Having Lunch with Nana and Papa

There’s a watermelon on the floor. I see it as I set down the bag of sandwiches. Nana rebuffs my offer to help set the table and gives directions on where everyone is supposed to sit. After I plead my case as to why the spot against the wall next to the floor fruit will be just fine—Nana goes over the side dishes. Silverware clanks against plates as she introduces tubs of macaroni salad, potato salad, coleslaw, and extra pickles. We sit in the corner of the kitchen, making small talk about the weather. The cuckoo clock ticks loudly across the room and the refrigerator is decorated with photographs of grandkids in various states of life from infancy to graduations to engagements to marriage and the birth of great-grandkids. I begin to explain why I’m here to interview them as our soda cans crack open. Before I can finish a sentence, though, I’m chastised for not using a straw—my grandmother not understanding how I can drink Diet Pepsi straight from the can. I start to explain again, noting that I’m recording our conversation.

Nana and Papa, 2011.

Awhile ago, I thought about what this website was and what it could be in the future. What were the things I wanted to write about, the subjects I wanted to photograph? I had the idea to do stories on “having lunch with” or “grabbing a beer with” certain people. It’d be a series on having conversations, documenting people at a particular place and time in their lives—to share who they are. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever launch that project, and I’m still not sure, but I knew that if I did—I wanted my grandparents to be first. 

So today, all I want to do is document a regular conversation with these folks. There’s no doubt that the three of us sitting here are all aware of mortality and truthfully, there was some guilt as to why I felt I wanted to make a record of a simple conversation with them. But as the scheduled lunch date approached, I felt that self-inflicted guilt subside. There’s no mysteries to unravel here, no questions I’ve been dying to ask. I see these people regularly. I know them. I love them. I don’t think I’d ever regret not having spent enough time with them, but still—I wanted to make today’s visit last longer then the usual “pop in” as it’s know in Seinfeld parlance (a reference Nana and Papa would easily understand). 

After I bungle through a shortened version of that explanation to them—Nana states that she has “nothing interesting,” to say, turning the conversation back to me. Papa enjoys his sandwich quietly as I answer the following questions: 

Q: What’s the latest with the virus? 

A: It’s important to wear masks and you guys don’t need to be going to Kroger and Walgreens.

Q: What’s the latest with work? 

A: Still working from home mostly. 

Q: What’s the latest with your life? 

A: They get an abridged version, I want to talk about them.

Q: Are you going to be around for the Fourth of July? 

A: An abridged answer again, not really sure how to explain the trip I had planned.

Apparently, I’m going to miss out on meeting my cousin’s new boyfriend. He just bought a house too. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but I’m not really interested in the real estate market of suburban Cincinnati. So, we turn to talking about family in Florida and the sole great-grandkid who’s about to be the big sister to a second great-grandkid. 

“Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?” I ask Nana. 

She doesn’t have a preference as we talk about kids and I remind her that she once left a voicemail instructing me that it was ok for my partner and I to have children before we were married—because I needed to ensure the family name carried on. She mishears me. 

“You’re starting‽” she exclaims excitedly. 

“Uh, no,” I reply, explaining that I was just referencing a humorous anecdote from a few months ago and not planning to have kids at this moment. Still, she doubles down on trying to hear about my life. I shift to the topic of masks and the coronavirus once again. 

“I tell ya, I’m old. I wear a mask, but I’m not like you,” she says with a New York accent that has persisted longer than her desire for me to have children. “If I get it, I get it. If I die, I die.” This isn’t morbid. This is just Nana. 

Nana, 2019.

Papa remains quiet, having said nothing this whole time while Nana references a family member back in New York who hasn’t left her house since February. She sees that as comparable to jail. Papa, lightening things up, asks Nana if she plans to finally take up swimming at the July 4th family gathering tomorrow. Thinking he’s serious, she fires back with how impractical that is. Why would she go swimming?

I go to a prepared question in hopes of getting a deeper discussion going. This question comes from journalism school, I explain. It’s an ice breaker, something fun and lighthearted to get an interview started. 

“If you were a super hero and could have one super power, what would it be?”

“No cancer in the world,” Nana fires back empathetically and emphatically. 

I back the question up, explaining that it’s more of a “fun question” and people usually choose things like “super strength” or “x-ray vision.”

She sticks with the good natured ‘no cancer’ choice and I dub her super power as “the ability to eliminate cancer from anybody.” 

Papa chooses “permanent good eyesight” and Nana adds: “I should’ve said that.” 

That power would’ve helped us all locate the spoons for the side dishes earlier.

“To be able to fly” is my answer, but Nana labels this as “silly” and we enter into a long conversation about airlines, her explaining that the first time she flew was an international flight with her sons to join Papa who was working in Holland. 

The now retired, once world traveling engineer begins to open up and tell stories of taking a 747 to Indonesia from San Francisco via Hong Kong. I explain that I’m taking a flight soon, a hard choice to make amongst the pandemic—how I plan to be as safe as possible and won’t be able to see them for awhile when I get back. Nana sneezes and apologizes. I tell her I’m not worried about getting the virus from them, but giving it to them—that the virus is still a very real threat. “Next question,” Nana says, putting the impromptu interview format back on track. 

I go into a story about how at all the weddings I’ve photographed, from trailer parks to country clubs, there’d be a dance. Married couples had to take the dance floor and every few seconds the wedding DJ would start calling out years. If a couple hadn’t been married as long as the year announced, they had to leave the dance floor. Eventually, everyone would be eliminated except for the longest tenured pair—generally an adorable older couple whom everyone smiles at while swigging open bar booze. The DJ will then ask the winners to share their best advice for fostering such a longterm relationship.

“I hate it,” says Nana. “You forgot, Papa and I were the last ones at [my sister’s] wedding.” 

I don’t remember this, but before I can say that, Nana’s already done the math and told me she knows they won’t win at my other sister’s upcoming wedding—the groom’s grandparents have her and Papa beat. Still, I ask: what did they say, what was their advice? 

“I don’t know,” says Nana.

“I don’t even remember what answer I officially...” Papa begins to say before Nana cuts him off with: “Patience,” as Papa patiently lets the interruption slide.

They laugh when I refer to myself as “cynical” and point out that every time I come across this dance tradition, the answer is: “never go to bed angry,” that every well-meaning, wonderful older couple at a wedding somehow gives the same advice. So I ask them, if they were at a wedding at this moment, what would they say?

Papa speaks up and offers some defense of the “never go to bed angry” trope, albeit with more nuance: he says it’s ok to be mad at the world at the end of the day, but not your partner. Despite Nana interrupting him again, he highlights that the answer can change over the years, stating: “bottom line, whichever way you play it out, I think the answer is to care for each other.” 

Papa, 2014. 

Nana, laughing, cuts in to share an old adage: “You know when you’re first married and you fall, you say: ‘honey, did you hurt yourself?’ After you’re married 20, 30 years, you fall, and you hear: ‘you’re so clumsy!’”

I ask to make a photograph of the two of them and explain that even though I’m shooting digitally at the moment, I still take multiple photographs and always add an extra shot even after I’ve looked at the LCD screen and am happy with what I have—a habit learned from Papa’s family photos when he’d take “just one more” during holidays.

Nana asks what I’m writing in my notebook after I put the camera away. I say I’m making a note about the watermelon sitting on the tile floor. Apparently there’s no room in either refrigerator, so it’s sitting by an A/C vent to stay cool. 

This leads to a lengthy discussion about the importance of notes. Papa had emerged from college as a note taking, commissioned Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. By contrast, I emerged from college as a note scribbling amusement park middle-manager. 

Nana takes care to ask us multiple times if we’ve had enough of the side dishes. If it weren’t for the conversation going, there'd likely be a round of cookies from a tin and peanut M&Ms offered for dessert.

I ask Papa how he’s been feeling and he walks around the question with the same answer that seems to come every time: a muffled response about "good days" and "bad days." Ultimately, he leads us back to the discussion on note taking.

The phone rings loudly and a robot voice proclaims who it is. Despite knowing it’s probably a scam call, Nana answers and offers two “hellos” before she hangs up. Which is good, one time some scammers tried to convince them my cousin was in jail for a DUI and needed bail money. Michael, however, is a well-behaved adult. 

Papa begins talking more, especially as we discuss a book about the history of the atomic bomb. Like Nana, his New York accent still shines, especially when he speaks of “Manhattan”—explaining to her that it was just the code name of the secret weapons project, not the location where the bomb was manufactured. 

Our chat on history allows me to lead them into talking about their own past—growing up and meeting in New York. Nana continually references “home” as “The Bronx,” not the greater-city. She had been working at a bank, a bookkeeper for Manufacturers Trust when her coworker set her up on a blind date with a boy who had also attended Evander Childs High School.

“I was blind,” jokes Papa. 

Nana laughs and says he was a “big shot” in high school. She tells the story that when he came to pick her up for the date, her mother wasn’t concerned so long as his arrival wouldn’t make her late for bingo. Meanwhile, her brother was skeptical. She added that later, her grocery-store owning father couldn’t have been happier to have a son-in-law who had graduated college. 

I ask Papa how he knew wanted to marry Nana. He raises his arms up while talking about the family’s approval: “I was trapped,” he says laughing, before adding with a soft smile: “Once I went out with her, that was it.”

Despite the heartwarming story, some bickering breaks out over the timeline that follows—when Papa was away for what. As a company commander within an engineering battalion of the 77th Infantry Division, there were times where his reserve duty would be extended due to the unit’s “combat ready” stance and Cold War tensions developing overseas. Exactly when these incidents occurred, we never really settle on an answer, except for the time that their first child, my Uncle Bob, was born. Papa was home from active duty and not allowed into the delivery room. After Nana had spent 12 hours in labor, the doctor went to tell Papa the good news, but he was enjoying a ham sandwich at the diner across the street. He eventually got to meet his firstborn before having to return to the military where Nana says he wrote constantly, asking how his “bundle of joy” was doing. 

“I wish I could give him to you,” Nana jokingly says, recalling how she wrote back as a new mother. 

I ask Papa how he got into photography, because it was the influence of him and his sons that got me into it—a hobby I eventually turned into a career. He tells me how his father gave him a camera for Christmas and he became the go-to family member who was now in charge of documenting moments. Even when I was a kid, he was still the guy who took that upon himself—many of his classic 35mm cameras now belonging to me.

We get to talking about those various cameras and the boxes of slides in the basement. Nana offers up that the childhood photographs of my dad are “so cute,” but that she doesn’t like looking through the slides, because they make her sad on account of my Uncle Bob having passed away from Multiple Myeloma in 2014. 

I ask if I can look at their wedding photographs once again—these really amazing color photos that get inserted into a big plastic viewer so that you can see them via a vintage 3D effect. While I unsuccessfully search the basement for the device, I leave the recorder on and later hear that they were still bickering over the timeline of Papa’s military service. 

The stereo photograph viewer I was looking for, as seen in 2015.

The phones of the house ring loudly again, but this time the robot voice is ignored as I ask them what their favorite place to live has been over the years. They had started in New York, moved to Holland, went back to New York, then to Texas, and eventually Cincinnati—all with Papa having originally being born in Italy. Nana is quick to say Long Island, where she had a home with her three young sons and husband. Papa states Cincinnati. I’m surprised by this—but probably due to projecting my own, ever growing skeptical views on a place I’ve always known as home.

Papa had arrived in New York in 1946 via Pier 59 at the age of 12, eventually taking the name of Vincent instead of Vincenzo. He had lived through fascist Italy and Nazi occupation alongside his family while his father was over here in the United States, separated by global conflict. After a career with the United States Army, the Italian Army sent him a letter in 1967. He had missed his compulsory service. He recalls the story with a laugh, still wondering how they managed to find his correct mailing address after all those years and how they never wrote back once he informed them of his U.S. Army career. 

After he agrees to let me use his real name in this story, not worried about the Esercito Italiano still looking for him, I realize that I need to get going. I apologize to them both that we don’t have time to play cards, but there’ll be an opportunity for that in the future. Probably over lunch, after making plans via multiple phone calls to negotiate what food we’ll be ordering—another chance for conversation and more stories.

Wedding photo seen through the stereo viewer in 2015.

Update | Sept. 29, 2022:

• My grandfather, Vincent Salerno, passed away in the fall of 2022.