My grandfather was a talented artisan. He especially enjoyed building with stone. He had built from brick and marble a large outdoor stove with a chimney.

Another project was a concrete fishpond that was probably all of twelve feet in diameter but to me, as a boy, it was the Atlantic Ocean. The pond was filled with clear water so you could see the gold fish. He created a waterfall, powered by a garden hose, which cascaded into the pond.

At either end of the pond were two stone castles. These were my favorites. He built them in his basement during the winter from stones he’d picked up at the beach during the summer. Each stone was round, approximately two inches in diameter, whites and off-whites, and smooth from the water and sand. With these stones he fashioned four-foot-tall miniature-cement-and stone castles. He labored for days on them and was proud of his simple but impressive creation.

I was taken with them and could spend hours playing with the fish and just imagining. I thought the whole affair was grand and my grandfather was Michelangelo. This was his expression of this artistic side, a side of his personality that he had the opportunity rarely to show. Life was too practical for him. He was an Italian laborer, a delicatessen operator seven days a week—who had time for art or creativity? It was a luxury—and his life had no space for luxuries. But now in his later life he had his artistic flourish and it was enough for him.

My grandfather Andrea left Tramonti [his wife’s Immacolata’s hometown Salerno province] in southwestern Italy in 1926 and came to his country, a skilled craftsman with no prospects and a wife and baby back home. He took a back-cracking job laying sewers in New Jersey to earn the money to bring them to America. It took him twenty–three years to accomplish his goal: owning his own single-family home with a yard.