From what I have heard throughout the years, it was ridiculously funny. Mom and dad never considered the possibility of miscalculation, therefore... They did not take our stuff with them. It was not the case of getting in a car and crossing town as fast as possible to get two baby bags because, well, we were across the ocean. Dad was so nervous he actually considered taking a plane to Tulsa and back to Italy to get our things and though very cute, also highly stupid. Faith often says he was trying to get away from having his hand smashed by mom in the delivery room, or very disgusted. Both theories work fine, though the second one is funnier.
Mom barely made to the delivery room. Faith popped out in the middle of the corridor leading to the room and she did not have to push hard to have me. I much prefer dad’s version to that event, honestly. He says I was kicking her out ‘cause I smelled the chocolate cake in the oven and decided to come out to try it.
To cut in shorts, whose was the brilliant idea of traveling with a pregnant woman that could possibly pop out two babies at any given minute? Mom says that was when Faith and I started plotting to ruin the most precious family moments. I beg to differ, but she is kind of right. Despite all the trouble, we got Italian citizenship. It came in very handy for Faith a few years later. However, we did not have enough time to learn Italian. The entire family flew back to Tulsa before we got the chance to stop waking everyone up in the middle of the night for bottle or diaper change.
Faith and I had a wonderful childhood in Tulsa, filled with ginger cookies, apple pies and decorated cakes. We grew up in the suburb with the three eldest sons of our parents’ wedding godparents. The five of us were home schooled together until we were twelve years old and while our three best friends traveled around the globe thanks to a song with a meaningless title that meant a lot to us, Faith and I moved on with our lives studying really hard and spending our spare time at the family’s bakery shop.
Let me tell you about the bakery shop, our beloved Wonderland. My father’s side of the family is somehow related to Lewis Carroll, the writer of “Alice in Wonderland”, hence why – or simply at random – the bakery’s name is a tribute to the writer. Eva opened the first shop over 200 years ago in England, and it has been in our family ever since. She was completely unaware of the tradition she started and that she was going to be the responsible for the culinary genes of the six generations to come. After her, there was Nora, Florence, Grace, Constance and Gilmour, my grandfather.
According to the tradition, Wonderland goes from mother to daughter. Constance, my great grandmother, had twins: Gillian and Gilmour. Gillian caught a cold when she was only ten years old and passed away less than three years later, diagnosed with tuberculosis. Therefore, Constance had to break the tradition and left the bakery for grandpa. Thanks to the whole tradition thing, my father’s family suffers from a great pressure with each pregnancy. Girls always come first. Always, no questions asked. Some relatives say that Gillian’s death brought a wave of bad luck: we almost lost the shop twice. The building grandpa chose to settle the shop was almost destroyed after a hurricane in 1998 and years after, our crazy aunt decided to claim the shop to sell it because she had no intentions in going on with the business. After that sad incident, grandpa deserted her and decided to keep the shop open under dad’s management. Why our father did not take over the kitchen? When he was five, dad almost burned the place in one of his attempts to make ginger cookies. Thankfully, dad majored in business management, and it made up somehow for his obvious lack of talent in the kitchen.
