To this day, my European parents care little about American culture in general. The message they sent to my sister and I a long time ago without saying it was they didn't care what others thought and lived on their own terms. And they still do.
An example of their own terms was what they watched on television. Aside from The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite, they only watched PBS: Masterpiece Theater, Upstairs Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and Butterflies.
While my parents sneered at our neighbors for conforming to American materialism, my sister and I coveted their homes and lifestyles: an underground pool in the backyard, a barbecue on the back porch, color tv, cable, new cars, and soda in the fridge. There were so many brands of food in the kitchen it made my head spin. They played music in their homes that were not only in English but recognizable from my AM transistor radio. I wanted to be adopted by one of these families.
They were mostly Italian-Americans with little if any connection to their country of origin. They went to the local movie theater to see a James Bond film while my Dad took my sister and I to silent films by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton at the local library and then foreign films with subtitles at the local community cinema.
Being European, my parents have an air of formality in how they socialize. They believe if you invite someone to your home, the guests should return the favor of having you over their house. More often than not when they invited someone over, they would not get a return invitation.
When I graduated from this cave-life, I thought assimilating into mainstream culture would be a smooth transition. I welcomed brands, tv ads, cable tv and anything else I thought I was deprived. What I didn't realize was how my parents affected how I spoke. They hardly used any slang in the house and sometimes would get the pronunciation of words wrong when they read a word they hadn't heard yet.
As a result, I became an accidental comedian.
It first started with the word chocolate. All of the kids in my neighborhood thought it was funny to say it as "CHOCK-let" rather than "CHAWK-lit." Shrieks of laughter came from high school classmates when they heard me pronounce the store Fortunoff as "For-TUNE-off" the way my parents would say it at home. Another word was the Long Island town of Hauppague (pronounced Haw-PAAG) that I pronounced as "Hoe-PAAG" and buffet sounded like "BOO-fay." To this day my parents continue to mispronounce these words no matter how many times I've tried correcting them.
On the flip side to these mispronunciations, my parents never spoke any slang. I picked up as much as I could from kids in the neighborhood and in school but not everything.
Too many times I've made the mistake of inquiring what someone was talking about when they used common expression I hadn't heard under my parents' roof - "pleased as punch" and "loosey-goosey."
"You grew up in a cave," my wife would tell me when we were dating.
As much as I want to pretend this part of my life never happened, it gives me a perspective about America I would not have developed on my own. Rather than practice what Mom and Dad preached, I prefer to use their values as a theoretical framework just as I have others from my life experiences.
As a Dad, I can see what my parents were trying to do with my sister and me. They wanted us to follow the map they had drawn based on their European infuence. But it did not match the territory we lived in.
