the verge

a walking enigma (with an important preamble)

2012-01-07T07:05:00.013-07:00

There are several reasons I have not been writing here much of late. Without going into them all, most of which are boring, I will say that when family members, distant and not so distant, and friends in general started reading this blog a couple of years ago it probably did change my approach a bit. I didn't mean for that to happen. This venue was started as a kind of online journal. When I write for any other sources, it is strictly third person. Here I have always written from the "I". That is the whole point. My husband does not read this blog (reading my English blathering would likely stress him out anyway). My children do not read this blog. No way. Still, there have been several instances of family gatherings where someone has mentioned something I wrote here in the company of my husband and children, only to be met with puzzled expressions or raised eyebrows. I remember last year this happened once as someone mentioned this blog while my kids were present, and when the kids asked what my blog was about, this person blurted out "It's about YOU!" Enough said.

So, as preamble to further writing here, if you know me, see me or know my kids and husband, please consider what you read here confidential. I ask this not because they would be upset about anything I write here, but because I have noticed that it holds me back as a writer. I just assumed this was an unwritten rule. But I am also a person who would rather just paint paintings for her own eyes and not show them to anyone else, so I am officially asking you this favor. Just keep it to yourself. Please. I am tired of worrying about it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You would think that one of the greatest joys for a parent would be having their three year old child pick up the newspaper and read aloud. A child who has not been subject to early pounding of the alphabet into his head. A child who spends his days covered in mud from his escapades chasing the hens around the chicken coop, with no other love in the world except his older brother. You would think that this moment would be exhilarating, and for me it was, in a certain sense. My son did just that, with an Italian newspaper, at the age of three. This was followed by surprise mathematical calculations based on the car odometer, which I still cannot even imagine without a calculator, as well as an ear for music, a hand for art, a knack for languages. You would think that this would be a thrill for a parent, imagining this child with his straight A's, his prowess on the debate team and the science club and in the math Olympics. His über achieving. Imagining the road rising up to meet this child, who not only possesses a brilliant, lightening fast mind, but is exotically beautiful, with broad shoulders and almond shaped eyes, and huge dimples.

But the reality is something else all together, and the road to the present with my younger son has been nothing but potholes and detours. Perhaps the problem with a mind like his is that he sees the superficiality and inherent wrongness of the system that surrounds him, and often totally refuses to play the game. Boredom has been his worst enemy, and injustice of any kind, even the most mundane, like being forced to sit through a lesson when he got the point in the first five minutes, has been his biggest challenge. My son was expelled from the last few months of middle school. Albeit a sort of voluntary expulsion, jointly agreed that he had gotten all he could get out of the school as far as learning went, and that he could no longer torture the science teacher by asking her to explain quarks, or the theory of everything, if she could (she couldn't). When we went to the hearing to remove my son from the school, the president of the school board at the time, a church lady bouffant of a woman still in 1980s shoulder pads and frosted blue eyeshadow, who is now in the state house of representatives, asked my son what his vision would be of the rest of the year at school. Basically expecting an answer explaining that he would stay out of trouble, stop badgering the teachers, blah blah blah. With his mother squeezing his thigh under the table to inspire the right answer, my son looked church lady in the eyes and in the most respectful, polite tone, told her he envisioned himself at that school bored out of his mind, learning nothing, being forced to conform, staring out the window. And eventually getting right back into trouble. He was 12. His mother let go of his thigh then. If you have seen the movie "Social Network", there is a scene where Mark Zuckerberg tells the fancy lawyer exactly why he is not paying attention to him. That is my son. Anyone who knows him and sees that movie can't believe it. I sent him to private math lessons for the rest of the semester.

My son is now a sophomore. The potholes and detours are still there, but becoming less and less frequent. He has a math teacher who is the ultimate nerd and the most feared teacher of the school. My son loves this teacher. He recently told me he is inspired by my son's mind and ability to ask "scaffolding questions"... um, OK. About calculus. Now if he would just do his homework... My son thinks English is basically "stupid" and Shakespeare was a loser. His grades are average. He is taking college statistics next year and still can't figure why anyone thinks Biology or Spanish or Physics are even remotely hard. The hardest thing he has to do in school is shut up.

If you meet him and don't know any of this, you might think he is a bit of a turd. A dude. An effortlessly beautiful teenager at six feet tall with a bit of smirk and a skulk, whose family probably loves too much and spoils, until you get close to him and he smiles, genuinely and beautifully, and he asks you how you are doing and really means it. Really wants to know. Tell him the truth if you are not so great, if you thing the world is shitty and meaningless sometimes, if you thing things really need to change, if you think you are miserably misunderstood. He will look you straight in the eye and nod and smile. He will understand. He will get it. He will listen.

And for a moment you will see the ticker that is his mind, spinning so much faster than everyone else's. How tired that must make him most of the time. And how grateful I am that he is ever closer to his future, which I can only hope will be filled with people just like him, as smart or smarter, people who get it. Or understand why he doesn't get it. He is my greatest challenge and mystery, and the barometer of my days. He loves me and his father and brother unconditionally, and is loyal to a fault. He doesn't lie and doesn't fake it. He is not lucky, but he is special. A walking enigma.

inspiration

2011-12-31T10:21:00.004-07:00

thanking my lucky stars still

2011-12-27T18:11:00.004-07:00

Met my adorable, honest, genuine, earthy, funny, beautiful , oh so generous husband 20 years ago on Christmas day, without a clue why he would turn my way and still be here after so many years. A man who is the sun of so many people's orbit, who always has a kind word, who will give you his jacket if you are cold and cook for you if you are hungry, so loved and admired by all who meet him. The kindest of the kind and the realest of the real. A Buddha.

Thanking my lucky stars still.

from the archives ~ the secret life of Jenny

2011-11-23T11:13:00.006-07:00

A post from several years ago I was reminded of when I spent a few days on Lake Garda last July. I have so very much to be thankful for.

The Secret Life of Jenny

As I've written in all my posts dedicated to Jenny, Jennifer has often remained a stranger to the many people I have known during my fifteen years in Italy. I've grown to miss Jennifer so, to dream about wearing her shoes again that I often forget the nostalgic love I feel for Jenny.

Last week I met a dear longtime American friend that I grew up with. She was in Italy on holiday, and I decided to take an entire day off (no small task... I leave in 20 days) and meet her in Sirmione, on the shores of Lake Garda. Sirmione was the backdrop for the first four weeks I spent in Italy, and was were I fell in love with the man who would be the catalyst for abandoning America.

Each time I rattled off something in Italian to the waiter or the ice cream vendor, I realized how strange Jenny must appear to someone who sees me as Jennifer. I've been here so long that much of Jenny has permeated me forever. When I return to the US, people often comment on how animated I have become, and how I talk with my hands. My mother loves the way I break my bread open right on table, and worry about cleaning up the crumbs later. My boys sit just like their father, with their long legs gracefully crossed in a pose that seems feminine and awkward on an American man, but that is unmistakabley European and beautiful on an Italian. And even though I am always in jeans and a tee shirt, you can bet my accessories match! It just happens that way over here...

My longing to finally return home and excitement/dread over my upcoming trip had so overshadowed everything else, that the attack of utter, weepy, mushy nostalgia I felt as I turned my car onto the peninsula that is Sirmione bowled me over. There was the first Italian supermarket I had ever set foot in, where I bought a fiasco of chianti for the first time. There was the little restaurant, still going strong, where my husband and I had dinner almost every night at midnight. He was working as a chef in those days, and would finish his shift at 11:30 and run back to our rented room to fetch me for dinner. I almost always ordered the same thing- spaghetti allo scoglio.

I parked my car and walked down the same sidewalk that I had walked everyday so many years before. And when I came upon the castle, I could see myself perched on the drawbridge (that's right, there's a real drawbridge and a moat) waiting for my husband to arrive. Our courtship was a scene straight out of a fairytale, mind you, and coming back to this one spot brought it all rushing back.

Back then as I waited, I would usually have a bag of bread or cookies to feed the swans.

As I entered the archway into the old town, I saw the restaurant where my husband was the chef during those years. It's the only restaurant located right in the castle.

My friend and I took a ferry to the far side of the lake. The weather was cloudy and gray, and I could just make out the shores of Gargnano, the so beautiful that you've fallen to sleep and are dreaming that you are walking around in a picturebook town where I spent my wedding night.

Even though I spent the entire day reminiscing my former life as Jennifer with my friend, I came away from that day with the memories of Jenny taking her first steps.

I smiled all the way home, and I am smiling right now as I write this.

a prayer wouldn't hurt

2011-11-05T19:12:00.006-06:00

One of my most important clients is located in northwestern Italy. In my line of work, you always try not to put all your eggs in one basket, but sometimes it is inevitable. I have many clients all over the world, but this client is special. The company is a large multinational that deals with power generation and gas turbines, and they are lovely, professional, exquisite people. I feel like they are family.

Last week this area of Italy was hit by intense flooding. If you have ever visited the Cinque Terre or dreamed of doing so, you should know that the cinque have become quattro. Monterossa was practically obliterated by the flood and ensuing mudslides. When last month I heard on the news that there was a satellite falling from space that would hit the earth, all I could hope was that it wouldn't hit Italy. I imagined it falling on Assisi, or the church on the hillside above our old refuge in the mountains, or even on our own house with its thick stone walls. I also imagined it falling on the Cinque Terre, and what a tragedy that would have been. The beauty in Italy around every corner is no myth. It's real.

My favorite clients have gone silent for the past week. My finances are shot, which just goes to show that I shouldn't have put my eggs all in one basket. I am fretting and frayed, and wondering how I will pay for the zillion payments that I somehow must spit up every month. What a mess I have made.

My pleas were finally answered when one of the project managers I work with there wrote me that their offices were buried in a tomb of mud, and that they only now had any power or Internet access. She also wrote me that they were all feeling lucky that no one in the company or in their families had been killed, since many have been. She was afraid. It had started to rain again.

Pain is relative, and the tremor in her e-mail gave me pause long enough to gain perspective. Money is nothing. My business will rebound, as will my favorite business partners. Those northern Italians are funny that way. They always, always bounce back. Hard core.

But still, a prayer wouldn't hurt.

eternal spring

2011-11-01T08:51:00.008-06:00

Eternal Spring ~ Auguste Rodin

Another stop on my visit to the Met last month, with a heavy sigh.

My husband is leaving for a 10 day trip to Italy, and I already miss him. After 19 years of marriage he is still the only north star I ever see in this world, and I have no idea how I got so lucky to have a constant companion, always, to face this life.

~~~~~~~~~

a fair chance

2011-10-22T08:42:00.005-06:00

When I was in New York City a couple of weeks ago I happened to walk out onto Broadway just as a massive group of thousand of skateboarders were occupying all of Broadway and skating all the way down to Wall Street. It was a beautiful day and the crowd on the skateboards were high-fiving everyone as they sped by. There were so many of them that it took something like half an hour for the entire group to pass me. I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, meaning they had quite a ways to go yet. Seeing all of Broadway so peacefully occupied was stunning. There were young kids and entire families riding, older folks and parents with babies on there backs. Everyone was smiling.

In my own tiny, small way, in my macrocosm of a world so full of my family and responsibilities that I rarely feel like I can breathe while treading water, I am protesting. After many years living abroad, and about four years back on American soil, I am finally getting clear about what the protests happening around the globe, and in the United States in particular, mean to me and my family. It is not about who owns the bigger house or fancier car, because I could care less about these things. It is not about material things at all, or about my future retirement or lack thereof. It is not about my parents, who I believe were lucky enough to be born into the generation of opportunity, with access to affordable education, health care, the economic boom, and now Medicare. It isn't even about the fact that I personally do not have health coverage in the United States, despite the best of my creative efforts to do so. What it really is all about is my children.

My older son is now a senior in high school. He is so talented, fluently trilingual and with the most open mind in the sky, and I wonder how he could ever blossom to his full potential in the US higher education system, where the fatter your wallet is, the wider your choices are. And not only are your choices wider, but your entire life after earning your degree is brighter. On www.collegeboard.org, one of the categories under each university lists the average indebtedness of students exiting that school after graduating with a four year degree. Each public school that my son is considering in the US ranges at about $20,000, and this is on the lower side of the overall spectrum. If the costs of going to college have increased 600% since the 1980s, who exactly is being penalized?

Of late I have often had people ask me why we are returning to Europe once my younger son graduates, when the news is so full of the "European Debt Crisis". The answer is strikingly simple. Living in a country without guarantees of basic human rights (what I consider to be human rights, anyway), such as equal access to health care and education, means that the inequality gap between the 99% and 1% can only widen, burgeoning into such inexplicable wrongness that it borders on incivility. Only the wealthy are truly healthy. Only the wealthy are truly educated, or if the rest of the younger generation does manage to study, they are forever indebted to those same wealthy for that privilege. There is an innate sense of civilization in Europe that I miss dearly, and that I do not see on the horizon in America. My son is applying to several US colleges, to which I know he will be accepted. He is then taking a gap year before starting his studies, because he is very young, and because he is not so sure he wants to dive into the student loan debt pool. We are likely sending him to Spain, where he can learn to speak Catalan in Barcelona, or perfect his Spanish in Madrid, where he will be close to home in Italy, and have access to health care wherever he goes. Where he will likely enjoy the benefits of his European Union passport, and apply to one of the top universities in Europe, perhaps in Madrid, Salamanca, Bologna or Pisa, not returning to study in the US. Where I won't lay awake at night wondering why such a deserving kid would have to go so far into debt to make the most of his talents. Where I at least feel like he has a fair chance, a shot at doing what he is best at, whatever that is, wherever he eventually winds up.

What a lucky kids he is, at least having a choice. What kind of country would this be if we actually invested in our kids, as opposed to ten year wars and Wall Street bail-outs? What would our collective future look like?

A little closer to my idea of civilization.

the storm

2011-10-11T10:08:00.003-06:00

Seeing a work of art that has been overwrought in mass media is almost always a letdown. I remember seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time, and how disappointing it was. I generally could care less about seeing a Van Gogh or a Klimt. There are some artists that defy this rule, like Botticelli or Michelangelo. And Caravaggio. I have never been let down by Caravaggio.

Then there are the surprises. The images we have probably seen, or in my case walked right by on my way to one of my favorite galleries in the Met. The images that are sometimes part of popular culture or part of our own experience, which slap us in the face and make us sit still.

I was at the Met last week and heading towards a Hieronymus Bosch painting that I love to linger over, with its minuscule imagery of death and torture and ecstasy, as I walked past The Storm, a painting I have walked by so many times in the past, and I could not help but stop.

Then I sat and stared, and its beauty and unimaginable joy seeped into me. It is probably the effect of where I am in my own life, and how I long to give up everything and run through the woods most days, hopefully holding my husband's hand, but the glory of this painting is positively inebriating if you just stop to soak it in.
So stop.

The Storm ~ Pierre-Auguste Cot

pinkies held high in definace

2011-09-29T10:08:00.006-06:00

I've written a bit in the past about the ongoing food revolt in my family since we moved to the US a few years ago. Well, nothing has changed. In fact, the situation worsens by the day, and no matter how creative we are, how much we pack our suitcases with when we return from our trips to Italy, how great we are in the kitchen (my husband is a chef, after all), the general lament running through our family life is LOUD and getting LOUDER.

I know food seems like a frivolous topic, but the truth is that it played such a central role to our lives, to our living, for so long. And it's not just the actual food I am referring to... the beautiful, fresh, light, delectable food. It is the ceremony, the ritual of what food represents in Italy that we miss. It is the art of doing the daily things in life. It is constant work to recreate that feeling here. It is so absent outside of our door.

The result is that we never eat out, and if we do, we are always, always disappointed. I usually leave with a stomachache to boot. The giant portions, mysterious fatty sauces covering everything, the ever present CHICKEN in every dish, even salads, has conquered our desire to go out. Not to mention the molestation, violence and perversion of Italian cuisine! The rubbery mozzarella, goopy Alfredo sauce (Who on earth is Alfredo? I never met him in Italy...), the burnt garlic, sugary marinara, crazy pseudo coffee combinations... it's all way too hard to bear. The grunts and moans of my children when they try eating out with friends, especially a pizza, make us sound like the worst of snobs. And I know it is true. And I have become the absolute worst of them all. The expat turned food snob forever. I have actually considered accepting some interpreting projects in Italy lately... let me explain by saying interpreting is truly one of the most demanding, brainy, exhausting jobs in the world, especially in the fields I work in, and almost never goes well with an 8 hour jetlag in tow. But the thought of the cappuccino and warm briosche in the morning is enough to convince me. I'm going to Rome in February.

Many years ago when I was traveling to Nepal with my husband (he was still my boyfriend then) we had a layover of several days in Moscow, where we met two young guys from my husband's city traveling to Nepal on the same flight out with us. I remember that I was still learning Italian, and had just begun to get the swing of the language. I had spent about three months in Italy at that point. I did not know what that word, Italian, really meant when applied to a person yet. I was still a tourist. In Nepal we separated from our friends in Kathmandu, only to meet them again by chance in another smaller Nepalese city before our trek. We went to a cafe, and we all ordered a cup of coffee. The lovely waiter brought our coffee, and as I took a sip of my somewhat watered down, but flavorful enough coffee, I looked on at my future husband and two friends as they clutched their coffee cups with their pinkies in the air, the involuntary gesture of the Italian coffee connoisseur, and tasted the coffee. The expressions that spread from one to the next went from puzzled, to startled, to downright afraid, and finally to disgusted. The pinkies in the air combined with the pursed lips, furrowed brows, splotched cheeks and despairing eyes had me laughing until I almost wet my pants. I will never forget it.

We ordered an espresso machine when we returned from Italy in July. We always drink our coffee (brought over from Italy in our carry-ons) from our moka coffee maker, but this time we decided desperate times call for desperate actions. Our machine is a jewel and makes espresso and cappuccino just like an Italian bar. Every morning, the four of us gather round, no words spoken, sleepy and needing courage to face the day ahead, smelling the glorious aroma from our tiny espresso cups. The Snob family, my two towering boys, my ageless husband with his crazy curls and me, sleepy and dreaming of that warm briosche, with pinkies held high in defiance.

called to the cause

2011-09-06T09:01:00.003-06:00

I recently published a letter in our local newspaper in response to a column written by Ken DeShaies. If you are interested in reading the column, click here. His article was based on a book by T.R. Reid called "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care". You can read more about this book here.
I wrote the letter because I could not help feeling called to the cause. Anyone who has been following this blog knows that I have written extensively about my personal journey through the US health care system. I have recently stopped writing much about health care after having come to a relative peace with my decision to eventually leave the US. I do not hold much hope that things will change here. I actually think they will get worse.
For anyone who doesn't follow me on Facebook or other mailing lists, I am also copying the letter here. The best of health to all of you.

Re. “US health care a broken system” by Ken DeShaies, opinion, Sept. 2

After leaving the United States in 1992, I lived and worked in Italy for 17 years. I returned to the United States with my husband and two children in 2007 to allow my kids to finish their high school years in an English-speaking environment and also to be closer to my aging parents. I woefully underestimated how bad the situation had become in the United States in regards to access to adequate health care. I had been living in a country that provides excellent health services to all of its people, regardless of employment, age or station. I had been through two pregnancies, undergone two surgeries and a myriad of common health issues. I took for granted that I would find the same access to health care in the U.S.

Over the past four years I have been terminated from one insurance policy when the company discovered my family history of breast cancer when I received a call back on an annual mammogram. This company terminated my policy just in time not to pay for the $10,000 biopsy I would need to find out that I did not have cancer. I had always paid my premiums. This money was worked for and spent in vain. I was then effectively priced out of another insurance policy, as my annual deductible eventually rose to $10,000, and my premiums more than doubled. My husband's insurance debacle is almost worse than mine, as he was part of Colorado's “high risk pool” with a $10,000 annual deductible and an extremely expensive premium. He is an incredibly strong, slim, fit, non-smoking man who can run straight up a mountain, but needs cholesterol medication for a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol. This was his ruin. We were eventually both forced to drop our policies as the deductibles continued to balloon and the premiums became unfeasible. It became more and more evident that we were paying for nothing. The word “insurance” has nothing to do with health insurance in the U.S. My premiums padded the wallets of the insurance companies' billionaire CEOs and did not “insure” me against anything. We decided that a plane fare to Italy was more of an insurance policy than anything we could expect from American insurance companies.

Last year I became progressively ill from gallbladder disease. I had scheduled surgery in Italy for November, but in October I became extremely sick. I flew to Italy on a day's notice, jaundiced and in pain. As soon as I arrived I was taken care of by professional, expert physicians and nurses, who performed my surgery and kept me in the hospital for six days to recover. My gallbladder was on the verge of rupturing. I could have died from an infection had this happened. The Italian hospital in our city has nothing like the grand entrance to the St. Anthony Medical Center in Frisco, with its fireplace, chandeliers and plush sofas. It is clean and Spartan and efficient. It is a well-oiled machine that turns no one away, whether for a broken leg suffered on the ski slopes or a heart transplant. Health is a common good for all in Italy.

The most telling moment of my entire journey through the U.S. health care system and through my own personal health challenges these past four years was on the runway in Newark Airport as the plane took off for Milan. As soon as the wheels left the ground and we ascended over the Atlantic, I felt an immense, total sense of relief. I knew that from that point on I would land in Italy, and no matter how sick I became I would be cared for. I would be treated and cared for without the worry of losing the home that I had worked so hard to pay for, or the worry of decisions about my care being made based on cost or on the whim of an insurance company, or even worse on the size of my wallet. It was a sobering moment of clarity.

My husband and I are self-employed. We pay our taxes, our mortgage and give to charity when we can. We are your neighbors and your colleagues. We are also part of the population that only the United States cultivates within its own society, citizens without access to health care. We will be leaving the United States when my children graduate, but there are many who do not have this luxury. Mr. DeShaies' article should hit a nerve with every American, whether insured or not. My own personal perspective is a footnote, a drop in the bucket. I know I am extremely lucky to have viable alternatives. The majority of uninsured Americans do not.

from the archives ~ for my son

2011-08-23T08:41:00.008-06:00

A letter to my beautiful, brilliant, frustrating, sweet, impulsive, impossible son from the archives. Apropos again today as he starts his sophomore year in high school, and as I watch from the sidelines with bated breath.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Letter to a Gifted Child in a Sluggish World

Sometimes life feels like a battle

Dear gifted child in a sluggish world,

I know you feel like there will never be a time when your wits catch up to your ever growing feet and hands. I know the quickness of your mind is sometimes so fast that you feel queasy, seasick as you try to walk in the straight line everyone expects you to. I know the passage of time is often painfully slow and other times gut wrenching fast, and that the middle ground eludes you. The world seems sluggish and in a blur to you. Meaning is hard to find. Sometimes life feels like a battle. If I could give you any of the wisdom, or foolishness, of my years, I would tell you this.

Slow down. The road stretching out before you may be long or cut short, but the steps you need to get there are the same. Stop running and walk. Be still when you are tired. Turn when you feel like it and do not follow the masses, who usually lead you nowhere. If you can, walk alone.

Travel. Leave everything you know behind and enter a place where nothing and no one is familiar. Open your eyes and mind and ears, and remember that you always have much to learn. Stay until you are complacent, and then do it again. You will never run out of places to go.

Study. Cultivate an eclectic mind full of knowledge which may not seem to matter. Learn something every single day you live. See something new. Say a new word. Listen to a song you have never heard before. Eat a new flavor. Smell a new smell. Read.

Risk. Risk it all when you can without hurting someone you love.

Do not covet things. Get what you need, and sometimes what you desire, but do not become a slave to things which will rot and wither when you move on. Things are heavy and burdensome, and never really give you what you are seeking.

Laugh. A lot.

Practice compassion.

Get ready not to know the answer. While you are always the first to understand and the first to finish, get ready to never really know the answers. As you struggle and fight to figure it all out, try to imagine that in the end you won't, since no one ever really does. That's when you can find the true happiness of the quandary. That's when you will revel in the excitement of the search. If the search ever really ended, what would you be doing anyway? The search is the answer.

The mother of a gifted child

hope springs eternal

2011-08-22T15:11:00.007-06:00

I saw the Rise of the Planet of the Apes a few days ago.Let me preface this by saying that I am not writing a review of the movie, which I basically cared nothing about. It was the only semi digestible film playing at the only theater with an hour of me, and my mother and I longed to sit in a dark theater and eat super salty popcorn. It was well worth it. James Franco reminds me a bit of my husband...

I left the movie duly full of popcorn and contented, but there was something underlying the story that lingered with me. As I watched the previews and then the movie, I was struck by the fact that there are so many films with a basic underlying plot about how hopelessly messed up the human race is in general, and how we are constantly sowing the seeds of our own destruction. There was a preview for a movie about some not so distant future where everyone lives forever, and only the rich can afford to "buy the time" to stay alive. The poor die young (not so far off current reality considering the health care system in the United States, or the starvation crisis in Somalia). There was another preview for a movie about some deadly genetically engineered virus that becomes a pandemic and spreads across the globe by accident. Then of course, there were the apes and the greedy pharmaceutical companies in the main feature. Was there actually anyone in the theater not rooting for the apes?

So as I left the theater, I thought about how I feel in general about the human race. I have cancelled cable so I no longer listen to the endless stream of rubbish coming from the news channels. I am doing my best to avoid politics altogether, which inspires zero faith in me from either side of the Atlantic, and opt instead to read Scientific American or National Geographic. I am totally dedicated to my children still, and their race to adulthood is on the fast track now. I have no plans to miss the finish line. My older son spent his summer reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the ultimate confirmation that hope springs eternal. I spend the virtual breaks in my work day surfing sites about how to volunteer as a married couple (even retirees go!) with the Peace Corps when my children are grown, and I scramble to fit in pro bono translation work for Doctors Without Borders. I could care less about the rat race permeating everything (ever think about how the human race has managed to invent the rat race?). I may be close to finally understanding the lack of meaning so apparent to me in so much of what I see in today's society. The problem is probably not with society at all, but instead with me.

What a relief!

My son also read Ralph Waldo Emerson this past summer. What a thrill to return to Leaves of Grass... sit, stare, listen. "Peace is always beautiful".

le isole tremiti

2011-08-05T16:32:00.016-06:00

my Italian bonsai

My husband and I have shared enough experience living in both Italy and the United States to realize that we want to "retire" in Italy. We will likely spend much more time there when my kids finish high school, which is ever nearer. I am now so grateful that I had my children when I was so young! We have basically decided that Italy is for the old people (us), with its health care system, eternally slow food lifestyle, museums for wandering, our myriad of friendships and list of cousins too long to count, and that the US is for the young people (my kids), with its dynamic universities, part time jobs, merit based ideology, driver's licenses at 16, and all the rest.

We do not imagine returning to the house we own, but instead to somewhere on the coast, hopefully an island, somewhere a bit warmer than where we have always lived, a bit slower, a bit less chaotic. Northern Italy is beautiful and majestic, but there's a reason those Italian islanders live so long. So we have set out to visit all our potential future islands, one at a time, some of which we have already visited in the past and some new. We are not old quite yet. We have plenty of time. And if we change our minds, we have lost nothing and only gained so much. Our sojourn in June was the first of these visits...

unforgiving and beautiful

We spent a couple of weeks in the Isole Tremiti, a tiny group of five islands off the Adriatic coast of Italy in Puglia. It was rocky and craggy and magnificent, and reminded me of the time I spent sailing in the Kornati Islands in Croatia. The Tremiti are tiny islands, and only two of them are inhabited. They are islands of rocky caves for snorkeling and diving, and famous wild capers grow abundant on the sides of the beaches and cliffs.

wild capers growing along the shore

San Domino is the island where we stayed and where the largest village in the archipelago sits (a sweet piazza and scattering of whitewash houses). The other inhabited island is San Nicolà, where a 10th century abbey is carved from the rocks perched high atop the hill. The abbey was transformed into a fortress in the middle ages, and the castle is a perfectly intact example of medieval architecture, rife with turrets and slits in the walls for cannons or for pouring boiling oil on the marauding Turks, who once surrounded the island in an onslaught that lasted an entire year with over 100 ships.

San Nicolà at sunset ~ the cathedral is being restored

the holy well

looking down

There was something so mythic about the Tremiti Islands. I swear Odysseus must have spent time there on his voyage. The albatrosses that have colonized San Domino screech and howl after dusk, like sirens tempting sailors into the rocky crags on the shore. The cobblestones are worn smooth from the centuries. There is nothing beachy about it. To swim you had better be willing to dive off a cliff.

free falling

The scenery, like most scenery in Italy, is breathtaking. It is so blue and and so green that it knocks you down. It is savage in some places and gentle in others, and reminds me why there is so much history here, layer after layer, and the night sky rivals the sky where I live now. Every step is a precipice.

on San Nicolà

I do not think we will ever live in the Tremiti Islands. They are too small and the ferry service is too unreliable. The people were solare, with sunny dispositions, something I rarely find in northern Italy, and the sea was beyond belief, but it is not quite what we are looking for. I will say one more thing, though, the pizza was buonissima...

the free smile

2011-08-01T15:14:00.005-06:00

Years ago I traveled in Nepal. I first wrote a bit about our travels in Nepal in this article from several years ago.Nepal is one of several developing countries that I have visited over the years. It was and still is my favorite. It wasn't the beautiful Himalayas rising up over the steaming hot springs in the valley, or the yaks wandering through the street of Kathmandu amid the people, some beautiful and some old and haggard, some shoeless and some decked in glittering, rainbow colored eastern finery. It was not the delicious yogurt or the stupas covered with monkeys, or the marigold necklaces for sale at the market as offerings to the gods, or the slow moving donkeys with the gentle eyes climbing up Annapurna. The most beautiful thing in Nepal were the smiles, the smiles plastered on everyone's faces, from the city to the temple to the dirt floored shack. The white teeth gleaming and the bows of the generous, exquisite people I met there. Nepal was so full of smiles. Free smiles.

When we were about halfway through our travels by foot, I fell and badly sprained my ankle. We were days and days away from any hotel or hostel, and several hours from the nearest stop on our trekking route. I hobbled into a tiny village, about the size of a small city block, and sat on the ground and grimaced. I did not know what would become of me. I did not know that a family that had never seen me and would perhaps never see me again would take me into their home, a two room shack with a fire pit in the middle, children giggling and climbing over me, the eldest daughter braiding my "golden" hair over and over again. We stayed for three days until I could walk again, my husband befriending the man of the house and helping him to cut the firewood, me watching the mother cook and sew and carry up water from the river in old plastic buckets, smiling and smiling all the way.

Where is the source of so much infinite smiling? Where does it come from? How do they do it? I believe the answer is meaning. A life of meaning, a mindful life, transcends where you live, how much money you have or lack, how much you accumulate, how much you covet. There is meaning in the ordinary, the dedication we each commit in our lives to something greater than ourselves, in the smallest of actions, in our respect for others. I have so often felt I was born into the wrong culture, the wrong country, the wrong shoes, into a rat race towards nothing, a rat race I cannot imagine participating in. There are few places on earth where I felt as alive and at peace as I did in that shack with my swollen ankle. I do not remember pain or fear. I remember the smiles and the warm tea, the feeling of being instantly and without question part of the human family, part of the natural order of things. I was the woman with the golden hair and the limp, with a backpack full of goodies to share with the children, with my husband so adept at cutting wood and milking the yak. I hope to one day go back and visit my Nepalese family again. I slept so well there.

arrivederci

2011-06-01T09:18:00.001-06:00

I'll be back in about 6 weeks ~ think of me here

depth perception

2011-05-24T09:22:00.009-06:00

Today is my birthday. As I have gotten older I have come to believe that milestones are important and deserve pause. Not that I always do this, but trying live a more mindful life starts with trying to be more mindful of myself, no?

At today's milestone I am grateful that the school year is almost over. In retrospect, my own high school years were all about navigating imminent disaster and hopefully drawing the luckiest cards. It was about only seeing myself through the eyes of others on some days, and on other days being far too sure of what I wanted or didn't. Years have mellowed this certainty for me a bit, but my children are in the midst of those years now. I am grateful that we have come through another year still liking each other a lot. I am grateful for my oldest son's wisdom and warmth and heartbreaking beauty. I am grateful for my younger son's head splitting brilliance and impossible nature, and huge psychedelic smile.

I was recently published with my first byline as a translator. The book is a study in spatial physics by a professor at the Sapienza University in Rome. The word sapienza literally means knowledge, and I am grateful for the knowledge that I have a love of physics. With my younger son's Stephen Hawking books scattered around the house, I realized that even though I have always worked and studied as an artist, there is a physicist hidden away in my innermost brain dying to get out. There is something extremely comforting and humbling in the study of how the world is made, how and why we see it the way we do, something I have never found in any religion. I studied perspective and depth perception and color theory extensively when I was in college. I remember feeling like I was seeing the world through such enlightened eyes, like I knew a secret no one else around me did. Now I have that feeling again. Art and science truly are the same. I hope to continue my studies into physics. It is the ultimate trip.

I am grateful for the eighteen years of marriage I have passed with my husband. I am grateful that our vision of the future continues to evolve and transform in the same direction with the same ideas, generally off the wall and far fetched, which we always seem to make happen anyway. I am grateful that somehow against all odds by pure happenstance I found someone who loves me totally and selflessly and unconditionally. I have no idea how I got so lucky.

Depth perception is not a given. It is an art. Depth can be seen everywhere if you know where to look, in the smallest most mundane of things. It is elusive when I am living on the surface, running and running to get through the day. Depth can only be seen if I stop and seek it, so on this milestone I am grateful for a moment to see it, right here in front of me. On my birthday.

Thanks for reading.

the solar system

2011-05-02T07:42:00.008-06:00

When my oldest son was about 2 years old, he locked himself in our car. We were parked in front of our former business, an alpine refuge high in the mountains. You can read about our times in the refuge here, where my children grew up with their nonno tending our hens and rabbits, gathering mushrooms and wild blueberries. We had just arrived from the village below with groceries, and somehow my son was still in the backseat of the car, I remember he was holding a popsicle, and he managed to close the door and promptly press down on the door lock, locking all the doors. He then climbed into the front seat and began to beat on the window, and his little foot knocked the gear shift into neutral, so the car began to roll ever so slightly. We were perched on the top of a mountain, and only 15 yards away there was a cliff, a cliff like you only see in the Dolomites, a cliff leading to another cliff, and finally into the abyss below.

In the fashion of a young mother with her first child, I panicked. I screamed and fat tears rolled down my face, all while I was trying to reason with my 2 year old son, telling him to pull up on the lock, pull it up! A quick thinking customer ran to his car and pulled it up against the bumper of mine, so I knew the car would not tumble down the mountainside, and that we would somehow get my son out, but my tears and panic would not abate. My son's face went from mild surprise to fear to full on rage. He threw his popsicle at the windshield. He laid back and beat his feet against the door. He gripped his own hair in his hands and pulled in fury. The expression in his eyes was that of a wild animal caged and fighting. He could not get out. He had lost all reason. He was powerless.

I had a vision of those eyes recently. I was at my desk, looking over my unsustainable work schedule. The schedule I am forced to maintain for now, just to keep up. I glanced at my bills, my older son's ACT study materials and thought of my younger son's generally impossible nature. I wondered when they would somehow become men. I thought of the mini solar system that my life felt like, with me the fulcrum of so much in my orbit. I was the sun, and if I dropped out, the rest of the planets would plunge and crash. I felt like my little son, trapped in a small space, banging my feet and pulling my own hair. Let me out! I want out! The panic rose up in my throat, and the immense, enormous, monumental responsibility of my family felt like it would drown me.

We got my son out of the car be removing one of the rear windows. Somehow my husband, the guy who can literally do everything and fix anything, removed a car window and replaced it on the top of that mountain, without breaking a shard of glass or making even the tiniest scratch on that car. My sons heaving sobs turned into bouncing joy and then a heavy snore as he passed out in my arms, and he forgot the entire incident. I never forgot the look in his eyes, though, and the terror he felt at being trapped. I just need to remember that he got out. He was rescued without a scratch. My husband saved him. And sometimes he is also the only thing that saves me, from feeling like I am the creator and sustainer of all this gravity.

We forget the hair pulling and kicking when it is over. We only remember the joy of being saved.

ode to the nonconformist

2011-03-22T10:43:00.005-06:00

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over the last several years as my boys have navigated the roughest sea that is adolescence, I have more often than not felt inept as a parent, clueless even. I have been awash with fear and uncertainty. I have questioned so much of what I have done as parent up to now, which in retrospect was joyously easy. Nothing prepared me for raising young men except my own adolescence and instinct, which is to say not much. I have frequently found myself saying to myself and to others "I just want it to be over", with my sons grown, say somewhere past about 23 years old. I can't quite believe that when I hear it come out of my mouth, because I adore them both so.

One of the recurring questions that I have when I am in the soupy uncertainty of parenting a teenager is if I did the right thing. My husband and I, unconsciously, solely based on who we are, have raised our children to buck the norm and live outside of so many conventions. We did not know we were fostering such open mindedness. It just happened, the result of our travels and political views and loud mouth debating over long tables full of Italian friends after countless delicious dinners. We were often outside the norm in Italy for our insistence that our children cultivate independence, especially of thought and responsibility. We are often outside the norm here, for our insistence that our children do not see the world from the strangely isolated, atop a mountain looking down, narrow minded view that is often American (actually, this does not require any insistence). My boys are generally the quirky in their Italian circles, and the same holds true here.

So when my younger son, the enigma, whirlwind, restless rebel with a heart of gold comes home to tell me that he participated in a debate during his economics class about his statement that the peril of America is akin to that of the Roman Empire before it crashed and burned, or about a debate over another student's comment that "America is the greatest country in the world" being based on nothing but television commercials, since this other student has never even been anywhere else, or even the existence of God, or what men call God, being compatible with the physics of nature, I cannot help but cringe just a little. Did I do this to my child? Isn't life just a bit easier when you conform? Or at least keep your thoughts to yourself? And when my older son, my tranquil, balanced, beautiful, nature loving boy who everyone can't help but fall in love with, looks at me this morning over breakfast in a busy restaurant and says, "there are so many people who basically talk about nothing, only war and money and power", and writes his term paper on "the inability of Americans to see how they are perceived around the world as it relates to their general lack of exposure to other languages and cultures, resulting in a pronounced difficulty to even speak foreign languages", I prickle for how this may be taken by those around him, no matter how dreamy eyed or lovable he is. Their views in any Italian classroom would likely be just as charged in that context, just as controversial. Their views in an American classroom are always provocative, hence my inner cringe.

But the cringe doesn't last. Right behind it is the pride of seeing my children with free reins on their thoughts, on their futures and their possibilities. While I know they have each faced enormous challenges living the life we have created for them up to now, their truest sense of identity seems to finally be coming from somewhere within as opposed to somewhere outside. Life is never easy for the self aware, but it is lived, no? While all parents wish the smoothest of roads under the feet of their children, I also know that mine will travel roads full of unexpected hairpin turns, potholes, uphill strides and dangerous downhill races. The road is not straight, but varied, with open vistas and tight canyons, familiar faces and exotic strangers, cultures different and the same. They will surely fall. I can only hope they will get up and brush off the dust from their knees. They have so far.

How I envy them once I get past the cringe of seeing them challenged. The ultimate nonconformists, the ultimate free thinkers.

the ecstasy

2011-03-21T09:01:00.005-06:00

St. Francis was visited during the night by an angel to receive the stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Jesus on his hands and feet. He was in the forest with his small band of followers and the animals, the same animals that would become his companions in compassion and kindness throughout the rest of his life.

This image of St. Francis painted by Caravaggio is one of my favorites, for it's chiaroscuro lightening and drama, and for the collapsed St. Francis, abandoned to the arms of the angel. His load was so heavy. He was so weary. And his ecstasy came at the same moment he abandoned himself to the forest, to the animals, to silence.

Allegory for thought.

from the archives - my body

2011-03-10T11:53:00.003-07:00

My scars from my surgery last fall are finally starting to fade. I have a small constellation going across my stomach, star shaped tracks that mark the passing of where the surgeons poked and prodded, and where they finally fixed me. I have spent most of my adult life in a one piece bathing suit, but this new set of footprints on my body has inspired my to wear a bikini, showing off my dues paid.
I just reread this post from a few years ago, which is more true today than ever. We must love ourselves. We are all we've got.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

my body

The possibility of cancer in my body was nightmarish to me the first few days. Literally. I would lay in bed and think about what it would feel like to have one or both of my breasts removed. I would imagine the scars and the feeling of no longer being top heavy. I imagined my equilibrium shifting and my shoulders hunching forward to hide the void. For someone who has spent the better part of her life searching for and inventing ways to camouflage her breasts, my fear of losing this part of my body was striking. I tried to imagine what it would feel like. And I was scared that I indeed would no longer be me.

As I stood beneath the shower this morning I thought of my body and the life it has carried me through. I often look at my children and steal a caress of their perfect skin and marvel that my body could have produced such perfection. I looked down at my feet, which are strangely attractive considering the feet in the rest of my family, and thought of the places they have trekked and run. The mountains they have climbed and the sidewalks they have pounded. How we mistreat this one true companion in life, we women in particular. How we long for it to be different. To be younger.

What would it feel like if I could love my body the way I love my children? Unconditionally and without refrain? My brief brush with what it would feel like to lose this body made me want to love every aged, scarred, weathered inch of it. As cliche as it may sound, it really is a temple. The only one I'll ever really have.

andiamo

2011-03-09T13:53:00.004-07:00

in the Himalayas on the top after a long haul ~ I made it

I try to imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't traveled so much. Would I feel more content than I do in general? Would I have amassed more wealth or more self assuredness? Would I have more complacency and calm?

All I know is, every chapter of my life seems to be leading to the next trip, the next airplane, an infectious waiting and planning and waiting. I can't remember any trip I have taken coming to a close and me actually wanting to go home. I used to think this was a fault, something I needed to fix. Age has taught me that this is actually just who I am.

Oh the joy of being the foreigner and the stranger and no place in particular to go. Oh the joy of people so different and places so beautiful and ugly, of an escape from the frame of mind of a culture, any culture, that defines who I am supposed to be.

I can't wait. Andiamo.

insanity begets insanity

2011-03-07T13:30:00.007-07:00

Last week I had a brief moment of clarity, when everything become plain, simple and clear. I was down with the flu, and forced to work straight through it, trying to make sense of some very difficult gas turbine specifications. It's funny sometimes for people who know me to imagine me that way, cajoling words about turbines and robotics and aeronautics, when these same people likely know me as a creative, artistic, dreamy eyed sort. I do not know where I found my talent for science. It fell on my head one day and led the way to a different part of my brain, where things make sense and are clear and concise, where there are no blurred edges or abstract ideas. It is a beautiful sort of respite for me. I've built my business and livelihood on that clarity.

My moment of clarity last week came as I turned away from my work and turned on the television. I was flipping through the channels to find my favorite series, and all I could see and hear were reports of Charlie Sheen. I don't know who Charlie Sheen is, except for his role in Platoon when I was in college, because he looked so much like my boyfriend at the time. I have no idea what his sitcom is about, and I must admit that I have no idea what any sitcoms are about. All I know is, his face and drama are plastered all over the news, all over Facebook, all over newspapers and magazines. And as I continued on to find my most geeky favorite TV series, I realized that this is really what people are talking about. This is the hot topic, the butt of jokes, the front page splash. This is the common thread. And I felt sick.

The United Sates has been waging a futile war in Afghanistan for 10 years. 2010 was the deadliest year for US soldiers, and 2011 is trending to be even worse. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has recently stated that he believes the US Forces should remain in Afghanistan even beyond 2014, the tentatively scheduled date for pulling out troops. This after apologizing for the "accidental" deaths of nine children collecting firewood last week. Is any death in war ever truly an accident? If you are there to wage war? When many of the US military and political upper echelon are asked what "victory" would look like in Afghanistan, and what exactly we are fighting for at this point, their answers are a combination of self deprecating mumbles and lofty ideals, and their eyes shift to floor and back up again, like a child trying to answer a teacher's question after forgetting to read the homework chapter the night before.

The war in Afghanistan has up to the moment I wrote this cost the US $384,141,258,991. If you would like a taste of the numbers, click here and let your mouth fall open. The numbers are beyond your wildest imagination, and are so much more mind blowing to me than when the national deficit numbers are thrown around in the news. The United States is cutting funding to public education (wealthier families can just send their children to public schools) and Pell Grants (once again, if you've got the money, what's the big deal?) and we are the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide access to health care to all of its citizens (but everyone else must be wrong... we have the best health system in the world, so the story goes...). Our children are inept in math and science, our people are dying from lack of health care and the recent recession magnified the gap between the richest and poorest to the widest margin since the census began counting. Last year, the top fifth of Americans, who earn more than $100,000 a year, received nearly 50 percent of all income in the U.S., while the bottom 20 percent received just 3 percent. The U.S. has the greatest disparity between rich and poor among Western industrialized nations. And yet we are fighting a war, sending our own men and women to kill and be killed, with no clear plan for any semblance of victory or any real benefit to the safety and security of this country.

Perhaps this is the real pull to the Charlie Sheen story. From what I hear, he is insane. Insanity begets insanity, and this country surely is insane.

My brief moment of clarity.

back to the floor

2011-03-02T15:41:00.005-07:00

Back to the floor, with the world ready to trample your naked chest

That's me of late. With all things good and bad. I'm writing some fiction and will publish it soon.

Go to Rome and see this painting. Do it!

the call back

2011-01-31T09:30:00.005-07:00

I had my annual mammogram screening about 10 days ago.I began mammogram screenings when I turned forty three years ago. My mother barely survived breast cancer and by all odds should have died when she was diagnosed. She was only 44 years old.

I have written about this before. Two years ago I underwent a bilateral biopsy, which turned out to be negative. I apparently have tissue that is very hard to read, adding insult to injury, with the sheer terror I feel every year when I return to face the ultimate free falling dive into mortality. That's exactly what it feels like.

I went to have my mammogram about 10 days ago. I wasn't worried. I have had 2 clear mammograms in the last two years. So I was utterly shocked when I got the dreaded call back. I would be going back for a second look, for further investigation into a "palpable finding". I had to wait another 5 days, and I thought I wouldn't make it. I was sick with worry and terror. I couldn't stop touching my sons' cheeks and smelling their hair. I couldn't stop holding my husband's hand. I couldn't sleep and couldn't eat. I couldn't quite live.

Is there anything so humbling as facing the possibility of your own mortality? If I could imagine the absolute worst disease, worst diagnosis, worst threat to face, it would be breast cancer. I know this is not objectively true, but I think my testimony to my mother's illness when I was about my eldest son's age has made the ultimate fear even more more horrible... this even though she survived and survives still, and is living the fullest of lives. The eyes of a sixteen year old girl, at a time when the treatment of breast cancer meant whipping the patient down to her last breath of life, savaged and hairless and sick, have left me still with horrible fear. I imagine the horror of being mutilated through surgery (even though I know many women who have been through this and have gone through successful reconstructive surgery), the debilitating sickness from chemotherapy (even though I personally know several people who have come through chemotherapy relatively well, and have recovered fully with a shine to their cheeks) and the humility of losing my hair (What is wrong with me? Am I so vain?). Last year, I lived through an illness which left me checking my eyes for jaundice and twenty pounds lighter, navigating a personal odyssey to find health care without ever giving in to terror, but the idea of breast cancer is for me insurmountable. I cannot forget the wraith-like figure of my mother as she passed by my bedroom door when I was a teenager, or the memory of checking for the rise and fall of her bedsheets as she slept to make sure that she was still breathing. I wish I could, but I can't.

My follow-up was negative. I am fine. I do not have breast cancer. I did not breathe for a week and let out such a sigh when it was over that I thought I might vomit for joy. This was another chapter past, and hopefully I will find the courage as I grow older to face these challenges with more strength and dignity. I don't know. What I do know is that the precariousness of living in a country without access to adequate health care was once again forefront, and I knew that I would leave if I was ill, uprooting my entire family and future. As I have said before, I am so lucky to have that option. And I am lucky to have another year of reprieve, and to hopefully have left behind a 2010 of disease and pain, with a body ready for living.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A grant from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation made both of my mammogram tests possible, and would have also funded an eventual biopsy if necessary and life saving treatment. Please take a moment to find out about this incredible organization and give anything you can. Everyone has in some way been touched by this illness. You can help to find a cure.

the love affair that keeps on giving

2011-01-24T08:59:00.006-07:00

laying back and enjoying the music

I recently finally saw the movie "Eat Pray Love". It was predictable as I knew it would be and lived up to the moderate expectations I had. The book was better, as is almost always the case. But there was one moment in the film that spoke to me. Julia Roberts is walking down the sidewalk in New York trying to explain to her friend why she is studying Italian. "Every word in Italian is like a truffle", she says. That was the only moment in the film when I actually said "Yes".

I adore Italian. I love to hear my husband speak it, even when he is angry and cursing (actually, especially when he is angry and cursing). I love my own voice in Italian, which transforms from a trifling, nondescript American voice into a rolling, staccato, rhythmic tune when I am speaking Italian. I have a sharp northern Italian accent which is the bane of many jokes from native Italians when they find out I am not a native speaker. I have grown affectionate and proud of my throaty brouhaha Italian full of breathy "H" sounds. Northern Italian is a language of mountains and sharp cheeses and the finest red wines in Italy. It suits me. My children's voices change in cadence and timbre when they switch from English to Italian, becoming deeper and more commanding, a step from adolescents to men in a single breath.

~Come io vorrei~

Even for a translator, some expressions are hard to render. This is a line from an Italian song meaning something along the lines of oh, how I wish... oh, how I would like to... but with a stronger dose of yearning and a heavy sigh that just don't make any sense in English. Italian is a goldmine of expressions and phrases that never cease to make me smile, make me ponder or make me appreciate what poetry means, whether vulgar or exquisite. It is an intrinsic part of how I think and how I wish everyone else did, and I am grateful that I have created a career that lets me explore this one favorite slice of life on earth every day.

Italian really is like a box of truffles to me, the love affair that started so many years ago when my husband said "violino" to me, that just keeps on giving.

the cake dish

2011-01-08T14:23:00.007-07:00

I bought a cake dish last week. We were cooking for a dinner at a friend's house, and we had no place to put the tartine. My husband has been pestering me for a cake dish for a while now. We always have a pie or tart or focaccia that needs a cake dish. We often cook and take our creations over to other people's homes. We needed a cake dish.

I didn't want the cake dish. I love to cook and share. I love to see a pie neatly sitting in a cake dish. But I didn't want one. The reason? Well, a cake dish is big. A cake dish will not fit neatly into a box, much less my suitcase. A cake dish is another commitment. Another thing I must figure out what to do with someday, hopefully sooner rather than later.

I do not see my life expanding in possessions as I grow older. I have officially gotten off the consumption train, and I must admit that it feels good. I look around me and see so many people acquiring more and more, needing more and more, wanting more and more. People going to Black Friday sales the day after Thanksgiving (how on earth was the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day of humility and gratitude, transformed into a stampede of people at the stroke of midnight crashing into Walmart? Does anyone else see something inherently wrong there?). There is a surge around me of a vast accumulation of nothing. Accumulation of things to pay for, things to dust, things to be put away, organized and remembered. Things to protect and covet.

Our children will be leaving the nest in the next few years, and I am immensely grateful that I became a mother at a young age. I am just as grateful that my husband's view of the future is once again aligned with my own. I want to work less, paint more, cook more, laugh more. I want to get my Master's Degree. Maybe a Doctorate after that. I want to wander the Uffizi as many times as I can before I die. I want to go back to Nepal and find the humble family who gave us a room in their home when I sprained my ankle, and bring them another piece of real Parmigiano. I want to live in ordered places absent of piles of stuff collecting dust, with only my most precious belongings, like my grandmother's paintings and quilts. I want to have a view from every window, unfettered and open. I want to feel free of the crazy machine of consumption that is the driving force behind the road to nowhere.

I do not want an ever expanding footprint on the world, with mountains of things that are supposed to make me happy, but which in truth only make me a slave. I want a life I can fit into a frame, like a painting, reflecting myself and nothing else.

There just isn't room for the cake dish... I will have to share it with someone else, another lesson in living.

Venus

2011-01-06T16:28:00.007-07:00

Years ago I went to the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. It was the first visit of many that would come in the future. The Uffizi is reminiscent of a rambling villa, with long windowed corridors that wind around the building canopied by frescoed ceilings and fine woodwork. The floors are marble and feel cool under your feet even on the hottest Florence day.
Wandering the Uffizi used to feel like I was roaming in someone else's house as a voyeur. I never used a map or had any idea what I would find as I crossed the threshold of each room. Would I step into the Filippo Lippi room, with his Madonna and her face so serene? Would I happen into the Rembrandt room, with the dark, smoldering light that I love so much in my own painting? Would I wander into the Caravaggio room? To be knocked over, literally down to the ground?
Each step was a mystery and a revelation. Your first visit to the Uffizi can happen only once, and when you go back you will remember the thrill and look for it behind each pillar.
But nothing in my wildest, most colorful dreams prepared me for the last room on that first visit. I had seem the Mona Lisa in Paris, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Michelangelo's David, my favorite Chagall in Milan, many of which did not live up to their luster after so many imagined encounters. But that day I walked into the Botticelli room at the Uffizi, I sat down on the stone bench and gazed and gazed. Inexplicable, elegant, fantastical, mythical female beauty like nothing else on this planet that I have yet seen. I swear it smelled like roses and the light radiating from the canvases warmed my face. I swear it was ethereal.

I sat on that bench for a long, long time.

I go back to the Botticelli room each time I visit the Uffizi, and the thrill is never, ever lost on me. Venus. On her shell.

from the archives ~ the love of my life

2010-12-24T13:21:00.003-07:00

Here is post written two years ago, even truer now than it was then, nineteen years since I walked into a guest house in the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico on Christmas day and met my husband. With every passing day, every sunrise and sunset, I ask the heavens how I came to be so lucky purely by chance...

the day that changed everything

It's almost Christmas. Christmas is the same day that I met my husband. The day that was like me standing on a coin spinning on a table. The day that would soon change everything.

My husband carries the suitcases. He buckles my ski boots and unloads the groceries. He holds my hand tightly as we walk along the icy sidewalk. He does all the night driving. He makes me chamomile tea when I have a stomach ache, and cappuccino in the morning when I awake. He carried my own backpack loaded on top of his when I sprained my ankle in Nepal. In the Himalayas. For three days. He holds the door open for me and cleans the ice from my windshield. He puts up with moodiness and craziness from me. He cooks me exquisite meals. He cuts me wood for the fire, takes out the trash, rubs my feet and listens to my babble. He was the only person I could stand to touch me when I was in labor, and I grabbed onto his shoulders so hard that he was bruised for days afterward. He blazes our trail.

17 years ago I was planning a trip to Mexico, and had not the slightest clue what was about to happen to me. I was about to be given the greatest gift of all.

the thoroughbreds

2010-12-18T10:55:00.008-07:00

My children traipse in and out of my writing, never lingering too long. This is probably because I am healthily wary of trying to figure them out, trying to figure out what their futures may or may not look like. Their lives, so intertwined with mine since their birth, are essentially a mystery to me. Rightfully so. Any parent who imagines otherwise is living in a fantasy. At least I think so.

I have this feeling of late around my children, both of whom have hit six feet and radiate pure life, pure strength. I feel as if their blood must be so much redder, their breath so much more powerful than mine, their muscles and hearts galloping without effort. They remind me of thoroughbred horses, with steam coming from their noses in the cold, skittish and unpredictable. They are so obviously beyond anything I can offer them, except for my support and undying love.

I have this feeling around my children which has been so hard to describe in words to myself, which is why I haven't written about it here. I feel conflict. I feel proud. I feel lost. I feel powerless. I feel hopeful.

Conflict, because I sometimes suffer for the fact that my sons seem to be constantly bucking the system they are forced to live in everyday. Questioning everything and everyone, authority above all. Questioning the value system that the school and government and culture in America, or lack thereof, seems to want to force down their throats. My conflict lies in the fact that I know my husband and I have likely been the greatest inspiration for these eternal questions, and what could be more natural than non-conformist children coming from non-conformist parents? What on earth did I expect? There is a part of me that wishes I had been just a bit more conventional, just a bit more silent, just a bit more of a believer in standardized testing and planning my children's futures from kindergarten on. But then I get over it. Who I am I kidding anyway? At least this way I actually like my children...

Proud because my children are creatures of power and thought. They move through the world in bodies and minds which are so far from slothful. And they are not afraid. Proud because they look you in the eye and have firm handshakes. They are kind and do not judge their neighbors too harshly, and they have minds as wide open as the Milky Way. They do not live on pretense or doctrine. That makes me proud.

Lost because I know I have long surpassed that moment in my children's lives when they truly needed me for everything. I remember those moments still, and while I was so tired and often frustrated with the hands that clung to me endlessly, I now know that there was indeed an end in sight. I just didn't see it coming.

Powerless because I am.

Hopeful because I can see all the greatest aspects of my husband reflected in my older son, and some of my own ricocheting around the aura of my youngest, these mixed in with sparks from somewhere else far away, beyond the boundaries of my own imagination. I do not know what their futures hold. I do not know if I have been a good parent or a failure. I try valiantly to stop the voice in my mind telling me what I should or should not have done. I am holding on. Tightly. Eyes squinting shut against the next hairpin turn in the road, the next cliff and next patch of ice, seeing all of us slipping and sliding wildly towards the future.

Nirvana for a day

2010-11-27T17:14:00.008-07:00

Have you ever been envious? I wrote a series of articles a few years ago about the seven deadly sins, and the sin that got under my skin the most was Envy. Rereading that article gave me a bit of the creeps today. Envy feels quite close to evil for me. Is there anything worse that coveting what is not yours? Is there anything so seductive as wishing for something imagined that you see on the surface of someone else's life? Whether it is money, things, talent, love or some other figment of your imagination? Have you ever envied your friend, your neighbor? Did it make you feel dirty and useless, shallow and a bit pathetic? Yes... give me lust, wrath, pride. I can dispatch those swiftly and not feel a thing. But I will admit that Envy has been hard. Until now.
Walking through my life this afternoon, with my husband who adores me after nearly twenty years together, with my children who alternately drive me to my wit's end or make me flush with pride, with my orphanesque dog, my broken down car, my mountains of books, my skis, my orchids blooming, my too full work schedule, my post-it notes framing my computer monitor, my sketchbook gathering too much dust, my body's new scars, my debt, my doubts, my dreams, I had a sudden realization. With all of this, so much and so hanging by a thread, so frantic and so unpredictable, I envy no one.

I envy no one. Nirvana for a day.

Typhoid Mary

2010-11-15T16:16:00.003-07:00

It's finally sinking in that I'm not sick anymore. I will have these moments, sitting at the dinner table, putting on my pajamas, when I realize that I am no longer sick. It's a revelation and a shock. It reminds me of when I sent my oldest son to kindergarten. I would be walking down the aisle at the supermarket and have this horrible realization that I had lost my child! Where was my son? And then I would remember. I have the same feeling as I catch myself checking the whites of my eyes for jaundice or reaching for the thermometer to take my temperature. It's OK. I don't need to do that anymore. It's OK.

My experience of sickness and how it evolved has changed me forever. It has changed my view of myself and my body. It has changed my view of what is important and what is frivolous. It has changed my view of destiny and chance. It has profoundly changed the vision I have of my life from here on into the future.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, as important as health. It is the basis for every single other aspect of life and experience. It is intrinsically what it means to be human. It is our collective vulnerability and strength, at the same time. It is the ultimate bare all.

I have a vision of myself on the operating table. This was not my first surgery, but I think my age in life, and the horrible, degrading circumstances I found myself in living in the United States, made this my life changing surgery. I am lying on the table, I am naked, I am anesthetized and asleep. I have people around me, some of them who know my name and my story, and some of them who do not. I am once again a baby. As these people cut into my body to heal me, I imagine their only thought is to do their jobs, to use their talents to remove what ails me and heal me. I imagine that after all their training and experience and schooling, this is probably a simple task. Do no harm. Heal the patient. There were no insurance protocols to follow or forms to sign or credit cards to hand over. There was only heal the patient.

I was in the doctor’s office with my son today waiting for his appointment. A young man came in, probably not even ten years older than my son. His eyes were red and swollen from crying, and he was in severe pain. He told the receptionist that he was afraid that he had broken his shoulder. He was alone, and his voice was cracking with fear. And pain. I imagined his mother far away, and wished I knew her so that I could call her. The receptionist was kind, and told him to sit down, take a deep breath. She would help him fill out the forms. Could she have his insurance card? He began to cry, telling her that he did not have insurance. He explained along story of being in between jobs and in some kind of “trial period” of three months. His shoulder was broken or dislocated, and he was alone. The nurse called my son, and we got up and went into the examination room. I felt sick. I thought I would vomit.

My youngest son has another 3 years before he graduates high school. After he is finished, I will leave this crazy place. I do not want to witness any more scenes like the one I witnessed today, especially not in my own life story. I want to live and work and thrive and make the most of my talents. I want to live, and I can’t do that here.

Since I have returned, I have become a sort of untouchable. I publicized my story on many fronts, since I do not believe that Americans are insensitive to their neighbors, just that they prefer to ignore them, pretend they are far from their line of sight. They spray deodorant in the air hoping to mask the stink. People like me are like the untouchables in India, a population living on the fringes, cultivated by the same state to which they pay their taxes and for which they send their children to fight on foreign fronts. My story is not unusual, but I have found that many of the people in the orbit of my own life, people who know me and arguably love me, people who are related to me or respect me or share histories with me, have been strangely silent. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody. It may be catching. I hit too close to home. I am the Typhoid Mary. I am the spot on Lady Macbeth's dress, a sour reminder of what is really happening.

My life looks good from here. Rosy even. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. And I won't forget it.

Jennifer, sei finalmente libera!

2010-11-05T07:46:00.005-06:00

Departing from my regular articles, I would like to take an opportunity to thank the many people who wished me well in public and in private as I was dealing with my health crisis. It seems banal to say, but the positive thoughts of so many people from so many places felt like a halo of good vibes over me. It was a boost, since I have often felt so alone in dealing with the mystery of how to take care of myself in this changed life.
My operation was a success, longer than is usual for these procedures and produced a huge, mysterious, heavy rock... a kind of mini boulder, coming out of my abdomen, one of the largest that the surgeons had ever seen. I remember being awakened from anesthesia while still in the operating room by the attending nurse, who is also a friend of mine from way back. She was holding a jar and shaking it in front of my face. She was wearing a surgical mask, but I could see her eyes were smiling, and the clinking of this crazy thing in the jar that they had fished out of me. She was laughing and saying, "Jennifer, sei finalmente libera!" (Jennifer, you are finally free!).
My experience in the hospital was peppered with so many visits from so many friends and family that I cannot count them all. I try to imagine my surgery as day surgery, as it is performed here in the US, and cannot. I had this feeling that I could not quite describe when the surgeons came to check on me everyday during morning and evening rounds. I can best describe it as love... I wanted to hug them and bake them cookies. There is obviously something profoundly strange about this, but I now realize how I deeply craved care. And they were giving it. I kissed all of their cheeks when I left, several of them blushing.

Thank you all again.

~Jennifer, finally free

Leaving the land of plenty

2010-10-08T14:10:00.012-06:00

"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

Have you ever thought about what it really means to have your health? How many times have you felt badly for some reason or another, and only after the malaise had passed could you appreciate what it meant to feel well? How that malaise, no matter how slight, had seeped into every part of your life, and how it had nearly transformed you into another person, a person with a different set of footprints on this world. Maybe it transformed you into a sick person, a gray cast over your glow, or maybe it transformed you into any angry person, envious and loathing the seemingly healthy people walking past you in the supermarket. Maybe it transformed you into a weak person, when you once believed you were so strong. Or maybe it opened your eyes to the light of the world, making you finally see truths that weren't so apparent before this thing took you over, making everything look more stark and simple, making priorities and decisions look strangely obvious to you now.

I sorely underestimated the effects of returning to America after so many, many years abroad. Just as I had no idea what I would miss when I left my homeland so long ago, I was just as clueless about what I would soon miss when I returned. I was as naive at 20 as I was 40. I was ingenuous and adventurous as always. I do not regret my choices. I do not look back and wish to change anything. I actually feel lucky in my underestimations, which have always given my license to dive into life head first. Some of the biggest decisions I have made in my life... getting married, having children, moving around the globe... were made in the spirit of knowing that things would always work out in the end. I'm still sure they will. They always will.

I have been walking in the shoes of sickness for several months now. I have been biding my time, praying to no one, and am almost to the finish line. I will be leaving in three weeks to have surgery in Italy, a place that I often scorned just before leaving for its frivolity and chaos, and which I now know has its scatterbrained, luscious, extravagant roots entwined in a deep set core belief in humanity. This value is something I took for granted when I was living in its midst, and now long for it to my very marrow as I am living in a place that lacks it, this so-called land of plenty.

I believe America will never reach the greatness it aspired to at its founding until it provides health care to its people. It will rot from within from its own neglect, it will become more and more polarized with the haves on one side of the fence and the have nots on the other, the haves being those who have access to health care, and the have nots being those who do not. Because the truth of the matter is, no matter how much money or passion or love you have in your life, if you do not have your health you essentially have nothing. Why America cultivates a population of have nots on the margins of its aspirations to form a more perfect union is unfathomable to me. It is just as unfathomable to me that I am living amongst so many people who believe this is acceptable. If a human being does not have a right to health, all other rights are moot. At least that's how it looks from this side of the fence.

And so I now see my life on a different trajectory. I will be leaving this land of inhumanity, of neglect, war, ignorance and blindness for good in the future. I will miss the majestic mountains and wildlife. I will miss the open space and night sky. I will sorely miss my American family, some of whom are probably reading this now and tearing up along with me. This is the America that we have all created together, an America that has slowly sapped the life blood right out of me trying to find a way to make it work. This is the apparent land of plenty of our fore fathers, where all men are created equal.

I'm leaving the land of plenty.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Addendum: I do not want to be mysterious here... I have severe gall bladder disease. I need to have it removed.

from the archives ~ 15 of my favorite Italian words

2010-09-29T07:22:00.000-06:00

1. violino ~ violin. This was one of the first words I heard my husband speak. When he said it, it sounded like music and was the start of my love affair with the Italian language.

2. mirtillo ~ blueberry.

3. dondolone ~ loafer, ne'er-do-well. This word comes from the word meaning to rock, to sway. The image is of swaying in the breeze without a care in the world.

4. sensuale ~ sensual. So much better than the English version.

5. affascinante ~ literally fascinating, charming. A beautiful word to describe a person or thing that irresistibly draws you in.

6. porcheria ~ filth, dirt, muck. This word comes from the word porco (pig), and is great for when you want to call something really gross, especially in a moral sense.

7. sussurrare ~ to whisper. Ah, so perfect a word for what it describes...

8. azzurro ~ light blue.

9. aurora ~ dawn. Not just the time of day, but also the color and sensation, also in a figurative sense. One of the most beautiful words.

10. cretino ~ idiot, nitwit. Quite literally cretin. I love this word to describe a fool.

11. luna ~ moon.

12. ninfea ~ waterlily.

13. vendemmia ~ grape harvest. But that's not all, also a season, a celebration.

14. farfalla ~ butterfly.

15. amore ~ love. The real thing.

the sweetest moment in time

2010-09-24T16:42:00.006-06:00

My older son fell asleep on the sofa a few days ago. I could not believe my luck, as I sat on the other end of the sofa with his long legs draped over my lap, the same legs that have recently taken him to six feet tall. There he was all for me to cherish just for a moment, my son who is never home, never bored, never complains, never asks for much, never sees his future as anything but brightly lit. My almost sixteen year old son who walks with a dashing smile that melts the hearts of all around him, who takes his own beauty in stride, humbly. My son who wakes up at 5am to study for a test, since he says he is a dolt in the evening and cannot think, just like his mother. My son who now speaks three languages, who likes to build things with his hands and prefers reading novels in Italian. My son, the official dreamboat of his high school class, a title he would rather not have, my son who doesn't notice how many want to be in his orbit. My son who would rather play frisbee than video games, who packs granola bars and apples to eat on the top of the mountain, and who is so good with little children.

Here he was asleep in my lap once again, with his limbs every which way and his thick curly hair tousled over his eyes. The light came in through the window, and I, daring not move, could see it shine on his face, outlining the soft stubble on his upper lip. And there was a moment when he was once again a boy in my arms, the same boy who clung to his mother at all costs, who refused to be weaned, who would not tolerate being far from me. It was just a moment, as he soon opened eyes and said "ciao mamma, what's for dinner?".

It was the sweetest moment in time.

the difference between me and a burnt down house, and a lesson in humanity

2010-09-18T11:28:00.009-06:00

I thought I had given up on writing about politics. I thought that anything I had to say didn't matter, wasn't heard, was misinterpreted, was basically meaningless in the grand scheme of things. There is something refreshing about giving up on the grand scheme of things, giving in to apathy. I can understand why so many people do it. I can understand the allure.

Then yesterday something happened. I was once again appalled to hear the words coming from a politician's mouth. The politicians and preachers and talking heads, who all sound the same to me now, who all say nothing. But the words coming from Mike Huckabee's mouth, an evangelical minister, a man who actually ran to be president of the United States, gave me turn. I couldn't quite believe it.

The analogy used by Mr. Huckabee comparing American's with "pre-existing" conditions, a condition I have often compared to being alive, to burnt down houses was so offensive, so beyond the logic apparent in any sane mind, to the right or to the left, that I began to wonder what was really behind Mr. Huckabee's bizarre statement. Mr. Huckabee's own wife is a cancer survivor. Why doesn't he see her in the vestiges of a burnt down house? Something to be demolished, or at least ignored? Why does she get a free pass from joining that most undesired club, that murky, stinky, pathetic band of humans with pre-existing conditions? Why isn't she in the same boat that I am? That my husband is in?

Of course the reason behind her get out jail free card is quite simple really. Mrs. Huckabee has insurance. Mrs. Huckabee probably has a gold plated Cadillac insurance plan. Mrs. Huckabee is covered. Mr. Huckabee, Mrs. Huckabee, the Huckabee's children do not have to worry about any of this. It is one of the greatest lessons in humanity... learning empathy and understanding for what does not touch you personally. It requires an open mind, intelligence, experience and wading into the unknown collective beyond what you see within the four walls of your own home. Obviously way beyond Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. Huckabee could use a lesson in humanity, straight from the Bible that he religiously bangs in his head. Until we can conceive of every American citizen's right to access the health care system that people like Mr. Huckabee love to chant is the best in the world, all we are left with is a system of privilege, of blindness, of greed, of stupidity. Mr. Huckabee is stupid. He is stupid because he obviously has never been touched personally by the plight of the burnt down houses of the world, millions of people like me who have been forced into the shadows and the sidelines. People like me who do the right thing, but still get left with nothing. Yet he generously gives himself the right to open up his mouth and espouse false wisdom for the automatons who follow him. The burnt down houses of Mr. Huckabee's so very Christian mind, the burnt down houses he cannot see in his own neighborhood, are people like me, or maybe like those of you reading this.

But the difference between me and a burnt down house is something that Mr. Huckabee is too much of a fool to see. As long as loud, self righteous false prophets like him find bands of glassy eyed, simple truth seeking robots to blindly follow, foaming at the mouth about family values as they trample their own neighbors, this country will never stand on the moral high ground where Mr. Huckabee envisions his pulpit. It will stay where it is today, hostage to ignorance, blindness and fervor for nothing. America is looking more and more like a burning house, the burning house in Mr. Huckabee's small mind. And he is wafting the flames from his own blowhard mouth, torching the country he claims to love, in a burnfest that seems to be growing ever wilder and more drunken across this country.

I am not the house Mr. Huckabee sees burning in his little mind. That is his own sense of humanity.

flying free in Balè

2010-09-15T12:31:00.012-06:00

a Croatian fjord in the autumn

My family and I have traveled to Croatia several times. The first was a quick trip during the fall about 8 years ago by car. We fell in love with the Adriatic and the pigs continuously roasting on side of the road, with big signs beckoning you in to eat them. We loved the haphazard architecture blending so beautifully with the craggy shores and hilltop castles, the hidden, unexpected fjords. We loved the people.

the boys in a seaside Croatian town

gazing at a Roman amphitheater in Croatia

The second trip was the following year to a seaside free campground we had happened upon during our first trip, where we camped for two weeks, snorkeling all day and watching the sea cucumbers raise up their heads in slow motion. It was located far down the coast on a promontory in a place called Balè, which gave my children countless rounds of laughter, since in Brescian dialect, the language my children learned from their grandfather, "balè" basically means "balls" if you say it just right. Those "balls". The sign into town said Welcome to Balè and had an image of a bucking bull (I still don't know the story on that... we never saw even one bull), so the hilarious, silly, still childish jokes would follow. The place was so stunningly beautiful, we still wink at each other every now and then and say how much we "love Balè".

a big sea sponge in Balè

The third trip was a week long sailing trip with my father through the Kornati Islands. It's hard to describe the beauty of the Croatian coast from a sailboat. Impossible. The water is so emerald green that it seems unreal, and the rocks so craggy red that you feel as if you may have been slipped LSD. We ate fish caught by my children off the back of the boat, and mountains of olives. We swam and read and sailed, and once got caught in a nasty squall which would have left us sunken on the rocky shores if not for my father's sailing skills.

cruising the Kornati Islands

One of my all time favorite experiences in Croatia happened on our second trip to that awe inspiring campground by the sea. We had discovered the campground during the off season, empty of campers, so we were unaware of it's greatest secret. As we set up camp and began to wander, I noticed a plethora of topless women sunbathing. I didn't care. Italy was full of topless women on the beaches, on TV, basically everywhere. I then began to notice not just topless, but also nude sunbathers, and then finally realized that we were camping in a nudist campground. There were grandmas cooking in their outdoor kitchens nude wearing aprons (I loved that), and grandpas watching the soccer game at the bar slugging back beers and letting it all hang out. The only fresh water showers were by the beach, and I soon joined in the nude evening ritual of a public cold shower. Everyone of every age and size was in various stages of undress. It was like a big strip poker party. And best of all, nobody cared. Everyone was wonderful. No one was ashamed. A real eye opener from someone raised in oh so uptight, prudish America.

Our favorite scene was on the last day. There were some semi-permanent campsites along part of the shore, where the owners had built up small fences and stone walls. A man was collecting stones in a wheelbarrow to build a wall around his site. He was tall and athletic and covered in dust. And he was completely nude, except for his gloves and work boots. A real sight to behold! Awesome and emblazoned into our collective memories.
Europe is great that way... you never know when you are right around the corner from a whistling man naked as a jaybird swinging a hammer in work gloves and boots.

How I miss it of late...

flying free in Balè

fall

2010-09-11T17:06:00.004-06:00

Fall is finally here.

on the road to my house...

and beyond.

Promising great things.

Brouhaha

2010-09-10T10:06:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure about anyone else out there, but I am running. Taking cover. The world around me in America feels so out of control, so disastrous, such a brouhaha, that I find my self turning away and away. Not that I have ever participated overmuch, but my instinct is to avoid despair by refusing to look.

Reason and thought are being continuously usurped by ignorance and idiocy. Religion, objectively an imaginary, fantastical, intangible belief in something no one can ever explain, but which so many people are using to spout and speak in tongues from their pulpits on imaginary mounts is once again tearing up the world around me. Again. For the umpteenth time throughout history. Would you please all just shut up about it? All of you? Has history taught us nothing?

We are still fighting a senseless war in Afghanistan. We are still a country which does not provide health care to its own people, me included. We are still hunkered down in Iraq, "nation building" in a country we invaded on false pretenses. We are still fat, our children cannot keep up with the most of the children around the globe in reading and math, we still cannot even spell.

The only bright spot of the week for me was my son's hero, Stephen Hawking, giving another moment of pure thought and mystery, making everything seem more bearable...

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

Think about it.

it must get lonely up there

2010-09-05T10:23:00.004-06:00

I just received a supremely nasty note about an article I wrote a while back. Most of the truly intimate comments readers make about anything I write come through e-mail. This is particularly true of the nastier versions. Isn't it ironic how people with their feet cemented in a righteous, religious stance seem to take such liberties with spouting their opinions? I can only imagine how it must feel to be so sure you are right, and so sure that your fervor will one day open up pearly gates while you watch the rest of us, me included, writhing in flames. It must get lonely up there.
What do you think?
The article is below. I still believe every word of it, here within my four walls with my family.
Sinners all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The God Thing

Silent, solitary prayer

In my attempts to wet my feet in the zones which are not so comfortable to me, I have encountered something I hardly expected. The God thing. It's incredibly ironic to me that the God thing would touch me personally here in the US. Italy was awash with crucifixes... in nearly all of the public buildings, including the schools. I remember once someone commenting that children who were not baptized in the Catholic Church grew up as bestie (beasts), a comment that I thought rude at the time, and sadly, pitifully ironic now. I found the blending of organized religion and the state utterly offensive. I remember commenting to my husband that this was one piece of me that absolutely would not budge. I grew up with an American flag in the classroom. Shouldn't the Italian flag be the only symbol allowed in my children's schools? He could only agree and sigh... this was Italy, after all.

Oh, the irony of what is happening today in America, right in front of my nose. When did it become so easy and blasé to talk about God? How much you love God? Pray to God? Commune with God? When did that word become so easily to say, so easy to bend to anyone's will? I cannot think of anything more profoundly personal than one's spiritual beliefs. My own are so much so that I do not need to share them here. But the shouting out in America about God and country is so loud right now, that I can't help but feel like no one has any idea what they are really saying. The Bible banging is the drumbeat to the crescendo of a chorus of people claiming God as their champion and their own, glassy eyed and monotone and droning, an ever growing mass of voices all sounding alike, all without passion or reflection, all with a spark of righteous fervor in their cadence. These unwitting soldiers have usurped the church on the corner, the temple, the Flag, the Bible, the loudspeakers. Their volume makes it impossible for them to think or reflect, and the lines they march in, so scarily like those of an army, make it impossible for them to stop and ponder, or to turn. How startling to have come across the ocean back to the land of separation of church and state, only to be confronted with an army of automatons. How bleak.

In the end, we are all free, so thankfully free, to choose, change, renounce, convert, be born again, dead again, free again. The beating of a drum may be seductive, and make our quandaries dissipate, our decisions easier, our loneliness more bearable, but is it really worth it? Is it easier, less demanding, to ponder quietly or shout in chorus with a gang? Is it worth the trouble to attempt to understand your adversaries, to learn from them, or to claim that you have God on your side, therefore you need not bend. The God thing is a blaring loudspeaker, soothing and searing, drowning out room for discourse or debate, and I wish someone would unplug it.

i tempi belli

2010-08-12T09:07:00.009-06:00

My older son on a bench outside of the refuge

I spent the first 10 years of my marriage running an Alpine Refuge with my husband. A Rifugio Alpino is akin to a combination of a lodge, restaurant, B & B and rustic hotel. He had run a similar refuge for several years before we met, and when the opportunity arose to take on another one after we married, we took it. I was expecting out first child, and we saw the refuge as an opportunity to raise our child together 100%.

Our refuge was poised atop a mountain pass that connected one craggy Italian mountain valley to another valley leading down to picturesque Lake Iseo. When we took over the refuge, the only way up was a muddy, rocky road carved into the side of the mountains. My American relatives would hold their breath collectively when we made the trek up the mountain. You haven't seen a real hairpin turn until you've driven a jeep up northern Italian mountains. The road would become impassable during the winter months because of the snow, so we would often make the trek up on foot with our child, and then two children, in packs on our backs.

The refuge was a very old stone structure, which had taken on a sprawling appearance after centuries of additions... the pig stall, the hay loft, the cisterns. We had no electricity for the first year, and we had to pump our water up from a spring located below a steep ridge. We had only wood stoves for heat, and the only place I could talk on the phone was in the closet under the stone stairs leading up to the second floor, which was perennially full of stinky, muddy boots and pitch dark. Our kitchen was a huge, bright room with a fireplace so large that you could sit inside of it on the sides atop carved stone benches. We had a small bar, constantly full during the summer months, we served lunch for about eighty people and we also had rooms for about 25 people. We did not have a dishwasher. Our clients ranged from hunters to tourists to dairy farmers. Our refuge was also a stop on a popular 10 day trekking route, so we also got plenty of backpackers from the rest of Europe.

We had a hen house full of chickens and an obnoxious rooster that my younger son would pick up and pet like kitten. We had a wine cellar full of barrels of wine and a cheeses cellar full of local cheeses from the dairies that would open up on the mountaintops during the summer. The sound of clanging cowbells was my children's first lullaby. We had a giant paiolo, a pot for cooking polenta over the fire, which was so big that it took two people to empty it when the polenta was cooked. Once my children were born, we found a wood burning hot water heater, and I could finally enjoy a hot bath without my husband having to lug buckets of hot water up the stairs from the wood stove in the kitchen.

We ran that restaurant for 10 years. Both of my sons were there at one day old, and learned every inch of those mountains, bringing home baskets of wild blueberries and porcini mushrooms. They would race their tricycles through the dining room to the joy of our guests. We sold the business as my youngest son was turning 7 and starting the second grade. We were exhausted. We had always said that we would leave as soon as the road to the top of the mountain was paved, since it would surely bring new people to the Refuge, people looking for a wine list and fresh fish and a well appointed bathroom. That is what happened and that is what we did. It is the kind of life that looks romantic from the outside and in hindsight, and it actually was. But it is definitely a life for the young.

The view from the Refuge

When we returned to Italy this year we went back to see our refuge. It was completely renovated a couple of years ago. There were private rooms with their own bathrooms, fancy table linens and frothy curtains. There was a real printed menu, no longer the menu of the day that I would recite depending on what we had decided to cook. There was central heating and a sparkling stainless steel kitchen. The hand carved benches that were once out front were gone, and the ancient fresco over the entry door had been restored in a garish and crude manner, probably by a local artisan proud of this brightly colored image of a crowned saint. The refuge now even has its own website. The images are almost spooky to me, as if someone kidnapped the refuge of my memories and replaced it with a lakeside hotel. But the photo galleries of the vistas over the mountains and sunsets are the same.

We stayed for a while, and we were immediately surrounded by some of our former customers and friends, some of them older and grayer, and all of them missing i tempi belli when we ran the refuge. When we left my younger son said he was not at all impressed, and I couldn't help but agree. He went on to say that the absolute best part of the refuge, the most cherished memory of his childhood, was completely gone. The hen house, he said. The path down the mountain had grown over and the daisies his grandfather had planted were no more. The road that took us down was paved and crowded with fancy cars on such a beautiful summer day, and I remembered bumping down that same road nine months pregnant and in labor, and I smiled. We really did have the best of times, i tempi belli.

dead woman walking

2010-07-22T08:52:00.009-06:00

I recently returned from several weeks in Italy. While my trip was dedicated to family and friends, the primary reason I went back to Italy was for health care. I stayed for about 4 weeks and saw several doctors, had numerous ultrasounds and blood tests and consults. One day I was in my local hospital, and since my first appointment for a gynecological ultrasound was late I had to inform the technician expecting me an hour later for an abdominal ultrasound that I would also be late. The clerk at the front desk looked and me with a wink and chuckled, asking me if I was in for a tagliando, basically a 50,000 mile maintenance check. She was teasing, but if she only knew how right she was.

When I was living in Italy, I was always careful to take a defensive stance when talking about my homeland. I'm not quite sure where this came from, if it was a natural reflex from living far from home, or my own reaction to the battering I often took for no other reason than the fact that I was American. When anyone would ask me about the health care system, I would answer that it wasn't nearly as bad as the press made it out to be. That like everything else, the criticism was overblown. I rarely thought about the fact that I had left America nearly 20 years ago, when I was young, single and in the good health that comes naturally at that age.

This time was different. When the doctors and nurses taking care of me asked me why on earth I was in Italy taking care of my health issues, I told them the truth. I told them that even though both my husband and myself have been forced to join the ranks of the uninsured in America, that even though I had to buy a transatlantic plane ticket to seek medical attention, my dual citizenship made me one of the lucky ones. I told them that even though a health care reform bill has been signed into law, people like me are now waiting for 2014, which is a slight improvement, considering that before I was waiting until 65. My husband had already lost his insurance several months before our trip. He had been in a "high risk pool", a frothy, malodorous, overcrowded swamp of murky water inhabited by those poor souls who genetics had failed to smile upon. I was trying to hold on to my own policy, since I reasoned that my Italy trip could produce something really awful, a long term illness, perhaps. But the letter I received from my insurance company literally days before my departure informing me of another 30% premium hike effective immediately sealed the deal. I could not do it. I officially became a dead woman walking.

My medical testing in Italy revealed that I need one minor surgery as soon as possible, and probably another in the not so distant future. I do not have a long term illness (which would have meant uprooting my entire life, my entire family, to return to Italy), but I do have a condition which is painful, which could be dangerous if I don't stick to very strict dietary guidelines, and for which the doctors in Italy wanted me to stay to have the required surgery immediately. Instead I am returning in November. The cacophony of shaking heads and disbelief when I explained my situation to them was stunning. In America.

So here I sit, up most of the night with nausea and now chewing on a Saltine cracker, working on a translation due this evening. I am distracted and have trouble concentrating. I have arranged for my children to stay with their grandmother when we leave in November. I am hoping the flight back to the US so soon after surgery will not be too difficult. I do not think it will. I look in the mirror in the morning to make sure the whites of my eyes do not look yellow, signs of jaundice, and I think about all the people just like me, or much, much worse, who do not have the options that I do. And I wonder again, again for the umpteenth time in the last three years, how on earth I can stay. Waiting to be 65. Waiting for 2014. A dead woman walking.

the menagerie

2010-07-14T20:33:00.008-06:00

I live in a house full of pictures. My walls are covered with memories and moments. There I am sitting at the base of Annapurna in Nepal, holding my Tibetan flag. There is my husband sitting on a rock in the Mediterranean Sea, looking like a pirate winking his eye. There is my grandmother, young and beautiful standing in front of what I think may be a real Model T. There are my children catching grasshoppers in the Alps, buried in Caribbean sand, traipsing through their years from apple-faced babies to lithe, fetching young men, big dimples and smiles, towering over their mother. There are pictures of places, of Venice in the rain, all gray and melancholy, the way I love to see Venice. There is my favorite Alpine lake that shines like an unreal emerald, the Croatian islands popping up from the blue sea like anthills, the glorious Colorado mountains traced by the tracks from our skis. There are romantic paintings by my grandmother, fleshy roses losing their petals. There is my own booming canvas of Etna with lava flowing down the rocks. There are my favorite images by Leonardo da Vinci, my great passion, the unfinished leaves and flowers from one of his sketchbooks, reminding me of the thousands of unfinished drawings haunting my own sketchbooks. There is a black and white photo of my dog on a winter's day perched atop a snowdrift as big as a skyscraper.

When I came home from my month away in Italy, my month returning to a place I had filled with so many pictures for so many years, I walked in my house and found all my pictures crooked on the walls. It was as if a tremor had passed through my home, upsetting the maze of my life I had hung on my walls with it. As I righted one picture and moved on to the next, the picture behind me would somehow wind up askew once again. Crooked. Cattywampus. I couldn't get it right. My life in pictures had become a menagerie with a mind of its own. It would not do my bidding.

I have been back from my month away for a while now. I gave up trying to set the pictures straight. I gave up trying to see my life through the eyes of an American or an Italian. I gave up wondering where on earth I will be in five years. The menagerie has calmed, and the horizons in the pictures are once again beginning to straighten. The Vitruvian Man is no longer standing on his head and the clouds are rolling across the sky the way I remember them. A sunset is never truly beautiful without clouds. Without many unpredictable, volatile, bursting clouds.

going off the grid

2010-06-01T07:20:00.003-06:00

A woman needs comfortable shoes, light baggage and the ability to sleep in any time zone. And definitely no fear of flying.

I am thankfully, finally going off the grid for several weeks. Turning off my phone and e-mail. I hope to not even have to watch or read the news of this world.

I'll be back. Happy travels.

From the archives: Life in the Middle

2010-05-24T09:23:00.003-06:00

~ One from the archives in honor of my birthday today, written three years ago and still apt today. ~

Life in the Middle

It may be the effects of my fortieth birthday. It may be my own reflection in the mirror, which unbeknownst to me overnight has taken on the appearance of someone who should be addressed as mam by the supermarket clerk, regardless of my mussed hair and flip flops. Most likely, it is the effect of being witness to death, since I have been one of those lucky people to live my life up to this point without too many close brushes with death, at least not in my own close knit circle. My father-in-law's passing has now led to the eminent passing of my dearest Granddaddy, who has never quite recovered from the loss of my grandmother several years ago. He is wasting away from his own very old age, and I suspect a certain desire to join his beloved wife, as well as a bone deep tiredness. We are awaiting the call that he is gone, which may come today or may come in two weeks.

All of this leads up to my pondering of life in the middle, which is where I feel I am. Writing about life in the middle seems pretty banal, like something from a shallow women's magazine. But to me life in the middle is a mystery. I have no desire to go back, but going forward seems a tad scary. I often find myself thinking that I just don't feel my age, as if there is some way that my age is supposed to feel. At other times I feel content and at ease, like I've finally reached some kind of ephemeral peace, where all the trials and tribulations of youth seem like dramatic fluff.

There is also that part of me that feels an intense need to hurry. Hurry up, or life may just pass you by! When I am able to actually see that part of me in action, I can't help but think how stupid she is. What a fool, running to nowhere. Missing the colors and smells along the way. Thankfully, that part of me makes herself known less and less as I age.

There is also the vain, senseless part of me, a part that that misses my youthfulness, not in thought, but only in body. I went out to dinner in a busy restaurant the other night, and the waitress was circling around trying to find who was missing the ceasar salad. When she finally found me, she said, "Oh, there you are! They told me to look for the pretty lady at table 8!" Well, never mind the lady part of that phrase, or the fact that everyone else at the table were men... it was that pretty comment that made me glow! Being called pretty used to be such a given that it didn't matter. Now that I'm living life in the middle, those compliments have become gold... not something I'm proud of, but it's the plain truth.

There is also the fretting, ignorant part of me, that has to give in to the idea of aging, and finally death. Death is our neighbor and bedfellow, no matter what our age, but the farther along the road of life I get, the odds continue to sway in death's direction. That's just life, after all, the ultimate irony.

The longer I live, the more books I read, the more I think and ponder, the more convinced I am that I know basically nothing. Nothing in the best sense of the word. Life is a mystery, surprise, box of chocolates, passing of a loved one and birth of a child. It is only when I feel that irrational need to know that life in the middle becomes unbearable.

the God thing

2010-05-11T16:46:00.006-06:00

Silent, solitary prayer

Isn't it easy to only talk to people you agree with? To only read the newspapers you like, the authors you admire? Isn't it easy to live in your own microcosm, never setting a foot out of the boundaries that define who you are, your own values? I am the first to say yes. My life is full. So full that I rarely spend time with anyone who is not deeply important to me. I work best alone. I write alone. I give the rest to my family. I have so much fullness. I must make a concentrated effort to step outside of my comfort zone, and I try to as frequently as I can fit it in. Who are we anyway, if not who we define ourselves as in respect to others, to our environment? That is a lesson learned well after 15 years of expat living.

In my attempts to wet my feet in the zones which are not so comfortable to me, I have encountered something I hardly expected. The God thing. It's incredibly ironic to me that the God thing would touch me personally here in the US. Italy was awash with crucifixes... in nearly all of the public buildings, including the schools. I remember once someone commenting that children who were not baptized in the Catholic Church grew up as bestie (beasts), a comment that I thought rude at the time, and sadly, pitifully ironic now. I found the blending of organized religion and the state utterly offensive. I remember commenting to my husband that this was one piece of me that absolutely would not budge. I grew up with an American flag in the classroom. Shouldn't the Italian flag be the only symbol allowed in my children's schools? He could only agree and sigh... this was Italy, after all.

Oh, the irony of what is happening today in America, right in front of my nose. When did it become so easy and blasé to talk about God? How much you love God? Pray to God? Commune with God? When did that word become so easily to say, so easy to bend to anyone's will? I cannot think of anything more profoundly personal than one's spiritual beliefs. My own are so much so that I do not need to share them here. But the shouting out in America about God and country is so loud right now, that I can't help but feel like no one has any idea what they are really saying. The Bible banging is the drumbeat to the crescendo of a chorus of people claiming God as their champion and their own, glassy eyed and monotone and droning, an ever growing mass of voices all sounding alike, all without passion or reflection, all with a spark of righteous fervor in their cadence. These unwitting soldiers have usurped the church on the corner, the temple, the Flag, the Bible, the loudspeakers. Their volume makes it impossible for them to think or reflect, and the lines they march in, so scarily like those of an army, make it impossible for them to stop and ponder, or to turn. How startling to have come across the ocean back to the land of separation of church and state, only to be confronted with an army of automatons. How bleak.

In the end, we are all free, so thankfully free, to choose, change, renounce, convert, be born again, dead again, free again. The beating of a drum may be seductive, and make our quandaries dissipate, our decisions easier, our loneliness more bearable, but is it really worth it? Is it easier, less demanding, to ponder quietly or shout in chorus with a gang? Is it worth the trouble to attempt to understand your adversaries, to learn from them, or to claim that you have God on your side, therefore you need not bend. The God thing is a blaring loudspeaker, soothing and searing, drowning out room for discourse or debate, and I wish someone would unplug it.

a letter to a gifted child in a sluggish world

2010-05-03T20:39:00.007-06:00

Sometimes life feels like a battle

Dear gifted child in a sluggish world,

Risk. Risk it all when you can without hurting someone you love.

Laugh. A lot.

Practice compassion.

The mother of a gifted child

disillusioned and dumbfounded in America

2010-04-27T11:22:00.007-06:00

I was very young when I left America and became an expat. I was 23 or 24, and I had been living the single life in New Mexico in a small apartment and working at a Natural Foods Coop. I left on a whim and I stayed away many years, and my vision of returning was surely distorted by the youthful eyes I left with so many years ago.
I returned to the US regularly during my years as an expat, first with my husband, and then also with my children. I would revel in the things I missed being away... my favorite cereal, movies in English, central air conditioning, the dryer. And the more important things... the wide open sky and magnificent natural world, the animals and birds and majesty. I also sorely missed the diversity I had left in America, the many different faces and skin tones, the melting pot that was America. And of course my family, most of all.
I have been back in America for nearly three years. The first year was spent in a state similar to a tornado. There was just so much to do and so much to figure out, so many practical pieces of life to attend to. I had been away so long that I did not quite know how to swipe my own debit card or use the self checkout stands at the grocery store. My second year was spent with a certain amount of settling in, and a modicum of worry. I began to realize that America was not so kind to people like myself and my husband, self employed people who still have the bizarre need for health care. The insurance policies I had found when we first arrived the year before had already steeply increased our monthly premiums, and when we tried to shop around for something better, my husband's so-called "pre-existing condition", a misnomer for being alive, had gone on the record, making it virtually impossible for us to find another policy. I had also been introduced to the great divide in America during the presidential election, a taste of what was to come. I had no qualms about political discussion and debate. I had been living in a country of wildly debated politics for the past fifteen years. But I can frankly say now that I was still clueless.
My third year, a year that will conclude this summer, has been a year of doubt. Did I do the right thing? Was returning to America the right decision? For my children's sake, I think so. They are fluently bilingual. They enjoy some of the perks of American adolescence as opposed to Italian. They can get part time jobs, they have a much more flexible, modern school experience. They are expert skiers and live in an almost obnoxiously beautiful environment, without a drop of pollution or noise, bursting with wildlife and sunsets and snowy peaks. I do not know where they will go as they approach adulthood. I have the feeling that the closer they get to being men, the closer they get to the reasons why I feel like I am a foreigner in America. I hope for their sakes that their youth, open minds and life experiences will propel them both forward in a world of optimism and hope. They are luckier than they can yet imagine, and their dual citizenship will open a myriad of doors for them.
I, on the other hand, am disillusioned. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Speechless. For me, the debate which ensued over health care reform was the harbinger for a tidal wave of sludge that I had somehow been innocently unaware of while I lived so far away. I cannot quite convey how impossible it was for me to explain to my husband what that debate was about. It was exquisitely hard for him to comprehend that a nation like the United States could exist without providing health care to all of its people, and he was totally incapable of understanding how anyone could actually be opposed to the idea of doing so. This because the rest of the nations in the industrialized world provide health care their people. From Australia to Japan to Italy to Israel to Canada. This incredible backlash against this most basic notion of civility was frankly impossible for him to understand. As it was for me.
What has followed has been an undesired, unsavory opening of the door into the great divide in America. The lack of civility in our political debate is astounding, and I can only deduce this is rooted in fear and ignorance. As I read newspapers, surf the Internet and watch television, I realize that the election of Obama as our president has not thus far resulted in any kind of hope for the future, but has only invigorated the radicalism that frankly scares me. The same minds which are able to blatantly declare that upon the passing of the health reform bill into law by the "commie socialist pigs", who are "denying God" and "sowing the seeds of Armageddon" (all quotes I have read in print), which by default must also apply to every other industrialized nation in the world, are also the same minds that believe they are inherently, morally right. America has it right, the rest of the world is mistaken and misguided. These people have God on their side, and have usurped religion to back up their own bombastic ignorance. In the words of their flag bearer, Sarah Palin, "Nah, we'll keep clinging to our Constitution and our guns and religion -- and you can keep the change."
I had no idea where I was going, what I was doing, when I returned to America. While some who read this may retort with the sad, overused "why don't you just leave, then?", I wonder why it is always those like me who are asked that question? Is incessant flag waving and Bible banging all that is needed for some to believe themselves righteous? Is it as easy as that?
Disillusioned and dumbfounded in America. That's me.

without any answers at all

2010-04-12T08:10:00.009-06:00

My children are growing up. There is a moment in time, a moment that comes and goes and lasts forever, when boys become men. My eldest son is on the far side of that moment suddenly. While he is still dreamy enough to forget his wallet and wander around the house looking for the hat which is actually still on his head, he also has a new, palpable sense of purpose behind his eyes. It is as if he can finally see his future, changing and mutating from day to day. Unsure and out of focus, but he can see it. It is there.

My younger son, my big bang, is another story. His turbulent mind and body are still on the verge of crisis without warning. He cannot stop growing long enough for his horizon to become familiar and comforting. He cannot stop thinking long enough to relax and lay down his arms. But there are moments when he looks into the distance or the sky or the trees of our neighboring woods, and I can see his road suddenly open up before him, and it looks like an adventure. Each day I imagine him closer to some kind of truce with the world, as happened to my older son on the outside of adolescence. But I am not always so sure this truce will come. Probably because I do not know if it has ever come to me.

The older I get and farther I walk, the less I can explain or understand the world around me. When my son looks at me behind a flushed face during one of his rants and tells me that the world is just so stupid, everything is just so wrong, nothing really makes sense, I cannot help but agree with him. The world is just so noisy. War, politics, school are all so strikingly meaningless. Religion, any religion, is just a fabrication of man to answer the unanswerable, therefore letting you off the hook to ponder anything beyond what is written in a book, whether the Bible, the Koran the Torah. Or it is a fabrication of the clergy, in a timeless attempt to keep you stupid?

While these discussions are typical of a thirteen year old with a bright and questioning mind, what may not be typical are my answers. Shouldn't I have some of those by now? Answers, I mean. Shouldn't my life experience have led to a point in time where I could reassure my son that the world would one day make sense to him, that there were answers on his horizon? I certainly thought that would be the case by the time that I got this far, wrinkles and all. But the truth is that inside I commiserate with him. The older I get the more I seem to become a disbeliever. My disbelief, or perhaps the late or missed arrival of knowledge which I thought I should have gained by now, has led me to regularly question everything around me. In truth, I do not believe in a greater good, but that we can only do good with our hands with those that are closest to us. We can live by example and not preach too much or too loudly, and try to empathize with our children and our neighbors. I regularly forget these simple tenants, and become too loud or too selfish. Being a mother and a wife has given the greatest gift of all, as it teaches me that sometimes I have to shut up, because I do not have the answer.

And so my children, husband and I all shut up at once. We hike the woods or ski the mountains. We cook for each other and set our table and pet our sweet dog. We eat and laugh about nothing in particular, and wonder whether my oldest will attend an Italian university, whether my youngest will join the Peace Corps, whether my husband and I will make it to India again. Will it snow? Will we see the bright white jack rabbit come out from its den behind our house again? Will we swim with a sea turtle again? We imagine our children grown, and my husband and I moving into a smaller house. A tiny house even, with just enough space to thrive, a well stocked kitchen and with enough storage for our traveling bags and snorkels and skis, a place we can leave and come back to. And we go to bed and wake up again. Without any answers at all.

I cannot find the words

2010-04-04T19:35:00.008-06:00

Italy is a place of politics. It is a chaotic, turbulent, roiling mess, and in the fifteen years I lived there I saw the evening news awash with politics. I never quite grappled the intricacies of Italian politics, where every political party, no matter how small, has a stake in the parliament, where coalitions are formed over night and divorce the next day, usually with a public display of huffing and foot stomping. Politicians are recycled forever in Italy. It is akin to the ultimate consignment store, where a politician can walk in and hang him or herself up on the rack and wait for the next unwitting customer, who always arrives sooner or later. Italian politics are a mess, a show and a mystery.

Italians also love to talk politics. Really talk. The dinner parties I attended over the years were inevitably destined to wind up in great debates, bordering and sometimes spilling right over into quarrels. Fists would be pounded onto the table and wine would stain the tablecloth. Voices would be raised higher and higher, cheeks would flush, hair standing on end. Oh, the fights I saw! Oh, the stories, the history, the passion. I could almost imagine Julius Cesar himself beating his chest through his toga.

I also partook of these debates. I arrived in Italy during Bill Clinton's presidency, and I was greeted with the friendly, excited way that Italians perceived Americans then. I was still learning Italian in those early years, so my accent would inevitably result in the shopkeeper or taxi driver asking me where I was from, and when I would say I was American, their smile would grow large and they would tell me all about their great aunt or cousin or neighbor who immigrated to America. Later during my years in Italy, I was thankful that I spoke Italian fluently without an accent, for the Bush years were not kind to America's image abroad. And frankly speaking, I was grateful to be abroad during that time. But I would still bear the brunt of many heated discussions around the dinner table, as if somehow my very nationality made it all my fault, even though I had the ubiquitous fortune to have cast an absentee ballot in Florida, of all places. A ballot which surely wound up on the floor.

The beauty of those arguments haunts me a bit today, as I am living in such turbulent times in America. After the wine and espresso were polished off, and the hour was late and the guests had lost their voices from arguing politics, everyone would push their chairs back from the table, get up and once again be friends. We would kiss each other's cheeks and wish each other buona notte, and be back for the next round the following week. I spent most of my "formative" years in Italy, the years when I believe I began to comprehend politics, my own stance, my own values and what it meant to my own life. While I remember feeling the chaos was too much, the passion too great, I also remember learning a lot, and being able to disagree without degrading my opponent.

My American experience of politics of late has been something else all together. Are we so ignorant, so uncivilized in America? Are we so bratty, so scared and dull? Are we so far gone that we are turning into great bands of gun-toting, shouting fools, foaming at the mouth and fearful we may be tread upon? Are we so dense that we cannot see that we have a lot to learn, that as I told my willful son, we must learn from everyone and everything, especially from those we see as our enemies? Are we incapable of dialogue?

While I personally feel I returned to America at just the right time, where I felt my voice was heard and I could hope for changes that I believe to be desperately needed in this country, I also feel a sour dispassion, not for politics or politicians, but for the people doing much of the talking. Or the shouting. The Italians are loud, passionate, obnoxious and in your face. But they always leave you with a handshake and a history lesson. Their politics are a contest of wits and intellect, while here I sit with my mouth agape, wondering how on earth I can ever bridge such a great divide. How ironic that I learned to debate politics in what was a foreign language to me, and now that I am in my native land I cannot find the words.

the changeling

2010-03-26T10:30:00.007-06:00

I knew I wanted to leave the town where I grew up as soon as possible. I believe that dawning came to me sometime during middle school, right about the time I started to see myself as a separate entity from my family. I knew I would finish high school and leave. I knew I would go somewhere that required me to get on plane, that had a different climate, required different clothes and different lingo. I knew I would set foot in this new place and thrive, and that then I would likely move again. I was very young.

As fate would have it, I did just that. And then I did it again and again. I moved and moved. I discovered new landscapes and people, and ultimately discovered new languages. I was often the newcomer, and usually the foreigner.

When I moved back to the United States three years ago, I believe that in my subconscious I had this intangible idea that I would somehow finally be returning home. I would finally no longer be the foreigner and the oddity. I would magically feel the call of the roots I had left behind, which would wind up my legs and blossom, planting me finally on this earth somewhere. I would entwine myself with my surroundings, I would become part of the landscape and entrench myself in the ground. I would suddenly breath a sigh of relief as I felt the wind behind my back cease, as I began to finally know the geography of my own life as familiar and comforting, instead of as this brightly lit, fluttering, elusive thing, like a butterfly. My life would become that warm cup of tea, something to sip slowly, that doesn't offer unexpected surprises, but only warmth and the feeling of home.

Oh how wrong I was. If these past three years back on the soil which should by all definitions be called my homeland have taught me anything, it has been that I am the same creature I have always been. A creature without a home, a leaf floating on a torrent. It matters not what language I am speaking or dreaming in, I am a changeling. How could I have been so mistaken about the very nature of who I am? How could I have believed that age would somehow mellow me and make me ripe to settle. As I look around and see so many who seem to possess something that I do not, the ability to find their home, to plant their feet into the ground and be rooted, I wonder what intangible thing I have always been missing. What is the gene I was born without? Where am I leaving and where am I going?

Today I think there may be only one North Star in my life, one anchor and one home in the form of my husband. My husband who feels at home nowhere and a foreigner everywhere, who is eternally kind and generous and eternally the odd man out. Except when he is with me. Then we are together in our torrent. We are akin to one another in ways I never understood until now, until we have lived in the country of my birth. How could I have known so many years ago in Mexico how incredibly fortuitous it was for us to meet in that boarding house and to become each other's homes, homes forever moving and transforming, all while remaining uncannily the same.

Finally

2010-03-22T06:38:00.004-06:00

Ironically, I spent most of yesterday afternoon discussing with my brother, who is an attorney, how I could negotiate bankruptcy from medical costs and not lose my house. Mine was a hypothetical discussion, but I wanted to be clear exactly how the law works, because I cannot continue to pay my premiums, and have decided to go uninsured. I would rather pay for daily medical costs than continue to stuff the coffers of my insurance company. It's humiliating and embarrassing for such a stoic as myself, but the reality of "what is" caught up with the possibility of "what if", and there is no way I reconcile what I am doing now.

Then I came back to my hotel late and turned on the news, and my stomach souring, furrowed brow acidity retreated just a little. If things change the way they may, I may just make it. I had lost hope.

Welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to a more civilized society. Welcome to even just a little evolution and humanity.

maybe they are actually right

2010-03-17T07:23:00.012-06:00

The so-called "health care debate" has left me winded. It is one of those cardinal topics that makes me realize how long I was away from the United States, and how much things changed, or didn't change at all, while I was away. Most of all, it has left me defeated, even despairing. It has left me feeling like an alien.

The issue of access to adequate health care is the single biggest problem we have faced returning to America. From a practical standpoint, this means that my husband and I basically do not have the option to take care of ourselves the way that we should, this because we are self-employed. His so-called "pre-existing condition", which consists of a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol for which he takes medication, made it impossible to get him an insurance policy on the individual market, regardless of his actual health, which is very, very good. Far better than the average American, especially in regards to his waistline. So being in Colorado, he was given the privilege of joining a "high risk" pool. I've heard this term knocked around during the debate, and I hope everyone understands what this really means... his premium is extremely high, and his deductible is $7500 annually. Believe me, the incongruity of my husband's situation with the people sitting behind desks in corporate offices chugging Big Gulps and Big Macs without a worry in the world is unnerving.

As for me, I have a measly $5000 deductible, and in the 3 years I have been buying insurance here, my premiums have doubled. My policy does not pay for doctor visits. For anyone who thinks I'm getting a raw deal, I should note that I shop insurance regularly, several times a month. The similarity of the premiums and deductibles in the plans offered to me is stunning. They may as well be the same company. And they cover barely anything, can kick me off at their whim, and are guaranteed to continue to raise premiums. Many people have bemoaned that in Italy the taxes are much higher than in America, but I can assure you that our premiums and annual deductibles make our real taxes here much higher. And In Italy I did not loose sleep wondering whether or not I could afford a necessary surgery.

From a practical standpoint, this is huge. I have several nagging health issues which I cannot afford to adequately treat. If the choice is between paying my deductible and then co-insurance or the mortgage, the mortgage wins. If the choice is between self-diagnosing on the Internet, or actually visiting the doctor, who of course then needs blood work, tests, specialist visits to treat my issues, I am forced to choose the Internet.That's just math.

Over the past several months, I have written a few articles and editorials about the subject. Each time I write about this topic, I try to write about my own family, and what the health care system in the United States means for us. I believe I have a unique perspective after living for 15 years in a country which guarantees health care to all of its people. Italy has the epitome of the demonized "government run health care system", and how I sorely miss it. Not only do I miss the ability to just go to the doctor when I am sick, but also the absence of the intense psychic drain that this issue has created in my life here in America.

My letters to the editor and articles have been met with such vehemence, ignorance and despair that I have stopped writing. There are never answers to my predicament in these responses (because there are none, obviously), only replies asking me why I don't "just leave!", and "if you don't like it here, why did you come back?". I can't even begin to respond to these comments, and there is the despair. I am also answered with stories from people who say they work at jobs they hate everyday to have access to health care, why don't I just go get a real job? Assuming that today it is so easy today to just "go get a real job with health benefits", why on earth should I have to do that? I run a thriving, successful business. I pay my taxes. I work long hours and provide excellent service. I am the small business at the heart of American entrepreneurialism that everyone is talking about! The small business person that everyone says they are fighting for. As for the numerous people who have written to me saying they have jobs they hate, I dare ask why is that acceptable in America? What the hell kind of system makes people believe they should give up their potential, not to mention their happiness (the same happiness pursed in the Constitution) in order to have access to health care? What is everybody thinking? What are we settling for?

I do not write these letters any longer. Many of the private responses I received were bordering on threatening, making me realize that this issue has gone far beyond health care, to a place that I do not even begin to comprehend. Several of the letters I received exclaimed that I wasn't "supporting our troops" when I criticized how things work in America, and when I explained why a system in another country was so much better for me and my family. That the entire rest of the industrialized world provides health care to its people is a moot point, probably. And why these people who are so afraid of "government run health care and socialized medicine" do not burn their medicare cards and put their money (and health) where their mouths are is also beyond me. And maybe those people who asked me why I don't just leave, get the hell out of Dodge, are actually right.

a little gratitude

2010-03-03T16:51:00.006-07:00

Every now and then, all too rarely, I will read a book that changes me somehow. This is one such book.
I, like so many of us, spend so much of my psychic energy bemoaning one thing or another. My mortgage is due. My health insurance is too expensive. How should I punish my unruly teenager? How will my boys pay for college? What will we have for dinner? These are daily trappings, small and large, of my life. Some days they are insurmountable, and other days I find the comedy of it all, and give it up.
This book gives true meaning to the daily trappings of a human being's life. How much of what we need, or think we need, is real or imaginary? How much of what we want is dictated by powers that we will never see or control? How much of what we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe is spoon fed to us from a source we will never see? How willing are we to turn over our minds and hearts to a cause we want to believe is righteous?
This is a wonderful book, easy to read, full of true stories from real people. A window into a place right around the corner that most of us can't even begin to fathom. We are all so free and so spoiled.
It gave me a rare gift - a little gratitude.

an immigrant in my own home

2010-02-11T08:05:00.007-07:00

an open mind

I recently threw in the proverbial towel and joined Facebook. While I was sure that I would hate the additional e-mails and alerts that would add to my constantly blinking and beeping computers, that I would never want to participate and be only a lurker, the truth is that I have actually gotten a lot from joining. I have moved around so much in my adult life, and so geographically far away, that I inevitably lost touch with many of the people I was close to in my youth. Facebook has given me the opportunity to reconnect with many of the people that I knew were smart and special way back when. The passage of time has only confirmed this. What a treat to suddenly know so many fascinating people doing so many fascinating things with their lives. I who have lived for so long without a web of people around me… I feel lucky to be somewhat back in the loop.

There is also another side to my Facebook experience which has left me wanting to hightail it and run, and I have spent the last several days with a visceral queasiness in my gut. Not only do you suddenly know where everyone is and what they are doing, you also know what everyone thinks. You even know what their friends and even their friends think. Depending on how much someone is willing to post on their wall, you know things you probably would prefer not to… at least for someone like me.

A queasy sick feeling crept up on me after reading just such a posting on one of my friend’s walls. It was a friend (or maybe even friend of a friend, I’m not sure) who wrote what I read. I would like to preface this by saying that in an environment of such great division and flat out fighting, I do not espouse my political views on Facebook. Talk about a great way to lose the new “friends” I have so recently found again! I tread lightly and on eggshells. I try mightily to live my own life and raise my own children in a way that supports my beliefs. I vote. I write editorials. I read. A lot. I try not to make things personal even when I feel they are. I try, and sometimes fail, to live by example, and admire others who do the same.

But what I read that day saw me draw my hand over my mouth in disbelief. What I read touched me personally and at home, and I felt sick and hurt by words on a Facebook wall from a friend of a friend of a friend, a person who I will never know or see or talk to. A person who means nothing to me. A person who cares not a crumb for me or what I think or feel. What I read was “I'm reminding you to join If you live in America - speak english!” I have not changed the spelling or grammar. There it is, in all its glory.

It is hard to explain how offensive those words were to me on several levels. The first of which is my own tight circle, my own family, my husband and children. I live in a bilingual house. We rant in one language and laugh in another. My children are trilingual, and hope one day to acquire at least one more language. My dog is even bilingual. My husband is the dearest, best human being you could meet. Anyone who knows him will tell you this. He is a rare sort man. He is one of our finest. And he is also an immigrant. After my 15 years of living as a foreigner, it is now his turn. There is nothing easy about it. There is nothing simple at all about having to live your life not only in a foreign land, but also in a foreign language. I have written at length here about the challenges of expat living. It was the greatest, most life changing experience of my life, and it helped make me who I am today. The words on the Facebook page felt as if they were a double barrel shotgun pointed straight at my husband, or even at my own heart 20 years ago. The person holding that gun must be a fool.

The Facebook “cause” that the slimy link took me to was even worse. There was a list of over 64,000 members and comments left to spur on the cause. The greater part of these comments consisted of misspelled rants full of vitriol. Why should anyone have to learn Spanish at school just to be a good nurse? Why should anyone have to learn any language at all, aside from English? Why don’t they all just go back to where they came from?

The ignorance was stunning. So was the anger and hate. As a person who makes her living as a linguist, I have been so saddened to see the complete lack of importance put on foreign languages in American schools. My children began studying their first foreign language in the first grade while living abroad, and their second in the fifth grade. I have spent the last several years answering their constant questions while watching American television about why correct grammar is always so lacking. The logic behind English grammar was drilled into their heads long ago… why on earth are Americans having such a hard time? Learning a language that is not your mother tongue not only opens up an entirely different culture and way of life to your mind, but it also literally opens up doors in the brain. My own work has kept my mind nimble and my brain quick. I feel so rich to be a linguist, and I know that the ability to speak more than one language is one of the greatest gifts my husband and I have given our children.

This ignorant, hateful, litany of comments felt to me like a personal attack. How could their standards be so painfully low? How could their minds be so painfully narrow? When had diversity, one of the things I missed the most about America when I was living abroad, become a liability? I know I sound incredibly naïve. I can’t help it. I live in a microcosm of a melting pot. We do not have fancy cars or fine things, but we have traveled with our children around the world and hope to continue to do so, opening their minds to what it means to be a human being one this planet, helping them to become communicators and quick minded. Respect for the other is the mantra in our home, whoever the other may be. Even if we have now become the other.

Reading that friend of a friend of a friend’s comment saw my valiant effort not to bring political views into my relationships fall flat on its face. How could I pretend that such a “cause” didn’t deeply offend me? How could I ignore it? What could I possibly do, except nothing? What made me the saddest reading that meaningless Facebook page was the feeling I had, after so many years living away from my homeland and my intense yearning to come back, that I was once again a foreigner living in a foreign land. An immigrant in my own home.

a tale of two countries

2009-12-21T09:51:00.007-07:00

there's no place like home, if you know where it is

I began writing this blog as I was preparing to finally return to America after so many years in Italy. I remember the overwhelming urge I felt to leave and the brimming excitement I felt to return. There is nothing like relinquishing all the trappings of your home, language, family, surroundings, culture and familiarity for a long time, a large chunk of your years in this life, that makes you wonder who you really are. It is scary and exciting; it is lonely and awesome. Ask any expat who manages to stay away beyond the third year, and they will tell you what loneliness and insecurity really feel like. They will also tell you what it feels like to really get to know yourself, for lack of anyone else who understands what the hell you are saying.

My husband and I have somehow, against all odds, managed to imagine the same future. I think this is one of the most important components of a happy marriage. If your dreams manage to coincide, you just may make it. We have found a buyer for our house in Italy. Selling our house, the fruits of our intense labor in the early years of our marriage, means that we may have a taste of financial freedom. We may come close to paying off our mortgage here, and be able to work a bit less. I want to work less. I don't care about things or cars or toys. I want to paint more, ski more, travel more and breathe more. I don't want a bigger house or finer clothes. I don't want more things tying me down.

We are planning to spend summers in Italy and the rest of the year here in Colorado. My older son is considering attending an Italian university as opposed to an American school (translate: 1000 Euros a year tuition). I can tend to any major medical issues in Italy (translate: free of cost, truly the land of the civilized). My sons are stretched over the same bridge that I am, one foot here and one foot there. They are only just now getting an inkling of how lucky they are.

Because the plain truth is, for anyone who has been reading long enough to know me at all to laugh out loud, I miss Italy. Just not always.

So many years away means that I am not only an expat when in Italy, but also when in America. I am a citizen of nowhere and everywhere. A tale of two countries.

the big bang

2009-11-23T13:15:00.002-07:00

The big bang theory goes something like this: there is this tiny, irrelevant thing, this little speck of something, that one day explodes from within. It explodes and becomes everything, overwhelming and unyielding and unstoppable. It stretches and expands and writhes in its own energy. It is so much, so strong, so powerful that it cannot control its own creation. It is a slap of chaos and life. In your face.
And that is what happened to me thirteen and some odd months ago. There I was with my fussy, sweet, gurgling baby boy, and we decided to give him a brother. As I sit here and try to wind my thoughts together enough to return to writing, I am struck by the fact that my whirling dervish of a son has taken over so much of psyche lately that I feel slightly dumb. And while I've always felt a bit awed by his presence, I lately have felt more and more that he is an alien child, from some other planet. He is my greatest challenge, and puberty has only magnified his essere to epic proportions.
My son's latest injury is a broken collar bone. My son's latest statement is that most of his teachers are stupid, and don't even understand the theory of relativity. He is a raging thirteen year old with a brain lit up like the Las Vegas strip. He is obnoxious and immature, and at the same time brilliant and provoking. He can debate me into a corner, and I often find myself forgetting that I am the (supposed) adult in the situation. If it weren't for my husband's firm grip on reality, I could easily find myself asking his permission to stay out until 10.
One day when I picked Dana up from preschool (he was 3 years old), he asked me where I had been that day. When I answered "nowhere", he immediately told me I wasn't telling the truth. After all, the odometer was proof. I had traveled 109 kilometers that day. I surely must have gone somewhere.
The walking big bang. Everyday.

the european way

2009-09-23T15:55:00.004-06:00

The School of Athens by Raphael

Lately the ongoing insane health care reform debate has me missing the European way. I do not miss Italy so much, or loath the US so much, but I miss the European way of thinking. There is something so fundamental and civilized about how it feels to be a human being in Europe. At least there was for me. With all the frustrations I lived through, I always felt a sense of extreme civility. A deeply rooted respect for what it means to be a human on this earth. I could see it around me in the beautiful art and architecture. I could taste it in the carefully prepared ceremony that was eating. I could smell it in the perfumes and the spices.
There is nothing like living and breathing civility. And while I despised the traffic and pollution, while I struggled with what I believed to be narrow mindedness, while I missed the glorious diversity that I grew up in, I felt innately respected for my worth as a human being, and that it was the most natural, fundamental, civil thing in the world to be able to go to the doctor and care for myself and my family, regardless of my wallet, employer, social status or unfortunate gene pool.
Europe has been around for so long. So many centuries. Maybe that is how long it will take for this one most basic human right to be recognized in the young, brash, at times ignorant country that is the US.
I miss the European way.

the difference between me and him

2009-09-15T08:58:00.005-06:00

My husband and I went hiking on Sunday. We've ventured into the mountains ever since we met in the Copper Canyon of Mexico. We trekked Nepal and we ran a business atop the crest of the Dolomites for 10 years. My children were born in the mountains as was my husband, mountains that go straight up over craggy rocks that slip from under your feet.

And while I love the mountains and choose to live at 9000 feet, my idea of a hike will never have anything to do with his. Nearly seventeen years of marriage and I haven't gotten it. While I stop to admire the aspens changing or the flowers underfoot, he moves forward. Upward. Onward. He goes and goes until the trees are behind us, there is nothing but bear poop and big horn sheep.

The sky darkens and snow flakes start to swirl around in September. There is no chance of a picnic, and my lungs are tight from being up so high. The air is thin and I feel drunk, and even a bit scared that I have no business being up so high. How will I ever get down? Why am I here in the first place?

What is it that makes him push so hard and go so far? It is a man thing? A conqueror thing? Or is it just the difference between me and him? All these years and it is still a mystery to me.

a perfect ending

2009-08-29T19:32:00.006-06:00

The urge has finally come upon me to write about my return to Italy. I came back to the US about 2 weeks ago, and only now have I begun to feel any kind of clarity about my days in Italy. Not because they were tumultuous, but instead because they were complacent, and flew by quickly. I suffered jet lag even as a twenty year old. Now I have learned to give in to it, and plan my trips with a couple days cushion on each end, days in which I wander around wondering what language I am speaking, and why I am so hungry at 6am. This trip was no different, except for the fact that it was painfully short, only 12 days, so I spent a good fraction of my time stupid.

I traveled separately from my husband and sons. They had already been there for several days when I arrived. I had not been in Italy for 2 years, and after 15 years living there, it was once again the small things that struck me. I live in a very peaceful, civilized place in the US. Quiet to the point of meditative. The noise struck me first as we travelled the infamous A4 highway from Milan. It was everywhere. And dusty hot. We stopped at an Autogrill off the highway, a fancy Italian rest stop that has absolutely nothing to do with American rest stops. Gorgeous food and trinkets and the BAR... the Italian bar. Oh how I miss real coffee. I have yet to find it anywhere in the US, except in my own kitchen. As I stepped out of the car and into the crosswalk of the parking lot to make my way to the entrance, I was floored by a blaring horn and my husband yanking me backwards. People don't stop for pedestrians in Italy. They even honk at you to get the hell out of the way. I had forgotten all of my hard earned Italian driving etiquette. What was I thinking stepping into that crosswalk? That I could actually walk across it? I live in a town where drivers stop for everyone and everything, deer and foxes included. I've become such a bumpkin.
I came home to find my boys nowhere to be seen. They are immediately taken away by the throng of friends they left behind when we moved. They live like rock stars now in Italy. They are famous because they live in America and go to American schools, and are drilled about girls and sports and getting their driver's licenses at 16. Do they really have lockers? Do they really not have to go to school on Saturdays?

I saw many of the fellow parents I knew while sending my children through elementary school there, and most are in a panic about what to do next for their children. After three years of middle school, Italian students must essentially choose what they want to do with their future at the ripe old age of 14. There are several different types of high schools, from classic preparatory schools for university bound students to trade schools, and a myriad of choices in between. Many of the parents I know who have a child that has already finished the first year of high school as my older son has feel like they made the wrong decision. Can you imagine trying to figure out what a child wants to do with the rest of his life at 14? My own son was so awash in hormones and angst last year that the thought gives me a headache! And in Italy, such a decision bears much more cultural weight than it does in the United States. There is a prevailing idea that young people will enter into one line of work and stay in it for the rest of their working lives... even the same job. That would have meant that I would have spent my own life doing what?? Making sandwiches? Being a florist? A student counselor? A gallery assistant? A restaurateur? One of my husband's cousins came to dinner, and when I asked her how her son is (he is 14 and heading to high school this fall), she said that he had decided to go to a trade school in Brescia. Fiat was implementing a new numerically controlled machine into its production line, and this was one of the first schools training students to use the new technology. When I asked her if her son liked mechanical engineering, she said, "Well, I hope so. He'll be working on that machine for the next 40 years." Enough said.

One of the other things I brought back with me from Italy was 5 pounds. The amount of Gorgonzola I managed to eat coupled with my favorite wines and pizza every night was inhumane. How we miss the food. How we miss the wine. There's just no getting around it. We eat well and cook like masters, but there's just nothing like the real thing. American food just plain sucks.

My father in law's passing just after we left has remained a subtle pang. I missed him at the head of table as we ate. He was such a presence, such a pillar, that things feel almost too fluffy without him. It was never easy prying a smile or compliment from his stern mouth, but oh, when you got a smile or laugh, it was like winning the lottery. A real joy.

My sweet house is lived in by someone else. And while I thought I would feel nostalgia seeing it again, I felt nothing. Only a memory, like a chapter of book that you read once. The mountain refuge we managed for the first 9 years of our marriage, where we raised our children and became a family, has gone from being a centuries old, crumbling stone dairy to a fancy, newly renovated alpine hotel and restaurant. It made me slightly sick to see our old castle that way. My youngest son was quite angry that the chicken coop was no more. It was his favorite place of all, and where he spent hours on end chasing the rooster, collecting eggs and watching out for the weasels. He wanted to leave.

When I packed to come home, finally retrieving some of my favorite things left behind, I was relieved to feel happy that I was coming home. Home here. I felt trepidation returning to Italy. Would I have regrets? But now I am lucky enough to say that I can visit that most beautiful of places as a tourist of sorts. I no longer have to fight the traffic or pay the taxes. I can just enjoy all the bounty.

I have been making that transatlantic flight for over twenty years now, and I must say that on this trip I was finally, finally blessed with that gift of all gifts... I was bumped up to business class!
A perfect ending.

diving into Italy

2009-08-17T11:04:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite places in all the world - Lago di Ledro

on the verge of going back

2009-07-28T18:39:00.005-06:00

our valley in the Dolomites

There I go. I'm on the verge of going back. Back to the place where I spent so many years, became another person, learned another language, lived another life. Soon I will be heralded with people calling me Jenny, people asking me where have I been. What is it like? I am bringing two sons back with me who have long since become taller than I am, one blondish, exotic athlete with a brain who moves like a beam of light, and one towering, dark haired, handsome, gentle bear with a smile that melts your heart and a light touch.

How I can't wait to see my family in our Italian shoes, to beat the cobblestones and alleys, to spend long lazy happy hours with our friends who think we are so interesting and daring.

Here I go.

From the archives

2009-07-06T18:39:00.003-06:00

I was just asked to publish this post, with a few tweaks, for a collection of women's writing. Although here it looks as if I am doing nothing, I am actually doing overmuch. So here's one from the archives, still very apropos today.

Life in the Middle

It may be the effects of my fortieth birthday. It may be my own relfection in the mirror, which unbeknownst to me overnight has taken on the appearance of someone who should be addressed as mam by the supermarket clerk, regardless of my mussed hair and flip flops. Most likely, it is the effect of being witness to death, since I have been one of those lucky people to live my life up to this point without too many close brushes with death, at least not in my own close knit circle. My father-in-law's passing has now led to the eminent passing of my dearest Granddaddy, who has never quite recovered from the loss of my grandmother several years ago. He is wasting away from his own very old age, and I suspect a certain desire to join his beloved wife, as well as a bone deep tiredness. We are awaiting the call that he is gone, which may come today or may come in two weeks.

All of this leads up to my pondering of life in the middle, which is where I feel I am. Writing about life in the middle seems pretty banal, like something from a shallow women's magazine. But to me life in the middle is a mystery. I have no desire to go back, but going forward seems a tad scary. I often find myself thinking that I just don't feel my age, as if there is some way that my age is supposed to feel. At other times I feel content and at ease, like I've finally reached some kind of ephemeral peace, where all the trials and tribulations of youth seem like dramatic fluff.

There is also that part of me that feels an intense need to hurry. Hurry up, or life may just pass you by! When I am able to actually see that part of me in action, I can't help but think how stupid she is. What a fool, running to nowhere. Missing the colors and smells along the way. Thankfully, that part of me makes herself known less and less as I age.

There is also the vain, senseless part of me that misses my youthfulness, not in thought, but only in body. I went out to dinner in a busy restaurant the other night, and the waitress was circling around trying to find who was missing the ceasar salad. When she finally found me, she said, "Oh, there you are! They told me to look for the pretty lady at table 8!" Well, never mind the lady part of that phrase, or the fact that everyone else at the table were men... it was that pretty comment that made me glow! Being called pretty used to be such a given that it didn't matter. Now that I'm living life in the middle, those compliments have become gold... not something I'm proud of, but it's the plain truth.

There is also the fretting, ignorant part of me, that has to give in to the idea of aging, and finally death. Death is our neighbor and bedfellow, no matter what our age, but the farther along the road of life I get, the odds continue to sway in death's direction. That's just life, after all, the ultimate irony.

The longer I live, the more books I read, the more I think and ponder, the more convinced I am that I know basically nothing. Nothing in the best sense of the word. Life is a mystery, surprise, box of chocolates, passing of a loved one and birth of a child. It is only when I feel that irrational need to know that life in the middle becomes unbearable.

a revelation

2009-06-30T10:11:00.007-06:00

My boys on the beach a week ago

I've been alone for a week. Alone relatively speaking, since every now and then my younger son, that brightly colored sprite of a boy, makes an appearance between skateboarding, biking and the general revelry that is his life. My husband and older son are away until the end of July. We then go to Italy, lovely, crazy, besotted Italy. I actually miss it. I actually can't wait.

Being alone is not at all what it seems. I have taken on a huge project about medieval Italian architecture. The Italian text is erudite and challenging. The English translation is even more so. I am trudging through that place in brain where I once felt marginally intelligent, peeking around the creeping moss and ivy growing there, looking for words. I don't usually take on jobs so big in such a short time span, but this was the only way I could get through this next month. I, who love to be alone, love solitude, quiet, peace, I miss my boys horribly. Terribly.

I miss their laundry and dishes. I miss their deep voices and big hands. I miss their bickering, laughing and snoring. I miss their smell and sounds. I miss it all.

What a revelation.

tiny dot on the horizon

2009-06-28T18:16:00.000-06:00

escape

2009-06-25T08:45:00.000-06:00

even poppies need their freedom

2009-06-08T17:50:00.005-06:00

Poppies are coming up everywhere. Big fat oriental poppies, almost obscene to look at. And if you ever dare cut them to bring their gaudy sexiness with you, a little forbidden thrill, they die. Refusing to be tamed or touched. Even poppies need their freedom to live.

I am leaving. I have the fabulous rush of several time zones, continents, airplanes and boats ahead of me the next few months. I haven't done any real traveling since I moved here from Italy, and I have felt a bit dead for it.

May my travels give me a new desire to write. Here, not just for work.

I'm off.

finally

2009-05-20T06:47:00.001-06:00

the fabulous thrill of imminent disaster

2009-05-13T17:52:00.003-06:00

There's something missing from my days. Something vague, something I cannot quite get a handle on. I've become a gardener and a seamstress, a cleaner, a writer, a putterer. At this state of so-called midlife, a term I feel scared and afraid of, unable to imagine that it pertains to me, I have become addicted to the rush of adrenaline I only get when flying down a mountain.

Over the past two winters I have regularly asked myself what my problem might be; what is my death wish? I have strained and strived to go farther, steeper, faster than is at all acceptable for me. I nearly ruined my left knee several years ago skiing the icy slopes of the Italian Dolomites. That fall and long recovery made me wonder if I would ever feel any kind of thrill again, not only skiing, but doing anything else. My following winter back on the mountains of Italy I spent hesitantly, fearfully.

But then something happened. Since I revolutionized my life and moved across the Atlantic into an unknown, I have become the ultimate thrill seeker. Last season I skied down runs with names the likes of Devil's Crotch, Psychopath and The Boneyard. I was lucky enough to catch glimpses of a mountain lynx, countless foxes, coyotes, elk, mountain goat and fluffy white ptarmigan. I was slightly obsessed, and ran out of my house every afternoon, no matter the temperature, no matter the fact that I would surely then have to work into the night to meet my deadlines. I would come home with my braids frozen to my head and my cheeks blazing red from the wind. I would be exhausted, spent. But the feeling of such concentration, such total dedication to my body and what I was doing, made me feel incredibly sane. There is no moment like that one moment when my mind had room for nothing else... not my children, husband, finances, fears. There was only the challenge and the speed and thrill. Sometimes I would arrive at the base of the mountain panting for breath, covered in sweat beneath my many layers of clothing despite the sub-zero temperatures.

I never thought I would become this way in my middle life. So much responsibility and so much in my charge. But still, for me there is nothing, nothing, like the fabulous thrill of imminent danger.

how I became a translator

2009-05-01T14:14:00.003-06:00

I've been a freelance translator for about 11 years. I started this work as a fluke when someone in Italy asked me to translate press releases for an event she was organizing. I was teaching English as a second language at the time, a job many expats fall into when they go abroad. My students thought I was a good teacher, but I didn't. I was horribly, painfully bored, and frankly couldn't explain why English works this way and Italian works that way. It just is, was my usual answer, which somehow freed up the minds of my grammar obsessed Italian students. They would first look at me as if I had just broken the holy grail. Grammar is not only the foundation of the study of Italian language in Italy, but is also the main focus of the study of foreign languages in their schools. I had students who could tell me the difference between past participle and adverbs and present continuous, every rule in the book, yet they couldn't begin to understand me when I spoke or make themselves understood in English.

The woman who needed my help translating the press releases was one of my students, and the the event was the Italian Skeet Shooting Championship, of all things. I didn't know a skeet from a scooter. That first foray into translation proved to be the catalyst for creating my business. It was something I never would have thought about, never would have been curious about. Skeet shooting. But I researched and created glossaries and learned every inch of the world of skeet shooting. I did not know that my intense dive into skeets was not cost effective, not worth the money I would make on that job. I only knew the excitement of learning about something so foreign to me. I also felt the thrill of writing something, albeit about skeets, that others would be reading. That first job led to others and others again, and my business was born.

I never wrote about skeets again. Effective, successful translators have to specialize and find a niche in this business, and skeet shooting definitely wasn't the answer for me. A translator has to somehow be exceptional, providing a service that others can't. My own road has led me into two very different areas of specialization, preventing me from ever becoming bored, ever becoming complacent, ever becoming obsolete.

But more about that later.

a tenuous hold on happiness

2009-04-28T13:26:00.006-06:00

My children say the strangest things. Their comments on American life after growing up in Italy are at times funny, often startling. My older son commented the other day about how Americans have a pill for everything, even his 9th grade friends. If they have a headache, they take an Advil. If they have a cold, they take NyQuil. If they have an allergy, they take an antihistamine. Immediately. No waiting it out. No putting up with anything.

His comment made me think of this other feeling I have, somehow similar yet much more troubling. How many people in the United States take antidepressants? How many people actually need these? The United States is the most over prescribed, over medicated nation in the world. Do you ever wonder what the infamous "war on drugs" really means? What drugs are the enemy? What drugs are the norm? Why do Americans seem to have such a tenuous hold on happiness? Why are they so depressed? Why are they so eager to take a pill? Why are doctors so eager to prescribe them? Why are Americans so sad? Or are they? Is maybe just being alive synonymous with being depressed? Why do some people make it through devastating life situations and other sink in a quagmire of daily living?

From a fascinating CNN news story, reporting that the CDC rates antidepressants as the most prescribed drug in the US:

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells the story of a woman who didn't like the way her husband was handling the family finances. She wanted to start keeping the books herself but didn't want to insult her husband. The doctor suggested she try an antidepressant to make herself feel better.
She got the antidepressant, and she did feel better, said Dr. Dworkin, a Maryland anesthesiologist and senior fellow at Washington's Hudson Institute, who told the story in his book "Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class." But in the meantime, Dworkin says, the woman's husband led the family into financial ruin.
"Doctors are now medicating unhappiness," said Dworkin. "Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives."

For Dworkin, the proof is in the statistics. According to a government study, antidepressants have become the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. They're prescribed more than drugs to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, or headaches.

One of my younger son's more rambunctious friends spent the night at our house the other night. He suddenly exclaimed "Oh no! I forgot my chill pills!" I of course asked him what he meant, and he explained that the doctor had prescribed him chill pills. So he could calm down.

I do not know what pills he takes. I do not know why he takes them. But I just couldn't help it... chill pills. He said it in such a cavalier way. Like popping a Prozac.

Food for thought.

things change

2009-04-26T18:06:00.005-06:00

There's a reason that I have neglected writing here. More specifically, there are many reasons rolled up into one thing called change. While I used to revel in writing about change, lately I have been feeling as if I have been keeping secrets from this blog about nothing in particular. Maybe this is because I received some thorny e-mails and comments a while back. Maybe I am embarrassed. Maybe I am floundering.

I now believe it's time for change. Here, anyway. And I intend to write about myself again, no barriers. If the comment section bothers me I may just turn it off. If you want to e-mail me something nasty, think twice. I'm touchy. Do unto thy neighbor and all that.

For starters, the view of the sunset from my house. Spring and summer offer up spectacular natural fireworks here in the high country.

then I will be old

2009-04-15T07:46:00.005-06:00

My sleep has been fraught with dreams and turmoil. I wasn't sure of the cause, but yesterday I realized the the visage ruining my nights is my 14 year old son. My beautiful, sweet, dreamboat son who has become a full blown teenager. My boy who loves to be out and about and laughs and whose phone is incessantly ringing.

I'm more than happy that both of my boys are well adjusted, well liked, well acclimated to their American lives. We live in a gorgeous county with clean air, zero pollution, every sport under the sun and wildlife roaming the streets. We broke (and continue to break) our backs to stay in this school district, which offers both my middle schooler and high schooler the best that any public school could offer. We could not have done any better.

But the fact remains that my son is a blossoming teen. And the real root of the problem here is that I remember, I so well remember, when I was that age. The maze that I navigated without even knowing it. The hurdles and pitfalls and drama. I now know that once your child reaches fourteen, you can only hope that you have somehow instilled judgement and character and values into your child. Along with a healthy dose of luck.

My son is asleep downstairs in his room with a friend. A friend who actually drives a car. I am awake and working, but with a clock ticking in my mind counting down the days left of my children's spring break. A clock ticking down the remainder of the weeks to the end of school year, when my husband is packing my children in the car to drive them across the USA to Florida where he is rebuilding a lakeside cabin for my father. At least there I know they cannot get into too much trouble. Or who am I kidding?

Sometimes I think that I may not truly rest until my boys reach 30. The only problem is that then I will be old...

I decided to go

2009-04-06T18:42:00.004-06:00

My boys meandering the streets of our Italian hometown

I decided to go. I know I haven't written much here of late. I'm not quite sure why, since my life is probably no busier now than it ever has been. I've felt mute. I've felt lazy. I've been trying to decide if I would return to Italy this summer with my boys. And today I finally decided to go.

It seems like such a no-brainer. I mean, who wouldn't want to go to Italy? What's my problem? But I do have a problem with it, as I always have when faced with returning to an old chapter in my life. I'm a burn bridges kind of person, and last year when my boys returned to Italy I couldn't even fathom returning. But now that I am finally planted in my house with my things surrounding me, I couldn't help but think of those boxes and boxes of my former self gathering dust. The many trappings of Jenny packed away like fodder. I miss those things, what ever they are. And I may miss Jenny a bit, too. She sneaks into my dreams in smells and sounds, and I know its finally time to retrieve her.

So this morning, as I turned on the news to the horrible earthquake that shook Italy, I remembered my beloved house and how the walls swayed and shuddered when we also were hit by an earthquake. I remembered the sound, like hell had opened up and let out a scream. I remembered my crystal glasses in shards on the floor, the only crystal I had ever owned and had painstakingly brought over piece by piece from the United States. I remembered the gut wrenching fury and frustration and beauty of such a place, and I decided to go.

creature from another world

2009-03-12T06:33:00.006-06:00

a freestyle skier flying away

I have this child, you see, who surely cannot be mine. But of course he must be. He was born right at home in my bed and has never left my side for a moment.

But he is such a force, such a creature from another world, that I wonder and amaze that he came from any part of me. He is walking fireworks, a whirling dervish, a constant challenge and unknown. He is unpredictable and exotically beautiful. He is ever the surprise.

He had major retinal surgeries in October (frisbee in the eye). He broke his arm over Christmas break (overshooting a ski jump in a move known as a flying rodeo). I was walking down main street with my father who was visiting for the holidays and my son called me, asking if I could come and pick him up at the base of the slopes instead of taking the bus. He is eternally lazy, and I scolded him that he knew he was to take the bus. After putting the phone down, it rang again almost immediately... This is the ski patrol, ma'am. Maybe it would be better if your son didn't take the bus home. His arm looks like its broken. He didn't even cry. Didn't even tell me. When I picked him up from the ski patrol clinic, the patroller said he was one tough dude... he wanted to ski down to the bottom. Good thing his binding had broken right off his ski during the fall. No skiing for him.

Last week there we were again, in his doctor's office. He had performed a somersault off of his top bunk while helping me change the sheets and landed badly. Just as I was saying No! Don't do that! and he was saying Mom, you've gotta see this!

No cast this time. Only crutches, which he has already relinquished by training and exercising diligently to get better.

My only comfort is that my son truly is talented, and as the ski patroller said, he saw him crash and knew that Dana knew exactly what he was doing. He knew he had overshot the jump and pulled his skis up right before impact. Cool as a cucumber. He explained that he knew what was happening, and that was the only way to avoid breaking his ankles.

I suppose that should make me feel better...

mamma

2009-03-03T14:44:00.005-07:00

the cheeky daughter-in-law

My mother lives in the same town that I do. She was the catalyst for choosing this particular lovely spot in the United States for my return, not because she needed me, but because her living here made it possible for me and my family to visit, instilling the love affair with high altitude living that I knew would bloom in my children and husband (that was my plan).

Living close to my mother has been one of the greatest of returns.

My mother's husband left this morning for a trip to see his children. At noon, my husband called me and asked, have you called your mother? Well, no, actually. I'm glued to the chair working on a huge project. I'm busy. Why? You see, the Italian way of being a mother and child is totally different. Totally. While my husband is the rogue of his traditional Italian family, he is still imbued with the idea that if I don't call my mother when she is home alone, something is wrong with me. This leads to the inevitable thing that I just cannot say, just cannot admit. But in all truth, after we moved here to the United States and my husband's father suddenly passed away, I was so relieved that I wasn't there. This because I knew that my mother-in-law, a dear sweet lady who I always loved and got along with, would now be the focal point of every single breathing moment of life in our former Italian town. Not that his aging parents hadn't always been. My husband and his sisters regularly treated his elderly parents like children, checking where they were, what they ate, what they may need, how they felt. My sister-in-law, in particular, managed their medications, knew what they had for breakfast, lunch and dinner, knew if they slept well or not. It was exasperating and foreign to me. I imagined myself as somehow the cheeky daughter-in-law. With the furrowed brow and bratty expression. Even so, I cannot imagine treating either of my parents that way, much less being treated that way when I am older.

Now that my father-in-law has passed away, my sisters-in-law do nothing without their mother. She comes along on their vacations, spends weekends shuttling from one to the other, goes with one or the other grocery shopping, to the hairdresser, to the car wash, to church. My mother-in-law is a vibrant, energetic woman who is as healthy as a horse. She is actually enjoying her newly found single status, finally not catering to my father-in-law 24/7. But she is treated like a child, a baby, this woman who has lived so long and been through so much. Sometimes when my husband and his mother are on the phone, I literally have the impression that they have nothing left to talk about. He has been so constantly updated on where she has been, what she has been doing and what she ate for dinner last night, the conversation runs dead.

I loved many parts of Italian culture, but while from the outside it seems as if they treat their older generation so well, including them in every nick and cranny of life, in reality I find it mundane and patronizing. They relate to her often with exasperated sighs and eye rolling. There's an explicit sense of ball and chain. I sometimes feel that my sisters-in-law think that if their mother was left to her own devices even for a short while she might just disappear.

It's just not my idea of mamma.

the other side of the coin

2009-02-23T12:19:00.003-07:00

My children are mussing up their Italian. My youngest, in particular, has a tendency to tag on Italian conjugation when he is speaking English, creating crazy sentences like I forgot to turnare in my math homework... How strange to be living on the other side of the coin.
I try valiantly to be sure everyone speaks Italian at home. It is surprising to those who aren't expecting it, and we are a bit of a phenomenon if you don't know us and our story. I have been asked to submit a post from this blog (in a slightly edited version) to one of the translator journals that I subscribe to. I had forgotten about this post, as I have many others, so it was a treat to read about how unnerving and funny living a bilingual life can be. Here is the original post from the days just before I left Italy:

The Bilingual Brain

A different language is a different vision of life. ~ Federico Fellini

I'm trying to speak as much English as possible with my family. I know to those who have never lived in a bilingual family that should seem like a no-brainer. Speak English. What's the big deal? C'mon, you're American!

Learning, living, dreaming, reading and writing in a second language makes you realize the incredible intricacies and innuendos of your own. When I imagine my bilingual brain, it is as if it has different rooms; there is the Italian room and the English room. When I'm in the Italian room (a.k.a. Jenny's room), I do absolutely everything in Italian. I think in Italian, and even talk to myself in Italian (something that freaked me out the first time it happened). When I'm in the English room (Jennifer's room), everything is in English. When I am working, I imagine that the adjoining door between these two rooms is unlocked, and that I can go back and forth.

I've written before in this blog about how much I like my work, and how much I learn about a zillion different things that would normally fly right over my head. But I absolutely totally cannot work when I'm tired. When I'm tired, not only is the door open between the English and Italian rooms, but the entire wall disappears. My inherent ditziness (a few days ago I found my car keys in the refrigerator... don't even ask me what train of thought I was cruising on that day!) takes on a whole new persona... imbecile speaking in tongues, and I make no sense to anyone, myself included. Imbecile speaking in tongues usually makes her appearance when she's had a glass of wine too many, or is suffering from jetlag, or has a sick imbecile speaking in tongues child keeping her up all night.

Our move to the US has spurred me to speak as much English as possible with my family lately. My husband's English is OK, and since he never talks anyway unless you pinch him really hard, it's no big deal. My children's comprehension and spoken English is decent, but their spelling is horrendous, something that will surely benefit from their upcoming enrollment in an American school. When you raise a child in a foreign language speaking country, instilling your own language is not as automatic as it seems. Either that, or I just haven't been very good at it. When my children were small, we were running our restaurant business, so they weren't at home with Mom only speaking English. They were in the kitchen with Mom and Dad and their Italian grandparents making ravioli.

Yesterday we took a day off and went to the mountains. We were sitting in the parked car waiting for the children and I was speaking English. My husband was telling me how at his farewell dinner given by his colleagues, the cook got drunk and wound up burning the porchetta to a black smoldering crisp. He obviously then the wound up in the kitchen himself cooking his own farewell dinner, which seems to be the story of his life. As he recounted this scenario, I was fully inhabiting the English room, and when he finished I said, "Oh get out!" (you know, as in, oh come on... oh no way... oh you're pulling my leg...)

My husband got out of the car and stared at me as if I was nuts.

Living in two languages can at times be funny, infuriating, frustrating and exhausting. It can make me feel downright nuts. But here's the good news... this BBC article does shine one ray of light on my eternal feeling of being on the road to early senility:

Researchers from York University in Canada carried out tests on 104 people between the ages of 30 and 88.
They found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally.
Writing in the journal of Psychology and Ageing, they said being bilingual may protect against mental decline in old age.
Previous studies have shown that keeping the brain active can protect against senile dementia.

Oh, that makes me feel so much better. And it makes me not beat myself up quite so badly for that time years ago when I asked the supermarket guy for prosciutto senza preservativi... I thought I was asking for ham without preservatives. What I had really just asked for was ham without condoms.

it was a movie about dogs

2009-02-13T18:21:00.001-07:00

my work today

2009-02-09T13:31:00.003-07:00

I haven't written much about my work of late. My work is one of the main reasons I haven't written much at all. I've been so busy, which may be strange in light of the big hullabaloo crisis we are all supposedly living through. I have so much work I don't know what to do with it, and while doom and hellfire await us right around the corner, I continue to say yes.
I love my work. It sometimes keeps me up at odd hours and makes my hands hurt. It sometimes requires chasing down payments from long suffering clients in Italy, though I have managed to give most of these the boot. But it also gives me that one most precious thing that is so hard to come by... knowledge. I have learned so much about so many things I would have never come anywhere near if not for this job. I love it. I think it may keep my brain alive a tad longer.
I am a scientific translator. I specialize in robotics and automation. Last week I translated a proposal for the European Union about a new Mars lander, a robot so smart that it can find the tiniest particle of life that may have existed millions of years ago, photograph it, sample it, stick it in its pocket and bring it home. Today I am writing about nanorobotics- tiny a tiny army of soldiers that you swallow, taking care of what ails you from the inside. I know how all manner of machines work, from the most banal motor to the most cutting edge prosthesis hand.
I love this work. I love knowing so many strange tangents of what is happening in the world. I though I should write that down, lest I forget.

snow hugging a tree

2009-02-05T17:31:00.004-07:00

This picture reminds me of how I feel right now. The snow hugging the tree. Me hugging my life. And somehow looking graceful and light at the same time.

if only I could put it into words

2009-02-02T20:07:00.005-07:00

I have not been writing. I have been living and have had time for nothing else.

I quit the part time office job I took a year or so ago. The boring normalcy was killing me. The schedule was ruining me. My translation business continued to boom and I became a frazzled go between with sore hands.

I again failed miserably at what seems easy for others, and I am once again reveling in my self contentedness.

I may finally write more, if I could only put it into words.

The Sacrifice of Isaac

2009-01-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

the terror and the wrath

2009-01-08T11:00:00.002-07:00

I was flipping through the television channels last night when I happened upon a Barbara Walters special. She was interviewing Patrick Swayze, who was talking about his pancreatic cancer. I didn’t watch the show. I don’t like her and don’t particularly care for him, but what really hit me was the look in his eyes. He looked just like a deer staring down oncoming headlights. The fear and anxiety were palpable, right through the lens of the camera.
My mother had cancer. I was 15. She found a lump in her breast. She had been working crazily for several years and had let her annual mammogram slip by the wayside. She didn’t know she had a lump until she felt it with her own hands. Her biopsy showed cancer, and she soon after had surgery. Her surgery was a botched job, and the ensuing infection turned a lumpectomy into a radical mastectomy. Her lymph nodes had become infected with the cancer through the infection. She went to the best cancer center in the country and was told that the only way she would live was if they nearly killed her with chemotherapy and radiation. This was 25 years ago. She lost all of her hair and her fingernails curled. Her teeth wobbled in her mouth, which was full of ulcers. I remember going into her room as she napped to be sure that the sheets were still moving from her breath. I was afraid she might have stopped breathing altogether.
My mother survived a cancer that would have killed many. She has long term effects of the treatment that have never left her, but she lived.
My own brush with the possibility of cancer did not remind me of the horrible dark days of my mother’s illness. It reminded me that she survived, and how much she has accomplished and done in the years since her illness. It reminded me of the possibility of life beyond being mutilated and sickened to death.
So I wonder why Patrick Swayze’s face scared me so. I couldn’t stand it. The terror and wrath right there before everyone’s eyes. It made my sleep restless and fretful last night, a small insignificant nothing that pales in the shadow of what his sleep must be like. If he sleeps at all.

smiling at the top

2009-01-07T11:04:00.004-07:00

I have taken a break, and after much time pondering writing, I can't help but restart this blog by posting the cover photo from today's local paper, which says it all...

They look like they're smiling!

the drop in

2008-12-07T18:36:00.006-07:00

My husband at the bottom of the precipice, waiting for me to drop in. He always goes first.

In the lingo of skiing, a drop in is a decisive moment. A drop in cannot take place on a groomed, meandering ski slope full of tourists. A drop in can only take pace in what seems to be and is respectfully called a cliff. A drop in usually is the goal, the reason you hike with your skis up the crest of the mountain, or the reason you brave the wind whipping the life out of you.
There is a moment as you stand atop the precipice that you wonder what on earth you are doing there. But that moment only lasts as long as it takes you to take a deep breath. Then you go. And you can't turn back even if you wanted to. The speed and concentration take you over, and you are committed to the moment without reserve.
A drop in is a study in life, in marriage, in parenthood. You do it, you don't control it, you cannot go back. The thrill is in the doing. The joy is in trudging back up the hill. The why is something we don't quite understand. The payback is indescribable.

a subtle thing

2008-12-03T16:42:00.003-07:00

It's a subtle thing. Writing something down, saying it out loud.

The shadow I felt as I wrote my last post fell away as soon as I wrote it. I feel once again like a partner in crime and in life with my husband. Isn't marriage a mysterious, bewildering thing?

untethered

2008-11-26T17:47:00.004-07:00

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

I've been married a long time. "A long time" is definitely a subjective notion. I grew up in a divorced house, making my marriage seem long. My grandparents, on the other hand, were married for over 60 years. They literally lived and died together.

I never thought I would get married. I always thought that I would have children, but the marriage part of the family equation seemed a bad fit. Being married for 15 years continues to surprise me. It feels as if I must be talking about someone else, someone more stable and committed, more dedicated to the whole idea of marriage.

Being married has been hard for me of late. It's one of the reasons that I haven't been writing much, I think, as if laying down the words somehow moves me into dangerous, uncharted waters. And writing here is scary, and takes a modicum of bravery every time I do it. I've gone through these moments before. I should remember that.

Our move away from Italy has had many unexpected challenges and successes. It has been a journey of chance, and each day I am more convinced that I did the right thing. I cannot say the same for my husband. His reaction to stepping into a different world, as a citizen, not a traveler, for this is a very big distinction, has been hard, hard, hard. It may be because he is a man. It may be because he is Italian. It may be because he is proud. It is probably all of these. Is it that women are more resilient and adaptable to change? The majority of the expat blogs I read are women who have transplanted themselves into other cultures. I'm not so sure this is because of the stereotypical idea that the woman always follows the man. Could the woman actually be stronger, more able to adapt, more willing to feel a fool half the time?

And the intense culture gap, like a fault line between us, has never felt so enormous. My very way of thinking is foreign to him sometimes, and I realize how much our surroundings can camouflage our true selves.

I grew up thinking I wanted to be alone. I find myself slipping into fantasies of just that, remembering when I was untethered to any man. Fantasies are fantasies, they are not real. But it scares me all the same. Just as writing all of this down scares me. And so I wait.

the flu shot

2008-11-21T10:44:00.006-07:00

I got a flu shot for the first time this year. It was the day after my son's second surgery. It was an unplanned inspired spur-of-the-moment lapse in my belief that I am invincible. I was in the supermarket, overwhelmed and wondering what to fill my cart with, and there was a banner over the pharmacy shouting out Flu Shots Today! A force propelled me to the counter, to the woman pharmacist who looked on me kindly through her glasses, who gave me the shot and glass of water, who told me to come back and tell her if I had any problems at all, anything...

Sometimes I think I got that flu shot just to feel like someone was doting on me, or like I was doting on myself. Or maybe I got that shot for the same reason I opened this with, admitting that I am not, after all, invincible. When I was a young girl, I had this idea that life would reveal its meaning to me sometime around midlife (so right about now, I would say). Now that I am here, revelations seem absurd. I still like the idea of a pharmacist, a hairdresser, a client, a stranger looking kindly upon me.

I am trying not to listen to the news. Its funny how no one in the small circle of writers I read online regularly have written much about the mass hysteria that is gripping the news. Maybe they are all just trying to live their daily lives frugally and monotonously, as we are. Maybe they are ignoring the doom and dread, because in essence fretting changes nothing. As for me, I am listening to a novel on CD as I ride in my car, fetching teenagers and groceries. It is wonderfully descriptive, and takes a long time to describe the sound of icy tree branches snapping in the winter. I look around me and try to listen to the intense quiet outside of my new home.

I hope the flu shot will work. I hope admitting that I am not invincible will see me flying through winter, my favorite season, skiing because it's free (our passes are ours and paid for) and makes me feel even more free, maybe writing, maybe painting, maybe not taking so many trips to the hospital with my son, maybe taking the time and standing still enough to listen to the snapping branches and muffled sounds of the world around me becoming still and hunkered down for the winter.

bone tired

2008-11-11T08:35:00.004-07:00

In the last seventeen months, my life has been so full of everything that I have to remind myself that I have a right to feel drained. I can't remember if the pace of my life is abnormal, or it's really always this way. As I forget what has happened to me, I think I will record it here in a real list, a list to remind myself why I long for quiet.

In the last seventeen months:

I managed my husband's green card process, an Odyssey.

I uprooted my family after 15 years in Italy and moved across the ocean.

My husband's father passed away suddenly after he was here only two days, sending him back to Italy for a painful goodbye.

My beloved grandfather died a few days later.

I enrolled my Italian children in American schools, gritting my teeth on their behalf at first, and then watching them flower.

I somehow found two cars, insurance, dentists, doctors and a mechanic.

I helped my husband in setting foot in a country foreign to him, trying valiantly to support him in the language, the culture, the food, the extreme differentness.

I revolutionized my own work, finding a job in the mornings and translating in the afternoons, setting foot back into a workforce that I have not belonged to in so many years.

I faced the possibility of breast cancer. It's now time for my next mammogram.

My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I somehow (I don't remember how, exactly) managed to get approved for a mortgage, got the money together for the down payment, found a house and bought it.

My youngest son suffered a severely detached retina in his eye, and has had two major surgeries over the past 8 weeks.

... I can't think of anything else right now. I'm too tired.

I have written much and met many other writers, many of whom I deeply miss. I hope to find more time and energy and space to dedicate to these virtual friends and to myself. Do not forget me.

One thing I do know... it's snowing here, and the slopes are open.

days of hope and glory

2008-11-06T20:17:00.005-07:00

Never did I feel more foreign during my many years in a foreign country like I did when talking about how I felt about my country. That's probably why I avoided doing that as a rule. I was abroad at a time when America's wind turned sour, and my feelings of pride and love were often tinged with guilt. There is something intangible that happens to a child who grows up in our country which was hard to fathom in Italy. While Italians grow up with a crucifix in their classrooms, post offices and courtrooms, we grow up with the flag. These are things I never realized about myself until I left. I was inherently American.
Of course we have been wreakers of havoc and polluters and war mongers. We have also been the hope and dreams and open arms of the world, that place that is aspired to.
Like so many others, I cannot say what it has meant to me to be here... really here with my children and house and job and life, at such as auspicious time. I feel humbled and starstruck. I feel hopeful and energized. I feel all the potential of the fruits of hard work before me.
I feel proud.
I feel gleeful.
I feel home, finally.

the milky way from my window

2008-11-04T10:41:00.006-07:00

I have a new ritual at my house. The sky is so black and the nights are so quiet. I can see the Milky Way stretched out right over our roof like a nighttime rainbow. There are more stars than I could ever count.

before I go to bed each night I part my bedroom curtains and gaze at the night sky. I would love to learn more about astronomy, and I often harbor hopes that my youngest son will do something, anything, that has to do with space. He has the mind and the temperament for it, and the brains. Already twice as I have looked out at the sky from my window, I have been lucky enough to see a shooting star on its way to oblivion. Right there in that spilt second.

Have you ever tried to really look at a star? Not the big fat gaudy stars that are supposedly planets, but the small twinkly stars? The stars that disappear if you look at them for too long? Someone somewhere once explained this phenomenon to me, and to this day I don't if what they told me was true, and I don't care, because I love the idea so much. These disappearing stars may not even be there at all. What you see as you look at the night sky is an image that has travelled across the galaxies, for years, to reach your eyes. That star may be gone, dead, exploded, a super nova... and only now are you seeing it's image as it once was.

So looking at the sky from my home under the Milky Way is really a meditation. Whatever I am thinking or fretting about or grappling with that day leaves me. The ethereal, unreal, unpredictable quality of those stars, and the impossibility of holding onto them, even with my eyes, helps me remember that my life is the same. What a comfort.

who would have thought?

2008-10-26T18:53:00.003-06:00

We all hear about those teenage years, how our children will leave us, will become crazy, hormonal creatures with sullen expressions and rolling eyes. We will have to fight with them, wait up for them, punish them, dislike them. We will become angry and mystified. We will not understand them. We will suddenly be old, cranky, pain in the ass parents. We will lose our cool overnight.
My eldest son turned 14 last week. His transformation into a teenager has been at times tumultuous and unexpected, and at times sweet and melancholy. His sweet beautiful face and shiny hair made him an angelic looking child, and those same traits have made him a heartthrob now. His voice has become that of man, and cracks less and less. He is tall and has just the slightest European air about him, and he has my dimples. His teachers have warned me that the girls buzz around him like a bee to honey.
I remember being fourteen so well, every last detail. That's probably why I watch him leave the house with an air of wistful (how nauseating), of fear (how useless) and of chagrin (is he kissing his girlfriend?). Even though I probably have always looked like a comfortable, solid mother from the outside, these teenage years are already making me feel like I have absolutely no idea what is right. Am I too permissive? Am I too strict? My son's passage from a life in Italy to a life as an American teenager has been so seamless and effortless that I wonder what exactly it is I am supposed to do. I know my son has good judgement, has his feet on the ground, but the world which once consisted of home, school, family vacations and grandma's house has suddenly become overwhelmingly huge. I was raised with so much freedom that I wonder how my parents slept at night.
How can I be the parent? The one who has the answers, the rules, the knowledge?
I think it takes faith... some kind of faith. I remember the years with my small children only eighteen months apart, dreaming of a moment for myself, a longing for quiet. And now, in the meantime, I feel so lucky to still get kisses on the cheek and sweet words from my beautiful son. And I cling to my twelve year old... I hug and cuddle him until he tells me to stop.
Who would have thought?

heading home

2008-10-06T13:39:00.004-06:00

Heading home

I will be away for a while as we move into our new home. My hope is that with a place that I feel is my own, and with a room of my own, I will feel inspired to write more of what is meaningful to me. I'm afraid as of late I have lost many of my readers due to my erratic and fluffy stuff.

Below is a reminder of where I was 16 months ago. I enjoyed taking a peek backwards. Maybe you will, too.

Until next time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell. ~Emily Dickinson

I'm done. Really. The suitcases are closed, bordering on explosion, and are in the car ready to leave at 5 tomorrow morning. My children and I are booked for a long journey with two layovers, one of which is in Canada. We are flying on our frequent flier miles, which means you must take what they offer as far as the route goes. Usually I would be dreading it. Out travel time will be 24 hours easily by the time we arrive in Denver. This time I don't care.

It's been quite hot in Italy, and yesterday we went swimming in this stream that runs through the mountains behind our house. The water is glacier cold, and the pool beneath the waterfall is deep enough to dive into.

The dog's kennel is ready and he has his ticket, too. We glued a poster that I took off the wall of the children's room to the top of it. It's an aerial photograph of the Colorado Fouteeners, the Colorado mountain peaks that exceed 14,000 feet. We are moving to a town at 9,000 feet altitude, where it takes you a few days to catch your breath. My husband drew an arrow on the top of the highest peak on the poster with the words "Lucky is here". Lucky is the lucky dog coming with us.

One of Colorado's Fourteeners

The last few days have been the hardest of all. The rounds of goodbyes have been literally gut wrenching. I didn't consider that at all, until all of a sudden I found myself crying over and over again. The truth is I wasn't crying for the people I wouldn't be seeing for a while, but for myself and family, for the fear that this big leap will land us a mud puddle. In my heart I believe that I lead a sort of charmed life, and at times like these I'm sure I'll do something, or something will just happen, that will take that life away from me. My doubts began to manifest the moment I laid my head on the pillow.

I've been tending to this rose bush for the past two years in the hopes that it would bloom. It has finally decided to bloom now that I'm leaving!

Cleaning out and dismantling my home has been both painful and liberating, and has brought to light things long hidden away. As I was cleaning out the drawers of my children's desk, I found my eldest son's diary. I have a vague memory of both my children asking me to buy them diaries years ago. My firstborn had a green diary with a little padloclock on it. My youngest had a blue one. I believe they were 9 and 7 years old at the time. When I stumbled upon these the other day, the blue one was torn open and scribbled on with pastels, and held a few drawings of cartoon characters. The green one, however, fell onto the floor and was opened to the first page. My big boy really had kept a diary for a while, and his neat fourth grade calligraphy filled the first twenty or so pages. I resisted my urge to read the whole thing, and put the diary in a box of our most important keepsakes. I did, however, see the introductory line to his diary, which read:

"Io vengo da una famiglia speciale..."

(I come from a special family)

I guess this means that I'm not the only one who thinks she leads a charmed life. And I know that feeling is something we hold inside and nurture no matter where we are, or what language we are speaking.

gripping the banister

2008-10-02T09:58:00.002-06:00

We are moving to our new home next week. Each time I walk down the stairs of the little apartment we have been squeezed into for the past year, I feel my handing gripping the banister, waiting for a fall. There is something about taking the plunge, yet again, that always makes me trip on something, stumbling and falling.
It reminds me of many years ago when my husband and I visited Nepal. I wrote about that life changing experience a little more than a year ago as I prepared for my move from Italy:

My husband and I traveled to Nepal years ago before we got married. I had just sold or given away everything that I owned that couldn’t fit into two big suitcases, except for my books and paintbrushes. I have a thing about my books and paintbrushes. Those I packed in boxes and shipped to Italy.

Everything I needed for our month long trip in Nepal was in my fancy REI backpack. I remember feeling so proud of myself as I walked around the house trying out the pack that I was soon to lug around the Himalayas. I was such a good and efficient packer! The pack wasn’t heavy at all!

Nepal was a wondrous and very foreign country. And let’s just say very pedestrian. That pack began to weigh more and more everyday. And my husband, being the chivalrous hard body that he is, often stacked mine on top of his (that’s around the time that I realized I should consider marrying him). The farther we walked, the more stuff I left behind. I didn’t really need two changes of socks, so I gave one to the family that had rented us a room in their home for the night. And I didn’t really need two pairs of jeans either, so I left those to someone else. My pack became lighter and lighter and my back began to straighten. My step became swifter and I stopped whining like a brat.

Near the end of our trip, we came upon a sadhu.

This isn't actually him, but it's pretty close. He was living in a lean-to perched on the bank of a river, and was in a loincloth and nothing else. He had no shoes and nothing to cook or eat with apart from his hands. The trail passed just a few feet from his home, where he sat cross-legged looking out onto the river. As I passed him, his haggard face lit up in a serene smile as he brought his hands together in front of his chest and bowed. Namaste. Literally, I bow to you.

All my life, I have tried to balance my desire for motherhood, for a home, for security, with my desire to live in a way that feels authentic. My union with my husband has made that even more of a priority, as he pushes me more and more towards freedom. We often imagine how we will live when our children are gone from the nest... where we will go and what we will do.

Maybe this is why I ski. Three years ago I was skiing in Italy during a snow storm. It was cold and blustery, and I couldn't see more than three feet in front of me. I was disoriented. I fell and tore the meniscus in my knee, and went through a long, painful recovery. My knee still bothers me today, and most likely will the most of my life. But I made a decision to ski again. It was conscious choice to let go of the banister. I then made a decision to ski faster and higher and steeper. It's not about bravery at all. It's about living.

persistence of memory

2008-09-28T18:48:00.007-06:00

Today I was standing in the supermarket looking over the different coffees. I was in my sweatpants and clogs, and my hair was in my face. At times I think that I have taken my return to the land of sloppy from the land of matching accessories and designer labels to an extreme. But somehow here it just works. Everyone here looks like me, I think.

So I was looking through the coffees and there it was, a feeling creeping up my back, over the top of my head and into my face. I could feel the presence of someone from my past. Someone who I can't quite seem to forget, even though it has literally been twenty years since our brief encounter in time, someone who I can still just think about and feel my knees wobble a bit, my breath sucking in between my teeth. This person doesn't live anywhere near me as far as I know. This person is married as am I, probably happily, as am I. This person is probably nothing like what I remember him to be; he is a specter from the past, from my subconscious. Oh how those we only remember become grand. How they take on mythic proportions, the subtleties falling away, leaving only sweeping gusts of emotion. That gut sinking feeling I had when I was twenty, when a person who loved me rejected me for reasons I still do not understand.

There I was smelling the coffee, and as I willed myself to turn around, I knew before my focus peered down the aisle that he wasn't really there. Maybe it was the smell of the coffee, my hair in my face, my feeling of youthfulness. Maybe it was the dark hair of someone I saw from the back in the parking lot as he walked to his car. Someone taller than my husband and so much haughtier, so much more complicated and withholding.

I can't help but wonder if I am the only one who runs into a ghost without warning. I imagine he even now hears my name, which is so common, and feels his neck prickle. I imagine the picture of me at twenty, a bit disheveled and flowery, distracted and feeling intense, creeping up behind him in the supermarket. He turns and realizes that it is not me at all; it is someone else's blond hair and laugh, some other Jennifer. He feel his heart sink and then feels relieved, and turns back to his wife's grocery list. He feels a bit of a fool, standing there at 40, happily married, a father, to be opening that door to a past that has taken on impossibly romantic proportions, with all the angst of youth that seems so silly now.

Will we meet again? I crept down the aisle of the grocery store, here in my small mountain town with oh so many out of town visitors. Will I be skiing down the ski slope, riding up the chairlift, waiting in the airport, sitting on a plane? Will I be alone or with my beloved family? Will I be older than I am now, elderly even? Will it never happen?

I think not. About five or six years ago I was in New York City. I was walking down 23rd Street to an art gallery, and as I passed by the 23rd St. subway station there he was, climbing the steps. He was gray and had a beard. He was taller than I remembered. He was walking fast and alone, and still a bit haughty. He was heading straight for me but hadn't seen me yet. And I turned away. I saw him pass me by and stop for a moment. Stop in his tracks. Then he walked on.

I'm sure he would have done the same.

follow the yellow brick road

2008-09-26T18:43:00.003-06:00

the road leading to my new home...

actually takes you...

to a pot of gold

I have a right

2008-09-24T15:05:00.008-06:00

This is too much. I have a right to hear the presidential candidates debate. I have a right to hear both candidates explain what they would do about the sickening quagmire this country has wound up in 40 days from now. I have a right to see the candidates on the spot- no scripts, teleprompters, lobbyists, smear commercials- answering questions using their own knowledge and brains and reasoning. I have a right to a president that can handle that spot. I want a president who has the wherewithal to spend all day in Washington and debate his or her positions and points of view until midnight the next day if necessary. This is, after all, an election for the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
I'm so angry about this. I think it is fake and phony and dishonest, and not the least bit about integrity. Do these people think I am stupid?
If you feel the same way, or any other way for that matter, say it. Write it. Make phone calls. Write e-mails. Yell off of your roof, your balcony. Use your blog. Use your voice. Use your brains.

5 steps to that thing called a Rocky Mountain high

2008-09-22T06:30:00.004-06:00

The approach

Sneaking in

Looking up

Peeking through

The other side

go

2008-09-16T14:46:00.005-06:00

Please go vote this time. Please consider what is really best for you and your family. Please be thoughtful and sincere. Please ask yourself what kind of country and world you want your children and grandchildren to inherit.

I moved away from the United States during the Clinton era. I remember well the open arms that welcomed me all across Europe and Asia. I remember what it was like when people asked me where I was from, and what my Americaness meant then to the world at large.

I also remember how grateful I was in the last several years to speak Italian without an accent. How I rarely let on that I was foreign, and when I did I surely did not want to tell people I was an American. This was where our place in the world at large was when I came home last year. I know it seems not to matter as long as you live here. Who cares what those foreigners think, anyway? But there was a time not so long ago when many still considered the US to be a beacon of light.

I miss those times.

So whatever you think when you take away all of the trappings of politics and media and sensationalism is important.

Go vote. Please. Go.

the mystery

2008-09-12T07:05:00.005-06:00

I often have the feeling that I am holding on by a pinkie to my marriage. Not because I am unhappy, or dissatisfied, or any other tangible thing. The feeling really isn't about my marriage, but about me.

Do we ever think about how much anyone really knows us? What fraction of our true selves do we reveal to those who are closest to us?

Isn't marriage a mysterious thing? At the same time that I feel so foreign, I feel so at home. Over the years, I've found that accepting that contrast has been the key to my own marriage.

Loving someone enough to let them be a stranger.