Wait until spring, Bandini

"Then he left. The poor thing. His mother — the poor thing. It worked in a despair in him that made his eyes filled up. Everywhere it was the same, always his mother — the poor thing, always poor and poor, always that, that word, always in him and around him, and suddenly he let go in that half darkened room and wept, sobbing the poor out of him, crying and chocking, not for his mother, but for Svevo Bandini, for his father, that look of his father's, for his father's mason tools, for the walls his father had built, the steps, the cornices, the ashpits and the cathedrals, and they were all so very beautiful, for that feeling in him, when his father sang of Italy, of an Italian sky, of an Neapolitan bay."

"Rosa, my Rosa, I cannot believe that you hated me, for there is no hate where you are now, here among us and yet far away. I am only a boy, Rosa, and the more every of where you are is no mystery when I think of the beauty of your face and of the laughter of your galoshes when you walked down the hall."

John Fante