It Might Get Messy

In Italian families, food and drink is a way of life. Wait, that’s not right. Food and drink is THE way of life. I don’t mean nutritional functionality. I mean the way to, through, around, under or over all of life’s features. Food and drink express Italian love, friendship, companionship, joy, humor and fun. They also accompany and light the pathways through sorrow and sadness. As well as being enablers and enhancers of addictions, delusions, resentments, angers, and just plain dysfunctionalities.

Both sides of my family had Italian threads in their origins, by marriage on my father’s side, blood on my mother’s. My father’s sister, beloved Aunt Helen, married into a big Italian immigrant family smeared across northern New Jersey and Long Island. As I recall, the major outfall of Aunt Helen’s cultural venture beyond the German, Irish and English customs of her parent’s household (we’ll ignore for the moment Grandpa’s contention that we might be of Alsatian and/or Jewish origin) was a serious upgrade in the routine partying of Sunday visits. Not to belittle Butch Grandma’s cooking or hospitality. She did indeed switch to LeSeur Very Tiny canned peas when they first came out, and I thought her devotion to a vinegary form of mayonnaise labeled as “salad dressing” was a nice touch. But Uncle Tony’s appearance brought with it not just a quartet of cousins (shoutouts here to Ms. G and Ms. ME), but pasta, sausage, meatballs, tomato sauce and a more serious emphasis on appetizers than ever before. Coupled with theirs being the first household I knew of to own a color television (we invariably left for home just as Ed Sullivan was ending and as the theme song for “Bonanza” came on), and the replacement of sparse canned beers by rapid-fire Manhattan cocktails, those visits picked up a lot of cachet.

On my mother’s side, Italian genes were snuggled deeper in the DNA. Her father arrived in the U.S. in 1902, with assorted brothers and sisters, from the agricultural hinterlands northeast of Genoa over toward Parma. He married into a large German family who also had Italians scattered over their genetic landscape. Holidays at Aunt Deet’s in Union City, New Jersey (shoutouts to cousins Ms.’s L and L and the latter’s wonderful children), at the rental cottage in Point Pleasant, or the aperiodic “family reunions” in summertime yards or parks were just short of riots at all times. Packed into a narrow second-floor apartment in the family-owned townhouse there were two rooms full of men smoking and drinking heavily and watching sports (and I’m proud to say that the family included a gay couple, guys who I’m not even sure were related but who appreciated televised sports and alcoholic beverages and were considered as much family as anyone), a large and active Irish setter named Debbie, a kitchen full of women pumping out a stream of stuffed peppers, chicken gizzards and livers, stuffed pasta, baked pasta, homemade pasta, hunks of beef, pork and chicken cooked in tomato sauce, desserts, and espresso with lemon. There was nasty homemade red wine that was only drinkable mixed half-and-half with lemon-lime soda, olives and anchovies, and provolone and pecorino Romano cheeses so sharp they would blister your mouth. Cases of Knickerbocker longnecks and big bottles of rye and bourbon filled in any voids. Everybody ate and drank until they couldn’t move and/or shouldn’t have been driving. Simmering interpersonal mistrust, suppressed anger, lifetime disappointments, depression, borderline abuse? Donnya worry aboudit, have a cannoli and some Sambuca, a couple of unfiltered Pall Malls and you’ll be alright.

The point is this. The holidays are here. And I’m faced with the hard reality that much of my life, and nearly all my holiday rituals and memories, are built around eating and drinking. Which turns out to be hard because eating and drinking have little meaning for me anymore. They are difficult and marginally painful to do, clumsy and best conducted out of the sight of others, and just generally damned uncomfortable. Far from being pleasant ties to the past and happily anticipated gates to the future, they are chores to be dispensed with.

Facing the holidays without enjoying the food and beverages? Holy hell, it’s enough to make you panic. For a little while. Then, off in the distance, he heard a gritty blues guitar twanging out a deep and slow walking Texas boogie. A tear grew in the corner of his eye. And he realized, as hard as he tried, he just couldn’t make himself that pitiful. He knew he had plenty of non-food rituals to fall back on. Watching long nights of variable-quality movies culminating in the restored original version of Wicker Man with Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, and Britt Eklund. Getting decorative lighting up in the neighborhood cul de sac. Reading the four gospels plus Revelation by midnight on Christmas Eve, when it’s time to switch to the Vatican mass broadcast. And feeding everyone else who comes anywhere nearby over the course of the winter.

Can you hear it? Pounding like a huge metal heart, resonating through the ground, shaking the windows, rattling the framed photos on the wall? That reassuring pentatonic march, reminding you. You don’t need to deal with reality, or the hair-raising disclosures from your mother’s deathbed, or the bizarre wackiness of your anti-Semitic grandfather suggesting the family is actually Jewish. You can feed everyone else. Knead up the Pan Dulce, bake the ziti, roast the beef. The holidays are here, and you’re alive one more year to see them.

And, what the hell. The world ends in any case on 21 December 2012 when the Mayan long-count calendar runs out. I might just have to have a big-ass turkey sandwich and a mug of Sambuca this Thanksgiving. It won’t be pretty goin’ down. But it’ll remind me I’m alive!

Hope everyone’s looking forward to a bitchin’ holiday. As many as possible of you should be convening here at some point in the coming week. Beef is ordered. Turkey’s in the frig. There’s 10 pounds of tiny creamer potatoes on order at the grocery store. Check out the professional blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . By this time next week there’ll be new material here and Thanksgiving photos up on one of the other blog sites. I’ll let you know. Have a great time, everybody. Damn, it’s great to be here!