Italian Dinners

“Dinner’s ready!” Those are my favorite words to hear every Sunday night when my mom finishes cooking her authentic Italian tomato sauce to go along with her made-from-scratch spaghetti. My mother was born in New York to Italian immigrant parents; my father is a first generation Italian who was born and raised in Italy then moved to California.

Ever since I was young, I have come to cherish the traditions of the Italian culture, especially nightly family dinners. For example, no matter how late my father comes home, sometimes as late as nine o’clock, the rest of our family patiently wait to eat together. This ritual is essential to my worldview. In those times when we gather, my siblings and I learn how to live. From my mother we learn to not get flustered or overwhelmed: there is a lesson to learn from everything. From my dad, we learn that self-discipline is essential for living a meaningful life.

However, one thing always missing from those dinners is the rest of us: my cousins overseas. One of the drawbacks of being from an immigrant family is that no matter how close my immediate family is, my extended family is continents away.

As a child, I visited Italy every four years, and it was easy to play and feel close with my cousins, but now I can only have simple conversations or use my parents as translators. My cousins in Naples are close to my age and I crave the opportunity to ask them about their lives. This is a strange feeling: to know that we share the same blood and DNA, but not the same language. All of my relatives live in close proximity to each other–most of them even on the same street. I’m not part of that, but I can change it. I want to know them better, and rather than live with regret that I didn’t learn Italian when I was younger, I want to use my time in college to study Italian language and culture and further my understanding of the world I come from only a generation ago. My father is the epitome of the Italian culture and my greatest dream is to be able to live as he has: a supportive and inspiring presence. In order to do that, I feel the need to know more about where he and my mother came from.

I have never faced adversity like my dad did. He immigrated to England at fifteen and then to California at eighteen, where he got a job working in a stockroom, barely able to speak English. Now, twenty-five years later, he lives the life he chooses and provides us all with any opportunity we could imagine. I look forward to finding new rituals and new ways of figuring out who I am in the world as I focus my studies on what I love. My love of sports is a fierce burning fire. My goal, ultimately, is to be a team doctor for professional basketball. I have a vision of my future: I take my kids to Italy to visit their cousins and we all speak Italian to each other. Sitting around the twenty-person dinner table eating my aunt’s penne and telling stories, I will argue with them about how great the Lakers are and remind them that I was the one who healed D’Angelo Russell’s knee injury.