Eat Now; Talk Later: 52 True Tales of Family, Feasting and the American Experience
Author
James Vescovi
Author Bio
James Vescovi’s essays about his eccentric grandparents have appeared in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Alimentum Journal: The Literature of Food, Newsday, Gazetta Italiana, and are now collected in Eat Now; Talk Later: 52 True Tales of Family, Feasting, and the American Dream (March 2014). His fiction and essays been published in venues such as Midwestern Gothic, The New York Observer, the Georgetown Review, Calliope, and Natural Bridge. He teaches at high school English and lives in New York.
Description
Eat Now; Talk Later: 52 True Tales of Family, Feasting and the American Experience is a memoir containing stories about the author’s grandparents in the years he and his father cared for them. The stories can be read before bed, on a lunch hour, or waiting in line. They can even be shared with friends who complain they have enough to read. Together they ask the question, “How do you make modern life run smoothly for grandparents who grew up when oxen were used for plowing, children left school after third grade to tend chickens, and polenta was eaten twice per day?”
This is not the usual immigrant-made-good tale. Tony and Desolina Vescovi were born on farms where life hadn’t much changed for hundreds of years. When they came to America, they passed through a time-tunnel that brought them face to face with the 20th century, and they found themselves puzzled by banking, supermarkets, college degrees, voice mail, airplane travel, and the nuclear family. The tales in this collection chronicling their lives are poignant, hilarious, and bittersweet.
You can get more info and read an excerpt and view photos and recipes at http://www.eatnowtalklater.com/
Eat Now; Talk Later is also a book about storytelling—and was written to encourage readers to collect their own stories.
I once took a New York City cab whose driver grew up with my mother. My father once gave a ride to an elderly woman while on business in Italy, only to discover that 60 years earlier, she’d been one of his father’s girlfriends.
People ask me, “Where does your family find these stories?
My response is: We don’t come up with them. We simply keep our eyes open in the same way a radar detects approaching planes.
There’s nothing special about this “radar” of ours. It isn’t a gift from the gods. Truth is, all humans have this radar system if they simply turned it on.
In our day-to-day existence, conversations, images, street scenes, and other information come at us all the time. For example, you observe the strange morning coffee routine of a work colleague, or overhear a conversation between a mother and her 3-year-old son at a supermarket. Yet how do we pluck out a good story amongst all that visual and audio white noise?
It’s easier than you think and you can find out why here: http://guiltlessreading.blogspot.com/2014/04/guest-post-dont-believe-youre-born.html
Book excerpt
ENdEI
My wife and I chose our son’s name, Luca, from a book of Italian names. It was very much unlike the American names our first-generation parents had given our siblings and us—James, Anne, Mark, or Jane.
I thought my grandparents, immigrant peasants who came to America in 1929, would be thrilled. I was wrong.
“Luca?” my grandmother, Desolina, asked. “Il suo nome è Luca?”
“Sí,” replied, beaming.
She looked at me as if we’d named him Benito (Mussolini).
“It’s an Italian name,” I said in defense.
She snapped her wrist, as if to flick the name from the apartment.
“Mi piace George!” my grandfather hollered from a couch, where he’d gone for a siesta after lunch. “I like George.”
“Un bel nome.” said Desolina, “A beautiful name.”
Were they kidding? These old folks came from families who gave their children beautiful, exotic names: Bartolomeo, Dirce, and Scholastica.
“Allora, si chiama Luca,” I said, with finality.
Desolina shook hear head, as if there was plenty of time to change the birth certificate. “Luca è un nome stupido,” she said.
Now I was angry. I asked her, peevishly, “What would you name him?”
She took a pen and napkin, wrote, and passed it to me.
It said “ENdEI.”
I read it several times. I couldn’t figure out what she’d written.
Like many girls, Desolina was pulled from school after third grade. Not only couldn’t she spell, but wrote with a mix of capital- and lower-case letters that reminded me of ransom notes cut from magazines.
“Endee?” I asked.
“ENdEI!” she said.
“Si, Endei,” my grandfather, Tony, said. He looked at us sideways, his head on a pillow. “Very good name.”
“Endee?” I asked. “No capisco.”
Desolina grabbed the napkin and underlined the word a few times, as if that would help, and passed it back.
“ENdEI!” she cried. In disgust, she tossed the pen at a plastic banana in the fruit bowl.
I shrugged.
Then my grandfather spoke with an inflection that helped me understand. “AN-Dei.”
“Andy?” I asked.
“Si!” they shouted.
“Andy…” I sighed.
“ENdEI,” Desolina said.
“Un bel nome,” Tony advised.
“I don’t like Andy,” I said.
“All right, then, George,” Desolina said.
I shook my head. “Luca is the boy’s name. Finito.”
I left the kitchen table to cool off. I was really irritated.
I might’ve known the name would be a problem. Luca’s older sister’s name is Alma. Tony and Desolina never got this straight. They kept calling her “Elma,” which is my mother’s name. They couldn’t comprehend how we could’ve chosen a name so close to “Elma” without naming Alma “Elma”.
As for Luca, though Desolina adored him, she never took to his name. Either she refused to accept it or, at the age of 91, with her shaky memory, kept forgetting it. Until the day she died she referred to him as “Il Boy.”
“Come sta Il Boy? How is the boy doing?” or “E molto intelligente, questo Boy.”
Author Website
http://www.eatnowtalklater.com
Best place to buy your book
http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Now-Talk-Later-Experience/dp/1491831480
