My Daughter

We had just sat down at the table. She was across from me. My wife, seated to the side, asked why I was watching her in silence, without a word.

She asked if there was a reason, a condition, something that had focused my attention that way.

I was eating my hot dog — the best thing I could have, even in Italy — and my eyes were looking for hers. Giorgia. My daughter. Trying to understand what she contained.

She was truly a part of me. My imperfections inside a perfect body. A refined mind. A woman.

At a certain point she stood up to challenge something I had said earlier — almost to correct me, with that manner of hers, that personality — and she tried to land a few pats on my shoulders. The kind mothers give to children.

But I was only her father. And I smiled, thinking that I had beside me another woman, after my mother, with the same assignment: not to protect me but to control me. This was my destiny.

I asked myself why. What my soul truly was. Who I was representing in that moment. I asked myself, genuinely, who the hell I was.

The same question people who know me ask. The ones who read me. And maybe one day, from a corner of New York, they will see me with a cart, giving away hot dogs in the street — just for the joy of watching people smile. The way it has always been, for 61 years. At no price to anyone.

Because that is who I am.