The Year I Became a Liar

INHALT

Thirty-seven year old Ricardo Trogi narrates the story of a specific time from his childhood about which he still obsesses, it a time that changed his childhood. The year was 1981, when he, then eleven years old, was just starting grade 6. He was obsessed with material possessions, and as he felt his working class parents didn't buy those things for him he wanted so dearly, his most prized possession was the Consumers Distributing catalog from which he made his list of items he wanted, long at the top of the list a $400 calculator watch. These possessions he felt would impress the world. He largely dismissed his waitress mother Claudette, but he admired his father Benito. Although he at the time didn't know what his father did for a living, Ricardo believed he was smart enough to be a lawyer if he had the means to go to college, that belief largely by the stories Benito told of growing up during WWII in Italy. In 1981, the family, which included his adolescent sister Nadia, moved to ...