The one I always think of: Lincoln Heights, some time during the long years of the Depression. No work for Papu, still. He’s angry, uncharacteristically so, and starts to beat one of the boys with a severity beyond even that era’s permissive approach to corporal punishment.
He is a petite man, not much above five feet. Later, when Papu finally has a job with the Department of Water and Power, his coworkers will nickname him Shorty. His wife towers above him. This is a fact that she and most of the people on the block where they met and now raise their children ignore, out of respect for a small Italian man’s pride. But not tonight.
She pulls herself up to her full height, close a foot taller than him. Screams him down. Grabs the boys and they lock themselves in the jalopy out front, where they sleep for the rest of the night while he calms down from the rage and shame of being unable to provide for his family. I heard the story decades later from the younger of those boys, my grandfather.
Yeah, I believe it.
— cpb
He is a petite man, not much above five feet. Later, when Papu finally has a job with the Department of Water and Power, his coworkers will nickname him Shorty. His wife towers above him. This is a fact that she and most of the people on the block where they met and now raise their children ignore, out of respect for a small Italian man’s pride. But not tonight.
She pulls herself up to her full height, close a foot taller than him. Screams him down. Grabs the boys and they lock themselves in the jalopy out front, where they sleep for the rest of the night while he calms down from the rage and shame of being unable to provide for his family. I heard the story decades later from the younger of those boys, my grandfather.
Yeah, I believe it.
— cpb
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