Men

Drinking yerba mate in my CC running shorts and an old t-shirt, listening to Madeleine Peyroux while I translate an Italian magazine article into English. The best part is that existing, for this moment, needn't be more difficult than this.

I sat on a bench yesterday afternoon to read while one of my charges finished up his gymnastics lesson, and an Italian man in sunglasses and linen pants walked by... twice... and came back. Inward groan. The following exchange prompted me to write the conversation in my margins so I could laugh about it later:

[dude] Mi scusi, magari ci siamo visti prima? Sorry, but I think we've met?
[me] No, credo di no. I don't think so.
[dude] Aah, ma non sei italiana. Di dove sei? Ah, you're not Italian. Where are you from?
[me] California. Lavoro qua a Torino. I work here.
[dude] Oh! I speak English some.

Great, I thought, Just great. Now we have to be awkward in two languages.

[dude] If it - possibility - drink?

He accompanies this... statement? request?... with a hand gesture of tossing back a rather large bottle of something invisible and likely alcoholic. I smile but shake my head, hopefully in a gently discouraging way. No, thanks.

[dude] Okay! Thanks to you, very much! Ciao, ciao!

And he is off again on his merry way, undeterred by my rejection. This is not the first time that has happened. What a funny breed.

Stars Aligning

Look at the date of this Learn English podcast titled Lauren's Eyes.

Weeeeeeiiiiiiiiirrrrrrdddd.

What, exactly, is the world telling me? To wear more makeup? Start a video podcast? Drive taxis? Keep on speaking English?

Resurfacing

Hey, everyone. Sorry for getting too into my head and soul these past several entries instead of actually telling you something of my life.

Lately I've been staying up too late and waking up too early, the extended springtime sunlight pushing me to get up and out of the house to accomplish as many things as possible while it's light. "Things" are art projects, books, errands, half-hearted attempts at exercise-- but I have a hard time concentrating on any one thing long enough to actually finish it. My shelves and bedstand are littered with partially written letters, partially read books, and scraps of paper or bus tickets with notes and quotes to put in some upcoming journal entry. I credit the restlessness to the change of season, and the panic that comes with knowing just how quickly the next ten weeks will go by.

My sweet Italian family brought home a psychadelic patterned dress for me from their Easter vacation in Berlin, and despite fears that it's not really "me" I wore it to my 10am haircut on Tuesday. (Turns out it is me.) While Fabio trimmed my bangs the conversation turned to the economic crisis, and I asked him if he felt it at Studio Pepe. "No," he told me, "And I'll tell you why: because I have regular clients with whom I have built real, good relationships. It's like a therapy when they come to my studio, and the more they feel the crisis in their lives, the more they come to me. Sometimes they come just to talk, not even for a cut, while others do things they've never done before, like add color, to cheer themselves up. We don't suffer from the crisis because we know we all have to take care of each other."

This is what I will miss about Italy! The smallness of their community, the familiarity and special personal touch in so many family businesses. I'm convinced that it exists in the Bay Area, too, though, and I'm out to find it.

I did the New Haircut Strut into the center of town to buy Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends" album for the house. I stopped by the flowershop where my good friend vehemently advised me never to marry. Have children, yes, but settle down with a man, no. "It's not for people like us," she said with a shake of her head as she wound green wire around the tulip stems for a funeral arrangement. "People who need to move and change. Trust me - I've seen a few [men], tall and short, rich and poor, bald and with long hair - and it's not worth it. Don't marry." Information saved under mental file titled "Open After 27th Birthday."

I came home and put on the new CD while for lunch I reheated some leftover inky black rice, made with Venetian octopus ink, and sauteed asparagus. (Brief digression: our maid usually prepares a vegetable dish in the morning for us to eat at dinner, and when my host mom came home she was surprised to find the best part of the asparagus missing. The next morning she asked Giovanna what had happened to the heads of the asparagus, and Giovanna said she had cut them off. "But haven't you ever cooked asparagus before? Don't they have asparagus in Peru?," asked the petite Italian mother, in her business suit and pantyhose. "No," replied the Peruvian, good-naturedly. "Next time we get asparagus we'll cook them together, and I'll show you," was the solution.) After lunch I played guitar on the terrace until I broke a string. I worked on an article translation. I napped in the sunshine ten minutes before putting on my shoes to go get the boys from school.

This is how I pass my time these days, dabbling in many projects and hobbies. Two or three times a week I meet with four regular clients for 60- or 90-minute English lessons, for which I receive either 15 or 20 euro. This extra money generally goes towards espresso, gelato, or an after-dinner alcoholic beverage at one of my two favorite places. The rest of my weekly allowance is being prudently set aside for my travels in July, which remain unfixed as yet. (Stay tuned for more on that.) The changeable spring weather, shifting daily from beastly heat to lightning showers, has us all feeling a bit unsettled, but we've emerged grateful and strong from the darkness of winter, and now put one foot in front of the other in a dogged march towards summer...

In Which The Very Sky Breathes His Story

I am overcome with the fact that we only get one chance - just one! - to live this life. Each decision we make eliminates hundreds of other options, which means that each moment has infinite potential to lead us to a different destiny.

My heart hurts from loving.

I had a crazy adventure this Sunday when four of us took a train into a tiny village outside of Turin to help my friend pursue a great beer from the restaurant where she drank it to the brewery where it was produced, and somehow our clumsy grope into this obscure corner of Italy got us into a private and exclusive pre-Grand Opening party for a new branch of what was already a flourishing establishment. I wish I knew more about beer so I could appreciate more deeply the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of it! We rubbed shoulders and clinked beer glasses with Italy's most notable brewers; toured the handpainted and entirely custom-crafted Casa Baladin, the nearby hotel; met the professional cartoonist who does all their graphics, the photographer who does all the pinhole imaging, the bartender who designed their website and the manager who will debut their men's fashion line in November. Outside the the rain fell ceaselessly while inside we drank our way to merry, flushed and uninhibited in a funky pub that likely none of you will ever visit. I was struck by the feeling of community I found there, among a group of old friends who happen to be perfectly suited for each of the niches of the business - financial management, dècor, advertising, brewing - and have thus been able to make money doing what they adore, together. Everything about the place emits a kind of light (yes, even the vegetarian pasta), for it has all been and continues to be produced out of love: the love of beer, love of travel, love of beautiful things and good company.



Driving me back to the train station, one of the co-owners told me he never graduated from college. And here he is at 45, wearing a navy designer leather jacket and driving a brand new BMW, holding third row season tickets at Turin's Teatro Reggio (home to one of the best symphonic operas in the country) for the 25th year in a row, working alongside his best friends to follow in the footsteps of America's fine brewers to bring artistry to the local beer industry -- and without a college degree. Everything I've learned, he tells me, I learned from the right people. They taught me how to be who I am at an early age, and I'm different from anyone else I know. These people continue to teach him, I'm sure, and he, them. I'm beginning to see the sense in forming artists' communities like the Bloomsbury group and other famous literary societies, because when surrounded by a group of people with the same information, moving in the same direction, you not only find yourself but tap into a stronger and swifter current; a current that has moved the great thinkers behind you and will surely move those who come later. Fifty years ago, Simon and Garfunkel produced a chart-topping album retrospectively described as "a meditation on the passage of life and the psychological impact of life's irreversible, ever-accumulating losses"; around 2am today, a good friend of mine emailed me,

[It’s] this precise love of the mysterious that draws me to the wise. . . . I don’t think that wisdom the answers [sic], but rather the sustained curiosity to investigate. And the full-understanding that there are things one will never know. And the learning and growth is thus endless. One day bleeds into the next and one journey turns the corner onto the following; time passes, and because one can never know when death will come, life has an enigmatic infinite discreetness.

Whoa. Time - art - love - loss. The resonance of these themes over the passing months tells me that something must be done with, must be produced from, their repetition. I once worried that the great thinkers, authors, musicians, artists, were long gone, but I begin see that we are indeed in a continuum. There is a legacy here that moves across time and space and, without presuming to be omniscient or egotistical, I feel that I'm nearing one of the aforementioned currents. A society is beginning to form... I can feel distant pieces slowly orienting towards a common place, as the points of so many widespread compasses all trembling northward.



We are all telling each other's stories.

In Which Her Mother Comes To Call

My friend just skype-asked me,

how is your friday?

To which I replied,

good

started it with my mom

feels like a hundred years ago



she woke up early and dressed,

and lied down beside me until i had to get up

and i cried



She came to Italy last Friday to stay with me in and around Torino for one week, and it was glorious! From start to finish with no itinerary, just to be mom and daughter and catch up on the past ten months apart. I introduced her to the people who have been taking care of me here, like the florist, Monica (who gave her freesia, tulips, and a present for her new house); one of the boys' friends' moms, Silvia, (one of the few neighborhood mothers who doesn't work full time and thus mothers everyone else's kids... and au pairs...) over whose kitchen table I poured out many a wintertime woe; family members nonna Mariucia (who doesn't speak a word of English), zio Enrico and nipote Marta; and the Carpaneto family themselves. She and I weathered one lightning and thundering rainshower, some overcastness, some days of warm sunshine, and one intensely long country lunch on Easter Monday. We saw a castle-turned-museum, some horses, a lot of La Crocetta (my neighborhoos), and one important episode of "House" in our pajamas in my bed when we couldn't fall asleep.

On Thursday morning, on the way to Parco Valentino, she rubbed my back in that unconscious circular mothery way and tears sprang to my eyes so fast that I had to cover my mouth. I buried my face in her shoulder and, smack in the middle of the sidewalk, with cars driving past and old men hobbling by, my mommy held in her arms the sum of my homesickness for Berkeley and my family, my homesickness for Colorado and college, my guilt for having moved away again, my frustrations and doubts. Maybe she cried, too, for all the heartbreaks in between. When we resumed our walk she asked me if I needed a Kleenex, and instead of my customary grateful acceptance of the rumpled tissue from the bottom of her purse, I refused; for, since I've started working with these kids and never leave home without a pack, I had my own!

A Forgotten Slideshow

Just one slice of my big (little) life:

What Am I?

P.S.

Speaking of rootlessness, I should add that it isn't a bad thing. For all my lamenting for California and home, I have come to like carrying my wallet, journal and apple around these cities, satisfied. It suits me. Celebrated American short story author Kevin Brockmeier, comfortable in Arkansas, says, "One of the advantages of working as a writer… is that you don’t have to live anywhere in particular to participate in the strongest currents of your art form. As long as you can sit down with a pen and a sheet of paper one minute and with a copy of War and Peace or One Hundred Years of Solitude the next, you’re basically living right at the center of literary culture. When it comes to literature, there’s no such thing as the provinces.”



Maybe I'm a writer.

In Which She Finds This Journey Has Already Been Named

On Wednesday I had my regular English lesson with Giorgia, an educational anthropology student who hopes to improve her pronunciation for an international education conference in Vienna next October. As we read aloud together the introduction to Paul Rabinow's book Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, a nonfictional account of his time in Morocco in the 1960s, I came across a ringing bell: dépaysement. This French word was similar to an Italian word I'd discovered with delight some days before, spaesato, in a magazine article about the plight of Italy's current youth generation. I noted paese, or country, and the prefix s, which usually indicates an opposite like un- or dis- in English. Un-countried. The electronic dictionary told me it meant 'out of one's element; uncomfortable.' A state of unease for lack of being in one's own homeland. Rabinow, describing the various personal and historical reasons for setting off for North Africa, was compelled by Lévi-Strauss's obscure concept of dépaysement, a "paradoxical call for a distancing that would allow one to return more profoundly home." Whoa, whoa-- I had to shake my head to clear it, and take a break from the lesson to explain to Giorgia with wild gestures that this was exactly what I was doing! That, without knowing there was a name for this particular journey, this had been my intention all along, not only of my post-graduate year in Italy but of my initial departure from Northern California for Colorado Springs. Remember the end of high school when all directions pointed away from California, not because I didn't like it but precisely because I adored it? I couldn't explain it then. I didn't know how to tell my friends, my teachers, my family, that I needed to leave in order to come back. All that lost and sad and restless I used to feel in El Cerrito was not in vain, but in fact has brought me right here the glass of chilled white wine, the paperback book about Jews in Palestine, a sparkling blue Colorado College ring, a haircut that looks best after 3 days without shampoo.

"Every man," wrote Françoise-Renè Chateaubriand, "carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world." (This same French philosopher once wrote, "One inhabits, with a full heart, an empty world." Too bad he lived in the 1800s, or else I'd try to get him to meet me for a glass of wine at the jazz club on Via Gioberti.) "Henceforth," said Lèvi-Strauss of Chateaubriand, "it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds." All these quotes of quotes... maybe we do it in order to validate our own histories, taking comfort in the words of those who have already gone this way. Italians use the same word for "story" and "history." I feel like I've traveled so many different worlds over the past four years - Colorado, Mexico, Florence, London, Petaluma - each one leaving traces within me like so many dusty pebbles, to carry around in my pocket in hopes of one day having the time and audience to explain the handfuls. At the end of June, 2008, I drew a picture of Torino so I might remember what I have seen and loved: There are so many little idiosyncracies about life in Italy that I forget to write down each day, like seeing a woman ride her Vespa (which means "bee") in stilettos, seeing a young couple on a park bench popping each other's zits, going to the supermarket and marveling at the smaller sizes of things. My favorite is the sleek 3-pack of beer. It's so silly! But wonderful, too, the way we had to re-organize the entire car to fit 5 bags of groceries into the trunk. That's how compact and economical they are with their space. And so with their waster, their home organisation, kitchen-- everything (except Ruggi's room of toys) is useful, and has a place to live. There is little waste, and the luxury lies more in richness and value than in size or stature. This is true of the apartments, stacked one atop another all throughout the city; the small cars, even their park/garden across the street, not exactly the sprawling lawns of London but a mini-concrete pedestrian area with along, narrow strip of play equipment. The trees are big, the buildings are tall, but lives are lived on an altogether more personal scale.

Speaking of space and luxury, another gem from one of my French philosophers: "Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between an individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal." I have learned that this family, part of Northern Italy's upper crust, for all their wealth and Europeanness and domestic picture-perfection, have their tribulations just as I do or anyone else does. Freedom boils down to a matter of one's relationship to one's space; and self-identity, to the sum of one's previous choices and experiences.

With just eleven more weeks here in Torino, I can feel the end of the Distancing start to curl up at the edges to reveal the pink, painful beginning of the Coming Fully Home.

The atmosphere thickens, everywhere.