I
taly saved my life.
I first arrived there in the summer of 1969, 14 years
old and thousands of miles removed from the streets of
my New York City neighborhood. I left behind parents
waging a futile battle against a crumbling marriage and
a jagged mountain of debt and my closest friends beginning their surrender to the allure of drugs and a life of
petty crime and one-way jobs that always follow in their
wake.
I didn���t know what I would find in Italy but knew, even
at such a young age, that whatever it was it couldn���t be
much worse than what I was leaving behind. We lived in
a four-room 10th Avenue tenement railroad apartment
whose windows cracked and froze during long winter
nights and were incapable of capturing even a slight
breeze across many a brutal August summer. The night
before my flight was to leave for Rome I sat with my
mother on the stoop of our building, each of us cooling
off with a Puerto Rican shaved ice cone. ���You sure you
want me to go?��� I asked, speaking in Italian since my
mother stubbornly refused to learn English, her one rebellious act against an American family and a way of life
that for her amounted to little more than a prison sentence.
HYLAND
