spaghetti [spuh-get-ee]

1

      My father's side of the family comes from northern Italy, so, yes, we speak pasta. We drop the "i's" off the ends of pasta labels. Rotelli is "rotell." Rigatoni is "rigaton." Ditalini, "ditalin."And don't you dare call a good ziti a box of noodles. My father will swear that the shape of a piece of pasta affects its flavor.

     My grandfather, you see, was a butcher. Carmine Paganelli, when I knew him, had a thatch of pepper hair and a thick Jersey accent, and knew damn well how to slice a ham. I would skip into the deli, blonde cowlick tufted on my four year old head, and hug him around his belly.

     I would beg Grandpa to take me to the pasta machine. Take a second: think back to your Play-doh set. You had the cookie cutters and the play knives, maybe a Sesame Street mold of Cookie Monster. Did you have a pasta maker? It looked a little like a cheese grater, rows of holes made to push the dough through, creating long spaghetti-like squiggles.

      This is much like the machine my grandfather used to make pasta, except his had a handle to crank. He pushed the pasta dough through the machine right into my eager hands. I gobbled it up, the warm dough soft and a little sweet to the taste.

2

      It's dinnertime I miss the most when I'm not home. The food? Well, of course. Every college student misses that. But even more, I miss the quirky conversation and the way my father looks at my mother, with I-love-you-to-the-moon-and-back eyes. My mother and sister demonstrate the yoga poses they've learned in between bites of soup. My father shows us the Heimlich maneuver on an imaginary dummy (somehow, that always seems to happen on steak night). We talk sci-fi TV or funny people we know or the way we were as children. We step out of days rife with work and school and busyness. We step into a space where we don't look at the clock, just at our plates and one other, and maybe in the spice cabinet for a little salt or oregano.