About that time I grew up Sicilian in a resort fishing hamlet

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 8

Hey you, what do you see?

Something beautiful or something free?

Hey, you, are you trying to be mean?

If you live with apes man, it's hard to be clean

The beautiful people

The beautiful people

Editor’s Note: Well we’re deep into the dog days of August and our annual summer readership dip. Folks are on vacation, and it’s just too hot to read a bunch of serious ruminations about anything. So we’re doing The Best of Perfecting Equilibrium Sunday readers until pumpkin spice season autumn. This post originally ran for Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start to The Season in Hampton Bays, so I thought it would be fun to share it again this Labor Day weekend when The Season ends for this year.

Here’s hoping you and yours are enjoying a wonderful Labor Day Weekend and resting from your labors!

The Sunday Reader, June 3, 2024

My dad and I had the same argument every morning from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Neither of us were anything approaching morning people, so it was mostly an exceptionally grumpy sort of grunting.

It’s your turn.

No I did it yesterday, so it’s your turn.

It was a desultory sort of argument born of familiarity and affection. Eventually one of us would pull on shoes and head outside to see how many drunks were sleeping in their cars in front of our house.

It was always the same conversation. Bang on the window.

Wake up! You can’t sleep here.

What?

You cannot sleep here. Get a move on.

Why?

This is our house! Get a move on now.

Can I pee in your bushes first?

ABSOLUTELY NOT. GO. NOW!!!

Now to be fair, the front of our house was not easily recognizable for drunks driving around in the dark. Our house was not usual for that neighborhood, or any other, really. I come from a family of tradesmen – master carpenters, electricians, roofers – and when someone in our family needed a house, we just built it. ?We’d buy a piece of property, then the family crew would show up every weekend for months until the house was done. I’d been helping out since I could walk. Younger kids would fetch and carry. Older kids would carry bigger stuff and pound nails, and start to learn a trade. My father and uncles and older cousins who built houses during the week did the serious work, and supervised the rest. There was never a problem passing any of the building inspector’s inspections.

If you’ve never been fortunate enough to be part of an Italian familia, it’s more of a tribe than a sitcom family. Everyone pitches in, and does what they can. So while the tradesmen built and the kids carried, the family who didn’t work in construction pitched in any way they could. My maternal grandfather, for example, came every single weekend and took care of the groceries and cooked meals on a camp stove.

My family is half Italian, from Naples, and half Sicilian, and 100 percent…well, rude. The Italians I grew up with were backwards that way. If we are very, very polite to you, you are at best a stranger. Or we don’t trust you. And you are definitely not family.

If you are family…well, Italians like to do something we call Breaking Your Shoes, which ranges from rude humor to detailed explanations that whatever it is you are doing you are doing it wrong. Here’s an example that became a family legend: when we built a house for my father’s father in upstate New York, we had to replace the rocks around the foundation with topsoil from up the hill so the home could have gardens. After a while we had great big piles of rocks, so one of my industrious uncles began wheel-barreling them up the hill and dumping them in the holes left from digging up the topsoil.

At some point my master-craftsman paternal grandfather followed up the hill to supervise, and immediately said the catchphrase he used to start every conversation:

No. NO! You’re wrong!

Apparently you were supposed to Tetris the rocks into the whole for maximum loading. And of course the rest of us thought this was hysterical and never ever let it go. For decades after whenever my uncle offered an opinion it was met with Why would we listen to you? You don’t even know how to put rocks in a hole!

Building those homes was a lot of work that took a lot of weekends – months and months of weekends. But we could build the houses exactly the way we wanted. So when we were planning the house in Hampton Bays we laid out the landscaping exactly the way we wanted. My dad and I both regarded gardening and lawn mowing as time wasted that could better be spent fishing, especially since the backyard ended on a canal off Shinnecock Bay with boats tied up. And it was all futile anyway; every lawn in the neighborhood was in various stages of dying.

Salt water will do that.

So the backyard was landscaped with pebbles, and the front yard was left wild with trees and bushes. The wood-sided house blended into the woods in the day; at night it was close to impossible to see the house among the trees.

We moved in when the house was almost done. I spent Labor Day to Memorial Day going to school during the day and fishing in a little boat named El Tub afternoons and evenings.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day I spent mornings policing the drunks who washed up in our front yard, which is why I’ve always had mixed feelings about Memorial Day weekend. I grew up on Eastern Long Island, New York in a little town called Hampton Bays, which is on Shinnecock Bay and the North Atlantic Ocean. Hampton Bays, located midway between Southampton Village and Westhampton Beach Village, is where the cooks and waiters and workers for both villages lived, plus the fishermen and clammers who worked the local waters.

Local wags called Hampton Bays a valley of humility between two towering peaks of ego and wealth; old money in Southampton, and new money in Westhampton. Memorial Day Weekend was the official kickoff to the summer season. Hampton Bays had about 5,000 residents from Labor Day to Memorial Day; but 50,000 from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

While the population exploded, Hampton Bays stayed exactly the same size. The roads didn’t get any wider; the town didn’t get any bigger. Even worse, Sunrise Highway, the highway that runs from New York City to the Hamptons along Long Island’s South Shore, ends in Hampton Bays. So every single car headed to the Hamptons left the highway to clog our local streets.

It was about a mile from our house to the little independent supermarket in the middle of town. During the school year we’d take the five-minute drive up anytime we needed groceries.

During the summer we’d take the boat and pay triple for a loaf of bread from the ship’s chandlery at the local marina rather than take the hour-plus drive to that same supermarket.

Like most resort areas, Hampton Bays was one place during The Season, and a completely different place the rest of the year. There were restaurants and stores that opened just before Memorial Day, and closed right after Labor Day.

And then there were the rental properties. Seasonal rentals are so expensive in the Hamptons that when a friend’s divorced mom remarried, they kept the bride’s quite ordinary house in East Hampton and the groom’s in Ronkonkoma. Renting the East Hampton house for the season more than paid the mortgages and taxes for both houses.

Plus a tidy profit.

The Villages had pretty strict regulations about rental properties, including how many people could occupy one. Hampton Bays, an unincorporated hamlet, did not. So spending some $30,000 to rent a house for The Season required a good deal of wealth, which was exactly what the Villages wanted.

But while $30,000 was a lot of money for a summer vacation for one person or family, it was quite doable for, say, 100 college friends who split the costs and weekends.

And parked all over the neighborhoods.

It was hard to blame them, really. New York City is famously hot and stinky and sticky during the summer. The beautiful people and parties of glittering Manhattan decamped to the Hamptons for the summer; why wouldn’t everyone else follow as close as they could?

They couldn’t afford a beach house in the Hamptons, but they could afford a sleeping bag on the floor in Hampton Bays with several dozen of their closest friends. And who cared, anyway? No one went to the Hamptons to sleep!

It wasn’t too bad for us. Our neighborhood, Old Harbor Colony, was down a few side roads and not obviously on the water. So people had to get completely lost to end up in our front yard. Once they were lost in our neighborhood, though, they inevitably washed up on our property, like a stretch of beach where the currents pile all the seaweed and driftwood. If you got into Old Harbor you could take the road until it ended in a roundabout at the beach. Coming out of that roundabout we were the first patch of woods.

So it was easy enough to close your eyes and sleep in your car, rather than continue looking for the rental house you couldn’t find – no GPS in those days – only to wake with the morning sun revealing our house and an angry Sicilian banging on your window.