TRUE STORIES

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,
           — Emily Dickinson
 
Stephen Raymond Pallucca, who died unexpectedly at his home in Frontenac on July 2, was, at times, wistful and melancholy and others full of humor and childlike joy. Always, he was kind.
He was, in short, a contemplative. One who loved to experience people, places, and things. But loved, just as much, to pull back and ponder the world alone.
He also loved stories. Loved to read, write, and tell them. He understood that stories — whether local, national, or international — contain the essence of humanity, so it’s not surprising that his degree from Notre Dame is in English.
In her book “Dakota,” Kathleen Norris asserts, when talking about small town life on the plains, that “no experience is really quite complete until we tell someone the story.”
So it is with a life.
Which is why, following his rosary at Friskel Funeral Home, friends and family stood beside his casket and bicycle and shared both funny and poignant stories about relationships and adventures with Steve, also known, through the years, as “Stevie,”  “Mound,” and the “Duke of Pallucca.”
In addition to some poetry, I passed along a Sacred Heart Grade School story Diana Pomatto Westhoff left on my answering machine about Stevie getting caught returning from an unauthorized school-yard absence by Sister “Attila the Nun” Beatrice.
She grabbed him and began to squeeze his cheeks. “Steve Pallucca, you’ve been uptown again. Let me smell your breath. Just what I thought. You’ve eaten a hamburger, haven’t you?
“No Sister. I haven’t.”
“Don’t you lie to me,” she said, squeezing his cheeks harder. “You’ve eaten a hamburger!”
“No Sister. I haven’t”
“WELL THEN, YOUNG MAN, YOU TELL ME WHY YOUR BREATH SMELLS LIKE HAMBURGER.”
“Because I ate a cheeseburger, Sister.”
Longtime family friend, Wayne Smith, who’s black, shared that, years ago, after visiting with him at a bar in Pittsburg, Steve invited him to visit Frontenac. To which Wayne replied, “Stevie, I’ve heard that brothers aren’t welcome in Frontenac.” Steve told him to come over to the house. It would be okay … which it was. Wayne went on to say the most magnificent thing about Steve was the loving way he daily took care of his dad, Raymond, after he developed Alzheimer’s. No one could ask any more from a son than that.
Father McElwee pointed out, at Steve’s funeral Mass, that there is more to a town than meets the eye. Steve, he said, wove himself deep into the fabric of Frontenac. That he was loved by many. Near the end of his remarks, McElwee read a deeply spiritual poem – a metaphor for everlasting life – written by Steve titled “Roman Candles.” It ends with the lines: I’ve known hearts of gold and amber / Of steel and lead was well as glass. / The one that all the others cherish / Is the one that lights the candles last.
My conversations with Steve over the years ran from humor to philosophy — and everything in between. Most of all, though, we talked poetry, for which he had a great love. He especially loved Emily Dickinson. (My wife, Linda, a high school classmate of Steve’s, told me that in English class she would call out a line from one of Dickinson’s hundreds of poems and he would invariably be able to identify it.) We talked not just poems but poets, in the sense of Walt Whitman, who said that a poet is anyone who, when he breathes into a thing, no matter how small, it dilates with the grandeur of the universe.
Steve was, in the words our mutual friend, Millo Farnetti, a horizon circler. One who, from the fringe of it all, observed the wonder and absurdity life. Steve often referred to Millo, who died in 2004, as "The Socratic Bulldozer" because he did not suffer fools gladly. "OOOH! OOWW!" Millo would holler, as if punched, if someone said something grossly ignorant or put forth an illogical argument. Of course Steve would do this on purpose just to hear him bellow.
You may have seen Steve, as if in a trance, pedaling his old-fashioned, one speed bike on his daily afternoon route from Frontenac to Pittsburg and back that invariably included a stop to see his mother, Betty, on old Mt. Carmel Road.  I wrote a poem about the transcendent vision of him passing me on Joplin Street back in 1999, pedaling steadily against the wind, his face full of wonder and puzzlement. Shortly after I found out he’d died, I had a vision of that ride followed by seeing him, as through the wrong end of a telescope, riding joyfully away into infinity.
To be sure, he loved, and was loved in turn, by countless people of all ages and walks of life. This I know, not only from talking to his sister, Marilyn, and mother, Betty, as well as those who attended his rosary and funeral, but those who stopped me at work, at the store, or on the street to talk about how much he will be missed. This truth was expressed most eloquently in what his dear friend, Kathleen Cerne, said to me toward the end of a long phone conversation just after his death. “J.T.,” she told me, “I don’t know if I know how to be in the world without Steve Pallucca.”