My family is vaguely Italian. In that my dad’s mother is one hundred percent, purebred, I guess. Her mother, my Nonna was from Sicily and father, my Nonno from Tuscany. They came over sometime before 1920. I was supposed to sit down and research this for a family tree project but that idea faded by the time we pulled out of the driveway from Christmas dinner at Bob and Bernie’s where we all got fired up about the prospect of it. Don’t you worry, that project is firmly on the list of things to do. Nonno died when I was a baby. I saw a young picture of him at Nonna’s funeral. I do not know much about him but if you asked me now to create picture that looked like the most nonpolitically sensitive rendering of a stereotypical group of young Italian men in the 1920’s, this would be it. I don’t know, maybe all Italian men moving from Italy to East Chicago during the height of Prohibition dressed like that. It seems innocent enough. Anyway, I have never felt comfortable asking any of my family members about that.
I was thinking today about the only Italian I ever knew and the last time I used it. Then I started thinking about the moment growing up when announcing your need to use the bathroom passed out of acceptance. When saying poopy out loud was not you being facetious or ironic but an actual, sincere and usually time-sensitive, declaration. For me the sense that I had become too old for such nonsense came calmly in a hurried moment. It struck as I crashed through the front door, leapt over the couch and nailing the landing with milliseconds to spare. The ruckus excused with the profound announcement, “I GOTTA KAKA!!”
At age 4 I had exhausted my conversational Italian.
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