In the summer, my father goes out onto his patio morning and night and
stoops over a few tomato plants rooted in a strip of dirt around the
concrete.  He's a big man so he bends carefully, eyeglasses sliding down his
nose, and shakes his head a boomboxes roar beyond the fence.  That happens
often:  the neighborhood is asphalt and ragged, a mix of homes and
commercial buildings near the East Norwalk train station with warehouses,
strip-malls, and rubbled parking lots all under the horizon of a railroad
overpass like a road into the future.

    The house, a four-room condominium, is the first of my father's homes he
didn't build himself.  It was a haven he came to after losing everything he
owned in a recession and at first, it didn't seem like a place for putting
down roots.  But decades have passed since then.

    He grew up in a house his father built on land his grandfather farmed.
Back then, Norwalk was a rural town, before so many commuters shuttled back
and forth to New York City.  I've seen pictures of him as a boy on his
father's land, standing in overalls near an old Dodge truck.  The photo I
have in mind is stained apricot with age and then, as now, he's missing
teeth.  The day looks summery as grass is parched stiff on fields that roll
off in every direction.

    When my great-grandfather came to this place, he was a widower with five
young sons, fresh from driving mule-teams down coal mines near Naples, and
he was determined:  he told his children to share the one big bed and a
start in America.  Like so many Italians, the boys apprenticed in trades.
One was an electrician; others were plumbers; my grandfather ran a
construction business, building starter-homes for soldiers returning from
the War.

    He was a good builder, though an erratic entrepreneur -- my grandmother
complained that he ignored debts owed by friends and a certain attractive
widow -- but his firm lasted long enough to hire his son.  A Norwalk Hour
clipping from the 1950s shows my father just back from the Army, straddling
a roof with an apronful of penny nails and a stack of tarpaper shingles, his
wavy hair outlined against the June sky, his eyes merry as he grinned for
the camera.  "I'm way up here," his smile seemed to say.  "I'd like to see
you try it."

                                                 II

    As a builder, my father met lots of new Italian immigrants, men who rose
before dawn to work their gardens before heading casually but relentlessly
to their jobs.  They worked his way all day -- not hurrying but not stopping
-- carving, digging, pouring, hammering, laboring in a country whose
language remained a mystery.  When my father became a supervisor, he had to
explain things and order the work.  He spoke broken Italian and waved his
hands around, and they smiled politely, replacing comprehension with a
readiness to haul and sweat overtime.

    At the morning break, my father bought coffee and stood talking with the
crew.  By then, the laborers had been at it for hours and needed food.  So
they pulled out long loaves of bread with garden tomatoes dressed in olive
oil and salt.  They always found they had extra food for my father, which he
really should eat.  "Taste, taste," they'd say, gesturing with the bread.
And after a while he'd take some, savoring salty tomato pulp that tasted of
hot sunshine on a sweet afternoon.

    As they sat, he'd talk about his own garden, a clearing at the edge of
the Wilton woods (my parents had left Norwalk, seeking quiet, or perhaps
just to get away from the house where two of their babies died.)He'd
describe sprouting seeds under lamps to stretch the short New England
growing season, or rooting eggplants in a huge clay pot.  Little Joe and the
others listened with the respect due a boss; then they'd boast of rival
methods.  One joked that you couldn't grow anything up there in the woods,
except maybe daughters.  My father shrugged.

    Starting in July, they brought home-grown produce to share.  The
"sharing" was really a contest; a gift -- accepted -- was also a victory.
Year after year, my father came home with bags of tomatoes, zucchini and
beans piled in his old truck from the laborers and shook his head at the
impossibility of beating their record.

    Then came the year of the three-pound tomato.

    Quietly, with the steadiness of a man who has no time to waste, he read
that Miracle Gro could produce three-pound tomatoes, and decided to take it
as its word.  Holding a tiny scoop in his broad hand, he measured the
crystals into pails of water and poured them out in strictly scheduled
feedings.

    "You can't trust what you read," warned a cousin, another formidable
gardener.

    "Three pounds?" said Nonnie, a Sicilian matriarch, and threw up her
hands.  Little Joe just shook his head.  But my father kept watering and
weeding tomato vines that spread amazing foliage, broad dark twisting leaves
like plants of the Amazon.  In the evening heat we'd sit out back and
breathe in the garden's dramatic scent: sweet, pungent tomato perfume,
snaking upward all night long from plants that had to be restaked each
morning.

    "It's all leaves," said the workers kindly.  "You get no fruit."  And
they gave my father extra helpings of their sandwiches because he was sure
to starve that summer.

    It was the 1970s by then and my father's waist had widened, though his
back was still strong.  His hair was thinning, his hands calloused, and the
sports photos in his high school yearbook spoke of better days.  Other
relatives owned more property, newer cars, and the kids were getting ready
to go off to college.  His own dreams had faded into memories after years
smashed by hard reality:  work, work and more work now seemed his one
purpose, going to the jobsite each day the source of pride.

    In short, he needed a victory.

    One evening when relatives were gathered around Nonnie's kitchen table
chatting and drinking coffee, my father walked in the back door.  "This is
for you," he said, and held up a perfect three-pound tomato.  He followed it
with a twelve-pound zucchini squash, which he set in Nonnie's arms like a
baby, stacking huge flat Roman beans on the table like lumber.  She laughed
so hard she cried.  We passed the vegetables around, turning them to catch
the light.

    The next day, he took more samples to work.  Little Joe patted him on
the back over and over again, nodding hard.  For two weeks, no one on the
crew "shared" their produce, in deference to the high new standard he had
set.  He came home empty-handed, singing in his truck.

                                             III

    My father's patio is walled by tall spikes of weathered wood and when he
sits out there he leans way back and looks up at the patch of sky over a
nearby factory.  Around the corner is a shop for coffee and newspapers, and
near that a deli, where the owner always sets aside my father's holiday
pies.  Across the Norwalk River, the town skyline peaks at an office tower
he built.

    The wood of the patio fence is cheap and soft, so he has no trouble
sticking pushpins in it to stake up tomato vines.  At first, he grew nothing
there.  The bare strip-patio had nothing to do with gardens, it was more
like a scar.  Then, someone at work gave him a few leftover tomato seedlings
and my father stuck them in the ground at the base of the fence.  By August
they were six feet tall and hanging over a parking lot on the other side.
By September he had bowls full of red plum tomatoes on his counter to be
simmered into sauce.  Shiny green ones stayed on the vine until early
November, when he brought them inside to ripen.

    Even so, one spring he threatened to discontinue the garden.  He said it
wasn't worth growing tomatoes to be gnawed by slugs and squirrels that
swarmed over concrete and up the fence in amazing hordes for this part of
town.  But when someone brought him seedlings as a "house gift," he planted
them, unable to leave any growing thing on the patio to die.  Despite a late
start, he still got baskets full of harvest and on Labor Day I was able to
photograph the patio, getting a nice tight shot of tomato-leaves twisting
thickly up the fence behind where he sat.  With that focus, that blue sky,
leaves covering the fence-poles, it could have been taken anywhere, anytime.
The plants look abundant, like his best gardens in the past.  Then I realize
what really centers this picture is my father sitting in the middle of it,
his face lined and hollow, his eyes tired, and his smile.

Wendy Nardi's essays, fiction, poetry and journalism have appeared in such
publications as Eclectica, 360°: Art & Literary Review, The Boston Globe,
Dance and High Performance magazines.  She was a writer for the Kerouac
Romnibus, published by Penguin U.S.A., and received a Connecticut Artist
Fellowship in fiction writing.