Gev Sweeney: Stories & Stuff

Now the canal was gone, the Old Overflow was no more, and Mommy’s father and the skunky dog were mummified tales preserved by Mommy and Daddy and uncles, aunts, and cousins who would stop on the slog through their personal deserts and expose the memories to derision, mourning the dead and enjoying the loss as they relived in words growing up in the Great Depression, bereft of childhood, forsaking school for jobs as low in status as they were in pay: ironing linens in a laundry, swilling counters for a butcher, sweeping homemade whiskey from the oil-blotched floor of a body shop. They were raised in a part of the city where American-Irish and American-German and American-Italian and American-Syrian and American Lebanese kids played basketball together and went to school and dated and it didn’t matter that their parents were still learning English, and you were as likely to hear cliffhangers about the famo