day twenty-nine: steak and champagne

When my grandmother got married to my grandfather, it was a peanut wedding. "That's what we called all the Italian weddings in the neighborhood," she told me. "We'd carry trays of beef sandwiches through the crowds, and we were too poor to rent chairs so no one would sit for the entire reception." Before they left, the newlyweds stood at a receiving line. This was jut after the Depression, and when the they got home and opened the freshly licked cash envelopes, "Most people gave us one dollar, some two, a few four," my grandmother recalled, "but to save face lot of men put empty, unsigned enveloped in the receiving bag."

Things had partly been so bad when my grandmother was growing up in Chicago during the Depression because her dad was too proud to ask for help or stand in line at the food bank. "Every night, we'd get a cube of sliced bread with milk poured over it." It's amazing, that my mom and aunt, and then me and my cousins a generation later, came from her tiny body.