Give my grandparents a hand

                              The cookbook and the Good Book.
                              They were the only texts in my favorite summer school classroom.  The aroma of simmering homemade spaghetti sauce wafted throughout the room like intoxicating nectar.  A gallon of homemade wine sat on a counter not far from the Bible; they were kindred spirits.  Homemade bread browned in the oven as if sprawled on a sun baked beach on the Riviera.
                              And front and center stood my Sicilian-born grandparents would tend to me during the summer when my parents went to work.  As my 8-year-old legs dangled from a chair at the table in their kitchen, I learned Italian.  Not the warm language of romance that centuries of poets have used to launch a thousand ships and link a lifetime of lovers.  Instead, these were interesting and expressive hand gestures that left no room for misinterpretation.  They were silent hand movements, and flicks, pokes and spins of fingers with which my grandparents created conversation masterpieces on a canvas of air.
                             Years before I understood that a trucker giving me the middle finger for cutting him off in traffic didn't signify the Teamsters were No.1, I learned a different type of sign language in that kitchen.  I took three years of Spanish in high school but can barely count to 12.
                             But somebody turning his palm to his throat, scraping his fingers across the bottom of his chinand angrily flicking them toward someone ----- it was a gesture in my neighborhood as common as tomato gardens and Virgin Mary statues ------ can only mean "non mi frega" or "I don't give a damn!"
                             I recall a time when my grandmother stood at her kitchen sink, motioned for my grandfather and pointed to a leaky faucet.  The grand old man in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and suspenders on a 90-degree day peeked into the sink.  He looked at my grandma, put his hands together as if praying and moved them up and down in a chopping motion.  The meaning:  "What do you expect me to do?"  or "Che cosa vuoi che io faccia?"
                             Another time, my grandparents were discussing in Italian a rumored tryst between a single woman in the neighborhood and a family priest, whose car spent too much time in her driveway.  My grandmother refused to believe the whispers.  My grandfather smirked knowingly, placed two index fingers together and repeatedly poked them toward the ground.  "Sono d'accordo," he whispered, meaning "Something's going on with them."
                            A few years later, that priest left the church and married the neighbor.  All the signs my perceptive grandfather saw with his eyes and related with his hands were spot on.
                           And I watched it all in that wonderful classroom, never wanting dismissal to arrive.
                           Today's kids learn and create bastardized words and terms in the street and at school, a trend that's changed the face of teen conversation in person and on mobile devices ----- all of it a confusing, unnecessary plastic surgery of the lexicon.  But back then, in my favorite classroom, I sopped up a rich language that remains unchanged and continues speaking to me today.
                           If I'm having a conversation without being able to use my hands to punctuate my thoughts, I feel tongue-tied.  Somewhere in an Italian medical journal, there must be a diagram connecting the hands to the mouth as surely as the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone.
                          My constant hand gestures sometimes annoy people.  To them I say, hey, it's what I know.  I can't stop.  Che cosa vuoi che io faccia?