I’d like to start off by apologizing for the poor images, the camera on my phone is not the best.

I grew up in Long Island, a land of new-age house-clone developments and stuffy shopping malls. I struggled to keep up with every trend that passed through my middle school peers, from Undeebandz to customized Soffee shorts. I was a chubby girl with thick (and, admittedly, masculine) eyebrows that wanted to fit into the groups of popular skinny girls that sported a different Juicy tracksuit every day. These girls came from families of the upper upper middle class, that could afford buying into brand schemes. My parents just couldn’t keep up, and at the time, I selfishly hated them for it. There was a large concentration of Italian families in my neighborhood, and I felt that despite economic differences, one thing I had in common with these (now, as I see them, materialistic) popular kids was that I am Italian, too. This correlation ties into my “awkward” prepubescent years, a time in my life when I was consumed with entirely wrong values, as well as complete naiveté. I only cared about being Italian for ultimately futile reasons, such as fitting in with the In-Crowd.

For most of my childhood, both of my parents worked full-time in the city. My Dad would bring home all sorts of funny presents for me and my siblings, funny little odds and ends and doo-dads he would sweep up along the sides of tree-lined parks and greasy subways. One of my favorites was a heart sticker with a Beyonce-esque woman proclaiming through a speech bubble, “Put on your big girl panties and DEAL with it!” Another was a (printed) hand-painted portrait of Angelina Jolie, signed by the street artist, which still hangs in my room today. These objects would make me laugh, and then would eventually collect dust somewhere in the house. However, one object holds an explicitly visual memory of my experience, and has been taken care of and semi-worshipped through the years. One evening in August 2005, during the summer between  middle and high school, my dad was struggling to open my front door after coming home from work. I remember coming downstairs in a Metallica t-shirt, brushing my teeth, and seeing Dad struggling not to drop what was in his right hand. Shuffling under his arm were what looked like, through the glass abstracted door, two large brown rectangles. I rushed to the door, still brushing my teeth, and opened it for him. He came staggering inside and rested the two rectangles against the wall. I looked at them blankly, then back up at him, and said, while brushing, “Whaa ah dose?”

He simply put down his keys, and said, out of breath and sweating: “Ellis Island.” He then adjusted his collar, and looking duly ahead, disappeared into his office.

…Right.

I went upstairs, rinsed, Listerined, and went back downstairs to inspect what laid underneath the brown wrapping of these mysterious packages. What I found is one of the coolest primary documents I’ve encountered: a log of a number of passengers sailing from Naples on August 11th, 1920 upon the S.S. Providence. One of the last names from the bottom is Vincenzo Petrosino, my paternal grandfather that arrived in the United States at the age of fourteen. Unfortunately, I never met my grandfather, but this one strip of information on a seemingly mundane and even painfully meticulous travel document is the one splice of information I have on a man that single-handedly started his own fish restaurant in New York City and was able to support a family on this business alone – a business he built from the ground up.

What was communicated through my father’s prideful stories of the “fish business” is that my grandfather was obviously a high roller. However, one particular anecdote that made his memory even more enchanting was the fact that “He came to America with two dollars in his pocket!” What a marvel, starting with two dollars and ending up making a decent living! I must have heard this particular line two hundred times, between family dinners, beach-parties, and communion brunches. I looked at this travel document, and alas, my father came out of his office and pointed out the $2 scrawled upon the paper. I was amazed. My grandpa was someone that came to America and started everything, from the ground up.

I was proud of this fact, and I while I was definitely long past the years of wanting to be Italian just because it was a fad, I still caught myself wondering how I could be so stupid. It goes without saying that being a hard worker is not a primarily “Italian” trait. However, I can’t help but tie my Italian heritage in with my prideful family history. In some way, Grandpa Vincenzo even helped his granddaughter realize where true values really lie.