until the issue was settled the men made a makeshift sign stating simply Sons of Italy “ Bocce ” Court . They encased the printed paper in plastic and although moisture got inside and made the ink run purple they left the sign up anyway .
The old men would show up around lunchtime with their wives who served pasta and homemade gravy in plastic containers . The men weren ' t supposed to drink in the park so they drank homemade Chianti from coffee mugs while the wives sat some distance away , talking among themselves .
The bocce balls were heavy wooden things passed down from family to family or recently purchased brushed metal spheres with their own carrying cases . All had etched stripes or squares or herringbone patterns . Each set with eight balls , four per team , plus one additional smaller-sized ball , the target or the mark , the pallino , which in their dialect the men called the baleen .
They played their matches matter-of-factly — disinterestedly , it might even seem to any outsiders watching . It was really not about bocce at all but the talking . So immersed were they in their favorite conversational themes — baseball ; kidsthesedays ; the never ending construction on Genesee Street ; the regularity , or lack thereof , of their bowel movements — they occasionally lost track of the score and had to start their games over . By late afternoon the men would tire and lumber across the street to Mulroney ' s for a draft while the women stayed behind . And set about designing the heavens . First they ' d gather the bocce balls their husbands had left lying on the ground . Then they took the court rakes and smoothed away all traces of their husbands ' footprints and any scuffs and dimples left from the thudding balls . After this the women stood , their backs to the courts , and tossed the little pallinos — suns , now — over their shoulders . Once this was done — one tiny sun dropped at random into each court — the women would slowly circle the perimeters , studying the sand . Every so often one would suddenly grab one of the large bocce balls ( planets ) in both hands and , leaning out over the bed of sand , drop it with precision . After all the balls were positioned just so in each of the four heavens , the women retrieved a handful of toy children ' s rakes from the trunk of a car and , as if it were a Japanese garden , meticulously drew ever widening concentric rings in the sand around each planet .
In this manner four brand new solar systems were assembled , each with eight planets orbiting their pallino sun . Their final touch : picking acorns and pebbles off the ground and flicking them sidearm across the courts : tiny asteroids and satellites leaving dotted trajectories in their wake . The women would study
42