Everything is just peachy

How’s this for a slice of long-ago Highlandtown?

“My father, Carmel, worked hard at Bethlehem Steel, at Sparrows Point. When daddy came home, he would be grimy. He needed a bath. I can remember my mother always going into the bathroom to wash his back. My father would say, ‘Phyl, come here, I need my back washed.’ She would go because she always did everything for him. They loved each other very much. They were Edith and Archie Bunker in disguise

“After dinner, in the summer, Daddy would sit outside at the corner of the alley in a rocking chair. He used to say he was catching the breeze coming up from the alley. In his hand was a portable radio, and he would listen to the Orioles game. Before evening’s end, my parents’ closest neighbors would bring their chairs over and sit and talk to my mother and father until dark.”

That’s all. The small pleasures of the world before air conditioning and cable TV turned us all into hermits, our lives filled with so much packaged entertainment and so much self-inflicted isolation.

Peachy recalls a time of mixing together. She spent her early school years at Our Lady of Pompei and graduated Patterson High School. Her uncle was the late City Councilman Mimi DiPietro, and she worked as a waitress for John Unitas at The Golden Arm. She’s been a fixture at Sabatino’s, in Little Italy, for as long as anybody can remember.

She wrote her 232-page memoir, she says, because, “I started this just to remember all the days of my childhood, and it ballooned into a story of my life.”

But it’s more than that. It’s the story of all those around her, whose lives revolved around the family, the church and the schools, and the neighborhoods that were the fixtures of Baltimore and are sometimes still its great strengths.

And it’s about the sweet times we make for ourselves when we don’t count on outside sources to fill our hours. How’s this for a celebration?

“Every New Year’s Eve,” Peachy writes, “my father and mother would have a big party at their house in the basement. My father had dug the basement out years ago when they first moved into the house. It was six feet deep and as long as the house, so there was plenty of room for everyone to sit around and dance. All of my aunts and uncles, on both sides of the family, would come over. My cousin played the accordion.

“Around 12 o’clock, my Uncle Fritz would get one of my mother’s old bedsheets, and wrap it around himself, and run up and down the street and pretend he was the New Year’s Eve baby. My Aunt Lena, who was Uncle Fritz’s wife, would say, ‘Fritzy, what are you doing? Stop acting crazy.’

“We would all tell him to keep on going – ‘Don’t pay attention to her; you’re having a good time.’ Oh, what a great time we all had, so much fun for so little money. Oh, the innocence of those times, just full of lots of laughter.”

The past gets away from us too quickly. Every family should have somebody like Peachy, to write it down and hold onto the details. That way, we get to relive the glad times, and pass them on to those who weren’t there, so they fully understand where they come from.

There are rough times, too. There was an abusive marriage for Peachy, but it produced two loving daughters. Money was always tight — but there were joys money couldn’t buy.

There’s the tale of her parents’ courtship, with a parlor filled with grandparents, uncles, aunts and priests, too, “to make sure they weren’t doing anything wrong.” There’s the first family car, which they proudly drove to Grandpa Gaetano, “who only lived right down the street from us.” There’s the tender scene, after Peachy’s father has died, when her sister gives birth to a boy, “and we all knew that Daddy had come back to us.”

When a family has someone like Peachy keeping track, no one ever really goes away.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com