Tanti Auguri (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

 Tanti Auguri  (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

It wasn’t long ago, only days in fact, that I became an octogenarian, 

which, for the record, is not to be muddled with being an antiquarian.  Though I do enjoy ancient history and have begun to accumulate the respectable patina of age, somehow I’ve reached eighty, a point well beyond the reach of any mid-life crisis.  Yippy, right? 

While reaching eighty is an achievement denied many, I've never been particularly fond of these annual markers.  One of our granddaughters spent more than a year counting down to sixteen.  For her that magical age was when the world hands you a set of car keys, a burgeoning sense of independence, and the first taste of adulthood.  But the odometer of life spins only one way, and eventually notable milestones like these are no more.

Birthdays are funny rituals.  Their meaning quietly changes while pretending not to.  When we’re young, each birthday feels like rocket fuel.  Each year launches us toward some new privilege: crossing the street alone, staying up later, voting.  Everything points toward an event horizon promising more.  Somewhere before I reached 80, questions began tapping me on the shoulder: What's all the excitement about now?  Why keep counting? 

     Pathetic?  Not really.  Just as I’ve changed with age, the significance of birthdays has evolved right along with me.  Around midlife, their tenor shifted.  The cake, candles and off-key singing remain, but now birthdays come with a side of self-examination.  People have long since stop asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?  Instead, birthdays begin to resemble annual performance reviews.  Questions creep in: “Am I where I hoped I’d be?”  “Why does my back hurt when I haven’t done anything in days?”  And like the

Why Bother with Cake?

chiropractic procedure we may need, birthdays begin to measure the alignment between the life you imagined and the life you’re actually living. 

By seventy or eighty, birthdays molt again.  To this point, age may once have been a secret, but why bother hiding it now, it’s just a number.  The blush left the rose long ago to become, with time, spots on my hands.  Celebrations shift from becoming and achieving to simply continuing.  Lighting candles becomes a soothing declaration that you’re still there.  By this point, a birthday is no longer a milestone.  It’s a victory lap, like the winner of the Indy 500 takes to the cheers of the crowd.  By then, compliments arrive with their own sly subtext: "You look great!" or "You don't look anywhere near eighty!"  At the same time, both statements manage to praise you while reminding you just how old you are. 

But survival is one of life's most underrated triumphs.  It means you’ve outlasted fads, crises, several generations of slang, and more computer apps than you care to admit make absolutely no sense without the assistance of a grandchild.  You’ve lived long enough

to watch the world reinvent itself in ways your younger self couldn’t have imagined.  The truth is rather simplistic: we don’t celebrate birthdays because we have an unlimited supply.  We celebrate them because we don’t.  

America may set trends, but is not known for its relaxed, slow pace.  Our race to achieve often outstrips our sense of community.  Italy, on the other hand, seems to have gotten the memo that family outranks frenzy.  Their birthday customs make this clear. 

The Italian approach is warmer, more communal, more food‑centered, and less self‑celebratory.  For Italians, birthdays matter, but they matter as a family-and-friends occasion, not as ego milestones.  Extravagant parties are uncommon; there are no grand productions, no day-long entitlement.  It is a day less about “me” and more about “us.”

    Best wishes arrive in the form of ubiquitous greetings: “Tanti Auguri!” (sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” as in the US) or “Buon Compleanno” (completion of a year)!  They’re not only spoken but repeatedly texted and emailed non-stop with the enthusiasm of a national sport. 

In traditional Italian culture, only one other annual celebration outshines a birthday.  While birthdays matter, they don’t carry the same historical or communal weight as the onomastico (name day).  Historically tied to the feast of the saint you’re named after, it once carried far more weight than a birthday, which the Church viewed as a pagan indulgence.  Modern Italians celebrate both, but the onomastico still holds deeper cultural roots.

We got an inkling of these striking cultural differences many years ago on the occasion of a friend’s birthday in Calitri.  We wished her happy birthday and invited her across the street to a café for the three ‘C’s’: coffee, conversation, and a cornetto.  Little did we know that in Italy, the birthday person is the host, not the guest.

In the U.S., friends might buy you dinner or at least a drink.  In Italy, birthday role reversal continues, for if you invite people out for your birthday, it goes without saying that you will be paying the bill.  At work, you bring the pastries.  It’s a gesture of gratitude for the relationships in your life.¹

Italians bring gifts to celebrate the birthday person, but don’t waste time hunting for the perfect card.  Cards aren’t needed even if you are lucky enough to find one.  We still laugh about the time Maria Elena fell victim to cultural unfamiliarity when she tried to buy a sympathy card.  The shopkeeper listened politely as Maria Elena explained what she wanted and its purpose, but to no avail.  They had no such thing.  A blank, folded note card was as close as it got.  Instead of sending sympathy cards, Italians prefer to attend the funeral, speak face‑to‑face, and console grieving family members directly, a tradition that feels both ancient and deeply caring.

Another cultural misstep comes to mind.  It happened following the purchase of beautifully potted Chrysanthemums for an Italian friend.  When we presented them she burst into laughter.  Chrysanthemums are for the dead on All Souls’ Day, which was approaching.  We were embarrassed but soon joined in the laughter.  Like our birthday café invitation, here was another gaffe in Italian cultural norms.  No doubt, there will be more.

As for the cake, the person celebrating their birthday will be the person who either makes it or buys one from a Pasticceria.²  The birthday celebrant traditionally enjoys the first slice.  Much like us, the celebrant makes a wish and blows out the candles hoping, in keeping with a universal superstition, that if all are extinguished in one breath, their wish will be granted .¹

But birthdays, in the grand scheme, extend far beyond the people gathered around us. Each  

DNA Double Helix

birthday is also a reminder of the humanity we carry within us: the thousands of ancestors, stolen by time, whose traits, quirks, and stubborn streaks we possess.  When that last birthday inevitably arrives and we pass, we are remembered by those we leave behind.  However, there is a further passing that occurs when those who knew us also pass into the annals of time.  Memories become further diluted and it goes on and on.  It is only fitting in our birthday enthusiasm to recall the long line of extended family that preceded us, those ancestors well before “great” and “great-great” appear in our family declension.  The past is never gone, just hiding inside us.

For centuries, heredity was a mystery.  Today science is cracking this enigma.  I tapped into these advances through a DNA test that provided a glimpse into the chromosomes I inherited from millennia of ancestors.  Far removed from bordering on expertise when it comes to the entwining of our makeup, I rely on a simplistic analogy:

•      The DNA double helix, always the same, is the font and paper of a book.
•      The chromosomes are the chapters (23 chapters from each parent).
•       My 'story’ (traits) depends on the words (DNA sequences) inside those chapters (in the above photo they are the T, C, G, or a four-letter alphabet on the ladder-like rungs which differ from person to person).  Like computer code, millions of these unique arrangements form the message which determine the traits I possess.  

It is staggering to contemplate but think of DNA as a ladder with millions of rungs, packed so tightly that six feet of it fits inside a cell nucleus far smaller than a speck of dust, pass to me some of the traits, even behaviors.  We are indeed remarkable beings of extraordinarily complex design.

Years ago, I was disappointed with the results of a glimpse into

Grandfather Domenico

my long-in-development pedigree.  I wrote at the time how shocked I was to learn I was only 11% Italian.  Recently, however, that number changed dramatically.  Had they felt my irritation?  Not according to the preamble which explained that technology had improved and databases had expanded.  Maps, names of unknown relatives and more emerged.  Their list of my physical characteristics was much more accurate: I was recast as blue eyed, fair skinned, and with little chance of freckles, baldness, or a hairy back.  All true.

Much like a fine blended wine, it appears that my DNA maturation is 99.8% European.  Forty-five percent of me was contributed by my Italian ancestors on my dad’s side, who originated in the Lombardy region from a mix of ancient Ligurian, Etruscan, Celtic, and Roman populations.  I’d love to claim descent from some Roman centurion, why not Caesar himself!  But wars, lost records, the loss of family lineage preserved in family bibles, and the fading of memory has long erased those details.  My grandmother on my father’s side, Adelina, originated from an eastern Lombardy town near

Adelina's Italian Hometown

Lake Garda.  My grandfather, Domenico, hailed from the opposite side of Lombardy, from the Italian lakes’ region, close enough to Lake Lugano that another few kilometers and I might have developed an inexplicable fondness for Swiss cheese.  Given that I now live beside a lake, it seems lakes run in the family as surely as DNA. 

How my grandparents arrived in the U.S. I know, but why they came remains a mystery.  Neither did I ever learn how they originally managed to close the 200 km gap between them.  While they ran out of birthdays many years past and I can’t ask them, I did inherit the breath of a hint from the April 1906 ship’s manifest they arrived on.  With them on their arrival at Ellis Island was my baby uncle, Antonio, born in 1903 and at the time two and a half years old. 

Grandmother Adelina (Lt)

I noticed they had married in February 1906, just before departing Italy.  In a small Italian town in 1906, gossip traveled faster than broadband ever would.  News didn't go viral; it simply walked out the front door and arrived everywhere at once.  I suspect Uncle Pete’s pre-nuptial birthday may have encouraged their departure for a new start in the U.S.  For that I remain forever thankful. 

My French DNA from my mother, tips the scale at 45.3% and descends from a blend of Gauls Roman settlers, and later Frankish populations.  The earliest known chromosome doner on my mother’s side was Marie Labrecque, born in Paris in 1435.  From there, a part of me migrated to Normandy, Brittany and Loire, before sailing to Canada in the 1600s.  One Canadian ancestor, Marie Michel born in Quebec in 1660, married Chief Martin Kaorate Taouabanoun, a historical figure in Quebec.  Admittedly, it has been some time, but I estimate that a drop or two of native Algonquin sangue (blood)

Canadian Grandparents

remains in me.  It may perhaps explain my occasional bouts of righteous indignation (a hereditary trait perhaps?), or as my ancestor might have put it, “going on the warpath.”  

I doubt that my Indian heritage celebrated birthdays especially in small tribal units.  Months were not part of their culture.  Absent a work-a-day, seven-day cycle, phases of the moon, community rites of passage like manhood, and seasonal events were good enough.

To allow everyone else to pile onto this DNA scrum, my remaining 10% is a blurred blend of Norwegian, British, Spanish, Portuguese, to name a few.  Apparently, my DNA development moved about in many directions, with occasional stopovers, resulting in packets of concentration along the way.  Clearly a combination of decisions made, sidestepped, or forced by circumstances outside my ancestor’s control played a hand and likely attributed to their success, eventually seeing them gradually make their way to France and Italy.  Many hundreds contributing to my make-up, many were likely average Joes and Sallys.  But then, there may have been some standouts among them.  Impossible as it may be, I’d love to know every one of their stories, from mundane to spectacular, especially of those French and Italian ancestors who dared cross the Atlantic.  Moving backward from limb, to trunk, to the very roots of my family tree, united in common DNA, we remain connected, and worthy of celebration in each and every birthday.  

    For each birthday we celebrate rests upon thousands we never witnessed: those marked by phases of the moon, church bells, by harvests, candles, chants, cakes, gifts, and calendars now long dissolved to dust.  Behind every one of us stands a long line of ancestors whose names have slipped away, but whose lives still pulse quietly in our own.

I've often told my children and grandchildren, "Remember who you are and what you represent."  The older I get, the more I realize how much is encompassed in those words.  None of us stands alone.  We are the accumulated hopes, risks, journeys, sacrifices, and lucky breaks of countless people who never imagined how their stories would ripple forward.  

So here on this my eightieth birthday, in true Italian fashion, the celebration isn't entirely about me.  It's also for the multitudes who handed down a fragment of themselves and then vanished into the long corridors of antiquity.  To all of them, from Lombardy to Paris, from Quebec to places whose names no map remembers: Tanti auguri for carrying the story far enough for me to add my chapter, and for making these eighty birthdays possible.

From the Rogue Tourist,
Paolo

1. Celebrating Birthdays in Italy: Traditions and Customs, 

https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions

2. Unveiling Italy's Most Fascinating Birthday Traditions You Never Knew, https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions