The school year was 1969-1970, and I was in the third grade. My dad, having taken a sabbatical year from Notre Dame to do research in Rome, moved the entire family of eight for a year into a large apartment which we quickly made small with our numerous presence. The address has stayed with me for reasons I don’t know: Via Ugo Balzani 6. My little brother and sister slept with me in a bigger bedroom, with my sister on a single bed under the window. My three older sisters were scattered throughout the apartment. I have no idea where my parents slept… It was a magical year of learning another language, schooling with students from around the world, and traveling to places that I had never heard of. We had a tan VW microbus, manual shift, and my older sisters regaled us in that hippie van with the new Tom Jones cassette as well as a collection of top Italian pop hits, San Remo ’70, which was Italy’s answer to Woodstock that year.
My dad was writing what would become his first New York Times bestseller, The Priest, though at the time I only understood that he was holed up in a small closet with a typewriter day after day, and seemed very pleased with his progress. After dinner, we would go out on the street and play with the neighborhood kids with real names like Massimo, or made-up names like Blondie Boy because we couldn’t pronounce his real one, and dad would write until it was time for the “three little kids” to go to bed. While my mom checked the homework of the “three big kids,” dad watched us brush our teeth, tucked us in and pulled out one of several paperbacks he’s found at an English bookstore in Rome. Each night he would read us one chapter, first from Treasure Island, and later that year from Huckleberry Finn. We would beg for more than a chapter, even though dad often had to stop and explain the story lines to us, but it was one chapter only each evening. When those books were complete, he started writing his own series of children’s stories featuring Granny One-Tooth, her grandson Roy Boy and their friend Sheriff Omar. He wrote a chapter in the evening while we were playing and would read it as our bedtime story.
Dad continued the Granny One-Tooth series after we returned to Indiana, and in later years we would recall them and ask why he wouldn’t publish them. He always refused with a smile, and when he passed away those pages were never found among his voluminous writing. Today, when I think about two things I have adored my entire life – traveling and reading – there is no doubt how those passions were deliberately fostered by my parents. Living in Rome, traveling the European continent, nightly tales of running away and heading south down the Mississippi or across the ocean with pirates, all before the age of ten. I didn’t have a chance.
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