I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it was a great apartment. It was an old, brick, two family house, the landlord wasn’t big on maintenance, I also wasn’t thrilled with living in the city back then, but it was a great apartment.
The apartment saw me through numerous roommate and dating disasters until I moved out with my soon-to-be husband to the town where we now live. When I lived in Newton, I could walk to work, I would walk to the supermarket; two of them, in fact. I was less than 20 minutes outside of Boston! I’d kill for that now.
I’d never lived in a neighborhood before, and boy, was this a neighborhood! I had never lived in an ethnic enclave, and though my downstairs neighbors were Russian, everyone else was Italian, very Italian.
The city of Newton is made up of little villages, all marked by little signs proclaiming “Newton Lower Falls, a village of Newton.” My neighborhood was “Nonantum, a village of Newton,” but nobody ever called it that. They called it “Da Lake.” In fact when I would tell people I lived in Nonantum, they universally responded with a blank look. When I explained that it was between West Newton and Newtonville, they all said “Oh! You live in Da Lake!” And it was always “Da Lake,” not The Lake.
If you don’t already know, I’ll let you in on a little secret. There’s no lake there. In fact, there was a joke going around, probably from non-Lake residents, that Nonantum was an Indian word for “no-name-swamp.” A small area of marshy wetlands is supposedly all that’s left.
It actually means, “a place of rejoicing,” and that, the residents do. They are exuberantly proud of their heritage and every summer the yellow lines in the middle of the street would get painted red, white, and green late at night. The fire hydrants would get the same treatment. One night, while on one of my many insomniac excursions (it was a very safe neighborhood, and I was very lucky), I bumped into the guys doing the painting. It was a bit like coming across the elves making shoes, except that these were elves in track suits and a Trans Am. They were really very nice. We talked for a while and I left them to it. They were gone when I returned.
Shortly after the paint brigade, came the flags; enormous Italian and American flags hung over the street. Every other week, it seemed, but at least once a month, some parade or festival made its way up the street in the summer, usually ending in a party in the park behind our house. “Any excuse for a party,” one of my neighbors told me. There was the Fourth of July; some festival involving several men carrying a large statue of the Madonna on their shoulders while collecting money from the faithful; and Elvis Day.
As I recall, Elvis Day was in September, after Labor Day, and probably the last big neighborhood event until Christmas. It involved the grown son of the neighborhood boss, Fats Pellegrini, dressing up as Elvis, and riding up the street on the back of a flatbed truck crooning to the old ladies who had gotten all dolled up for the occasion. From their sidewalk lawn chairs, they swooned and screamed as if it were the real Elvis shaking his rhinestone cape at them. Fats himself led the procession, in his pink Cadillac convertible with FATS on the license plate (the article I linked to doesn’t use the ‘S’ for some reason). Elvis would meet up in that same park with other Elvis impersonators, and they would put on a “concert.”
Living there was not without its problems. There was the aforementioned series of roommates; the utter lack of maintenance, including pipes under the kitchen sink composed mostly of duct tape; the otherwise lovely Russian neighbors who warmed their muffler-challenged car up at 5 AM; the biker bar across the street; and Vera.
Vera was not her real name, but we called her that even then. It was the perfect name for a nosy, pain-in-the-neck, neighbor. She had a beagle or basset hound that would bark terribly when left out in his doghouse for too long. Poor thing had no grass to hang out on and would really have preferred staying indoors. Every morning when the weather was warm, Vera would come out and hose off her car and parking space. She used that hose rather than scoop up dog poop or the pears that fell from her tree and smashed in the driveway, attracting bees. It seemed like an incredible waste of water.
In addition to living next door, she was also the landlord’s sister-in-law. She would complain every time we left the outside light on, or had too many cars in the shared driveway overnight. She did not like the boys staying over, until eventually “the boys” were my actual roommates (best in the series) and she had nothing left to say about it. I had just escaped my mother’s micromanagement, and had no wish to be scrutinized in that way ever again. Never having lived in a neighborhood, I didn’t understand how to get past her with politeness and charm.
For various reasons, I tried several times to move, but quickly found that on the money I was making, I really couldn’t afford anything in the area. We were paying $550 for a three bedroom apartment with attic storage, my share was under $200; astounding, even for 20 years ago. In the four years I lived there, my rent was never raised. By the time I got engaged, I was desperate to get out of there, but I’ve often wish that Piper and I had taken the apartment over and lived there for another 5 years.
By then I might have matured enough to appreciate the character, richness, and closeness of the neighborhood. I might have been able to afford the tiny Italian restaurant down the street. I might have had the guts to talk to the harmless old men hanging out in front of the Soccer Club, instead of avoiding their eyes. I might have learned a thing or two about good food, and how to shop in places that were smaller than the supermarket. And while I was young enough to enjoy it, I would have been less than twenty minutes outside of Boston.
