the Italian

We said our final au revoir to Maitre David yesterday. Jakob and Rittika were sobbing and moaning, clutching on to either side of his legs. They wouldn’t let him go, not even for me to give him a final proper hug – I had to side squeeze him, with a weeping child sandwiched between us. Hudson is known at school for being the only one who doesn’t cry. Even when he tripped over a tree root last week and skinned his knees sorely, not a tear or a whimper. "I'm fine, it was no big deal." No, he’s too manly to openly express pain already and this somewhat concerns me. Eric says it’s a good thing, that he’s a boy and that he’s tough and strong. 

The last day of school is always heartbreaking anyway, without having your favorite teacher move back to a remote village in Brittany, never to be seen again. The classroom had been stripped bare and the kids were sent home with cake-crusted lips from the afternoon party (I wasn’t kidding when I said the French like to party), and their arms loaded with different colored square French notebooks. Marion, the English teacher, had them journal for 30 minutes a day and I was impressed with Hudson’s ability to write a succinct paragraph and his overuse of the colon.

My favorite was an entry called “The Italian”.

My restaurant is called: the Italian. I want to be the owner. We will serve: pizza, pasta with pesto and cheese. The toppings for the pizza will be: mushrooms, pepironi, chesse, olive and garlic. The drinks are: Shirley temple, lemonade, vanilla shakes, and of course water. The toppings for pasta will be: chesse, butter, pesto and mushroom. Dessert: seven layers of chocolate (tiramiso).

Inspired by the good writing, we took him for a celebratory dinner at Sabatino's Lido Shipyard in Newport Beach. People will bear the Friday traffic on the 55 just for a taste of their house made sausage that is blended with a special Sicilian goat cheese. The long strand arrives on a flat iron skillet, squirming like a trapped snake, sizzling and curling piping hot. It smells sweet from the side of grilled onions and savory from the seasonings in the meat. I’ve never liked sausage, not even on my pizza, but this is the one and only place in the world where it will be my first choice. Hudson ate an entire one, along with an entire man pizza on his own.

We first came here with Eric’s Aunt Rosie years ago, before we had Hudson. She’s married to a well-respected divorce attorney and they live in Newport overlooking the back bay, in a house once owned by President Nixon. On our first married Christmas, Aunt Rosie had 20 shiny wrapped boxes of various goodies from the Home Shopping Network delivered to our door. This included essentials such as a telephone cord protectors, matching scenic Thomas Kincaide embroidered Bible covers, and an industrial size popcorn maker. That night before dinner at Sabatino's, she had given me a bottle of slightly used Bob Mackie perfume. “They don’t sell it anymore anywhere,” she explained as she handed me the glossy black box that was decorated with an art deco peacock tail in gold, pink and mint green. “I still have the box.” And indeed she did, along with the boxes to the hundred other perfumes that she had collected and displayed on her guest bathroom counter. It smelled musky sweet, like a rich woman from the 80s who would have worn furs to dinner parties. As she handed it to me, she said, “Never say I never gave you anything.”

         When Hudson was born, Aunt Rosie kindly sent us a huge box of Charlie Rocket outfits from a baby boutique on Balboa Island. She never had a child of her own and she told me she had so much fun shopping for such small items. And they were so tiny, newborn t-shirts that fit on my hand and of course they never made it over his head, because he was born the size of a watermelon. And now he’s already finished with the first grade, eating Sicilian man sausage, writing business plans about owning an Italian restaurant, using colons in his essays. Last summer when we went to visit my sister before Woo Lae Oak closed, she asked him, “What do you want to drink?” He replied, “What are my options?” All the clichés are too true: they grow up too fast. And if they’re only children, they grow up doubly fast.