Living in the New World, Leaning Heavily on the Old

WHEN I was in college and wanted to sound like an English Major (in capital letters), I’d enjoy musing over the complexities of narrative structure. In my youthful enthusiasm, I even wrote a paper that included a Möbius strip, which is formed by taking a rectangular piece of paper, giving it a half-twist, and then connecting the two ends. The strip produces a continuous surface, as the inside becomes the outside and the outside the inside.

More than 25 years later, I better understand why that mathematical metaphor had so intrigued me. As the granddaughter of Italian immigrants, I am curious about time’s continuous loop — how the Old World customs of my grandparents, who settled in Maplewood, N.J., at the beginning of the 20th century, are circling their way back into 21st-century life. 

At first glance, Maplewood’s tree-lined streets seem a radically different place from my grandparents’ home, a three-story apartment building they owned along the town’s busy Springfield Avenue. It’s hard to imagine that an ancient Mediterranean culture — where women gave neighbors who had wronged them mal’ occhio, the “evil eye,” and chased pigs that had escaped from backyards up Springfield Avenue — once laid down its roots in a suburb now filled with S.U.V.’s, Hondas and minivans laden with children’s car seats and athletic gear. 

But in the essence of how we live — from how we raise our children to the food we eat — Old World ways are refurbishing our homes, like a retro sofa that’s suddenly become de rigueur. 

The door has been reopened, for example, for grandma to enter as primary child care provider. Our new first lady, Michelle Obama, brought national attention to this idea when she asked her mother, Marian Robinson, to move into the White House to continue to help raise the grandchildren. As more women work long hours and travel for their jobs, the “old-fashioned scenario” of a grandmother serving as the primary caregiver is “cycling back into favor,” this newspaper recently reported.

The arrangement — one that also has deep roots in African-American tradition — brought me back to the Maplewood of the early 1940s, when my mother’s siblings began to have children. With my grandmother as matriarch, all the women pitched in (child care never fell to the domain of Italian men), running between apartments, and up and down the stairs, to help rear the children. 

By the postwar 1950s, life had changed as my mother and her three siblings, by now all married and with children, sought the American dream, and moved out of their parents’ building to buy their own homes. With no one living within walking distance, and my mother and her sister unable to drive, the cousins rarely played with, or even saw, one another or their grandmother. By the time I was born in 1959, the insular nuclear family became the New World model that my family had fully adopted. 

Yet, how naïve of us Americans to believe that grandma wouldn’t be needed any longer. That model worked only because my mother stayed home to raise her children. Then ’70s feminism came along and helped to radically restructure the American work force. As a society, however, we never figured out how to adequately help families with two working parents. So here in the 21st century, the New World reacquaints itself with the ways of the Old. 

This turning back to a way of life once deemed out of sync with modern times also reminds me of my grandfather’s devotion to his garden. Trying as best he could to replicate the agrarian southern Italy of his youth, my grandfather grew zucchini, squash, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, a fig tree, and colorful patches of pansies, poppies and peonies in a large lot next to his building. 

Early each morning, my grandmother entered the garden that her husband tenderly cultivated. She would slowly squat her heavy body to the earth, pick the day’s selection and place it in her large apron pockets. Weighed down with vegetables, my grandmother would waddle to the tomato vines to pluck a handful, and then climb three flights of stairs to begin her morning cooking. 

My grandfather’s garden was his small piece of paradise. Years later, new owners paved it and put up a parking lot. 

When I was growing up, suburban life had been duly sanitized and modernized. Every Friday night, our family piled in the car and headed to a supermarket to purchase the week’s worth of food. We wandered the wide aisles picking out frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, which had replaced the homegrown kind. 

But today, I shop the Old World way, caressing tomatoes, sniffing basil and picking a bunch of wild arugula at a local farmer’s market. I know that I’m not alone in my preference, as Americans have enthusiastically embraced elements of Old World culture in our daily lives. Except we don’t use the words “Old World” but more fashionable terms like “organic,” “local” and “artisanal” (derived from artigiano, the Italian word for “craftsman”). 

The inside has become the outside, the outside the inside. We have sensed that not all of modernity is healthy or pleasing to the senses. 

I’m not suggesting a nostalgic surrender to a falsely imagined better time — indeed the greatest gift of the New World has been to reject the confines of custom and embrace the freedom to make choices that can best suit our needs. Yet the intriguing continuous loop that captured my imagination so long ago presses me to question a basic American assumption: that life moves forward through progress, and progress is always benign. 

The complicated pattern of middle age has taught me that we move forward and we move backward, melding the old and the new, hoping to find a little wisdom and not to lose our balance in the half-twisted surface of our lives.