WINE AND RAVIOLI WITH CARLO AND FILOMENA

Earliest recollection of my grandma, Filomena Monzione Figliuolo:

I am about 2, stubby chubby legs struggling up what must be the world's steepest, darkest staircase, at 16 1/2 Rowland Street in Newark, New Jersey.

One tricky step after another, grasping the bannister poles with my right hand, stepping up with my left foot, Millie right behind in case I stumble. (My mom always had my back, right to the day she died.)

Finally, the summit. Sir Edmund Hillary could not have been more excited atop Mount Everest.

Out of the hallway's darkness and into the light — Grandma's sun-splashed second-floor kitchen, the tiny fiefdom where she performs her miraculous alchemy.

She is at her familiar battle station, her battered stove. With metronomic precision, her right arm guides a wood spoon the size of a small oar through a bottomless vat of gravy. Olfactory overload -- garlic, basil, tomatoes, assorted pork products -- embracing magically, blissfully.

She has monitored my snail's-pace ascension up the stairway to heaven, but feigns surprise as I burst into the kitchen. Dropping the oar into the gravy pot, she spins and picks me up.

"Ron-nie, Ron-nie," she croons. "You wanna sang-weech-a?"

Of course, I want a sandwich. Even at that tender age I have learned the immutable Figliuolo law: When Filomena offers, "no" is never an option. She fills a sub roll with slices of meatball, then ladles in gravy. She sits me at a Formica kitchen table battle-scarred by thousands of family meals, and tucks a large napkin into my shirt collar.

We both know it is a pious gesture. Even a shower curtain could not have protected me from splatters of blood-red gravy. She salutes my first bite with a single Italian word, "ben-u-ree-ga" (spelling phonetically here), which in later years I discover is almost a sigh of satisfaction — "enjoy."

Which I certainly did.

There was no queenly throne in Filomena's kitchen, but she managed to reign supreme despite hardly ever sitting down. The fulcrums of her little world were the gas stove and the adjoining refrigeration unit, her "ice-a box" — which got its three-syllable name from an 18-square-inch block of ice delivered three times a week on a horse-drawn cart that plied Newark's all-Italian North End.

"Ice-a-man! Ice-a-man! Getta you ice-a heah!" the driver would sing, grabbing a block off the cart with fierce-looking tongs and depositing it in the place of honor, the middle shelf, with a pan underneath to capture the devolution back to its original liquid state a couple of days later. Invariably, as the last sliver gave out, we could hear the cart clackety-clacking with replenishments.

That was pretty much the way you did business back in the late 1930s in the North End where for dozens of square blocks my grandparents lived cheek to jowl with their "paisani" — countrymen from Italy. Besides the "ice-a man," there was the knife sharpener guy, who every couple of weeks pushed his cart down Rowland. When they heard the whirring wheel of his whetstone, Italian matriarchs carried every knife in their utensil drawers down the stairs and out into the street.

Then there was the milkman, also in a horse-drawn cart, delivering actual glass bottles (not cardboard) topped with three inches of thick cream -- to add to coffee or churn into butter. Still in bed, I took comfort in the clinking melody of full bottles replacing empties. The symphony provided reassurance that there would be a cold glass of Becker Dairy's moo-juice with breakfast. He also delivered fresh eggs; Grandma had a huge standing order because eggs were cheap and she had 10 bellies to fill.

My favorite tradesman was the legless war veteran who traveled atop a sturdy four-by-twelve wood plank, roller-skate wheels attached to each corner. From a small, wood-burning stove in front, he extracted freshly roasted chestnuts and luscious hot-baked yams wrapped in several sheets of newspaper to protect my little fingers. When I became a baseball fan I would connect that memory to the term hot potato, a batted ball too hot for an infielder to handle.

Yam guy propelled himself along the street, hands tucked into thick gloves to protect knuckles. He sang, in a deep bass you started hearing a block away, the heart-shattering World War I ballad, "My Buddy." To this day I cannot hear that song without recalling the mournful keening of that brave, legless man.

"My buddy, my buddy,
Nobody quite so true.
Miss your voice, the touch of your hand,
I long to know that you understand.
My buddy, my buddy,
Your buddy misses you."

* * *

Filomena's hair, dark and thick in the fading photos that dotted the small apartment, now was thin and gray. Wrinkles had begun creasing her soft features, but the sweet smiles lovingly bestowed on her grandchildren never faded. She was a quiet woman, befitting a hard life caring for five daughters, three sons, and a stern husband. She struggled to acclimate herself to a strange new world far from Napoli, carefully marshaling money, wasting nothing. Her English was not so much broken as...