by Joseph A. Defetti

Created on: April 23, 2008   Last Updated: February 23, 2009

My First Memory and How I Tried To Live It Down

Maspeth, N.Y. 1956 (or was it 1957?) This is not the first thing I remember, but a rat was seen roaming through our apartment building when I was a baby. We rented a two-room flat from an extended Italian family who lived in most of the other apartments. At the height of the scare, my father stood guard in our living room one night with a shotgun. My parents were worried because rats, it was said, go right for babies in cribs because that's where the cheese is and that's where I was, sleeping perhaps, or else contemplating escape from my unjust confinement.

My father saw the rat and took a shot, blasting a hole in the hallway floor. A few minutes later the rat reportedly poked its head out and looked around. The next day one of the family's sons went to the hardware store, bought a bunch of traps and dutifully baited them. A week later the rat was still poking its head about, though the traps no longer sported their bait. Another plan was devised, this one said to involve electrocution, but the grandfather, born in Italy, spoke up.

"You estupido kids," he said, flailing his hands while chomping on a cigar. "You know-a nothing. I take-a care-a de rat."

The grandfather rolled out a barrel from the basement, filled it halfway with water, and set sheets of newspaper over the top with a thin slice of provolone cheese balanced in the middle. The next day the rat was found dead, drowned inside the barrel.

My father delighted in telling this story again and again, and our family always enjoyed hearing it. After a while, however, we figured that not a word of it could possibly be true.

Yet I remember living in that brick apartment building in a section of Queens near the Brooklyn border. My parents moved in when they got married, and I was born more than a year later.

I was toddling around the backyard wearing a diaper while my mother and other women from the building were playing cards at the picnic table. I ran up to the table and delivered a pronouncement. I forget what I said, just that I was not taken as seriously as I expected to be.

The backyard was where my father set up my inflatable round pool. I was splashing around in it one day, on my hands and knees wearing a diaper. My father was reaching up to our first-floor kitchen window, taking a bucket of water from my mother. Perhaps I emptied the pool with a cannonball or some such pronouncement. My parents described the backyard as "tiny," but the distance from the pool

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