By Lisa
People go to the beach for lots of reasons, namely, the sand, the sun, and the water.
I go for the food.
You might think there’s no food at the beach, but if there’s no food at your beach, come to mine.
Food never tastes better than it does on the beach.
How do I know this?
From a lifetime of eating on the beach.
You would think that the beach would be the last place you would eat, if you’re a woman self-conscious about her body, which is every woman in the world.
But I grew up in a family of chubby Italian-Americans, and The Flying Scottolines didn’t sweat the small stuff, especially the fact that none of us was what you would call small.
Mother Mary loved to cook, and the rest of us loved to eat, and none of us saw anything wrong with it.
We had the time of our lives on the beach, because we were so full of food.
It’s hard to be unhappy with a full tummy.
This was before the invention of Food Guilt.
Think back.
Because we Scottolines never had any Food Guilt.
Food is love, and we had a lot of love in our family.
We would never feel guilty because we ate.
We had guilt if we didn’t eat.
And we had guilt about wasting food, which was our version of a mortal sin.
So before any trip to the beach, Mother Mary would cook up spaghetti and meatballs, so we could make spaghetti and meatball sandwiches to take to the beach. I know that not everybody has eaten spaghetti and meatball sandwiches, so here’s the recipe:
To make a meatball sandwich, put a ton of meatballs in a hoagie roll and smash the top down. You can serve it hot or cold, but you should serve it on the beach.
Delicious.
The spaghetti sandwich is made the same way. Put a lot of spaghetti on a hoagie roll and smash the top down. It also works hot or cold and is perfect for the beach, because you’ll spill so much tomato sauce on yourself that you’ll have to go wash off in the water.
Not that I ever did that.
Less than two thousand times.
By the way, it goes without saying that you never put spaghetti and meatballs in the same sandwich.
Just in case you were thinking about it.
Don’t embarrass yourself, or me.
And of course after we had our delicious meal on the beach, we’d be looking around for dessert, and in those days, an angel would appear in the form of the Ice Cream Man.
This wasn’t a man driving an ice-cream truck like Mr. Softee, but a man who walked back and forth across the beach in the hot sun, wearing a white T-shirt and white long pants, lugging a massive cooler full of ice cream on his back.
Mr. Tuffee.
All the while he’d be calling out, “Ice cream and ices, ice cream and ices!” like a town crier for saturated fats.
And we would get our ice-cream treats, the first round of the day, but certainly not the last.
Because ice cream tastes better on the beach, too.
There’s nothing that doesn’t taste better on the beach.
Mother Mary used to smoke on the beach, and she thought even cigarettes tasted better on the beach.
You can tell we weren’t health nuts.
So then it won’t surprise you that we couldn’t swim.
Neither my mother, my brother Frank, nor I could swim at all. We never learned how, and to this day, we don’t know.
Don’t ask why.
The Flying Scottolines are full of mystery.
But my father could swim, and so for exercise we would go down to the water’s edge and watch him, like three beach balls looking out to sea.
So given my altogether adorable childhood, it’s hard to understand how I grew up and acquired Food Guilt, I-can’t-believe-I-ate-that, a generalized fear of carbohydrates, and a lifelong worry about my weight. And I’m always on a diet, and I just now gained back the ten pounds that I had lost last month.
But more and more, especially in summertime when I’m sitting on the beach, I’m learning not to sweat it.
To go back to the child that I used to be.
To see myself through the loving eyes of my parents.
To eat on the beach.
And not to worry about whether every little thing makes me look fat.
In fact, not to worry at all.
And so that’s very much the spirit of this book.
It’s full of funny stories and true confessions from my daughter Francesca and me, and though we write about our bodies, we know that weight doesn’t really have any weight with us.
It has to do with the stuff of life, yours and mine, as women in the world.
And at its warm little heart is a secret message:
Enjoy.