In my house, we have a tradition of ordering pizza on Friday nights. It just makes life easier after a long week. There’s one pizza place a few minutes away that we usually order from. Most of the time we have it delivered, but this one time I had a couple errands to run before dinner, so I wound up going into the pizza place to pick up the order.
But I wound up getting there early and our pizza wasn’t ready yet. I was the only customer in the shop, so the owner – who’s from Italy, and who knows my last name from our phone orders – he started talking to me about the fact that I’m one hundred percent Italian. He asked, “You ever been there?”
I said “The Old Country”, which is something you’d hear first-generation immigrants say when they were referring to a land they recently emigrated from. Not me, talking about a place I’d never been – and using the term on a guy who’d lived there for all of his life until recently.
I wasn’t totally sure if “there” meant “Italy,” so I was about ask him, “Do you mean ‘Italy’?” But I suddenly felt ashamed that I was in my forties and had never been to the one country all my ancestors came from. At that moment, it didn’t feel right to say the word “Italy” - it would have been too obvious. It’s like when people live close to a city like New York but they never say, “I’m going to New York today!” That would be way too on the nose. Instead, they sidestep the proper name of the place and say, “I’m going to the city” which sounds much hipper.
So all this was running through my head, when I second-guessed myself at the last second and said, “You mean... the Old Country?” I said “The Old Country”, which is something you’d hear first-generation immigrants say when they were referring to a land they recently emigrated from. Not me, talking about a place I’d never been – and using the term on a guy who’d lived there for all of his life until recently.
I felt instant regret. The pizza shop owner gave me look of pity and said, “...yeah... ‘The Old Country’.” I knew he’d lost all respect for me. I could tell he was saying it in quotes.
It took a lot of deliveries to dilute that faux pax enough so that I could show my face in there again.
