L'Italo-Americano

www.italoamericano.org 10 THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017 L'Italo-Americano LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE M y grandparents poured into me all the Italy they couldn't fit into their children. To others they spoke broken English, but to me, the first born grandchild, it was always their Italian, so I became the only one who could under- stand them. As they neared retirement, I was placed in their care on those rare occasions my parents weren't around. I was their assistant who ran errands and extended their reach; my life became an internship into the ways they thought, the ways they felt, and the ways they got things done. Their ways of doing and being were always explained more through stories than detailed instructions. Grandpa was an immigrant who had never really arrived, one who carried the burlap sack of his past wherever he went, a weight that slowed him down in the fast moving, modern America of television and astronauts. Whatever Italy was to me in my youth came from him. He reflected a dual image of my Italian heritage: one of pride and one of embarrassment, images that constantly fought one anoth- er. His broken English upset me, especially when he'd "speaka likea thisa" to me while I was with my non-Italian American friends, the ones he'd call "'meri- cans." His Italian, that strange tongue he'd use when spurred to a highly emotional point in an argument, while reminiscing with old friends, or when he did- n't want kids to understand what he was saying, always enchanted me. His language was only one way he conflicted with the America I was growing up in. At breakfast he'd be hunched over a ceramic bowl filled with chunks ofstale bread, the kind Mrs. Rossi used to throw out to the birds in her back yard. I watched in disbelief as he poured hot coffee over the bread and then added scalded milk and sugar to the mixture. Then he'd eat it! While he ate, I gathered the courage to spill some corn- flakes into my blue, Tupperware bowl and eat the American breakfast I had known from tele- vision. He offered me a taste of his concoction, which I rudely refused to his amusement. When I looked into his smile I lost the image I had had of him when I first saw him pour the coffee over the old bread. In that close- ness I loved, but didn't under- stand the immigrant. Grandpa never used the prod- ucts I thought were essential to American life. He bragged that he had never used shampoo or toothpaste and yet managed to keep a full head of beautiful hair and a mouth free of fillings. I was amazed, since by the age of ten I was already noticing dan- druff and had visited the dentist more than he ever had his whole seventy years of life. He pre- ferred to grow his own vegeta- bles, while I'd be fascinated by the ease of picking unblemished, even-sized tomatoes and other produce neatly wrapped in plas- tic off supermarket shelves. I was frustrated by the hours spent with him in his garden, sweating to produce a few tomatoes and peppers, or following him through fields of forest preserves picking dandelion greens and poking puffballs down from trees. Grandma was always the cen- ter of attention during the prepa- ration of Sunday afternoon meals. She ruled the kitchen and hollered out orders to the women in our family. But my attention always turned to Grandpa while we ate. He fascinated me, using bread in fingers to gather sauce that slid off the spaghetti, tongu- ing neck bones until they were meatless and dry. He could make me forget I had food in front of me; he was a noisy eater, but the sounds he made were hardly noticeable amid the loud FRED GARDAPHE A Generation Removed Author's note: This is the first installment of a serialized story that recounts my return to Italy and my grandfather's journey to the U.S. talk at the table. He rationed the salad of bitter dandelion greens by dancing around the table and dropping it onto plates, then would return to his seat, hug the huge wooden bowl with one arm and shovel forkfuls of greens into his mouth. When the storm of the meal had blown over, he would sit back and smoke an unfiltered cigarette, often with the lit end in his mouth. Magic! Grandpa never learned to read or write and I would feel so important when he ordered me to read something for him. I was the American he could never be. I was proof that his hopes of "making it" in America had been fulfilled. Grandpa never told me why he had left Italy and rarely talked of his childhood. I guess he thought it was enough to be in America and that all that had come before no longer made any difference in his new home. After he died, Sunday dinners were never the same. With him were buried many of the Italian traditions our family had fol- lowed at his lead. Without his influence, Italians became strangers in a collage of media images: spicy meatball eaters, Godfather gangsters and operatic buffoons. But he did leave me with a curiosity of what the "old country" was like. One day, the year before he died, he and I were on a beach in southern California. Our family had traveled to my uncle Pasquale's home after my father's funeral. Grandpa sat on the sand, staring into the sun's reflection off the waves. He said, "This beach, she like Monopoli" (a coastal town near Castellana Grotte in southeastern Italy, where he was born). "One day I'mma gonna go backa to Castellana." He said nothing else the rest of the day. He was silent for hours, as though in a trance. It was a look I had never seen before and it frightened me. I covered him with sand and he sat there until the tide washed the sand away. He was burned quite badly, but it didn't seem to bother him. He had been in Italy during those hours. It had been more than fifty years since he had seen the land he'd come from. Whenever I pictured Grandpa after he died, it was with the sad smile he had on his face that day on the beach. As I turned my energies toward pursuing an education and the pleasures of being a teenager, the memories of Grandpa weakened. I often lost my family in my growing disen- chantment with the American Way. In the late 1970s, I decid- ed to get as far away from the family as possible. I planned a trip to Europe to visit friends in Denmark and Sweden. As I gathered addresses, I thought it might be interesting to visit Italy for a few days, if I had the time. Grandma had maintained only Christmas card contact with " the other family" in Castellana Grotte. She had the address of Grandpa's brother and I wrote him. By the time I left, I had not received a response and won- dered if I should bother to stop in Castellana at all. "Grandpa was an immigrant who had never really arrived, one who carried the luggage of his past wherever he went, a weight that slowed him down in the fast moving, modern America" Grotte of Castellana: These spectacular limestone caves, 40km southeast of Bari, are Italy's longest natural subterra- nean network

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