Antoinette M.

I know I should probably be writing about healthcare reform today, but my mind has been on other things for the past few days.

March 19 was St. Joseph’s Day, a day that goes by unnoticed by most, but for Sicilian Catholics it’s a day of feasting and family. You’d be within your rights to ask, when it comes to Sicilians, what day isn’t about feasting and family. I promise you this day is way more about those things than at least 300 other days of the year.

St. Joseph is the patron saint of Sicily, so his influence over the Sicilian-American household is held in higher esteem than that of other saints. Growing up, my cousins and I would be picked up at school and brought to my grandmother’s house every March 19, where we’d all congregate like little ants to a picnic table, angling for Grammie’s fresh baked bread with anchovies and olive oil, various salads, and for a traditional pasta made with white beans and fennel that I only know as St. Joe’s Bista (Bista means pasta in Americanized Sicilian. Don’t ask; I don’t know the answer.), but probably has some other name that Mario Batali would slap my wrists for not knowing. There would always be such a whirlwind of activity: hellos, hugs, kisses, catch-ups, laughter, yelling (not out of anger, but out of heritage), praying, singing, eating; you were always left a little shocked when it all subsided in a blissful food coma that left my enormous family quietly waddling to the living room to recover.

I think of my grandmother every day since she passed away eight years ago, but March 19 holds particular poignancy for my family and me. St. Joseph’s Day was a holiday that we had complete ownership of and never had to compete for with any of the “medigani” sides of the family (A “medigani” is anyone who isn’t Italian). It was a day when my mother’s family took center focus in my life. Even as an adolescent who most days would have rather sulked in my bedroom, listening to the Smiths, reading Camus, or writing horrifyingly bad existentialist poetry, I knew it was a special day for my family, and I was uncharacteristically grateful for it.

These days my Uncle John and Aunt Sandi have taken over the annual St. Joseph’s Day celebration. Typically, they have a large group of us over the night before to make the pasta by hand. This year I didn’t get to go back home for St. Josephs’ Day, but ate a bowl of pasta in reverence and thought about my family, my Grammie in particular, all weekend.

Family was Grammie’s greatest love, but it was closely followed by food and music. As a young girl she enjoyed small-scale fame with her sisters, where they would yodel (yes, yodel) and sing country songs at community events.

As semi-musical progeny, she took interest in my passion for music and during the last years of her life, our musical tastes unexpectedly began to meld. She was an enormous fan of Emmylou Harris and I introduced her to some of my favorites: Gram Parsons, Lucinda Williams, and Gillian Welch, making my 80-year-old grandmother mix tapes during the last year of her life. Gillian Welch was her favorite. Words can’t express the beauty of—after decades of musical divergence—sitting on the side of your grandmother’s bed, holding her hand as you both listen raptly to a favorite musical artist you both adore equally.

Shortly after she died, I was introduced to one of Gillian Welch’s favorite musicians, and one Grammie would have loved. This is a song that reminds me of my grandmother and one that I would have loved to have played for her, written by Greg Brown about his grandmother and sung by his three daughters.

I can almost hear her humming along in heaven as she’s baking bread for all the saints up there. I hope St. Joe saves a roll or two for me.