John Fante - Home, Sweet Home

I AM SINGING NOW, for soon I shall be home. There will be a great welcome for me. There will be a spaghetti and wine and salami. My mother will spread a great table piled high with the delicacies of my boyhood. It will all be for me. The love of my mother will come over the table, and my brothers and my sister will be happy to see me among them again, for I am to them the big brother who never errs, and they will be a little envious of the welcome that is poured upon me, and how they will laugh at the things I say, and how they will smile when they see me swalow those squirming forkfuls of spaguetti, and shout for more cheese, and roar my pleasure. For they are my people, and I will have returned to them and to the love of my mother.





John Fante. The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories of John Fante, (1985)