Pull Up A Chair To The Hertiage Smorgasbord

Like most Italian families, we pride ourselves on our homemade spaghetti sauce.

We grow our own garlic, our own Roma tomatoes, our own onions, our own basil, our own oregano, our own thyme. In the summer, we all gather in the kitchen with our strainers and cast iron pots and we whip up huge batches of marinara, shouting and laughing with familial togetherness. Well, at least shouting.

Like most Italian families, we eat pasta three or four times a week. We have our own pasta maker; I use it to make my own homemade ravioli, manicotti and lasagna. We soak up the leftover sauce with homemade Italian bread, and wash it down with Chianti.

Unlike most Italian families, however, we’re not Italian.

Not even slightly. Not even un pocino. We don’t have a drop of Italian blood in us. I have Swiss and German and Scottish and English; my wife has Bohemian and French and Scottish and Irish. As far as I can tell, Italian is about the only blood we don’t have, although I’m not sure about Albanian.

However, this is America, darn it. Who says you have to actually be Italian to be Italian? If we decide we want to be Italian, we’ll whip up some marinara and act like we are.

Sometimes, though, we decide to be Jewish. We’re not Jewish either, but that doesn’t stop us from making potato latkes, our favorite breakfast, on Saturday mornings. It doesn’t stop us from having matzoh ball soup when the mood strikes us. It doesn’t stop us from listening to klezmer music, doesn’t stop us from using words like “schlemiel” in everyday conversation, doesn’t stop me from having as my life goal to be a mensch. (Look it up. You should strive to be one, too.)

We even whipped up our own Seder feast at home once, which, you’ve got to admit, is pretty extreme for a family of Catholics.

Then again, we are often Irish at our house. St. Patrick’s Day is a hallowed day, but we are not fairweather Irish. On other days of the year, we’re still partial to tinwhistles, ceili music, Guinness Stout, fisherman’s knits, tweed jackets, “Galway Bay” and W.B. Yeats.

I also sometimes believe that I am African-American - specifically, an aging black blues musician from the Mississippi Delta. I am none of the above, except “aging.” One of my most satisfying hobbies is to sit down with my cheap pawn shop guitar (“Lula Belle”) and play endless variations on the eight-bar Delta blues. Maybe my voice makes me sound like what I am, a white guy; but when I play the guitar I can truly tap into the rich black heritage that I don’t, technically, have.

There’s no end of the heritages that we co-opt at our house. In the autumn, we often go through a period of being German, cooking up a lot of dishes involving apples and potatoes and sausages, and having our own little Oktoberfest. At least we have some justification for this, our gene pool being some fraction of German.

We don’t have that excuse for our occasional forays into Japanese culture, for instance. I went through one period in which I was obsessed with yakisoba noodles. We also consider teriyaki sauce to be a staple, although the way we use it (on halibut, for instance) this may owe more to California culture than Japanese.

We have also been known to be, at least for an evening, Caribbean, Thai, South African, Mexican, Polynesian, Creole, Chinese, Greek and Korean.

So some of you might be saying, “Jim, what’s wrong with you? You’ve got your own heritage. Why don’t you just celebrate being an American?”

I already told you - this is American.

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.