One great source of joy in my life is that fact that I am an Italian. I realize that I had little or nothing to do with this fact. To be sure, my parents had very little control over it as well. I’m sure my mom and dad would have enjoyed having a little Irish boy (think of they fun they’d have with an accent like that) or maybe a Korean (I would have done much better in math). But as the Lord would have it they were forced to have an Italian son. I don’t doubt that their parents faced similar limitations with their choices in children.
But growing up Italian has some great advantages. The first one that comes to mind is being the first kid in my 6th grade class to need a shave. Come to think of it I was the also the first one in my 7th grade class to need a shave…oh, and the 8th grade too.
Another advantage to being an Italian kid is never running out of new family members to meet. I’m thirty now, and I’m still not all together sure that I have met all of the cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, and second-cousins that fill my family tree. The Sinagra-Oreste family is spread far and wide across America and I’m pretty sure we’ve got somebody living over-seas (don’t we?). When I was a boy my parents never actually took me or Jeanna, my sister, to a wedding but they regularly brought us to wakes and funerals. In a family our size someone passed away about every three months. My parents would bring us with a few toys and some drawing paper. Jeanna and I would sit around, not knowing anybody, and my parents would bring us over to who I can only assume were random elderly people they found outside and say things like, “You remember Aunt So-And-So, don’t you? She’s Uncle So-And-So’s wife and Cousin So-And-So’ sister and your third Cousin So-And-So’s grandmother!” We’d smile and nod without a clue as to what was going on. These old women were typically the widows of the man in the casket at the previous wake. One of the down sides of being an Italian male is that your natural life will run out long before your wife’s, leaving her behind to torment your children for decades to come.
Being an Italian boy, especially the first-born son, also gives you exclusive rights to the “Momma’s Boy” title. Being the Momma’s Boy means not having fun at sleepovers, wanting to go home from school early everyday, and completely flipping out when another kid made fun of your mother. Membership has its privileges. I had the added bonus of having my mom work in the same building as I did when I was in second grade. I used to ask to go to the bathroom and then go find my mom instead. I’m not sure I ever saw the inside of the restroom that year.
As I grew up I realized that being an Italian meant other things as well. It meant putting great importance on family. I can think of few things that my parents ever put before family, unless it was other family. My godfather, Uncle Dom (hi), is a living example of this, and so is my cousin Kevin on my dad’s side. They would both give you the shirt off their back. And when and Jess and I take the kids to New York to visit, family shows up from as far away as Connecticut and Virginia to see us. It’s like the Pope is coming to town. And of course with every family gathering there is another very important thing in the life of an Italian – food.
It seems today, eating has become synonymous with fueling. Stop. Fill up. Go. But food was not meant to be eaten in your SUV as you sit in traffic talking on your Bluetooth on the way to work. For Italians food is much more than that. Meals, especially good ones, are a time to come together. Sometimes, if the meal is good enough, it becomes a reason in itself for a gathering. In an Italian home meals are a time to share stories, to laugh and maybe to fight, but the food is always a focal point for the family. For an Italian, food can bring back tearful memories of childhood, vacations, loved ones, old friends, holidays, and far away places. I spent two years as a vegetarian. When my father told my Grandma Mille that I wasn’t eating meat anymore, she said, “I’m so sorry” in a voice normally reserved for tragic deaths.
Another advantage to being Italian is not having to worry about a natural death. When my wife, Jess, and I were getting married we had to make a family tree for the marriage class and list the cause of death for each person. I had very few family members who actually succumbed to old age. The cause of death ranged from murder to mistaken death followed by an autopsy. I think Jess was starting to get a little scared.
When I went away to college I left my small town home on Long Island and discovered the world was not comprised entirely of Italian Americans. I came into contact will a myriad of different cultures and practices. I found that a lot the things that I was taught to value simply aren’t important to others. My freshman year I had a roommate who couldn’t understand why I refused to eat at more than half of the pizza places in Philly. The fact that Philly’s pizza sauce tasted like fish and vinegar hardly seemed to matter to him. He was also shocked to learn that I had never heard of pierogies, scrapple, or cream-chipped beef. I spent a good portion of my time in college trying to explain why wet flat pretzels are not nearly as good as the ones you get from Manhattans vendors. Philly’s famous pretzels? Please! I once brought a half a dozen classmates to Manhattan to show them what a potato knish was. I also had a boss in Philly who told me he had never eaten pizza until he went to college! (He was from Idaho or Iowa or one of those flat square states.) I think growing up four out of seven meals a week had tomato sauce involved.
I’ve had to explain to friends why I go home to visit family so often. I’ve been shocked to learn that people go entire months without calling their mothers! And some people just have family they simply don’t see or even talk to anymore. I haven’t let anyone speak ill of my family since high school. I may be allowed to say something about my sister…but I nearly pounded a kid on bus one day when he said something about her. I’ve had a heck of a time trying to explain the Godfather to my friends. They just don’t understand.
My wife is not Italian (we can’t all be perfect, her parent’s didn’t opt for the Italian daughter) but she’s been getting a crash course in Italian culture over the last eleven years. I think she’s starting to catch on. My hope is that as my children grow up they’ll learn to value these things as well. They are at least half Italian even if they don’t look like it (all blond hair and blue eyes). I hope to see them some Christmas day with their kids sitting around a crowded dinner table yelling conversations out over the din of family commotion. Food and family. Now that’s Italian.
Then on Sunday Joey was baptized. We had even more poeple over for lunch and a HUGE cake. It was a great weekend. Check out the slide shows on the right for the nearly 200 photos I took between the two days!
