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city girl
MARY LOU SANELLI takes a short trip to her own heritage A Work-Hardened Soul 
I was raised in a family of
Italians who were "just off the boat," meaning they arrived on the shores of Manhattan in 1946 without much but hope. And a work ethic sound as the masonry they knew, so that all over the island and radiating like spokes of a wheel throughout the boroughs, my father's brickwork arose.
Then there was their ceaseless drive for status. So they worked. They worked scared, they worked through humiliation and failures and exhaustion. They worked without knowing the native language until, in the diligent way they layered stone, they built up their English a word at a time. And they never, at least that I can remember, dwelled endlessly on the past or pitied themselves. Life was about moving forward. And up.
It was a different era. Family made up our social circle. Together we forged into the American dream as many immigrant's still define it: home ownership, savings accounts, college for the kids,
and the end-all status symbol:
a Cadillac.
It was alien to me, when I went off to college, that there was this thing called of "time off." In our home there was no luxury to weekends. Saturday meant chores. Ditto for Sunday, a day-long procession of paying respect at the cemetery, mass and communion, and preparing a feast-like meal; because no matter how far we strayed from certain customs, there was little wavering from food tradition.
And I can still feel panicked if faced with too much free time. 
Nobody but my husband knows
the true scale of my task-free anxiety. I have first-generation work-hardened soul. I suppose I'll always live under the weight of it, its residue echoing off the walls of my home.
Today I look back and marvel at the way my family built their life up from tenements to living in those grand houses they later came to own in places like Long Island, Queens, and Connecticut.
And, every time I need a reminder of my real life rags-to-riches past, I leave my minute-old block of Belltown-where our homes are so close together that, protectively, we live farther apart then in neighborhoods with yards-to hike up Denny Way and weave through the eclectic mix of funky-meets-charming to reach the old "streetcar suburbs" of Capitol Hill; what was, until the 1950's, referred to as Catholic Hill due to its onetime large Roman Catholic population.
"Really?" I said when I read this history fact-of-Seattle. Call me perceptive, but the first time I walked the sidewalks around 14th Avenue and Aloha Street, I felt an odd but familiar feeling, a grounding surety that helps me turn my newness of living in Seattle into something more personal.
Such dazzling mansions. I like to walk by them just as daylight withers into dusk. When they take on a softer glow, rearing up from the manicured lawns and gardens with more comfortableness than prominence in the fading light.
To be amidst this aristocracy of houses, this wealth that displays itself, well, it's hard to know exactly what it stands for in this day and age, but I do know I'd be lying if I said the thought of my dad planting grape arbors over a driveway here doesn't escape me.
"I bet the people living in this neighborhood," I say to my husband as we walk the blocks just west of Volunteer Park, "like to take vacations in Italy, but here at home, the real thing (meaning me) makes them nervous." I don't know why I say this other than I'm feeling a little nostalgia for the working class currently unrepresented on this block. And melancholy can make me say heartless things if I don't keep it under wraps.
Silence.
"I know you know what I'm talking about. People who step backward when I wave my hands around and tell me to calm down when it's passion I'm feeling.
People who describe people like me as... marvelous. I think your life is just marvelous."
Marvelous is a word no one in my family would ever use.
My husband is a bone fide fourthgeneration Californian, white-collar W.A.S.P. He loves me sincerely, but hates when I describe "my people" as separate from his. There is a huge reservoir of unease creeping up his spine.
I pull my emotion back inside and smooth it down. Otherwise I'll force something far too small-homesickness-into something too important: my marriage.
The sight of the Space Needle rises on the horizon. It is a beacon drawing me back down the hill to my street, which is grimy compared to these blocks of elegance. Two hours ago, longing for something past, I never thought I'd hear myself say that I miss the grime.
So little time away from home can go such a long way.
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Join Sanelli at her book launch reading for her newest book, Small Talk, at the University Book Store on June 5, at 7 pm.
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