Sometimes I get bored with the monotony of everyday life and feel it’s necessary to temporarily adopt an Irish or Italian accent. The accents are never strong because I want them to be believable. The Irish accent is stronger than the Italian one because it’s just easier that way; if I made the Italian accent too strong, I fear I’d lapse into the stereotype of adding the “a” vowel to the end of every word and be immediately found out as an imposter.

I have a whole routine that I’ve developed in my boredom, so that I’m prepared to answer any simple-minded American’s questions concerning my origin. The story is always the same: I was born in a small village outside either County Cork or Saltimbocca, but my family moved when I was eight years old; my parents were searching for a faster-paced lifestyle. My father is a carpenter and my mother a musician – she plays the violin. My accent is very light and though I understand Italian, I can’t speak it, save a few easy phrases that help me keep up with what’s going on around the house. My family is neither Catholic nor Protestant – it’s a touchy subject since our entire family is Catholic.

I’ve only gone back to [enter country/city of birth] a few times since I was a kid, so I don’t know the area too well, but I have some relatives back there. It’s not the food I miss, but the countryside – there’s nothing like the romantic feeling that consumes me when the sun sets there.

All of this reminds me that I could have a prosperous future as a psychic, stating things that are pliable enough to genuinely fit any subject I’m discussing and still be believable because of the way I say it.

Things get a little trickier, though, if I find myself without cash and have to whip out my credit card. My last name, Shayne, is an Irish name, so it doesn’t quite work with the Italian background (though it’s quite convenient for the Irish one, clearly – though I can’t remember if it’s Catholic or Protestant and that alone sometimes discredits my story). But I can easily say that my mother is the Italian one, and my grandfather on my father’s side wasn’t Italian. My first name was taken from a Russian actress, they tell me, back from my parents’ youth. I’ve never thought much of it.

Last Tuesday, for some stupid reason, I left my house two hours before I was supposed to meet my friend for dinner. It’s half an hour’s walk downtown, through campus (typically deserted after dark during the summer – with the exception of Friday and Saturday nights). The entire way, I listened to tenor arias on my ipod, looking around before I began to dance in the street and eventually run with my arms joyfully spread like wings and my smiling face tipped up toward the moon – tenor arias. What can I say? They do strange things to me.

By the time I got downtown, I had time to kill and was in the best mood, and feeling more than a little appreciative of the Italian culture.

There was a new café that I hadn’t yet visited, and I decided to kill some time writing in it over a cappuccino.

“A cappuccino, please.” The “a” in “cappuccino” presented itself as an “ah” in the back of my throat, and the double consonants presented themselves in my annunciation, forcing the following “u” vowel to explode from my lips.

While he made my drink, I surveyed my new environment. Fa Bella. The walls were stamped in a giant coastal mural, depicting a beautiful sunny morning, the fiery sun still climbing up through the clouds, warming the venders who were leisurely setting out bottles of wine and various vibrant fruits in their stand. A few older men sat on folding chairs with a barrel between them, a makeshift table. I pictured my father becoming one of these men at the barrel, happy in his straw hat, a tailored stripe of blue wrapped around it, just above the brim.

I smiled and followed one of the men’s gazes to an older, rotund woman standing in a nearby doorway, wearing a beige, cloth bonnet, and wielding a rolling pin. She was looking back at him with a creased forehead and furrowed uni-brow, presumably his wife. The men looked unconcerned, as though the older woman was simply a part of the scenery to them as well.

The café’s color scheme echoed the murals with their subdued orange walls and multi-colored mosaic tabletops. The wrought iron table legs and sconces took the Mediterranean feel to a more romantic level.

Cappuccinos typically come out like a latte, the barista is told to make some espresso, froth some milk and combine. But this gentleman knew how to make a cappuccino – a cappuccino worthy of annunciation. I had switched my attention to him as he gracefully scooped out the foamed milk into the bowl-shaped mug. I would have fallen in love with him immediately if he wasn’t missing an incisor.

“Thank you very much, sir.” I had rolled my “r”s, not in a way that was over the top, but there was no way out of this one; now I was Italian. I braced myself to answer all ensuing questions. But he didn’t ask. I sat down and wrote for two hours, returning to the counter one more time to order a second cappuccino.

When I left, the gentleman was making a cappuccino for another customer with a leopard print shirt – she could never appreciate the craftsmanship that he was putting into it – you could tell, just because of her bad taste in fashion. No one could appreciate the shop to the same extent as I could – I stood outside and gazed up at the shop’s balcony with an orangey window box of magenta, blue, and white flowers. “It’s mine!” I thought, “This is my sanctuary.” And I vowed to never tell a soul about it, lest a crowd of café-happy college students, occupying the majestic mosaic tables for hours on end, studying something like biology or the Civil War, should ruin it.

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