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In the Fifties most of the years were the summer Johnny Ray walked his baby back home and cried when your sweet-heart says good-bye and it was no secret that all young girls of the world were Loretta—who one day became “Big Loretta” as she grew in innocence and age—and Gloria— whom we called “Polack” for she was the only blond in our ripe-olive colored family album of passage and remembrance—and that they spent hours rocking in WWII naval hammocks in the shade of once tall black walnut trees, crazy in love with Johnny Ray, whose songs came through AM radios or were played on Saturday afternoon jukeboxes when they could hold his imaginary head in their ever maturing laps and run their fingers through the waves of his Fifties hairdo as in a time when all the women of the world were cousins Gloria and Loretta, except young aunts—waiting for husbands, who were the vets, to return from toiling in dark cities—and young mothers who baked whole worlds left in ashes back to being as they labored at the center of simply being and all the boy cousins were Pauly, Johnny and Vinny, each of whom was nearing or rounding eleven and were one person in a trinity of expectation and longing and crazy to fathom the mystery that powered the ripening world of their cousins Pollock and Big Loretta, who, crazy in love, continued like the flow of a small and quiet river, hoping one day to console a little white cloud that cried at the end of another river.
Copyright 2021 Vincent Spina
I remember while I coveted the doggie in the window and cried a river.
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