The Things We Learn Over Dinner

George got lost on our first date.

This was not the impression he’d been going for.

He had planned to take me to a winery, which fit what I knew of him at the time. Up until then, George had struck me as a little fancy. Not obnoxiously so. Just polished enough that a winery seemed entirely on brand.

Except he couldn’t find it.

By the time we finally got there, it was closed.

So we drove around looking for somewhere else to eat and eventually landed at a little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant. Linoleum floors. Nothing particularly stylish about it. The kind of place that looked a little like an Italian diner from another decade.

And I remember thinking, essentially, Oh. There you are.

George grew up in West Pittsburgh and New Castle, Pennsylvania. My parents had lived in Jeannette. I knew Western Pennsylvania. And sitting there in that decidedly unfancy little restaurant, I finally felt like I was with a Western Pennsylvania boy instead of someone fancied up for a first date.

Then he ordered the stuffed mushrooms.

He knew I loved mushrooms, so we shared them. He even ate one.

I would learn much later that George hates mushrooms.

This is one of the things that happens when you share a life with someone. You accumulate information.

Not the important information we’re supposed to learn about each other. The ordinary information. The stuff no one asks on a first date because it would make for a very strange first date.

Do you sleep with the television on? How do you load a dishwasher? What food will you happily eat three nights in a row? Which food will you claim is “fine” while clearly communicating with your entire face that it is not fine?

And, apparently: How committed are you to impressing me, and does that commitment extend to eating fungus?

Over the years, I have learned that George’s culinary world has a very comfortable center, and that center is Italian food.

He’ll eat Chinese occasionally. Mexican, too. But Italian is his home base. Pasta, lasagna, meatballs, sauce—put us somewhere with good Italian food and George is generally a happy man.

The emphasis there is on good.

For a Croatian man, George has remarkably strong opinions about Italian food.

He’s picky. Very picky.

Which means that somewhere along the way, I became the Italian cook in our house.

I make the lasagna. I make stuffed Hungarian peppers. I make the Sunday sauce. And I make the meatballs he loves and requests, using a recipe that came from a former mobster’s grandmother.

There is obviously more to that story.

We’ll get there.

But I don’t remember us ever deciding that Italian food would become part of the language of our marriage. There was no conversation about creating traditions around food. No ceremonial passing of the wooden spoon.

We just kept eating together.

And that’s how a lot of the things that make a life ours seem to happen.

We repeat something because we like it. Then we do it again. Eventually we stop discussing whether we’re going to do it because of course we’re going to do it.

Our wedding anniversary is December 24.

Most years, we celebrate at Ezio’s, an Italian restaurant in Salem, Ohio. We order the bruschetta appetizer, which comes out shaped almost like a pizza and is ridiculously good.

It’s what we do.

I suppose we could go somewhere different. We could try the newest restaurant or make reservations somewhere considerably fancier. There is nothing objectively important about eating the same bruschetta in the same restaurant every December 24.

Except that it has become ours.

I think that’s one of the things I love about food.

A meal can begin as nothing more than dinner and, through repetition and time, quietly become part of the architecture of a life.

Certain foods begin to hold people.

A particular restaurant becomes our place. A recipe becomes the one somebody asks you to make. Sunday sauce starts tasting like Sunday. An appetizer becomes part of an anniversary. You make the same things often enough that eventually the smell of them cooking carries more than hunger with it.

None of this happens all at once.

We learn each other this way, too.

The person sitting across from you on a first date is still mostly unknown territory. Years later, you know the stories behind the stories. You know what makes him comfortable. You know what he’ll order. You know what he’ll send back. You know which meal will make him happy before he has even thought to ask for it.

You know the difference between the fancied-up version and the Western Pennsylvania boy underneath.

And you know he hates mushrooms.

He ate one anyway.