But as much as my father, grandmother, and more distant relatives clung to their past privately, talking about their cultural roots made them proud. I saw a funnier, and more dramatic, version of their Old European ways in the antics of the Portokalos family.

Like her family, we ate too much meat, talked too loudly, and were always there for each other. But, the most notable similarity my own family shared with the film was that my father, like Toula's father, Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine), had his own medical obsession.

In the movie, it's Windex. All of Toula's life, Gus has been spraying Windex on everything, believing that "every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex," as she says in the opening credits. Later in the movie, when Ian Miller (John Corbett) gets a zit on their wedding day, Toula asks him how he got rid of it so quickly. "I put some Windex on it," he replies. Even in the sequel, Gus still has an affection for using Windex for every affliction under the sun.

My father, however, went a more organic route. For him, it was ice. He believed ice was God's cure to any bodily imbalance, whether it was a cut, bruise, sore muscle, fever, or headache. If friends came over and fell down outside — ice! If my mother had to go to work and my dad was stuck at home watching me with the flu — a washcloth-wrapped ice pack would be handed over for me to lay on my burning head and achey limbs. Our freezer was like the Portokalos' Windex-filled pantry, except it was brimming with ice packs.