Mid-Term Essay: Family Rituals

“It figures that our only family ritual is going to an old whorehouse and eating pizza.”
Occupying what once was a “house of ill repute,” Old Chicago Pizza in Petaluma is a family tradition. Since I can remember, there hasn’t been a Bernard family visit up North that did not include a stop at this fine dining establishment. It’s about the only thing that brings Bernards together.
Situated above a shopping arcade on Petaluma Boulevard, Old Chicago Pizza represents the dwindling quaintness of the town where my maternal great-great-grandparents settled. My mother’s mother’s grandparents came to Petaluma from Sant’Antonino in Switzerland. My mother’s father’s grandparents came from the Azores Islands in Portugal, settling on a piece of property that had been disbursed from Juan Padilla’s Rancho Roblar de la Miseria in the 1860s. My Grandma and Grandpa still live here, although the holdings are much smaller than 150 years ago; we call it the Ranchito. The accumulation of rusted cars in the fields and derelict farm equipment in the equally derelict barn has long since my childhood surpassed picturesque.
The origins of my father’s family are more difficult. My Granny came from Texas, and my Papa grew up in the hills of Mount Tamalpais. But my dad says that we come from a long line of bastards. In high school, when my Granny and Papa were living near us in Riverside, I was doing some schoolwork in their kitchen, tracing out the family tree a few generations.
“Granny, what is your maiden name?”
“Dickerson.”
“And Nana Lu…Grandpa Herb’s name was Duer but what was her maiden name?”
“Dickerson,” was the reply, and “Well, what else?” was the wordless insinuation, as if I had asked a silly question, one I should have known the answer to.
She tried explaining some of Papa’s family history, but it was clear to me that details were being neglected, ignored, veiled, on account of their unpleasantness.
My mother filled in the details later, and my dad’s characterization of the family history is not entirely inaccurate. It is no wonder that Dad’s immediate family finds normal, human interaction outside of its faculties. There’s never any yelling, never any fighting. There’s hardly any speaking.
Even though my dad and his siblings grew up in Petaluma, the only Bernards still there are his older brother’s two adult children and his remarried widow. My parents live far south, in Riverside, and have for almost as long as I have been alive. Dad’s younger brother and parents now live in New Mexico, having moved on to some new place whose idyll (the charm is lost on me) was somehow elusive in the afterglow of Mexican California. His sistee is his closest sibling, and she lives in Las Vegas.
Every few years, the rare day comes when we are gathered around a table for a family meal. That table is always in a smaller back room attached to the large window front dining room of Old Chicago Pizza. “It figures,” my dad says as we walk in the doors from the narrow hallway which leads to other, impossibly small, rooms, “It figures that our only family ritual is going to an old whorehouse and eating pizza.”