Today's beautiful smile

This weekend we went to the Decatur Arts Festival. Here's Jami looking like Monica Vitti, all elegant and Italian. One of our continuing conversations is how she's at heart Italian and, as she claims, that I am at heart English. All because I ordered steak at an Italian restaurant in London. Since then I've tried to make the case that steak is a perfectly traditional Italian meal. I've since had a Tuscan steak at a restaurant here, and I've made the inference that "my it might certainly seem that steak is common in Italy after all, and that Tuscany would be the Pampas [a reference the steak producing area of Argentina] of Italy." [at which point Jami whacked me on the head, almost as if she were exasperated at the lengths I've attempted to protest any resident "Englishness" I might be said to possess] What I've tried to maintain is that back in the "old country" where I grew up [a land not unlike present-day north-central Georgia] that it was common to have steak as an extension of an Italianate [what we'd once observed that an Italian ate] identity. This may be an argument that has no real resolution. Certainly I have a fondness for meat that might seem to belie a typical Italian proclivity for sea food and pasta. Certainly Jami, who's actually been to Italy, might be considered to be more of an expert on Italy and what constitutes an Italian sensibility than me. Still my own interior reality requires that I continue to state my own standing-togetherness with Italian culture, even as I order a nice steak.
Still it's difficult to argue with someone as beautiful and intelligent as Jami.