Abuela Estela recounted how she had learned how to make homemade pasta from her mother and her mother’s mother in the old country, in a beautiful village that overlooked the Mediterranean. Being the eldest, she watched over and helped raise her four siblings.  She was a beauty and a coquette, and she told all of her various suitors she hadn’t made up her mind about them, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.

”Your grandfather eventually put his foot down,” she snickered in her Italian-lilted Castilian Spanish, “and since he seemed like a gentle, warm and loving soul (saintly, according to all those who knew him), I agreed to stick to just courting him.”

My maiden name and my grandfather’s name is D’Angelo, which means from the angels – so the name fits.

I lamented I did not remember him. I had emigrated at the age of three.  He had since passed on while I was innocently and naively growing up and apart from my entire extended family.  It suddenly dawned on me that news of tragedy, birth, and all events were occurring very far away from my reality.  Grief, joy and its aftermath were not experienced without my participation, nor was I learning how to be a part of it.  I observed alone and processed in a vacuum.

In her Italian-lilted Castilian, she interjected, “Did you lock the side door when you came in?  With the chain bolt?”

“Yes, yes, yes.  Go on about what happened with Abuelo,” I pleaded.

“More tomorrow. It’s time to sleep now.  We need to get up early and I will teach you how to make homemade pasta.  It’s your daddy’s favorite meal and you should know how to make it,” she concluded.

I settled in and was lulled peacefully into a gentle, lasting dream state where expectations of delicious strings of chewy fettuccini hung above my mouth.  I tilted my head back and welcomed the warm and tasty dripping sauce in first, anticipating the first bite of my Abuela Estela’s sublime homemade pasta.  Satisfied, content and at rest, I fell into a deeply profound and calming sleep.