I was well into adulthood before I realized that I was considered an American, albeit by the United States Census bureau. People like me and my mother, who are born here, as my father wasn’t, are listed on the roster as, “First Generation Foreign White Stock.”

Yes, I was born here, in America, and grew up living alternately in Manhattan, New York and Seymour, Connecticut, on my immigrant grandparents’ farm, for the first formative sixteen years of my life. But somehow it never occurred to me that just being a citizen of the United States meant I was an American. To me Americans were people who ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on mushy white bread that came out of plastic packages. I ate peppers and eggs or eggplant sandwiches on Italian bread that was baked fresh everyday by five in the morning. I was Sicilian.

For me, as I am sure it was for both first and second generation Sicilian-American children who grew up in cultural isolation in the 30’s and 40’s and whose grandparents, along with their children, brought up their broods in the strict island culture of their forefathers, there was a definite distinction drawn between us and them. We were Sicilians and everybody else was not. I don’t recall ever giving that a thought except that those “others” were just “them” and we were “us”. To reinforce that notion was all the Sicilian Americans who were then making their way in the world in highly visible fields and proving to us that our way of life was the better way.

For instance, among us we had, a milkman, a coal man, an iceman, a fish, man, a fruit and vegetable man, a watermelon man, an egg and cheese man, a man who repaired our umbrellas and clotheslines and a man who sharpened our knives and scissors and came to our homes to service us. (To this day I miss that way of life) We would anxiously wait for their call, their hawking their individual wares. We knew them all, and they knew us.

Americans went to the store for most of their food. They never knew the pleasure of waking up every morning to find a hot crisp loaf of Italian bread waiting for them on the table. And instead of being able to climb up on the back of the peddlers truck a couple of times a week, as we did to watch our parents go through the haggling of buying, “those others” had to be satisfied with going to the A and P Market. And when it came to food, it always amazed me that Americans only ate turkey at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Or rather that they only ate turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Now, we also had all of the above, but only after we had finished the antipasto, soup, lasagna, meatballs, and whatever else Grandma thought might be appropriate for that particular holiday. Our turkey was usually accompanied by a roast of some kind (just in case somebody walked in who didn’t like turkey) and was followed by an assortment of fruits, nuts, pastries, cakes and of course homemade cookies. No holiday was complete for us without some home baking, none of that store-bought stuff for us! This is where you learned to eat a seven-course meal between noon and seven P.M., how to handle hot chestnuts and put tangerine wedges in red wine. Sicilians are living proof that a culture lives a romance with food.

And speaking of food, Sunday was the big day of the week! That was the day you woke up to the smell of garlic and onions frying in olive oil. As you lay in bed, you could hear the hiss as tomatoes were dropped into a pan. On Sunday’s we always had tomato sauce and pasta, and Sunday would not be Sunday without going to Mass. Of course, you couldn’t eat before mass because you had to fast before receiving Communion. But the good part was we knew when we got home, we would find hot meatballs frying, and nothing tastes better than newly fried meatballs and crisp bread dipped into a pot of sauce.

There was another difference between them and us. We had gardens in the summertime. Not just flower gardens, but huge gardens where we grew tomatoes, tomatoes, and more tomatoes along with peppers, basil, lettuce and squash and other vegetables that were common in our cuisine. We cooked them, ate them and jarred them. And of course, we also had the mandatory grapevine and fig tree and in the fall, everybody made homemade wine, lots of it. And of course, those gardens thrived so because we also had something else it seemed those “others” didn’t. We had a grandfather! It really wasn’t that they didn’t have grandfathers so much as it was just that they didn’t live in the same house or on the same block as ours did. They had to visit their grandfathers while we always had one in residence and God forbid our punishment if we didn’t kiss him when first entering his presence or leaving it no matter how many times a day that occurred.

My fondest memories of that man is him telling me, over and over, how he came to America as a young man on a boat, settling in New York, a harsher climate, just because he felt that reaching the shores of America was enough for him; his dream had come to fruition. How he settled in a city apartment, away from the farming life he had loved and had left behind, until he could save up enough money from being a dock laborer to buy a farm away from the city. Once he did that he said he hated leaving the premises for fear someone would come and take it away as the land baron Mafiosi had done in Sicily making the peasants land slaves for their own riches.

I also carry with me, and will possibly carry with me into my grave, the holidays when all the relatives and friends, those who lived on the premises as well as those in the immediate area and as far away as New York city, would travel to my grandparents house and be welcomed with music, tables full of food and homemade wine. Holidays were boisterous affairs as there were kids, kids, everywhere. I must have a million cousins, first and second and some who aren’t even related, but what did it matter. Overseer to these events were my grandfather, with his gallon jug of wine beside his chair, sitting there in the middle of it all, grinning his mischievous smile, his eyes twinkling, surveying his domain. His ride on how well his children had done showed in every puff he drew from the pipe he had made years before as a young man out of a corncob! He died with it still in his shirt pocket.

But despite my grandfather achieving his goal in coming to America and building a successful life for himself and installing a springboard from which his children would vault into the future, times changed, albeit slowly at first, with the advent of the Second World War. Tragedy, in the form of loss lives of so many of our men struck us to our core. Where I couldn’t before, today I see that catastrophic period in our cultural lives as an understandable result of those times. Of course, that doesn’t mean that a hole doesn’t still burn in my heart and that a void still exists in my soul for those times and those people that are a staying power of my make up and which make me, me.

Lots of other things have changed too. The quantity of food we once consumed at one sitting without any ill effects is not good for us anymore. Too much starch, too many calories, too much cholesterol and so no one bothers to bake anymore. We claim to be too busy to do that and, besides, it’s so much easier to buy ready made what we need now. My grandfathers old house is now covered with aluminum siding and rented out to strangers, the garden and the farm animals are gone, the last of the homemade wine had long since been drunk and nobody covers the fig tree in the fall anymore. Occasionally we far flung members of that family unit do make the rounds on holidays but now we visit the cemetery more than we visit each other.

As a lot of my people are there, grandparents, aunts and uncles, a few cousins and even my own father and mother, perhaps we do that to try to recapture and relive that part of our past.

My parents and my grandparents were Sicilian-Sicilians as were their people ten generations before them. I am Sicilian-American, my daughter, while born of the same stock is American-American, as her son is. Oh, they are Americans all right, and proud of it, just as my grandfather would have wanted us all to be. But somehow, by their own admissions, they feel and live in today’s world as Sicilians.

Call it culture, call it tradition or call it roots. Even I’m not sure what it is. All I know is that my children have been cheated out of a wonderful piece of heritage. They never knew my grandparents and could only get remnants of them and what they stood for second hand from me.