My mother had invented an impossibly embarrassing way of informing me that dinner was ready. When I was aimlessly playing outside somewhere in the vast suburban landscape, my mother would go upstairs in our house and climb on the ledge of the mid-century cast iron tub in the bathroom. On her tippy toes she could reach the small highly positioned window. This allowed for a tremendous blast radius over the flat landscape of our newly built Long Island suburban neighborhood.
“Rrrenato! Rrrenato! Deenere time!!!”, she would scream at the top of her french tinged voice. The single call bounced off the high and low ranch roofs, asphalt streets, traveling aimlessly throughout the neighborhood like a prayer call from a minaret until every neighbor’s ears had been reached.
It mustn’t have been practical or comfortable for her. Nonetheless, she had formulated that this jerry rigged version of a medieval town’s tower meant for loudly communicating dangers or approaching armies to all the villagers, made sense.
As soon as the ritual call was blasted, whatever I was doing, playing street hockey, volleyball or king of the mountain, the same thing would happen. All my friends and I would suddenly freeze from whatever we were doing as if my mother’s booming voice emitted from the sky had the magical power of turning us into stone.
As the sound of my mother’s calls inevitably progressed, blanketing the entire neighborhood, my shoulders would slump and my head bow down. My reaction was partially due to embarrassment with the only mother in the neighborhood who not only deemed it necessary to do this ridiculous yodeling, and with a french accent nonetheless, mispronouncing english words in a shockingly loud melodic cry. The remainder of my disappointment was from having to accept the sudden realization that my day was quickly reaching its end.
My mother decided that this howling call to prayer process was effective and she used it for any need of getting me back to the house. When she did it, because it was the highest window in the house, it always sounded like she had climbed onto the roof. Our neighborhood, the forest that encircled it and the abandoned farm adjacent to it covered many acres and I could be located in any part of it at any given moment. That siren song from the rooftops seemed to always find me, no matter where I was or what I was doing. Sometimes I would make believe I didn’t hear it but my friends would make sure I knew I had. They enjoyed getting a good laugh out of the French yodeling and my bowed head walking home in compliance with it.
I don’t know if it was because of my mother’s minaret prayer call invention or because we were a partly Italian family, but the tactic was also used indoors. Hollering from downstairs to someone upstairs in a bedroom with a closed door was not uncommon. It seemed that the same level of volume was required inside as the rooftop version. It became the primitive intercom system which I use to this day. I live in a three story house today and we are all constantly yelling from the first floor to the third and vice versa. It seems to work perfectly. Although some people who experience our form of communication seem to be taken a bit aback by it. Maybe they’re shocked at its effectiveness. In any case, we all have my mother to thank for it.
An excerpt from the upcoming memoir… Babylon Gone…
Renato Passalacqua 