Tengo Familia

She's at least half a foot shorter than I am, slim and wiry. As I follow her through the empty, dim restaurant, I find myself tripping over my own feet as I attempt to keep up with her. As with every Italian I've ever met, her hands dart about as she speaks. Overall, I have the impression that I am following a bird as she flies about the restaurant.

She flips on lights, straightens table linens, tweaks a flower arrangement. She is excited, and I cannot help but catch her enthusiasm.

Breathlessly, she fills me in on the history of this old place - the brick walls, the well-worn floor boards, the panes of glass wavy with age. There are additions, of course - ninety-one years don't leave anything unchanged. There's a modern, slightly sterile banquet room ("People don't want your family photos and your decorations in their photos," she admonishes me). There's a new brick pizza oven, operated her nephew.

But there's so much more to this restaurant. So much more.

She darts to the fireplace, massive and hewn out of stone blocks the size of my head. The battered mantle bears tiny brass plaques, dedicated to the longtime patrons.

"So many marriages here - one couple came to our Memorial Day picnic, and the judge was here, and just like that, they decided to get married that day! With all of us as witnesses!" She crows with laughter.

Another jaunt across the restaurant, another memory.

"Table fourteen had an engagement here last night," she says as naturally as she might say that they had ordered a pizza bianca and a bottle of pinot grigio.

Two steps, and another memory.

"This was my grandmother's bedroom. There was a wall here, and my father slept in the next room," she says, straddling the invisible divide where her ancestry lies sleeping in some distant past.

The memories pile on, one on top of the next. It's a miracle that there is room for tables and chairs with all the memories jostling for space. I trip over my feet once more and land on another one.

"He slid the ring on a breadstick - we had hard ones then, in jars on the table, called crostini - because he knew that the first thing she did when she sat down at the table was reach for them," she laughs, "We were all crowded in the kitchen at the window in the door, watching!"

There have to be more marriage proposals, more romances, more love stories here per square foot than anywhere else for fifty miles. Whatever they're putting in the sauce, it must be working.

We talk for an hour, reliving the life, love and laughter that still echoes in these walls. She peppers me with questions too - where I grew up, how our families are connected (being here, of course they are), if I'm married myself, how long I've been writing. She tells me, in perfect Italian, what my family name means, asks me if I've ever been back to my ancestor's birthplace. She's been back to Tuscany many times, and when she and the family cannot go, the Tuscan relatives come here.

It's so much more than a restaurant - it's a way of life, a family legacy.

"More than any other business, dining is a celebration," she says, before landing me with such truly Italian wisdom that it might as well be the nation's motto.

"When the lord God himself, Jesus Christ, was alive, how did he decide to spend his last night on earth?" she asks, turning to me with a smile and spread hands, "He went out to dinner."

Her logic is irrefutable.

"There has been a lot of love that's come through those doors and into these walls over the past ninety-one years," she says. I'd say that's an understatement.

She calls me several days later, to check in and see if there's anything else I need for the story. She's talked with her brothers and sisters, scouring the family memory bank for any forgotten anecdotes. She invites me to come back again someday, not for reportage, but for dinner.

Usually I get irritated when someone calls me Annie - too many bad musical jokes, too much teasing as a kid. I can count on one had the number of people I allow to call me Annie, and at least three fingers are related to me.

By the time she hangs up, I'm Annie to her. And I find it doesn't bother me at all.