If I'm Hungry Am I Home?
Where you're "from" might be a multi-course menu
“So where are you from?”
Question posed by an Italian to a friend of mine, an Italian jazz singer of Nigerian parents, during her set break at a club in Trastevere.
“I’m from Naples,” native Neapolitan accent.
“But where are you from?”
“I was born and raised in Naples. Where are you from?”
No snark, just returning the question that Black Italians get every day.
Current events prompt thoughts on from-ness, and home, and what it means to be home—especially for immigrants like me.
The first is The Odyssey, that new epic film of Homer’s even more epic poem, in which our ancient Greek hero ping-pongs across the Mediterranean trying to get home, surmounting obstacles set forth by a pissed-off Poseidon (it’s complicated), only to find that home after many years isn’t quite how he left it.
The second is the World Cup which concludes today.
A couple of weeks ago, a former far-right prime minster of Spain complained the French team “does not have any French players,” a barely veiled (as in open lace) reference to their skin color. Beyond the fact that all World Cup players must be citizens[1] of the countries they play for, all but three of France’s 26-man squad were born in France—and two of those three were born in England and Italy.
But what is home for an elite soccer athlete? Wherever he parks his Maserati?
Take Folarin Balogun, the U.S. striker whose controversial red card was withdrawn after Trump controversially intervened, allowing him to play (and lose) against Belgium. He was born accidentally in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents after an airline refused to let his mother board a flight back to their home in London due to her late-stage pregnancy. He spent all of two months in New York, then grew up in London. Thanks to birthright citizenship, Balogun is an American citizen and thus eligible for the U.S. team. He could have played for England, but on that deep squad he would have been a bench player; the U.S. offered him a lead role. Smart play. He says he is proud to be American, but I’m pretty sure when Balogun thinks of home, he thinks of East London.
Hemingway wrote “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
He could have said East London, or maybe Brixton or…anywhere. But the point is the feast because food so often defines home, as in “comfort food.” By that standard I feel at home in Paris, eating confit de canard at a certain bistro in the Marais. “Meet us at Au Petit Fer à Cheval,” said my friend and former news colleague, the Danish novelist Christian Moerk who now calls Paris home. His neighborhood bistro on the Rue Vielle du Temple, a street lined with bistros—nothing special just a place where they don’t fuck up the basics and serve locals and tourists alike with efficient grace. That was five years ago. Now it’s my home away from home in Paris.
My other moveable feasts include Maine, where I got married and lived for 20 years and raised two kids plus chickens, ducks and pigs and made good cider and bad wine from my own apples and grapes. Where I can still dredge up buckets of oysters in fuck-all cold November water totally free with my friend Russell Kaye who is a national magazine photographer but maybe an even better cook who splits those jumbo oysters and roasts them over apple wood with Hollandaise and chili oil.
New York always feels like home having lived there for much of my adult life although the current version barely resembles the one I knew. The most moveable of Manhattan feasts is literally that—my beloved kraut dog from a rolling metal street cart, lunch on countless days rushing between classes, plucked with a fork from a tankard of greasy hot water, sliced down the center to make a canoe for the sauerkraut, mustard only please and if anyone asks for ketchup we’re gonna have to kill all these people. The hot dog cart came (like the current president’s paternal grandparents) from Germany in the 19th century but now the vendors, endangered, come from all over the world. Read a great story about them here.
Less mobile but of equal homey comfort: a sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich from a Midtown corner deli, watching the Mexican guy work the grill (Qué tal amigo?), shmushing those patties under his sausage shmusher (technical term, of Yiddish or ancient Mayan origin), cracking the eggs (wreck ’em please, no runny yolks it’s a sandwich takeaway not brunch with your mom), slapping on the orange cheese, fold it all together on a bun like cotton candy and hand it over in a foil wrapper with a wink, total relax, making it look like it’s easy to juggle 40 of those on the grill, a line of a New Yorkers hungry and all eyes, who missed the A train because they shampooed twice and had to take the fucking C local and are late to the office. I’m home.
Rome is an easy place for immigrants to feel at home because they’ve been coming for millennia including emperors like Hadrian (Spain) and Septimus Severus (North Africa) and 50 popes not even counting the non-Roman Italian ones.[2] Those enveloping arms of Bernini’s colonnade around the Piazza San Pietro are justly described as welcoming all to the church of Saint Peter (he from the Sea of Galilee), but they could as well stand in for the larger metropolis. Buried in the Protestant cemetery are Keats and Shelley.
“Why do I live in Rome?”
Question posed by Gore Vidal in the 1972 Fellini film Roma, a cameo filmed at the outdoor table of a trattoria. Nearby, in his apartment above the Feltrinelli bookshop and the pre-Augustan temple remains on Largo Argentina, Vidal wrote the historical novel Julian (about a late Roman emperor) and much of the screenplay for Ben-Hur.
“You could say I live here because the Romans don’t care if you live or die. They’re neutral, like cats.”
Arriving any day now is my first grandchild, down in Calabria. She will be American and Italian at birth. Maybe someday she’ll play for Italy in the women’s World Cup. Or America. Or somewhere else she decides to be from.
[1] Technically “nationals” according to FIFA which usually but not always equals full citizenship.
[2] It’s not known how many popes were native Romans; the last was Pius XII (1939-1958).
Lovely. You’ve nailed something special, in a meaningful way. My family moved six times before I left for college, and at least that many times in the years following. #s 2 & 4 were the Long Island north shore town of Port Washington, ages 3 to 10 and 13 to 15, and I still have friends from those times, as well as from Freeport, on the south shore, ages 11 to 14. The song says “anywhere I hang my hat is home,” and the other song says “darlin’ be home soon,” and the other is. “I can’t find my way home.” All of them meaning home is not a location, it’s where the heart resides.
You should come home for a few on the half shell or I'll meet you in the Marais for duck - give our hugs to the bambino...congrats!