Italian Company for the Night

This week, I took a train out to Long Island to meet my grandparents at their friends’ house. As I walked in the door, I gave and received a kiss on the cheek from every man and woman, most of whom I either didn’t know or had met when I was too young to remember. At one point, one of them held my shoulders and took a step back for a better look before saying, “sheesh, you look just like your fahhtha.”

They asked how my father was doing, said that he should visit some time. They regaled me with old stories of my father’s Little League games many years ago—“lemme tell yuh, you shoulda seem him out in centa field, oooh gawd could the kid flahy. And when he was battin’? Fugetaboutit.”

When an Italian tells a story, you see the passion in their eyes. You feel like you were actually there when it happened. You feel it in your bones.

The men sat outside trading old New York sports stories all afternoon while the women sat inside, playing cards and cooking tremendous portions of food; everyone occasionally exploded into laughter. An hour and a plate of caprese salad and prosciutto rolls later, we gathered around the meticulously prepared table for dinner.

Two hours and four courses later, we migrated to the living room. The grand piano, covered in more pictures than hang in my whole house, was the centerpiece of the room.

Our host sat down and dove headfirst into a beautiful Italian tune. Many hummed along and slowly bobbed their heads, simultaneously enchanted by the seductive melody and third degree food coma. Without warning, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” began and verses were assigned; I had “two turtle doves.” Within seconds, it was Christmas in July.

On the way home that night, I was exhausted and impossibly full. The funny thing, though, is the utter normalcy of the evening for everyone else. For me, it was an extraordinary night of family, rivaled only by Thanksgiving and Christmas. But for Italians like our hosts, it was business as usual.

If you’re Italian, you host dinners as if you were serving kings. Dinner is an extravagant, multi-course, all-day, all-night family event, and family gets the best: the freshest food, the neatest table, and the greatest company.

Now, to me, an ethnically impure millennial, dinner is a much simpler affair—simply spooning myself a serving from a pot on the stovetop, and grabbing a seat near the kitchen TV. Afterward, we might run off to resume our homework or our pre-dinner activities, which almost always involved an electronic screen. Clearly, things have changed drastically.

It is no revelation that our culture is under a constant, unwavering, and insuppressible pressure to change. Change—gradual and unrelenting—is never immediately noticed, yet beats onward without fail.

It is bewildering, however, when you realize the vast cultural gap created by a mere two generations.

In the days of our grandparents, the men sat outside and the women inside. The men chatted and smoked; the women cooked. A cell phone was the last thing on a person’s mind. Sunday—the entire day—was for God and for family. You spoke your mind openly, without regard for offense or marred pride. Skin was thicker, but generally less colorful. You went to college close to home; you lived and died in the same town where you were born.

Just as Mother Nature can bring both destructive hurricanes and drought-ending rains, transformations of societal conventions bring both positive and misguided shifts in cultural normalcy.

Society is more integrated now than it was two generations ago, no longer so black and white. Sundays aren’t only for God—or more accurately, for Christians—because we aren’t only Christians anymore. Men and women grow closer to parity every day. More people have squeezed into big cities, living amongst a wider breadth of cultures and lifestyles. Society is also more ideologically divided, and we are more afraid; we don’t speak up as much anymore. We don’t want to hurt, to inflict or receive.

And the changes aren’t only demographic. For those not in big cities, there are seemingly endless ways to connect to people across the country and around the world. The massive wave of technology and social media has brought us closer to those farthest away from us, but pulled us away from those nearest to us. Today, teenagers venture farther away for college, and often move out of their hometown afterward. There is less sense of community, less commitment to family, but more opportunity.

Naturally, these inevitable changes divide opinion. Personally, I hate that, today, dinner is less about family and more about eating (and nowadays, often too much). And dinner is often interrupted by beeps and vibrations. Sometimes I wish that electronics—our sources of instant knowhow—would vanish and that we would instead notice the stories deep in each others’ eyes. We should strive to find God (or any spiritual guidance) on any day of the week. I hope we never get used to the convenience of big cities and relish being off the beaten path.

Change is sometimes a double-edged sword. Attitudes shift. Sometimes we can control it. But often, we can’t. Grandparents will always say “I miss the old days,” and we’ll usually say, “I like the new days better.”

Change is bittersweet, simultaneously positive and negative, depending on whom you ask. In all honesty, I don’t know what to make of it. Heck, I just realized these things because earlier this week, I was Italian company for the night.

I can only wonder what lies in store for me tomorrow.

Ryan V. LaMonica ’18 is a mechanical engineering concentrator living in Mather House.