Memories Are Like Clouds immediately drifts back to childhood after the funeral of a soldier killed in Vietnam. Kenny and his sister Diana's young world was the mill-town neighborhood they inhabited with Eastern European immigrants and their offspring during the Eisenhower fifties. This touching memoir is a fond remembrance of growing up when life seemed simple.

Gliding on the porch swing while listening to their mother's stories of her youth, counting dead goldfish at the five-and-ten cent store, playing pick-up baseball games down near the dump, collecting Ralph Kiner and Stan Musial baseball cards, helping Daddy at his candy business, devouring Sgt. Rock comic books, and running numbers for the neighborhood bookie in a housedress filled those innocent days in East Vandergrift, Pennsylvania.

In this book readers will meet dozens of memorable characters: Mrs. Trotaskovich, the widow across the street, who called her bowels "barrels" and ate prunes from morning till night; Herr Fromer, the traveling baker who sang opera on the radio; Cazzy and Sousha, the town's biggest gossips; Uncle Caz, who could tell when it was going to rain by the shrapnel pain in his back; the hunchback of All Saints Polish Roman Catholic Church; normally sweet Uncle Bobby, a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer; witchy Mitzy, the candy store owner; Mr. Jaztremsky, the washing machine repairman and Bataan Death March survivor; Mutzy Futzy, the neighborhood bully; war heroes Man Mountain and the PNA janitor.

Weaved together here are the universal and the particular, experiences shared with millions of other baby boomers (that first television set, polio season, iceboxes, telephone party lines, drive-in movies, "Amos 'n Andy," hula hoops, the milk man, Davy Crockett coonskin hats, Sputnik) and those individuals and situations unique to a specific place or family (the ragman and his tired old horse, Father Shezocki's rumored-wife, the Polish Barber's dirty adventure magazines, Bupchie's chicken coop, shotgun weddings at the Slovak Club).

Every page has something wonderful--a perfect turn of phrase, a trace of quiet wisdom. Here are great teachers, crabby neighbors, pious sinners, and valiant men and women, the everyday heroes who faced disaster with good cheer and usually muddled through.

This coming-of-age tale, filled with hope and old-fashioned values, will delight and engage and then, long afterward, persist in memory.