After watching “A Complete Unknown” recently, I had an itch to go back to Greenwich Village, NY–particularly the West Village, where my grandmother and great-grandmother lived. Standing in front of Our Lady of Pompeii yesterday…the church where my parents were married…I’m instantly seven years old again…

It’s the corner I remember coming out of the church with my grandmother and meeting my great-aunt Marie—a tiny sparrow of a woman whose fingers pinched my cheeks so hard (“What?!? This is Joseph’s daughter?!?”), I was convinced the red mark were permanent. Her husband, my Uncle Albert and my grandfather’s brother, was a mountain of a man (at least to my child’s eyes), who taught me to dance the polka at Our Lady of Vilnius Lithuanian community parties by standing on his giant feet while he whirled me around. I begged him to do it again and again. He worked in the diamond district and helped my father pick out my mother’s engagement ring. Everyone is gone, now. That little Lithuanian church tucked next to the Holland tunnel is sadly also gone, the community it served scattered well beyond Greenwich Village, and the lure of prime real estate led to its replacement with high-end condos.

With cheeks still stinging, I remember going with my grandmother to the pork store around the corner and being fascinated with the fragrant rows of hanging salamis and aging ham hocks…it was my first time tasting a slice of salty, melt-in-your mouth paper-thin prosciutto, and thinking I’d found Nirvana. Thereafter, she never came to visit us in New Jersey without bringing me a precious package of wax-paper wrapped layered prosciutto slices that I would devour slowly, deliberately, one slice a day to make it last as long as possible.

Ah, how I love savoring “Old New York” moments…