In December 1975, less than a month after arriving in America, I packed my few belongings into a spanking new Dodge Dart (recommended by Consumer Digest) and with my then best friend, Aldo, drove from New York City to Indiana.
I’m still here. Each time I visit New York memories of those exhilarating first months rush through the floodgates of my mind. Kathy, fiancée of Richard Cassone who had recommended me to his program in Newark, helped me find my first apartment. It was one of four tiny studios above a carpet warehouse a block from the Pulasky Skyway. I didn’t buy a car until just a couple of months of leaving so on the weekends I wasn’t on call I’d walk to Journal Square to take the PATH train to Manhattan. I got off at the Christopher Street exit because I fancied Greenwich Village. It was my idea of everything I wanted from the Big City. I loved the Bleeker Street cafés, the off-Broadway theater on Grove Street, the funky shops on W. 12th Street, the cornucopia of wildly intoxicating foods at Balducci’s on Sixth Avenue (no one called it Avenue of the Americas).
Of all my memories of food, I remember best my first slice of pizza at a tiny pizzeria in Jersey City just outside the train station on Journal Square. It was a piping hot thin slice of dough with crisp, golden edges encircling steaming cheese and rounds of pepperoni like a crown. Jersey City was like Little Italy. At the corner of Newark and Central Avenues was an Italian bakery, across the street from an Asian grocery and just steps away from a butcher shop where one could buy veal as well as lamb, pork and beef. It was all a dream come true.
What happened? After the "dream" became reality, how did I end up living the last 35 years in Indianapolis?
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