Hey, Louie:Wherever you are now--somebody told me...

Hey, Louie:

Wherever you are now--somebody told me you’re an Air Force colonel, no less--you must remember those high school days when we fell in love with the same girl.

We talked about her in mechanical drawing class, where even the protractors and T-squares took on a romantic glow. We pretended to be jealous of each other. We joked about it, as a way of reassuring ourselves that we weren’t jealous, when really we were, a little.

Only a little, though. The main thing we pretended was that our rivalry mattered--that you and I were each other’s only competition--when the truth was that neither one of us had a chance. She was out of our league, pal.

That’s OK. I can say that now. But the Mafia jokes weren’t OK. And I’m not so sure about the grapes.

You see, from noon to 9 p.m. today in Santa Monica they’re holding the third annual Los Angeles Italian Festival. More than 100,000 people are expected to throng the Third Street Promenade to sample food from 35 of Southern California’s finest Italian restaurants and wine from Old Country vineyards. There’ll be music, too--opera, the Italian Classical Symphony, jazz by Cal Bennet and the Freeway Philharmonic. For Festa Italia information, call (310) 285-1575.

And I can’t help remembering that it was the Italians, who came to our far corner of Northern California around 1900 to work in the lumber mills, who civilized the rest of us.

We were savages. What else can you call people who drank beer and bourbon, period? Whose cooking ran to pot roast and potatoes and hard-boiled vegetables, with no spices stronger than salt? Who never uttered the holy word garlic?

Mexican and Chinese came later. My first hint of a wider world came in a joint called Mike & Tony’s, which had Caruso on the jukebox and wicker Chianti bottles with wax dribbled on them and, still, the best ravioli I’ve ever eaten.

Typically, we repaid this cultural gift with slurs. We pretended to believe that people like your dad, the grocer, were mob soldiers in deep cover, ready to machine-gun somebody down in Glover’s barber shop. We kidded you about going home after school to stomp the grape harvest for vino. And you went along with it, telling us how purple your feet got, how oozy the grapes were.

Were you kidding, Louie? Or was this another time when we finessed ourselves clean out of the truth, as with our three-sided romance? They grow grapes as far north as Washington; no reason why your family couldn’t have done it. Did you really stomp ‘em and hide the fact by simply admitting it?

Any chance your dad could send me a bottle?

Sir?