We used to sit together on Saturday afternoons; I'd be drinking Sprite from a Styrofoam cup, biting my teeth into its rim, feeling a satisfying crunch each time my jaw closed around the sticky white surface. You would be sipping your coffee, no cream, just straight black. Grandma used creamer in her coffee until she opened a curdled container once, Dad told me, on a trip to Nevada. It's been black ever since.

My Aunts, Dad, sister and I would all arrive in the backyard those Saturdays, climbing up the cherry red painted cement porch, through the security screen door, and into the avocado-toned kitchen, full of sweet delights of all shapes and sizes. I'd pass her collection of antique tea cups and race over to the candy jar, finding artificial orange taffy peanuts in the canister, and just like the cups lining the counter, thoroughly enjoying the crunch of the foam once my teeth met their surface.

The Aunts would bring Malfatti from the local liquor store. Mal fatti, I found out later, much later, in a college Italian class, comes from mal meaning bad, or poor, and fatti, from the verb fare, to make. Badly made. They are sausage link shaped ravioli that have been rejected as traditional, mixed with spinach and bolognese sauce with mushrooms, and cooked in a non-traditional Italian Mamma's kitchen in the back of a liquor store in Napa called Lawler's, Why a liquor store made Italian home-grown cookin', I didn't ask until I was in my twenties. All I ever knew in my childhood was malfatti. My otherwise delicate, thin, and appetite suppressed Aunts drooled over the plastic bins it arrived in every Saturday, and I came to love the smell of malfatti sauce in a way that I didn't know I was capable of loving food: It reminded me of you, Grandma. It reminds me still of you, and your soft laugh. Your ring finger on your right hand that was bent from one summer when a mattress fell on it; your curled hair that you had washed and styled only once a week at Glamorama salon. Malfatti might mean badly made, but nothing else in your life ever seemed to be.

Years after our malfatti Saturdays came to a close, after you were laid down beside Papa Chris in Tulocay cemetery, I still remember those smells, that laughter, and you, each morning the weekend begins. I often want to order a vat of malfatti from the liquor store off Jefferson, but never bring myself to do it; malfatti to me just symbolizes family, and ordering it alone doesn't feel right.

I tell you the first thing I'm going to do, Grandma,when I have a home, and people to fill it. I'll make my own malfatti, and know that each time I do, you'll be in the kitchen with us. I'll make it as much as I can manage, because I know that.

I wasn't that impressed with Buckingham Palace.
You gave me a watermelon Jolly Rancher, and I winced.
"We'll go to the Eiffel Tower, and that'll change your mind,"
you said, smirking a little.
I won't matter, I thought, as I lost my last Euro coin.
You joined me on a bus trip to Galway.
"Can't wait for you to see it," you gushed.
I stubbed my toe on the train platform.
So many clouds, I thought, looking up at the sky.
"Monterey is beautiful," you said, tossing a sleeping bag in the truck.
I forgot sunscreen, I thought,sulking.
"Where to next?" you asked, full of pillow creases and yawns.
I held your hand.
Anywhere you are, I thought.
I wasn't that impressed with Buckingham Palace.
All that I was looking at was you.

x.