[The following is a chapter from Jan Vallone’s memoir Pieces of Someday. The speaker is a lawyer and 44 -year-old mother of two who longs to become a writer and a teacher of writing. To make the career change, she examines her past, including the demands of her father that she not become a teacher like her mother, and she looks into her feelings of inadequacy.

In the chapter we post this week, the speaker is on a hike with her family during a planned overseas vacation. Just before leaving on what was to be a fun trip in Europe, the family suffered a robbery in their house in Seattle and with it, the loss of many family heirlooms. The writing weaves back and forth in time and among settings past and present, as the speaker assimilates her loss. As you read, think about how the writer keeps us clear about where we are and in what time frame.

Next week, we will post an interview with Jan, who has achieved her goal of becoming a writing teacher and shares not only her personal writing and publishing story but the resources she found useful. –ed.]

Perspective – July 2003
by Jan Vallone

I followed the footpath that had been etched into the side of the mountain. Above me hung a canopy of firs, larches and pines, shafts of sunlight flickering through. Cool vapors rose from the earth, scented by pine needles crushed beneath my feet. Ahead of me trekked my family — Mark unfazed by the sharply climbing grade, legs methodical, knapsack on his back. Cristin, fifteen, portabrasing with a pink water bottle, her graceful dancer’s gait. Sean, thirteen, scouting high and low, severing shoots and roots with his penknife.

I lagged behind the group, losing sight of them when the trail curved, glimpsing them when it straightened, letting the distance grow. When they turned to wait for me, I insistently waved them on. They nodded, vanished into mist.

I leaned on a lightning-scorched tree that had fallen across the path, branches barren, arthritic roots grasping. Redwing thrushes flitted — fir to larch, larch to pine — as if searching for something, calling. Breathing in alpine air, I held it for a moment in my lungs: I’m in the Dolomites. Every cell of my being should be tingling. What is wrong with me?

Days before I’d been humming all morning, my first teaching contract in my pocket, arms lugging shopping bags of hiking gear. I strode up the walkway to our house, reached the old door, fumbled with my keys. Inside, I dropped my parcels, plopped in a living room chair, sunlight through the diamond-light windows making patterns on the floor. It caught the family photos on the mantle, lit the crystal bowl, dazzled the paintings. Still, despite this clutter of things, the room seemed strangely vacant.

I looked around me, then over my shoulder: God, our stereo is gone.

I bolted — up the staircase to the second floor, down the hall to the bedroom. I reached for my dresser drawer, grabbed the knob and pulled. The drawer skated from its hollow, nose-dived to the floor. The broken lock. The screaming void.

For as long as I could remember, my jewelry had resided in that old oak drawer, carefully locked, the key hidden. Although my family was never wealthy, all the milestones of my life — communion, birthdays, graduations, Christmas, wedding, trips — had been marked with something special, purchased with money scrimped and saved. Whenever I felt lonely, or that I’d accomplished too little in my life, all I had to do was turn the key and slide open the drawer. There, in bits of gold and silver, I’d find reminders of people who’d cared, sometimes of my own worth. Most precious were the family heirlooms — my grandfather’s silver pocket-watch, my father’s diamond ring, my grandmother’s ruby earrings, my mother’s strand of pearls. Treasures once part of their bodies, warm, pulsing with life. For me, wearing family jewelry was the embrace of a loved-one long gone.

I bent over the path to tie my bootlace. A finger-sized salamander scurried by, eyes darting to and fro, shiny patent leather skin. He skittered over twigs and gravel, disappeared inside a crevice of a tree. If only I’d hidden my jewelry as well as he hid himself. Why hadn’t I listened to my dream? Often it awakened me in the middle of the night, always taking my breath away, making me spring up in bed. Surely, it had been a warning, an insistent ticking bomb.

In the dream, I’m thirteen years old, and it’s summer, muggy, hot. I am home alone; my father and mother are working, my friends away at camp, a luxury we can’t afford. Longing for some company, I go outside, scope up and down the street. I see no one, but our neighbor Tova’s door is open; maybe her beagle Peanuts needs a walk.

I cross the street to Tova’s, peer through the metal screen door. She’s pacing, talking on the phone, coiled cord stretching and relaxing, binding her to the wall. I rap lightly on the screen. Peanuts leaps out from a corner. He barks and skitters on the floorboards, nails screeching like blackboard chalk. Tova startles, then she sees me, signals just a minute with a finger.

I step inside the foyer, pat Peanuts’ wriggling body. Through the screen I gaze back at my house — sky cobalt blue. Lawn neon green. Bricks radiating heat. A sudden, fluorescent flash. A man is fleeing from our house, over the lawn, shooting like an arrow. He hugs a golden coffer to his chest. I scream. He dissolves into the heat.

Once, I’d learned from a news show that prowlers make a beeline for the bedroom, head straight for the woman’s dresser drawer. How could I ever have imagined that simply locking mine would be enough? The key was still under my mattress when the thief was cleaning me out.

I proceeded up the footpath, climbed higher through the forest. A waterfall sprang from a cliff, a sudden symphony of sound. Mist cooling my cheeks, I tiptoed over river rocks, crossed a shallow stream. Then I hiked through the shadows of a fir stand, arriving at a meadow, a slope of alpine light.

My family was already seated on a smooth slab jutting from the slope, apples, pane dei francescani, Asiago and Speck spread before them like a feast. As I approached, Sean licked his fingers, scooted over, making space.

I shook my head at him. “No, Hon, I’m not hungry. I’ll sit on that boulder over there,” as if ceaseless rumination would bring my jewelry back.

I knew my family was worried I was taking the theft so hard. Before we left on our trip, Mark had daily prodded the police, hoping to recoup my things. Cristin gave me extra hugs and kisses. Sean plied me with diverting conversation. And on the flight to Milan, they badgered me with earphones, made me watch the featured film.

In the movie, American teenager Daphne goes to England to search for her father. She’s his by a long-ago lover; he’s not aware she exists. In London, she learns her father’s famous, a politician from an upper-class family, so she makes her way to his house, scales the garden wall, introduces herself. Smitten by her perkiness, Daphne’s British family throws her a debutante ball. On the night of the party, Daphne descends the spiral staircase a-shimmer in a silver gown. When the girl reaches the bottom, her grandmother kisses her forehead and tiaras her hair: “Many years ago, I wore this crown to my ball. I’m delighted to pass it down to you.”

Daphne hugs her grandma; I volcanoed mucous and tears: “I have nothing left.”

As passengers turned to stare at me, Mark gently stroked my hair.

Wandering through meadow grasses, I crossed velvety mosses, crackled lingering crusts of snow. Sitting on the surface of the boulder, I hugged my knees to my chest. Warmth penetrated my body from smooth stone and limpid sun, wild thyme scent ascending. Poppies, gentians, lilies winked at me — yellow, blue, orange in a visage of green. I looked across the meadow at the pines through which I’d trekked. They were silver as my grandfather’s pocket-watch. The kind called a savonette, hinged cover protecting its crystal, fob link at three o’clock, I’d loved to wind that watch, watch its hands circle its face, listen to its tick, tick, tick.

The summer I was eight, my grandfather took us grandkids to the Freeport fishing pier — my cousins Angela and Nick, my little sister Pat and me. Each of us carried a pail, salt water sloshing out the top, and we laughed as it splattered our legs, wet our shorts and sprinkled the boards. Ahead of us walked Grampa, toting a tackle box and fishing rods, head shining in the sunlight like a Benedictine’s tonsure. When we reached the end of the pier, he pulled his pocket watch — glint — from his shorts. Grampa smiled and nodded, “Plenty of time to fish.”

My grandfather loved to fish and it was no wonder; he’d grown up in Castellammare on Sicily’s western coast. There, as a boy, he’d fished with nets from a wooden dingy. But in Freeport he never used nets. Rather, he opened up his tackle box, strung hooks and sinkers on our rods, baited them with mackerel, his stubby tailor fingers nimble. One by one, he released our reel locks, lasso-flicked our rods, lines arcing over our heads and unspooling into the sea.

He handed each of us a rod. “If you want to catch a fish, you need to be quiet. Don’t move, and when you feel a tug, do this.” He cranked a reel to whirring, winding hook and sinker from the water. “Can you do that?”

We nodded, then waited. Waited, silent, still. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, seagulls swooping and crying, sun burning my cheeks, sweat stinging my eyes.

Tug. My rod suddenly flexing, tip almost touching the sea. I tottered, pulled back, regaining my balance. “Grampa, I think I caught a fish!”

He motioned with his rod. “Quick, Kid, reel ‘er in!”

Weight bobbing on the line, rod bending like a bow, I cranked the reel round and round. The fish flipped from the sea like a puppet dancing on a string. I jerked it onto the pier.

It gasped and thrashed on the boards, bulging eyes plucking my heart. Grampa picked it up, wrenched the hook from its kissing mouth. “Look kids, she’s a blowfish.” He laid her gently on his palm, tickled her tummy; it swelled to a sequined balloon. Grampa looked at us and smiled. “Amazing, isn’t she? But she’s poisonous — we can’t eat ‘er — so we have to throw ‘er back.”

Grampa cast the blowfish from the pier. She flashed silver, slipped into the sea, wriggled, righted, swam free.

I sat up straighter on the boulder, pressed my forehead to my knees. What right did that creep have to break our basement window, wander through our house, open my drawer and rummage through my things? A few days after the burglary, his ex-girlfriend reported him, and a policeman drove her to our house to confirm the scene of the crime. That’s when we learned the burglar’s name: Martin Jinks, a gunrunner, drug dealer, addict, a felon with wild red hair. He’d boasted to his girlfriend about the heist at our home — “Lawyers! I saw their diplomas!” Then, promptly, he skipped town.

Martin, how I hate you. What have I done to deserve this? How could you take my grandfather’s watch? Where did you pawn my grandmother’s earrings?

I loved my grandmother’s earrings — ruby teardrops from the twenties set in gold, so prized I rarely wore them, but my grandmother rarely took them off.

Hen-bodied, four-foot-ten, Gramma was fabled for her cooking. For my tenth birthday she made a special meal: sliced tomato antipasto, lasagna with extra mozzarella (to Gramma, “moohtsadell”), spiedini di vitello, cannoli stuck with candles. Peeking out from her kitchen, she smoothed her apron with her hands. “Time to eat!” Then she pointed to our places at her table, eyeing Angela, Nick, Pat and me: “Soon you kids will be so tall, you’ll eat spaghettis off my head!”

As always, when everyone was seated, she served my grandfather first, watching him take his first bite, pressing her lips together thin. He chewed theatrically, slowly, jaw revolving round and around. And just when his Adam’s apple bulged, Gramma blurted her signature remark: “It’s good, isn’t it!”

Grampa mulled over her words as if he hadn’t heard them each day for forty years. “It’s good, Es…but please — please, don’t make it again!”

“Salute!” Everybody clinked wine or Coca Cola glasses, Gramma shaking her head, ruby earrings twinkling like the stained glass at Saint Christopher’s Church.

Earlier that day, she asked me to help with the tomatoes. Banging cupboards and drawers, she grabbed knife, cutting board, platter, placed them on the counter, found olive oil, basil, salt, pepper, set them by the sink. Colander in hand, she marched out the back door.

Screen door clapping behind me, I followed her into the yard — patio baking in the sun, iron table, scattered lawn chairs. Mimosa reaching for the sky, feathered fronds, fragrant pink puffs. Tomato vines climbing the fence laced on sisal twine. Gramma kneeled before the vines. “If you want to make a good salad, choose red tomatoes, no green.” She lifted a bract of leaves, exposing a ruby tomato, snapped it from the stem and handed it to me.

Alpine breeze ruffling the meadow, a ladybug lighted on my shoulder; I sat still watching her preen. Dainty head, threadlike legs, she fluffed black-spotted red wings. Once Angela had told me I should never brush a ladybug away; each was the Virgin Mary come to bring good luck. Lady, is it true? Will you bring back my jewelry? At least my father’s wedding ring? I’d loved to slip it on my finger, flutter a diamond-light dance.

When I was twelve years old, my father planned a trip to Italy, one he’d fantasized for years. My mother, Pat and I had never been on an airplane; my father, not since World War Two. But often, on the weekends, he’d take us to Kennedy Airport (which he, a staunch Republican, never stopped calling Idlewild). There, we’d watch takeoffs and landings like other families watched T.V. :

He, pointing at the runway: “Look, a DC-! Four engines. Isn’t she a beauty?”

We, nodding in unison: “Uh, huh. Very nice.”

On our departure day, he again drove us to the airport, this time singing with Dean Martin:

“Volare, oh oh;
Cantare, oh oh oh oh.
Let’s fly way up to the clouds,

Away from the maddening crowds.” Tapping steering wheel with ring, he scattered diamond rainbows round the car — ceiling, dashboard, backseat — Pat and I trying to catch them — red, orange, gold, green, blue and mauve.

He parked at the T.W.A. Building, a concrete dove in flight, checked our baggage, led us onto the plane. We followed a stewardess to our seats. Then my father turned to my mother. “I’ll sit behind with Jan. You sit here with Pat.”

He pointed me into the window seat, slid into its mate, leaned over me to look out the window. “Nice. Right over the wings.”

The plane taxied over the tarmac. I pulled my seatbelt tight. We merged in a long queue of rudder art — a gold sun on blue for Lufthansa, red, white and green for Alitalia, a cobalt globe for Pan Am. One by one, planes nosed into the air.

Our plane lurched onto the runway, gathered speed. It lifted nose, then tail. Closing my eyes, I clutched the armrests: Dear God, please keep us safe.

Dad patted my hand, a brief, awkward staccato. “Kiddo, open your eyes. See the air-streams rushing round the wings? They’re so cold they look like frost. They create a special force that keeps the airplane safe. It’s called Bernoulli’s principle.”

I looked out the window. The streams embraced us like an angel, the sky, bright and clear, the Atlantic scattering light.

When the police fingerprinted our house, they said I’d likely not retrieve my jewelry. Thieves normally pluck out the gems, melt down the metals, then sell the lot. What’s the point of having treasures if someone can trash them just like that? My father’s wedding ring, molten. My mother’s pearls, severed beads. I’d worn them almost daily, sacred as a rosary to me. Why hadn’t I worn them that day? How had Martin known I’d left them home?

When I was two years old, my parents bought a lot on Long Island. While our house was under construction, we’d go there weekends to inspect — “Beeyooteeful Baldwin!” the train conductor always said. The foundation was dug into the sand, a short walk from the beach. In a photo, we sit among the pilings — Mom, sun-dressed on a blanket, pearls bright around her neck. Pat cradled on her lap, moonfaced, fast asleep. Dad in baggy paisley swim trunks, me in a skirted bathing suit. Sandwiches and curvy-bottled Cokes spread on a cloth in the sand.

After we moved into our house, Mom liked to walk upon the beach, short black curls blowing on the breeze, lipsticked smile, slightly buck teeth. When I was six, she took me clamming. We padded barefoot at the sea-edge, Mom singing my favorite song:

“Smile and the world smiles with you;
Cry and you cry alone.
My dear, little Jan,
Always smile and be happy!”

Skirting seaweed, dead crabs and driftwood, we left a trail of footprints snaking far behind us, sand coating my legs, my shorts gritty, wet. Every once in a while, a wave rolled out and lapped me clean.

Mom, carrying a pail, bent her head, scanned the tidal mud flats. “Clams live in the muck. They squirt water out of their bodies like they’re blowing through a straw. We can find them by looking for their holes. Look, see them here?”

Mom set down her pail, pressed her toes into the muck. She cupped her feet like trowels, then began to dig: left, right, left. Grit flew from side to side, water filling the hollows as she dug. When she’d gone down several inches, she reached into the puddle she’d made. “Here.”

She placed a clam on my palm. It pulled in its worm-like siphon like a miser taking money from a bank and clamped its pearly shell shut like a woman snapping closed her purse.

From my boulder, I looked beyond the meadow at a velvet valley buttoned with chalets, church steeple pricking up. The village was so far below me, it seemed like Lilliput. A ring of glacial peaks surrounded it and me, pressing into the sky, tops lost in the clouds. I tilted back my head, gazed up: Oh, how tiny I am. A fragment of Creation, a flicker in all-time. Even more miniscule are my trinkets, wherever on Earth they are. If I could spread them out before me, they would not outshine these mountains, this sky. What do I need them for?

Up the slope, the clanging of cowbells. Bounding down, a ram, a ewe, two lambs. As I watched, my family scrambled from their roost, laughing, meeting the sheep.

Sean stroked the ram’s back, turned to me: “Mom, c’mon. They’re cool!”

Mark rummaged in his backpack, pulled out his camera and lens.

Cristin dodged the nuzzling lambs. “Yuck! Make them go away!”

I stood, brushed the seat of my shorts, crossed the meadow to my family.
****