Winter 2019 Issue
OF TRAVEL & HOME
In the winter months, the street vendors of Rome, bundled against the chill, hawk roasted chestnuts. Their blunt, gravelly solicitations sound the same as the solicitat...
LAST BITE
Gourmet Dinners
From the time I was 7, our parents hosted gourmet dinners for friends at our house, the dining room transformed, a Japanese tea room, a Roman banquet hall, a Greek taverna. We kids got to stay downstairs only
long enough to taste one small bite—a cocktail meatball, maybe, or one tiny dumpling, and marvel at the way shag carpeting, the faux Tudor windows receded to make way for Chinese lanterns, Swiss fondue sets, Caribbean fruit boats and platters of shrimp.
There would be sticky drinks, exotic music on the stereo, our mom—dressed not in costume, exactly, but with a nod to the evening's theme, flower tucked over her ear or a tropical sarong shooed us up to our beds, where we’d listen to the clinks of glasses,
waves of laughter, lulled to sleep by wordless chitchat, hoping for leftovers, another bite of rumaki, perhaps, a bowl of fruit in strange shapes we could not name, a fortune cookie cracked open after school the next day, served with warm tea
in bone china cups, the ones without handles that made me want to be grown up, wear a flower over one ear; toss my head back with laughter, and have no bedtime in any country in this world.
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