With this month’s blog post, I’d like to start by saying that Papi & Romano stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
As a family business that specializes in home building, Papi & Romano’s interests lie, in large part, in the business of creating spaces that offer safety, self-expression, and shelter. As described last month, this work is about fulfilling the human need of feeling like one belongs in the spaces one inhabits. Everyone should be afforded that feeling, and the full range of human expression and experience.
The recent national tragedies of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the long line of unjust deaths and racial profiling stretching back in our history are appalling examples of Black Americans being denied the right to feel safe and free in the spaces they inhabit.
Small businesses, a foundation of Maine’s economy, have been hit hard by the pandemic. Of those, Black-owned businesses have been disproportionately impacted. The website BlackOwnedMaine has a great directory of businesses, artists, and organizations.
When drafting this blog for my dad, Rick Romano, the owner and operator of Papi & Romano Builders in Portland, Maine, I went off in several directions trying to understand what all connects the wider world to the work of Papi & Romano. Through a few missteps, I kept coming back to the space of a kitchen.
As a kid, any time I had a friend over, my parents would offer them a plate of homemade food. For my friends, this ritual became a kind of inside joke, and they would all smile and say they knew they had to accept the food, that to say no in my household – in most Italian-American households – would be considered a personal affront and poor manners besides.
What my friends didn’t see was that what always came immediately after the offer of food was the request to sit right there at the kitchen table and eat it. This is how my parents got to participate in our lives. Because if you were sitting at the kitchen table, you had to talk. So my friends and I sat, and my parents talked to us. The offer of food was not so much a gracious freebie but more an exchange for information about our lives, details of my friends’ feelings. We weren’t allowed to eat anywhere other than the kitchen, a rule I attributed to my parents’ neat-freak-ness, but now, I see, may have been more about the desire to have us right there at the table, talking about our lives in near-distance.
Papi & Romano’s portfolio of work has continuously engaged with the question of what makes a kitchen. Whereas many rooms in a house are designed with either the homeowners or guests in mind, the kitchen must be designed for both simultaneously. It’s often the first room one enters upon coming in from outside and accordingly it must be suited to receive and examine all that enters from the wider world.
As kitchen contractors, Papi & Romano crews offer the design, cabinetmaking, and installation of kitchens and dinettes. They help with kitchen space planning, incorporate inventive built-ins, like cozy benches or bookshelves for cookbooks, and build custom kitchen features such as this space-saving island in an eco-friendly home on Portland’s Munjoy Hill. The island has a butcher block top and is set on soft rollers that can be locked in place or moved, allowing the homeowners to use the island in another room, while entertaining guests, for example. Papi & Romano has done many residential kitchen remodels and design-builds. Our kitchen is one of them.
And our kitchen is explicitly organized to encourage conversation. The kitchen table – cherry - stands several strides away from the backdoor, so that the path of anyone who enters our home flows naturally to a seat at the table. On the wall just beyond the table, above a stretch of radiant Douglas Fir wainscoting, is a chalkboard, framed also in Douglas Fir, in direct eyeline with the door, so that a welcome message can be conveyed to a person even before they’re inside. The wood-framed chalkboard is a classic touch in Papi & Romano kitchens. My favorite detail is a built-in bench situated in a corner that offers the best view for talking quietly while observing the larger kitchen space. This, too, is an iconic Papi & Romano feature, small nooks in large spaces, meant to intersperse the intimate with the shared.
Then there is the kitchen island my dad built. With its slate countertops from the Munson, Maine Slate Company and underhanging pot rack, this island is functional, obviously. It provides more counter space and more storage space, facilitates workflow. But the full application of an island is that is provides kitchen space with four access points, so that more than one person may be at the island and facing the other. Standing around that island, I made Italian cookies with my sister, tasted my dad’s Sunday sauce; I mixed margaritas and heard from my brother that he and his wife were pregnant with their first child. After late nights in the Old Port, my siblings and I would convene at the kitchen island to eat our way through leftovers and talk, talk, talk.
I saw plain as day how my parents offered my friends food and expected conversation in return. I didn’t see how this same trade applied to us, their kids, every single night around the dinner table. Our nightly dinners served as the first models of conversation and self-expression.
And nothing was off-limits at that table. It’s where we received birds-and-the-bees type talks, where we discussed the Me Too movement, debated the stigma of the opioid crisis, talked about the virus just before it hit, where we would be right now talking about George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. It was also where we shared our everyday experiences, the bruised egos or insecurities or good grades.
The kitchen was where we first learned we had a voice and figured out through trial and error what it was worth using for and what it wasn’t. In a family of four kids, speaking up was a skill and sometimes-burden, something that had to be observed, tried out, practiced and refined over many, many conversations, a matter of perseverance, really. Listening too.
Another aspect of learning how to be in conversation was recognizing that we didn’t know everything. My dad had this annoying game where if a word we didn’t know came up in dinner conversation, we had to go get the dictionary from the next room, bring it back to the table, and educate ourselves and our siblings. We did not think reading aloud from the dictionary was very cool. But it taught us to be discerning with our words and assumptions.
When I look at that game now, I think what was really at stake was the disappointing adult reality that it is so easy to feel embarrassed by our own not-knowingness that it becomes an obstacle to ever seeking out more information or self-education.
To speak personally, the historic protests of the past month have asked me to hold myself more accountable to what I don’t know and to what I do. To call back these dinner conversations and think about which way my voice needs to be heard and in which ways I need to hear others’ voices.
As I mentioned in my last post, my parents underwent a kitchen remodel when I was in middle school. For several months we moved our kitchen to the basement, where we continued, somehow, to have family dinners around a kitchen table, set on unfinished concrete, situated between my dad’s woodworking station and my mom’s ceramics station, along plywood table of clay and clamps. It has always astonished me in retrospect that we fully moved an entire kitchen to the cement sprawl of our basement and continued almost as if the displacement had never happened. The point was, I guess, that we were still in a kitchen. It didn’t feel strange at the time, but in retrospect, I wondered, why on earth did my parents continue to try so hard to maintain our kitchen routine in the basement? Why didn’t we just set up a couple of chairs and eat take-out more often? When Papi & Romano renovated other kitchens, like the carriage house on Portland’s State Street or the ultra-modern condo on Portland’s West End, I wondered if those folks were eating homecooked meals in the basement too. I decided they probably weren’t, and that our family was a little strange. Now I see that, had we fully let go of the concept of a kitchen, we would’ve let go of our ability to talk by dissolving the space which made talking happen.
I haven’t been inside my parents’ kitchen since March 8th. Like our months in the basement, we are learning to reconfigure conversational spaces. We make outdoor kitchens in the backyard and hopefully soon at the beach. We wear masks, which makes it harder to talk and harder to listen and maybe just one more lesson in how much stick-to-it-tive-ness is needed to speak up.
Our country is in the midst of reckoning with the dual crises of a pandemic and racial injustice, one which has arrived only this past winter with devastating immediacy, and the other which is four-hundred years-old and has unfolded with devastating endurance. Both require more willingness to speak up and to listen. Both require those of us who haven’t yet done so to consider how our private and public spaces have been designed – to perpetuate these crises, or alleviate them?
Over the summer, a safety team at the Portland school where I teach will be reconfiguring all our spaces to accommodate for the virus. The school, housed in old homes in Portland’s West End, consists of many small rooms, not originally intended as classrooms. Already they’ve been drastically reimagined from the intimate family spaces they once were to the shared, raucous classrooms they now are. And now they will be once again reimagined, pivoted, changed with the times into something more helpful. Schools all over the world are doing this. Grocery stores are doing this. Even the changing rooms at Crescent Beach are doing this.
If we can analyze how our shared physical spaces perpetuate the spread of a virus, can we who are in the position to do so not analyze how our taking up of space perpetuates the oppression of some groups of people in order to center others and raise them up? Even the way I’ve written this blog can be analyzed as such - chunks of it presume a white readership.
Every individual deserves to feel they belong in the spaces they inhabit. A new home needs building, and we must listen to our Black, Brown, and Indigenous peers to understand what that home should look like.
Author Zoë Romano