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Every month I receive an e-newsletter from the National Italian American Foundation. Usually I just skim over and this one caught my attention so I thought I would pass on the info. NIAF has stared an Italian Heritage Travel Program and its first destination is my mothers hometown, Calabria. The trip is nine days and seven nights and leaves from NYC. According to NIAF there are several departure dates between September 2008 and June 2009. It looks like a great deal! In my last post I wrote that my earliest memories as a young girl are often memories of food eating, or food making, or food related events. I forgot to mention that in some of those dear memories the food was still alive.
As a third grader every afternoon was the same routine. I would run off of the school bus, sprint down the front yard toward my driveway, open the garage and then the door to the house which leads into (what else) the kitchen. Except once a year, a week before Easter, this routine was interrupted. I would run off of the bus, sprint down the front yard, and there, grazing in my driveway were three of the cutest, sweetest, little baby lamb. My brother and I would feed them and play with them all afternoon. We would name them, pet them, give them our love.
The next day, excited about my pet lamb, I would run off the bus, sprint down the front yard, open the garage door...and there, to my horrified surprise, were three fur-less, little lamb hanging upside down in the garage. It was traumatic! And all the while my dad with his apron on, standing by my side with a proud of the days work look on his face.
I apologize if you are a vegetarian and this behavior is not at all humorous but looking back at this time I have to laugh. The funniest thing about it is that we do not live on a farm or a secluded acre of land. We live in the suburbs about 20 minutes north of the city of Pittsburgh. And any one of our good American neighbors who buy their Easter dinner at Giant Eagle could look out their window and see three baby lamb grazing next to our Ford Taurus and our basketball hoop.
In this very moment I learned two things about my family.
1) We are different and 2) We don't care.
As hard as my parents try to assimilate, blending in will always come second to culture and tradition.
Pasta e Fagioli literally means pasta and beans. It is a carb filled soup with the smells and tastes of my Italian-American upbringing. As the daughter of two Italian born immigrants, my dearest memories are often surrounded by delicious food. Me and my three siblings grew up in a small home but like most Italians we have two kitchens (one in the basement).
