I did not inherit the sauce pot. That hot item was passed on from Nonna, to my father who was the oldest of her seven children, to…my cousin. Within anthropology the idea of kinship, and through that, inheritance, is somewhat of a master category. Who you come from, and what they pass on to you is supposed to mean something.
For my family the sauce pot was an idol. My father grew up watching his mother run between her medical office in the basement of the home and the stove, stirring risotto. The story goes that she got it as a wedding present. It was $30—a hefty price in 1945. As she got older, and subsequently stopped cooking, it became a survival (in anthropology, something from the past that persists in the present).
My cousin became interested in cooking and learned from my Nonna. So the pot was passed through generation to generation imbued with kinship and continuity. When my dad gave her the sauce pot we all cried.
I wanted her brooch.
To me, Nonna was not a grandma stirring a pot of sauce over a hot stove. My Nonna felt a bit further away. She asked me how school was going and I would always say, “Good, Nonna. Straight As.” She would pat my arm twice. (I never got straight As, but I wish that I could tell her I have started a PhD. I got the news I’d been accepted into the program while sitting next to my father editing her eulogy. I can’t cook, but I can edit.)
It is vintage Christian Dior, two shining and interlocking braided golden circles.
Nonna was always a proponent of education because it was the only thing that couldn’t be taken away. She was one of the first women to graduate from Georgetown Medical School. My dad would tell me she would study right up until exams started. I love this image of her. In my head, her hair is messy and her glasses are maybe dirty, like mine.
She was not warm and fuzzy. She was loving, and caring, and thoughtful, and dutiful. She held us together through tradition and a sense of obligation to family. And this sentiment, although at times I have felt drowned by it, has saved me so many times. When I was ill in college and needed to move apartments my cousins came and moved everything for me while I was incapacitated. It’s what you do for family. When I needed legal advice, I could ask my uncle—because that’s what you do for family.
Three pearls meet at the confluence of the rings.
I didn’t really know my Nonna, but I know what she did for me and what she built and what she brought together and kept together. She wore this brooch a lot and I have memories of her in it. And now when I pin it to my shirt I think about kinship and how it keeps us all together.
—
Illustrated by Lara Schaberg
