Saturday, May 31, 2008

The Squash Tree


If you squint at the picture to the right, you might be able to make out a sweet, be-capped elderly gentleman proudly showing off what appears to be a bumper crop of...what is that, exactly?
Squash. It's squash. Growing from a tree. And that's my grandfather, John Zavatto. A post-WWI immigrant from Calabria, Italy, and the happy grower of said squash, among other things.
Here's what you should be saying to yourself: "Squash doesn't grow on trees..." -- and you'd be right about that. Until the age of about 11, though, I sure thought it did.
In truth, it was an old, dead pear tree up which my grandfather trained his vines to grow and wrap and spread, so by the thick of summer they'd drip from the branches as if it were the most natural thing for a tree to sprout squash instead of leaves. I liked believing this, in that way when, as a child, you easily accept all kinds of myth as plain, irrefutable fact. It was a strange, unsettling kind of let-down when, several years after he'd died, my Aunt Iris stifled a laugh and let me in on the truth. It was...disorienting.
In my family, though, this was a little bit of a theme. Half-pieces of information, stories not told, things lost from the Old Country to the New. Calabria wasn't such a nice place to live when my grandparents and my aunts Iris and Phyllis left it in the early twentieth century. Being an Italian immigrant in America then was none too easy, either. Like many others who came over, my family just wanted to fit in; to feel like they were part of something. That they were home. Born here, my dad and his brother, Frank, don't speak Italian. We didn't do fish on Christmas Eve. We didn't do Calabrese hot peppers. We didn't call our aunts "zia" and our uncles "zio." Whatever few things we did do seem to have died off, year by year, generation by generation, until finally, three generations later, we fit in just perfectly.
My sisters and I grew up on pork-chop casseroles, English-muffin pizzas, Fluffenutter sandwiches, and Hungry Man dinners when dad worked late. When he didn't, we ate in the style of the best middle American families--prime steak, roasted chicken, loin lamb chops with mint jelly. And even though my dad was a butcher, no organ meats darkened our plates. The most Italian we got was meatballs made by my Irish mother (very good ones, to her credit), crusty bread with every meal, and Good Seasons Italian dressing on the salad.
And then I married my husband.
His parents are off-the-boat Southern Italians whose thick-accented English is all but indiscernable on phone messages. They have a picture of the Last Supper over the large dining table, which sits in the kitchen, in as close proximity to the stove as possible. Food is the central nervous system upon which my mother- and father-in-law exist. It's the thing that seems to help them hold so tightly to who they were and who they are, sometimes frustratingly so. They have introduced me to things I never ate; never heard of; never knew I should have.
Fun as all this was, it also felt eerily like the squash tree all over again; like I'd been duped, had missed something, been left out. But as the years wore on and I left my old job to become what I am now--a food writer--something changed. It's made me think that maybe this was how I could find the way back. Like someone handed me a compass that lead me straight into the kitchen.
That's what this is. Stories of mining the past through the portal of a refrigerator, a stove, a garden, a bottle, a pantry, a dinner table. Instead of feeling lost, I'm letting hunger be my map. And so, here we go...

3 Comments:

Blogger Mommy2Twinkies-Deb said...

I've always LOVED reading your writing. I love this story of your grandfather and the squash tree, and how it connects to your life. Great blog!

June 4, 2008 at 10:25 AM  
Blogger Cindy said...

What a lovely post, Amy. And how disappointing for all of us that squash trees don't exist. Welcome to the world, little blog!

June 4, 2008 at 11:11 AM  
Blogger sister1of4 said...

Reading you little blog reminded me of how we came from two separate families. (Hungry Man what?) When we were young, so much time was spent at our grandparents home in Cedarhurst, along with several of our cousins. Our Nana cooked like there was no tomorrow, and took great pains to feed us "Italian". This was not something that I embraced as a child, however our sister Janet made up for the disappointment I gave our Nana. I will never forget the Easter she sent several of us to the basement refrigerator to get sodas. Inside was a platter covered with a cheesecloth. Curious as we were, we lifed the cloth to discover a lambs' head staring at us - I can still hear my Nana laughing as we ran screaming up the stairs, sans sodas. Now that is a memory!

June 7, 2008 at 4:57 AM  

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