I wish I could step back in time once again to be absorbed in these wonderful, huge family dinners when all my relatives on my father's side sat at long tables in the side yard on a Sunday afternoon and ate the scrumptious ethnic dishes my grandmother cooked by herself. We would invite the priest of our local church that was just around the corner to dinner every Sunday. After we stuffed our tummies with all the wonderful kibbee and koosa and tabouleh, cabbage rolls, etc., we would go to another house down the street to talk and talk and sometimes we would dance to the accordion polka music that my uncle's father-in-law Pa Zelenkiwicz would play. Every relative and friend lived on the same street so it was so easy to be together. Then after dark on those warm summer nights we cousins would leave behind the adults to their own entertainment and we would walk around uptown and talk about important things that teenagers talk about and we would visit some of the shut-in older people that we knew and sit on their front porches and they would give us candy and we would talk about our ambitions and what our lives were going to be like when we grew up. The older people were always interested and never judged..they loved to hear what was important to the young people and listened intently at how we were going to "change the world". When we got back to our grandparents' house another real treat would be waiting for us that we didn't ever want to miss. We got to see our Sitoo (grandmother in Arabic) with her hair taken down just before going to bed. We marveled at how long her hair really was 'cause we always saw it up in a bun on her head during the day. I wish the past wasn't just memories.
