Neihborhood Character

10/19/07 - posted by jb

My Father, bless his heart, seemed to believe there were two types of people in this world: Characters and Real Characters. Being a “character” was a complement, suggesting traits that made one stand UP in a crowd…” Real Characters” where those who stood OUT in a crowd: To my Father’s dry, shy and somewhat sarcastic Irish wit, the last thing one should aspire to be is a “real character."

We had both varieties in my neighborhood although in playing back the tapes, one who comes most to mind is Rosa Ballecci. She was an old Italian woman who, at the time, was probably my age now.
She took her small plot of Doelger dirt and turned it into a Garden of Eden. Regretfully, her “garden” was in the exact location of third base in a diamond that started in the street by Wester’s garage, had first base sitting on Dillon’s lawn and second base fixed on the manhole where Northgate intersects Glenwood. If you could put the ball on the Green’s or Castranovo’s front lawn, the bases were all yours for the taking.

We’d play for hours and Rosa would come out with plastic bags on her hands and feet, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and yelling at us in Italian to get off of her lawn and go play someplace else.
Naturally, as was the custom on my block, we’d tease her until she’d pick up a tool and start shaking it at us. We’d run and then return to complete the next inning, feeling that we’d held our ground…and hers, too.

Until I bought my first home, it never occurred to me what Rosa was really all about. And when I installed light carpets and floor coverings, her plastic bags bordered on genius. Her garden was her pride and joy; a profound attempt to make her “Little Box’ little special and unique…her Victory Garden! Perhaps she was reviving a family tradition or indulging a primal passion. In our childhood demands to have everything fixed and familiar, we sacrificed diversity with a short pop-up to right field. I wish I would have taken the time to know Rosa Ballecci…Over the years, I’ve become a better gardener than I ever was a baseball player and you know, she was probably a real character.

Any characters, real or otherwise, from your old hoods to introduce?