A story for the Zeccardi’s and Williams children.
You need to know the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain funny about your ancestors. So here’s a bit of that history that makes me laugh whenever I remember it. And it’s about your great-grandfather, Joe Zeccardi.
Now I know there are a lot of Joe Zeccardi’s in our family but you can’t blame your great-grandfather Joe for this sometimes confusing naming of everyone with that first name. Ask your great-cousin Louie about that.
It was started by Giuseppe, your great-great grandfather. Anyhow, Giuseppe translates as Joseph in English through some strange metamorphosis. And so in our family we have lots and lots of Joe’s.
Now to the story.
So there was a time when your great-aunt Toni was young. Yep. We all were once. She was married to a man named Bill. Your great-aunt Toni was the first of us to grow up and try to be an adult. She was married, had a child, a house – all those grown up things the rest of the cousins hadn’t achieved yet. And one Sunday, she invited all the relatives over to her home for dinner.
This was very special as no one in our generation yet had the guts to feed the family given the expertise in cooking that radiated from both male and female relatives. In order to avoid any comparisons between her Sunday pasta sauce and what we all ate at home, she and Bill decided to cook a Chinese dinner. They worked for days so that everything was homemade and perfect – ribs, fried rice, dumplings. So good. You would think.
Fast forward to the ride home. There is a whole group of us in the vehicle together because this was what I refer to as their van phase. Your great-grandpop had a van and everyone thought it was the best thing in the world. The whole family could pile in and take trips together. This is why I was riding home with them listening to your great-grandpop complain all the way to Glenside that he had Chinese “agita”. I remember him asking your great-grandmom to pass him Tums from the glove compartment. He ate them all the way home. And when he got home, he wanted dinner.
Yes, boys and girls. You come from a very strange family. We love to eat. And we accept Italian agita gladly if it means eating what we love. But give some of us Chinese food – no matter how long it took you to make and how lovingly you made it – and here comes Chinese agita. And that was simply not acceptable to great-grandpop Joe Zeccardi.
Oh yeah, and he insisted you not go barefoot around the house. We all ignored that.
