Our Bedroom

I awake on Christmas morning and look up at the branches of our Christmas tree. It is my 6th birthday and I feel like a Christmas present as the tinsel catches the sunlight coming through the chintz curtains of our bedroom. My whole family sleeps in this room. It is one of only two rooms which we rent in this house, the other room being our kitchen. It is 1961 in Toronto’s Little Italy and the semi detached two story house is on a street where English is rarely spoken.

Our bedroom is at the front of the house on the second floor. It is a square room crammed with all of our worldly possessions. Entering the room there is a dresser on your right and then my single bed against the wall. Beside my bed and directly in front of the window is my Mama’s Singer pedal sewing machine. My Mama sews magic with that machine, transforming used clothes into dresses for me. At Christmas time we always buy a small real tree and place it on top of the sewing machine which is how I always end up sleeping under the branches and picking out pine needles from my bed.

On the other side of the room is my parent’s double bed. Hanging over their headboard is a plaster relief of the Holy Family which they brought from Italy in the steamer trunk as a memento of their wedding. Beside their bed is another dresser and then on the far wall, the crib where my sister Anna sleeps.

The room smells of a strangely comforting mixture of mothballs, camphor oil and Mama’s perfume “Evening in Paris”. Every evening my Papa winds up his alarm clock and sets the alarm. The ticking sound measures the night time, along with Papa’s snoring. The 5:00am alarm heralds the start of another work day for Papa. Mama will get up and make him breakfast, pack his lunch pail and he will head out on foot, to be picked up by the construction company truck.

On top of the dresser is a framed picture of a beautiful blond boy holding a ball. This is my older brother Renato, who died early the year I was born. This room knew sorrow again; when three years after I was born, Mama lost twin boys she had carried full term. After that loss she was bedridden for months, overcome with grief and rheumatic fever. I would play at the foot of her bed all day with my doll, oblivious to her grief, until Papa would return from work to make us supper.

The house is rarely quiet. The owner drinks heavily and often beats his wife and children. As a child I remember feeling like our small family was living under constant siege and that bedroom certainly felt like a refuge. Yet I have such fond memories of that room, that house and that time in my life.