounted Police Unit. The name every little kid in every Worcester inner-city neighborhood will shout when she or he sees one of the five Worcester Police Department’s courageous steeds and their cool cop riders: HORSES!

And then they’ll think, instinct leading them the way it does with all kids and artists: YEAH!! MY HORSES! LET’S PAT THEM!!!!

And then they’ll drop whatever they’re doing – good or bad – and run to the brown, black or bay equine (white is usually not the color of most police horses) to stroke the steed’s elegant neck. And the animal – huge, majestic, its coat glistening in the sun – will patiently stand (police horses must be calm, even-tempered, not skittish) as the city kids touch, tickle it and ask the cop astride it questions like: How much hay does he eat? How fast can he go?

No nags for our WPD! No thoroughbreds either! – they’re too high strung for the job! The city’s handlers (volunteers from the Sheriff’s Office and Mass State Police) will know which good horses to choose for the second largest city in New England – Worcester, my city, a city whose downtown and inner-city neighborhoods so desperately need more beauty a la the 12 POW! WOW! WORCESTER murals that grace our downtown buildings and bridges.

Picture this: a WPD mounted police officer and his trusty black steed trotting by the YWCA or the Hanover Theatre on a summer night before the Latin American festival, twinkly lights shining in the Hanover trees, salsa music blowing over Worcester City Hall, the Big Dipper blinking down on dancers pressed against each other in the languid August night: Absolute CITY MAGIC!!!!!!

Sure, City Manager Ed Augustus, the guy behind this brilliant proposal, knows a good cop and his horse can do the job of 10 police officers on foot patrol on in police cars. He knows this makes them perfect for patroling neighborhoods and crowd-control. A courageous yet calm horse can make its way through thick crowds of folks, the officer riding him or her can see great distances because he or she is perched so damned high!

Most city kids will want to be up that high! In that cat bird’s saddle! They’ll want a ride, too! Down Piedmont Street or up Ward Street! And they will see – learn – just how beautiful and mysterious nature is, how important it is to be kind – never cruel! – to animals; that our police officers can be as gentle and even tempered as the horses they ride. The community will see that Worcester Police Chief Steve Sargeant cares about our community – about streets that most people avoid or on which they even have the temerity to dump their garbage – right out of their car windows as they drive by! My neighbor has seen this happen on our street – Ward – and she’s run out of her home to give the slobs hell! Go, sweet neighbor, go!!!!

City kids, when they see the police horse, will admire his or her elegant neck with pretty long mane combed out like a pretty girl’s. They’ll admire its height, recorded in “hands” – usually between 15 and 16 of them – from its clopping hooves to its tingly spine. That’s roughly my height! Then those big soft brown eyes and ears that can turn in almost every direction to pick up the slightest sound! Horses can see almost 360 degrees around because of where their eyes are in their heads and their long flexible necks. Horses are amazing animals – intelligent and affectionate! They’ll rub their foreheads against your chest to say: Hi! I missed you! Any carrot treats for me?

There is nothing quite so special as a horse – any city kid can tell you that!

Thank you, Worcester Mayor Joe Petty and the majority (which means we’ve got a YES vote!) of the Worcester City Council for being so excited about this idea! Thank you for whole heartedly endorsing it! With volunteers, maybe even donated horses, the vet students at Becker, the fields at Green Hill Park, the donated stable space WE CAN MAKE THIS HAPPEN!

Of course, where would we be without Worcester City Councilors Mike Gaffney and Konnie Lukes taking a big steamy dump on the proposal? – as big as horse shit! These two perpetual naysayers and cheapskates are against Mounted Patrol Units. They say it costs too much money.

We say to community destroyer Gaffney and slumlord Lukes: Un-pinch your shriveled souls! GET CREATIVE! USE YOUR CONTACTS! GET BEHIND THIS PROPOSAL and vote YES!.. Even though we don’t need your crummy votes!

Here’s to the new cool Worcester!

Go, Ed Augustus and Steve Sergeant, go!!!

Go, horses, go!

Pony dreamin!

InCity Voices

From Worcester Common Ground … and Clark University

September 24, 2016 admin

Worcester Common Ground a Winner in KaBOOM! $1 Million Play Everywhere Challenge!

Competition will fund play spaces in unexpected places in cities across America

This week, Worcester Common Ground (WCG) was selected as one of the winners in the Play Everywhere Challenge, a $1 million national competition that will award innovative ideas to make
play easy, available and fun for kids and families in cities across the U.S.

The Challenge is hosted by
KaBOOM!, a national non-profit dedicated to bringing balanced and active play into the daily lives of all kids, particularly those growing up in poverty in America.

Worcester Common Ground created an arts-based placemaking intervention made up of three components:

The first is “Project
Tire Makeover,” a series of school workshops and community paint days to paint tires with playful
character designs (magical creatures, superheroes, animals, etc).

The second component is a community
chalkboard at our Tot Lot playground. This will be a long-term installation with rotating prompts, including: “What is your superpower?” and “Design your dream neighborhood.” The final component will be chalk spray painted pathways connecting the playful tires and the community chalkboard installations
with prompts such as jump like a frog, fly like a plan, spin three times, etc.

Our program Piedmont Plays:

A Campaign to Love Your Neighborhood was selected as one of 50 winners out of a pool of more than 1,000 applications nationwide. Other winning ideas include outside-the-box play opportunities like pop-up parks, laundry mat theaters, and running tracks with speed displays.

The Challenge, developed in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Target, Playworld,
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts, attracted an outpouring of creative ideas to spark kids’ imaginations and get their bodies moving.

“Ultimately, we hope to see our program increase opportunities for playful imagination, and empower our
youngest residents to think in creative ways about improving their community,” said Charise Canales, Community Organizer at Worcester Common Ground.

Research shows play is vital to healthy brain development and is pivotal to how kids learn problem-solving, conflict resolution, and creativity – in other words, the skills they need to succeed as adults.

Yet today, too many kids, especially those growing up in poverty, are missing out on opportunities for play
because of families’ time pressures, the lure of screens, and a lack of safe places to go.

“It’s an exciting time for our agency to see such energy building for arts-based placemaking in our city! This summer, we finished our Project Comic Style mural at our 133 Chandler Street property with our youth artist group, Urban Revival BlaQ Ink’d; we saw POW! WOW! Worcester transform the downtown area with a series of stunning murals; and now we are fortunate to have been awarded a grant with KaBOOM! to involve our city’s youngest residents in the beautification of their public spaces.

For us, it’s so rewarding to let our kids take the lead in reimagining and transforming their communities into a
fun, funky place to make their own. We can’t wait to see what they do!” said Charise Canales.

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Dialogues with Mother Earth

Clark University to host artist talk, mural exhibit

Clark University

950 Main St.

FREE!

Clark University will host artist Erica Daborn for a presentation, “Dialogues with Mother Earth: The Murals,” at 12 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 29, in the Higgins Lounge in Dana Commons.

The presentation is free and open to the public.

Daborn has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1995. Her work explores our interconnectedness and mutual fate as citizens of a shared planet — a finite, fragile, and ever-changing “home.”

Her series of mural-sized narrative drawings in charcoal record fictitious historical events related to climate change as seen from the year 2051.

“I consider the project to be a response to accelerating and irrefutable evidence of climate change. My goal is to provoke a reflection on the relationship between our 21st century societal values and the ways in which they have contributed to the degradation of our environment,” wrote Daborn.

The murals will be on display in Clark’s Schiltkamp Gallery (in the Traina Center for the Arts, 92 Downing Street) and in the Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons from Monday, Sept. 26 through Thursday, Nov. 17.

An opening reception and gallery dialogue will be held at 4 p.m. on Wed., Sept. 28, in the Schiltkamp Gallery of the Traina Center for the Arts.

This exhibit is part of the Higgins School of Humanities’ fall dialogue symposium, “Home (De) Constructed.” It is co-sponsored by the Higgins School of Humanities, the Schiltkamp Gallery, and the Department of Visual and Performing Arts.

Fashion

Mayor Joe Petty in our in-city neighborhoods – always in style! … and … a cool recipe Italiano!!!

August 25, 2016 admin

pics:R.T.

From the Mayor’s Office!!!!:

TODAY!

5 p.m. – starting at the Friendly House!

Worcester Mayor Joseph M. Petty will be leading a Mayor’s Walk around the Wall Street portion of the Grafton Hill neighborhood this evening …

… from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

We will be starting at Friendly House (36 Wall St.), then moving on to the former El Morocco site, and finally stopping at Westerman’s (50 Suffolk St.).

The Mayor will be joined by fellow elected officials, members of the administration, service providers and neighborhood group representatives.

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And…

Don’t forget! Tomorrow! REC Beaver Brook Farmers Market – across the street from Foley Stadium!

Veggies at ICT head honcho Rosalie’s shack:

She’s growing a 5-foot-tall tomato plant but ZERO tomato buds! What the?????

A friend gave R this corn yesterday – straight from the farmer’s farm! Thank you, friend!

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P.S. Here’s a great Italiano recipe from PETA.ORG!

Put the brakes on animal cruelty/American factory farms!
EAT LESS MEAT!!!!

Giambotta – Southern Italian Vegetable Stew!

Also spelled Ciambotta, this is a traditional dish hailing from Southern Italy!

It’s comfort food at its finest — and simplest!

1 Tbsp. oil or water…Saute in frying pan:

1 large yellow onion, chopped

2 stalks celery, diced

3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

Add to big pot filled with 1/2 cup water or vegetable broth and 1 (28-oz.) can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes:

3 medium carrots, peeled and diced

1 medium eggplant, chopped into 1-inch pieces

2 large yellow potatoes, peeled and chopped

2 red bell peppers, seeded and diced

2 medium zucchini or summer squash, diced

Spice it up with:

2 bay leaves, fresh or dried
1 tsp. dried thyme
1 tsp. dried parsley
1 tsp. dried tarragon
1 tsp. salt
Freshly ground pepper
1/2 cup (10 to 12 leaves) chopped basil

Cook in pot to taste…enjoy!

Copyright 2015 Compassionate Cooks, LLC. Reprinted and adapted from The 30-Day Vegan Challenge: The Ultimate Guide to Eating Healthfully and Living Compassionately by permission of the author, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

InCity Voices, Rosalie's Blog

Latino papi love!!!!

August 23, 2016 admin

Story and photos by Rosalie Tirella

Living, working and loving in Worcester’s inner-city neighborhoods I am impressed EVERY DAY by the DEEP TRUE AND EASY AFFECTION with which many Latino parents raise their kids – especially the Daddy Love! To see papi and chico holding hands as they cross Main Street, dad dapper in his straw hat and pressed chinos, chico cute in his tee shirt and cargo shorts – is to witness hands-on, hand-in-hand love!

To see a papa and his young son walking down Vernon Hill, chatting, drinking juice, eating chips, carefree during these last few days of summer vacation, Dad putting an arm over his son’s shoulder as they pose for a picture!

“I’m Isaac!” Dad says! “God bless you!”
To see Isaac and his son is to be blessed. By the love. To see the every day-presence of Latino dads – the simple, easy joys with which they celebrate family daily life. A walk in the ‘hood, a stop at a neighborhood mini store. For soda, chips, little money – big time!

Carless but not loveless! A parenting style practiced by my mom years ago on Lafayette Street, my two kid sisters and me the apples of her eye!

A love that doesn’t involve a lot of dough but is so strong precisely because it doesn’t involve a lot of dough! The tough love of commitment under less than ideal circumstances, the gold strands braided over and under the racism, the jobs not gotten, the slights not forgotten, the stereotyping that leaves so many left out, disenfranchised…on the periphery…

Just like when I was growing up in Green Island, poverty brings the people together in Worcester’s three deckers and apartment buildings, like this one, today, in Piedmont, a ‘hood where buildings sit cheek and jowl and Papis raise their kids …

… Siblings, parents, their kids, grandparents, grandkids, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins…nothing beats blood on blood. Whole families hold hands crossing busy Chandler Street, the little ones clapping their ears as the traffic screeches by before them. Several years ago a little boy was mowed down on the SIDEWALK of Chandler Street as he was running to Chandler Elementary School. He was racing to get to his school with homework he had just completed. The driver was speeding and drove her car straight up the sidewalk. I don’t think the little boy was older than 10. An innocent. Poring over addition and subtraction math problems, eating breakfast cereal just minutes before, perhaps … thinking about his neighborhood school, his classroom teacher and his friends.

In Worcester’s inner city, families invite their extended families over for a backyard bbq, play music … the men, at the end of the day, setting up card tables and folding chairs to play dominoes against the orange sunset… Sometimes, during these parties, with the music so loud, with four different boom boxes blaring four unique songs, the songs pulsating with their own rhythms, beats, their singers singing their own songs, I’d try to shake my head into silence! … all the while wanting to go up to the metal fence erected between us to ask: Is that music Salsa? I love it! Once a neighbor on Perry Ave offered to teach me to Salsa, but he was a ladies man and I liked his wife! The inner city swings without the official loud-mouthed concert promoters. Here, in the inner city, music is as ripe, natural as a plantain just before it hits the frying pan!

What did I see a few days ago, right outside my door?

A papi and his little princess girl walking down Endicott Street, the little girl in pink shorts and sporting teeny pink bows in her thick, braided chestnut hair, bouncing along dad, just jubilant …jubilee!!! He and his little princess off for a stroll through their kingdom of upturned shopping carts, pick up basketball games in the park, skateboards on cracked sidewalks, jerry rigged dirt bikes zipping up beat-up streets.

Build me a monument to these Latino dads! In the Peace Park, on the corner of Winslow and Pleasant streets, next to a strong young tree!

Take Leo and Luiggi! Just a few days ago they were out trying out the go cart Daddy Leo built for his chico!

What a wonder! Big, too! A haul from the three decker onto the sidewalk, where Leo pulls Luigi!

Leo built it himself. It has wheels but no pedals inside. A race car, nonetheless! No gang colors or insignia – just a Crayola Crayon color scheme topped off with a doggy bone!

Look at that smile on Luiggi’s face! So much love! Reminds me of my Polish grandfather who lived with us when we were toddlers and built from scrap wood swings on the door jambs of the two bedrooms in our flat so that his grand babies could swing and swing and reach for the clouds and sunshine with their little hands. Hands so different from his gnarly, wrinkled ones – wrecked, exhausted from years at the Dudley textile mill, the carpentry work for family and friends. And the sun fell into our big kitchen with its ugly green painted kitchen table and chairs! And the radio station was turned to top 40, Ma pushed us back and forth, listening to Wolf Man Jack! She loved early rock ‘n’ roll! The King! The Beatles, too!

The love I see in my Worcester neighborhoods outweighs the shootings that the racists want to use to shut the music down! To silence a people’s song! It’s about refusing to seeing poor people and immigrants! Hundreds of parents doing the right thing…

… despite the “pretenders and the begin and the enders” who bash them, as well as trashing our city manager and our congressman because they see the new Worcester and work in new ways to embrace her and make her flourish! Worcester! My gateway city, always reimagining herself!

See all the new love? Just look at all the pappis and their chicos!