Franny and Antoinette

This is my little house in South Philadelphia. A little shorter, with fewer trees (a very bizarre south philly phenomenon), and infinitely more familial than what I'm used to back in my native New York.

In complete opposition of over-developed, forever in flux Manhattan, home-grown South Philadelphians OWN South Philly. Each street belongs to a different family, whose roots in the neighborhood often go back to its development in the late 1800s. My next door neighbors, Franny and Antoinette, are a typical example. The rundown goes like this: Franny and Antoinette are sisters, both were born (literally) and raised in their house, which their father moved into around the turn of the last century. They have a cousin and two nieces who live on the block, one of which runs our corner store which has been family-owned and operated for as long as anyone can remember. They have a nephew who lives with his girlfriend down the street a block away. Franny actually lives around the corner now, but since Antoinette's health has gone down hill - she is now housebound - they pretty much live together. My house belonged to their godfather, who lived there till he passed away about 8 years ago. His blood relatives are equally dominant on the street. They are (almost comically) totally classic Italian-American, and have become my surrogate grandmothers, completely stereotypical in their nagging and guilt-tripping, and also in the amazing culinary and domestic traditions they have shared with me.

Whenever Franny sees me coming home tired and hungry from a long day at work, she says something along the lines of "Lauren, you're coming home? This late? It's a sin I tell you, a sin." Then Antoinette will come to the door and say "Lauren, you're working too hard. You're never home. You gotta take care of yourself honey." Then Franny will go into her usual monologue about the little kids on the street being too loud, how they don't listen, how kids today don't know any discipline, etc. etc. Antoinette, who can swear like a sailor if she's in the right mood, will chime in, and inevitably they go into a history of all the people who have come and gone on the street, which ones were the biggest assholes, how much the neighborhood has changed, what it was like in "their time"... meanwhile I'm still standing outside, exhausted, and starving (their speeches seem to go on the longest especially when I'm also carrying a lot of stuff). This can go on for half an hour. Really. Eventually one of them will tell the other to stop and let me go home, which is a cue to the other to bark at the first for being rude, and I'm instead invited in for dinner. Usually it's fresh pasta from a local shop and some kind of sauce that Franny has been laboring over - a fact always emphasized - all day. There's some kind of green and meat too, making for a full dinner. We sit, we eat, and also in classic Italian grandmother style, one meal per sitting is never enough, and of course rejecting food in this situation is taken as an extreme insult. They make me a sandwich, they bring out cookies, miraculously a cake emerges form the fridge, and suddenly I've been at the house for four hours, over the course of which I'll hear their gorgeously intimate and nuanced history of 100 years on McClellan street.

I never got a chance to develop a close relationship to any of my biological grandparents, and have always said that I would love more than anything to have a big Italian family. When I was 12 we took a family trip to Italy to visit my mother's cousin and her Italian husband. On one of our last nights, we attended a big dinner of their neighbors and relatives - I don't remember which guests were which, nor do I think the distinction mattered. At a table of perhaps 15, there were two women in their 90s, a baby, and every age in between; there were four generations in all, each sharing in this moment of each of their lives, all sharing the same food, the same stories, embracing their generational differences and developing even stronger bonds because of them. I remember being incredibly moved by the experience, and left in complete awe of all that this family must be able to share with each other simply by keeping those ties to personal history intact.

Being American implicitly prevents one from having such deep bonds to generational histories, and the - very American - exodus to and from cities only makes those cuts deeper. We scatter, we flee, we are a society born of the mind set that things are going to be better over there. We see our bonds as shackles, and remain obsessed with the pursuit of a new frontier, the romance of a great beyond. We don't know how to connect and be content with the people and things around us, and how can we when we have built so much since abandoning our roots.

Instead, we develop our own families and must fill in the blanks for our own histories. While 100 years of McClellan Street is impressive and a rare treat, I can only imagine what must have come before.