I hear their gentle voices calling . . .

My maternal grandfather came to America with his family in 1919, after the Great War had ravaged Europe. They emigrated from a small mountain town in the Dolomites not far from the medieval city of Feltre. My grandfather, who was nine at the time, had lost two sisters to sickness, and was himself severely undernourished when his family decided to undertake the journey.

When they reached America, the family settled in Globe, Arizona for a time and ended up in Los Angeles, where my grandfather eventually met and married my grandmother (whose family had emigrated from Croatia). He worked in the shipyards during WW2, and after the war he worked for, and eventually bought, an iron works business. He was essentially a blacksmith and artisan, who designed and created beautiful wrought iron railings, gates, and fireplace screens, which adorned the houses of rich people in Bel Air, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Beverly Hills. The works of his hand still grace the homes of his children -- my mother and her two siblings.

The business flourished, and my grandparents were able to send their children to private Catholic schools and good colleges and to see their daughters married to "nice Catholic boys" before they moved from their home in Los Angeles to a larger home in the suburbs of San Gabriel Valley. The new place had a big backyard with orange and kumquat trees, beautiful rose and camellia bushes, an explosion of bouganvillea on the white walls, a Chinese magnolia tree that still blooms like mad every February, and a profusion of jasmine whose tender scent is redolent, it seems, of every summer evening I've ever lived.

I spent at least one evening a week in that house when I was growing up. There we ate big dinners prepared by my grandmother, who was always worrying over a pot of polenta, my grandfather's favorite, when we arrived. One of my grandfather's old shirts, worn backwards over my grandmother's dress and already splattered with butter and olive oil and the other raw materials of her art, served as an apron. My grandmother pinched cheeks and called us by pet names my grandfather had invented (Katerina for me, Stella Alpina for one of my sisters), and my grandfather smiled widely, hugged generously, and opened his change pouch to dole out quarters to his grandchildren for various accomplishments -- like A's on our report cards -- or for no reason at all, except that the very fact of us seemed to give him great joy.

Dinner was usually a raucous affair, punctuated by laughter and stories, and sometimes by political disagreements. My grandmother was a lifelong Democrat, for whom the idea of leaving the party was akin to the idea of becoming a Protestant, and my father was a lifelong Republican, who had had the temerity to make a political apostate out of my mother (by recommending a book to her). Neither of them ever followed the "no politics or religion at the dinner table" rule, and our dinners were thus filled with lively -- and occasionally heated -- conversation. My grandfather preferred to steer clear of politics, and he would often just drink his red wine, listen, and smile, or regale his grandchildren with stories of growing up in the mountains. He particularly liked to tell about the time he had come face to face with a mountain lion -- a story my grandmother treated with a decided skepticism, but in which his grandchildren believed unwaveringly. I believe it still.

After dinner, my uncle would bring out his accordion or his guitar, or both, and my grandfather would take out his harmonica, and everyone would sing. We sang mostly American folk songs -- "Oh, Susanna!" and "Frankie and Johnny" and "Old Black Joe" were among my grandfather's favorites -- with a smattering of Italian and Croatian thrown in. There was a particular Italian folk song that my brothers and sisters and I faked our way through by making up words that sounded vaguely Italian. The singing, I think, was our favorite part of the evening, not least because we knew it was something that would have confounded most of our friends and classmates -- and because it seemed, despite the fact that most of the songs we sang were American, to connect us to traditions that weren't entirely our own and to lands we had never seen. It was as though those songs helped us to peer beyond the suburban landscape that circumscribed our existence in those days to mountains flecked with velvet white flowers or to a very old town on the Adriatic.

My grandfather died almost twenty five years ago, and my grandmother almost eight years ago, on the date of my grandparents' wedding anniversary. The rest of the family still gets together at least once a year to cook the old food and sing the old songs. It's a ritual of love and remembrance that seems almost sacramental to me, a recognition and embodiment of the way they touched our lives, with their songs, their voices, their stories, their food, their craft. We remember what they sang for us, what they made for us -- and what they made of us. I'm not naive enough to deny that the record of even the best people's lives, under careful scrutiny, reveals complexities, oddities, "cracks." But every time we gather to sing the old songs, I am grateful enough to believe that what my grandparents, my parents, and my aunts and uncles made of us was -- all things considered -- something good.