Rick Bailey's Blog: Stuff happens, then you write about it, page 7

That Time of Year

We’re looking for him.  We find 130 Michael Smiths.

I’m standing at the kitchen counter chopping an onion at eleven in the morning. We’ve just walked seven miles, on what feels like the first day of spring. Real spring: The sky is blue, the maples are in lush full leaf, the ferns along the east side of our house are burgeoning. The birds are so noisy even with these bad ears of mine I can hear them. Ten minutes into our walk I pull off one of my two layers, the long sleeve shirt. 

“That’s a lot of Michael Smiths,” I say now. Tizi is looking for him on her IPad. 

And I’m thinking, there could be a joke– How many Michael Smiths does it take to…? But it’s 130 obituaries. An obituary is not funny.

Earlier today, on our walk to the top of Van Ness, an avenue of maples near our house, we stopped and talked to Carol, a friend from the local senior center, which we abandoned during the plague, then never went back to, post-Covid. 

“Will you look at us,” she says to Tizi, pointing first at her own hair, then at Tizi’s. Both gorgeous silver. Carol is sleek and energetic and funny. This morning she’s dressed in slim jeans, a gray fleece, and running shoes. When we walk up her driveway she’s stabbing a weeding fork into dandelions along her front sidewalk. She says her house is too big. She’s lived here, post divorce, thirty some years. Too many flower beds, she says. Too much work. When I ask, she says her hip replacements were a great success. Yes, she tells Tizi, she did go back to the senior center, where there are some of the same people. And there are those, like us, who never came back. And there are some new seniors too. I think: Does that make us old seniors?

“What about Ed?” Tizi asks. 

I know she’s afraid to ask. Ed the trumpet player. Ed the leader of the senior center big band. Occasionally he took the elevator downstairs to the exercise machines and didn’t exercise. Mostly he sat at the round table upstairs, drank coffee, and dispensed witticisms. A few years ago we missed his 90th birthday bash. He had a yellow Corvette in the parking, but didn’t drive much. One Tuesday night I took him (or he took me) to a jazz jam session over on Woodward Avenue. We sat through two sets. Every so often, he wiped tears from his eyes. He drank one glass of beer. 

“Gone,” Carol says now. 

Tizi shakes her head. “I knew it.”

Carol says, well, Ed was 92. “But Michael Smith?” 

He was a young senior, with a shock of very premature gray hair and a wicked sense of humor. He had no business being a senior. And now, he has no business being dead. 

Like Carol I think about the flower beds. And the basement. And a spare room upstairs. Every house has a junk drawer. We have a junk room. At our age you begin to reckon with the too-muchness of a house. At least I do. Tizi not so much. 

Part of the problem is accidental shopping.  We try to avoid Home Goods. There’s one right next to Costco. If you’re waiting for Costco to open you can kill time at Home Goods. But there’s peril. We don’t need another pan, another serving dish. We have enough tongs. When I open kitchen and bathroom and mudroom cupboards, I find soaps we bought at Home Goods and forgot about.

I find soaps with a French accent–savon pour les mains (soothing, it says on the label, soft cotton), three 17 ounce pump bottles of those; Lemon Verbena made by or for aromatherapy rituals; Ginger Mandarin Hand Soap, which is pure and good, biodegradable and plant-based; a Rain Forest Collection of Ecological Products (meaning, judging from the look of them, soaps); we have Thyme Vegetal Soap and Cedar Vegetal Soap; Kirk’s Original Coco Castile pure botanical coconut oil 100% natural hypoallergenic skin care with no synthetic detergents soap; we have The Chef’s Soap (not A chef’s soap) also made in France. All that soap makes me want to get dirty. It also tells me don’t buy any more soap, maybe ever.

Online shopping has exacerbated the problem. It’s too easy to buy stuff. 

A helpful message popped up on my phone one day. I’m paying too much for hearing aids was the message. That day, it just so happened, I came home from Shake Shack,a stressful outing with a grandson involving touch screen menus and digital ordering and a flood of hungry young professionals, and I was missing one of my hearing aids. I tried calling. Did you find a small electrical thingie on the floor… and learned if you press 1 you can place your order and if you press 2 you can leave a message for the manager but really you really can’t. They don’t ever say wait for the beep. There’s no beep. I pictured Big Beaver lunch traffic passing through Shake Shack, my dinky, obscenely expensive device under foot, smashed.  

This ad said, “Get new hearing aids for less than $100!” 

The operating instructions, a 12-page manual only slightly larger than a postage stamp, said it can take up to two weeks to get used to them. I lasted three days. The problem was feedback, annoying high-pitched squealing coming from the direction of my head. I could hear the feedback just fine. The frequency-adjusted audible world that came to me sounded like sharpened knives.  Tizi said, “What’s that noise???” She meant the feedback. The one-button control panel on the side of these things, which are the size of a peanut inserted into your ears, is no bigger than the head of a pin. Press the head of the pin three times to adjust volume. Squeal. Hold the head of the pin down for three seconds to change the mode. Squeal. 

When my father got old and wore hearing aids, his fingers were always in his ears, adjusting, pressing, fiddling, which I think now, in my case, is only slightly less unsightly than a finger up my nose. No one wants to see that.  I am becoming my father. Deaf, like him. Old.

I sent them back.

Poor Michael Smith. We never find the obit. Nor the death notice

Next day I’m thinking about him again, walking out of a local market, and I see Ted. I’d see him at the senior center, too, but we go back a number of years. We go way back to BC (before Covid) years, to the years our kids were in school together. He is heavier. He has unkempt gray hair and an unruly goatee.

He squints as we pass each other in the parking lot. “I know you,” he says.

“Ted,” I say.

“What’s your name?” 

The look of irrecogntion is there. I tell him my name, feeling a shiver of alarm. He says, “How do I know you? Do you go up North?”

I say yes, we go up North. I tell him we’ve been to his house up there. This doesn’t register. He’s trying to puzzle it out. I can see he’s tired of puzzles. “We sat all those nights by the Herman’s pool?”

“The Hermans,” he says. He gets that. Then: “Whatever happened to them?”

I feel a moment of panic of my own when I can’t remember his wife’s name. I ask, Grandchildren? Yes, he has two. 

“We’ve got three,” I say. “We’re going to California on Tuesday to see the new one.” 

He asks again, “Do you go up north?” If he knows me I can’t tell. He has other things not on his mind.

When I get home I tell Tizi. She says she surprised Ellen lets him drive.

Ellen, I think. That’s right.

Before lunch I step outside to walk around the house, to feel the spring air again, to stand in the sun. In Tizi’s patch of trillium we have a lump of rock that’s a foot tall and comes to kind of a point on top.  Every year on a day like today we’re likely to see a chipmunk perched on top of it, looking around in its nervous, jerky chipmunk manner. This is one of those days. It’s the first chipmunk day of the year. I can’t hear it chipping and chattering, but I know it does that. What I do hear is a sound in the distance. At first I think: electric bicycle, the distinct whine as it picks up speed, probably just down the street. Then I realize, no, it’s a motorcycle accelerating, running through the gears in the far distance, going who knows where, fast, and enjoying it.

Drink Up

Years back a pipe burst in our apartment bathroom in San Marino. Three thousand miles away, we got the news: a trickle of water had found its way into Mr. and Mrs. Riccardi’s apartment below ours and continued to flow until the water to our unit was shut off completely. Repairs would be needed. It was an opportunity. Fix the leak, yes, and why not re-do the bathroom? That’s what we did.

Of course all that meant a lot of work: demolition, by a worker they call a “muratore,” a wall (and floor) man conversant with cement; then plumbing, tile, electrical, and carpentry work. It took weeks, procuring materials, scheduling the work, being there and not there (you couldn’t live in an apartment with no running water). Since then I’ve thought of those ads you see in travel magazines: buy an apartment in Italy for a dollar or a euro. How easy it sounds. What about restoration? I lived through that process on a small scale. It was not easy.

The job required my living for a few weeks ala agriturismo, in a bed and board place ten minutes from the apartment. Board was dinner every night, lots of good grub. And lots of good wine. On one end of the dining room was a wall with ceramic pitchers hung on pegs. And two spigots, one for sangiovese, one for cabernet. You grabbed a pitcher, filled it, and went to your table. The wine tasted great. At the agritour, they were like, Have all you want. We’ll make more. It was quaffing wine, slurping wine, uncomplicated, great with food. The grapes were grown in vineyards just outside the door. This, I realized, was vino sfuso. Wine from the barrel. I’d been enjoying it for years. Now I knew what it was.

I thought of vino sfuso recently–correction, I think of vino sfuso all the time–just back from our most recent stay over there. We drive and eat all over the Marecchia Valley and the low Apennine hills when we’re in San Marino. Much of the arable land is given over to olive groves and vineyards. Wine production is bread and butter, both a significant part of the local economy and a quality-of-life factor in the home.  

It was quaffing wine, slurping wine, uncomplicated, great with food. The grapes were grown in vineyards just outside the door.

In restaurants, the trattoria and osteria there and all over Italy, house wine is often vino sfuso. You order by the glass, by the quarter- and half-liter, or by the liter. It’s cheap and dry and, significantly, lower in alcohol content than bottled wine. It’s also lower in alcohol content than American wine. You notice the difference. For a decade I took people to Italy on 7-10 day excursions focused on local culture and what I called “heroic eating.” On the part of a few travelers on every trip, there was also some heroic drinking involved. Every morning at breakfast, a reveler would testify, “I drank all that wine last night and I’m not hung over.” Wasn’t that great?

It is great, as close as you can get to no-fault wine.

In Rimini, whose backstreets we frequently walk and drive, you’ll see signs in storefronts: Vino Sfuso. Stop in with your bottles and jugs. Fill ‘er up. That’s been the story for hundreds of years over there. According to the news magazine The Florentine, as far back as the 15th century, surplus wine in Italy has been a problem and a boon, depending on your point of view. There’s simply so much wine.  So. Much. Wine. Produced by land-owning families, who would keep the best of the wine for themselves, when the tanks ran over, the spillage, the excess wine was sold off in the cities, where common folk could buy it at bargain basement prices at “wine windows.” Today in Florence, near Piazza della Signoria, you can belly up to the bar at Fratellini, one of those “wine windows,” and enjoy a glass of wine on your feet, the way, for hundreds of years, residents would pass by with their jugs for a refill. 

In the US, as far as I know, vino sfuso is not a thing. In the summer of 2010 we went on a vineyard crawl in California with friends. We tasted a lot of the good stuff. When we took a break for lunch, I wondered what we would find in restaurants. Local wine, for sure. At reduced prices? (After all, it was made two miles away.) No reduced prices. No house wine. No vino sfuso. 

Home from Italy now for two weeks, I am nostalgic for that simple pleasure. In the US, wine is not cheap. (In San Marino I pay 5 euros at the grocery store for a bottle of sangiovese I find totally satisfying.) And in the US, to satisfy the American consumer who likes the complexity and clout of a big red wine, the average alcohol content approaches 14 percent. Many wines exceed that level. Thinking vino sfuso, at Costco recently I looked at inexpensive American reds, checking price, checking ABV. Nothing below 13.5 percent. Then I remembered–the box. Kirkland’s three-liter box of cabernet sauvignon. Inside the box, a plastic bag. Wine in a bag in a box. On the side of the box, a tap. The box wine was on a pallet around the corner from the bottled stuff, over there next to car batteries and folding chairs. 

I looked: ABV was 13 percent. 

Hello.

Could I get any closer to vino sfuso? I couldn’t see how. 

I bought a box of it, recalling, when I did, my father-in-law’s cellar, which I occasionally visited after Tizi and I got married, seeing the cases of gallon-jug wines he bought and decanted, CK Mondavi, Fortissimo, Cribari, wines he poured at the table and cut with water, as Italians are inclined to do. At that point I was a graduate of the university of Boone’s Farm. I had known the fruity bouquet of Ripple Pagan Pink. I found I could love those jugs. 

And in the US, to satisfy the American consumer who likes the complexity and clout of a big red wine, the average alcohol content approaches 14 percent. Many wines exceed that level.

Back home from Costco I read up on the box wine I had just bought.  And found this blessing, this paean offered by the wine critics at Tasting: 

Indigo color. Aromas and flavors of black cherries and vanilla, fresh wet coffee grounds and cocoa nibs, grilled peppers, and crushed violets with a medium-to-full body and a medium-to-long finish revealing accents of grilled black cherries, leather and peppers, five spice, and potting soil. A rock solid Cabernet with great pairing versatility; grab a bottle for the picnic with your friends this weekend.

I opened the box, pinched the tap, and tasted. I noticed color, not indigo, more the color of red wine. I tasted again, thinking I might actually try to count the spices for myself. About that potting soil finish. Really? I missed that.

In 1970 a bottle of Boones Farm cost a dollar. Adjusted for inflation, that bottle of apple or strawberry wine would cost $7.50 today. The box? Three liters, equivalent to four bottles, rings up at less than $3.50 a bottle. That definitely seems like progress.  

The wine is more than satisfactory. It’s good. I visit the box down in my dinky cellar space, on a shelf next to the tuna fish and Trader Joe’s cherries. When I cook lunch, between 11:45 and 12 noon, I go downstairs and draw a glass. Walking upstairs, lightly jostling the wine in its glass, I think I detect a bouquet. In Italy I could drink vino sfuso every day, before, with, and after food. In the case of the box, so far I have yet to slurp. In fact, I find I usually do not want a second glass. 

When you think about it, that’s probably a good thing.

Coming Soon: Drop and Add, a novel

This book will be published August 2024. Advanced copies are now available for review.

Think Richard Russo, Straight Man, only a new prof rather than an old one, an adjunct rather than a full prof, at a rural two-year school called Eastern Technical College (yup, ETC) not a private liberal arts college. In addition to trying to establish his place in the institution, Eliot Becker also tries to find his place in the one-stoplight town where he takes up residence, living above the drug store, bagging groceries at the local grocery store for extra money, singing in an all-falsetto band at a country bar for extra money. There are potential love interests, of course, the woman still living down in Detroit, trained to be an art historian, working as a tennis pro, and the new one, who happens to be the small town’s female plumber. It’s fun stuff and it’s serious business, taking the reader inside the gritty context of adjunct work–bad pay, no security, shitty hours, ill-prepared working class students for many of whom failure is not just an option, it’s a virtual certainty. What kind of prof did this protagonist expect to become? What kind of man? What will he become?

Nothing Last Forever

I have an email notification on my phone this morning: Nothing Last Forever. I read that right. So did you. Nothing Last Forever.

As if we didn’t know that.

Maybe the grammatical error is intentional, a nudge to get me to actually open the email rather than summarily delete it. If that’s the ploy, it worked. The message is an ad for masks, barriers against airborne pathogens carrying the plague, from a company called Enro. I bought a few masks for the plane ride over here. According to Enro, we’re due for a new mask. No, we’re not. But thanks. 

Nothing last forever–

Something like that has been on my mind for the past few hours, as I was lying in bed deciding whether to go back to sleep or get up and capture the events of the last few days. My go-to strategy for putting myself back to sleep is to list the names of the 50 states in alphabetical order. Name a state, count to ten, name another state, count to ten. Alaska. Arizona. Alabama, Arkansas… There can be something settling in this recitation, an effect, when it’s working, that’s almost hypnotic. California 5, 6, 7 …. Colorado 5, 6 7, 8, ….  Last time I did it, I didn’t get past Louisiana. But not tonight. When I get to Wyoming at 3:45 a.m., I’m still wide awake.

I’m kind of stirred up from last night’s church service. For quite a long time now, that is not something I imagined saying, ever. Kind of like when I heard our niece say yesterday. “Oh, I just got a message from Uganda.” Both solidly in the very unlikely category.   

We went to a mass in the church up the street, a mass said for Tizi’s aunt and uncle who left this world a few years ago. Since they’ve been gone, if we’re here, we go. Usually the mass takes place in a small chapel in a rear corner of the church, a nondescript backroom with some earnest oversize statuary and seating for 20-25 of the faithful. In those events, it’s 20-25 minutes and out. No homily. If you’re lucky, no music. It’s a perfunctory service, bare bones.  Last night we were in the church.  

The new priest, whom everyone approves of, shows up in a wheelchair. He has a busted foot. He’s a big guy well into his 40’s, with dark hair and a fleshy face. On the street you might take him to be the town’s butcher. Last night he was wearing the robes and all, trying to keep from running over them, getting a lot of help from a deacon, who shoved him around when needed and arranged a microphone stand and fetched liturgical scripts as needed. I enjoyed watching the priest wheel left, wheel right, turning on a dime.

It’s an old church, with uncomfortable utilitarian wood pews, travertine floor, a high vaulted ceiling above the altar, and what greatly enhances a church experience, a wonderful echo. And a good sound system. The last two funerals I’ve attended were in acoustically disastrous churches, with sound systems that enhanced muffle, as if there’s an anti-crisp setting on the sound system, wrapping words in wool and then wrapping them again in plastic wrap, making them totally unintelligible. Last night every word was crystal clear and repeated in the church echo.

Not that hearing the words is important to me over here. I don’t know the mass in Italian. I can sort of guess: this is where we confess our sins, that sounded like “and also with you,” here we go with the Our Father, sure I’ll offer a sign of peace and give and accept kisses. Given the language barrier, I’m in it, but just barely. I comprehend little.

I realized last night, it doesn’t matter. A critical detail last night: no music. No organ, no piano, no guitar.  Thank God. Not to disparage church musicians of the world, but you can ruin a pretty good experience. The big guy in the wheelchair sang the mass, hitting those single Gregorian notes with their odd intervals, and the parishioners sang the notes back when invited to do so, and the echo had its very rich multiplier effect. It was eerie, it was penetrating. It was like attending a musical without the music. 

Then came the homily. Oh well, he kept it short. There was one laugh line. He employed a few typical Italian gesticulations to get his point across. I know he was talking about Jesus. I rarely listen to a homily in English. In Italian I completely tune it out.

The Gregorian notes and the echo–that’s really all I require. I have to wonder–when men and women of the church take orders, when they become part of one of those communities, and they attend mass every day, do they just get the notes and the words and the echo? And no music? And no homily? They’ve taken orders, so they don’t really need the homily, do they? We get the homily; it’s like orders writ small. 

It may have been during the homily I heard a cellphone message notification somewhere in the church. Over here you typically hear five notes: 3rd, 5th, 8th, 7th, 5th. Bee-beep bee-beep-beep. I thought, thank God that wasn’t me. Then remembered, with a feeling of total horror, Holy crap, my phone! My ringtone is the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” and it’s piercing. I couldn’t get my phone out fast enough to silence it. The Bangles would have broken the spell, for me and for everyone. The American! Tizi, where did you find this clown? I would have slunk out of the church in shame.

But the spell remained intact.

If the church could give me a no-music guarantee, and a no-homily guarantee, and if I could go to Tizi’s hometown church, I would go, willingly and often. I might even go everyday, to the church, that is; not that backroom. The way I feel this morning, if I could get a no-music, no-homily guarantee, I might even like to become a monk for a while. But not forever.  Nothing last forever.  

Left Right or Straight

Things come to a head on our way to Babbi (pronounced “Bob-bee”). I mean an argument. A spat. 

Babbi is a chocolate manufacturer in Cesena. Their products are all over Italy. Wherever you find chocolate, you’ll find Babbi (which could be a Babbi slogan or tagline. “Ovunque trovi cioccolato, troverai Babbi”).

We’re on our way home from Ravenna. Today we came to see, among other things, the Domus dei Tappetti di Pietra. The house with stone carpets, which means 4th century Roman-empire era mosaic floors. It wasn’t easy finding it. No one I asked on the street knew where it was. When I said that the ticket lady at San Vitale told us it was right around the corner, first the older man I asked, then the older woman, both of whom looked like residents, then both the young storekeeper and the older storekeeper, all four shrugged and said they’d never heard of it. Never heard of it? It was right there on the Ravenna website, a three-minute walk from San Vitale. Was I mixed up? Was I mispronouncing words?  Was my Italian no good?

“It’s gotta be around here somewhere,” I said to Tizi. “Ticket lady said turn right, it’s on the left.” 

“I don’t see it,” she said. Which sounded more like a slightly impatient question. Where are we going?

I asked three more people before we found it. Third ask, the nice lady in the coffee bar takes my elbow and leads me outside to the corner. Not on the left. On the next street to the left. Then at the end of that block, on the left. And it isn’t a house. Or it is a house, but with the church of Sant’Eufemia built on top of it. Anyway the 5th century mosaics were cool, we got to see them, and after that we see more mosaics, in the baptistery and the arcivescovo museum, and then we have a decent lunch. 

Leaving Ravenna, our thoughts turn to future pleasures. Chocolate. Tizi thinks big. The Babbi we’re going to is not a store. It’s a warehouse, a distribution center. All chocolate roads lead to Babbi in Cesena. Tizi’s not looking for a candy bar. She’s shopping volume.  

We’ve been to Babbi before, twice. I should know the way. I sort of know the way: somewhere around Cesena. I think I know where we’re going.

In general, driving has felt different this trip, more frenetic. I’ve discovered I need to wear my glasses.  That way I can read road signs. Night driving has been nerve-wracking, due to foot traffic, due to bicycle traffic, due to scooter traffic. Also frustrating, I’ve struggled this trip at the automated pay stations on the autostrada, which repeatedly reject my credit card. For years I had to talk to the guy, the actual pay station guy smoking a cigarette and talking too fast to me or talking on his phone with a friend. Then came credit card pay. It was easy, it was fast.

“It always worked before,” I say to Tizi at Rimini south.

“You must be doing something wrong,” she says.

Automated pay station lady voice says, “Take your card out and insert the other end first.” I do that. Automated lady voice repeats herself. I take my card out and turn it again. Is it chip first? Is that the problem?

Tizi says, “Turn your card.”

“I understand that.”

“Put it in the right way every time.”

Oh. That’s genius. I tell her I thought I knew the right way. 

Two or three times I flip, turn, rotate my card before automated lady finally says, “Hang on a sec, the transaction is in process.” There are two credit card pay stations at the Rimini south exit. Every time I pay there, we have this conversation, me and automated lady voice, and me and Tizi. 

“Remember which way for next time,” Tizi says, “which way to insert your card.”

I remember. “I do remember,” I tell her. And it doesn’t seem to matter.

Finally one morning, on a website I stumble upon called “Mom in Italy,” I realize that I don’t need to insert my credit card at all. It’s a tap-friendly system. 

“I just need to tap,” I say to Tizi next time. 

She nods.

“All that frustration. The tap icon was right in front of my face.”

Another driving annoyance: we’ve been pulled over by the Carabinieri. Twice.

Pulled over is the wrong term. It’s the American term for the transaction that begins when you see a cop car in your rearview mirror, the menacing flashing lights. Here it is different. At checkpoints at the side of the road, a uniformed officer stands, holding a wand that Italians call a lollypop. He waves you to the shoulder, invites you to pull over and stop. Unlike the traffic event in the US, this feels civil, almost friendly. Hey, stop in and see us. They work in twos. But you better stop. There’s two cops, one with the lollypop, the other with a big gun, standing at the rear of the cop Fiat, the trunk open, operating the mobile information system. 

“Documenti,” the cop says.

I hand him my Michigan driver’s license, explain what it is. I hand him my $30 International Driving Permit I acquired at AAA before leaving the US. I hand him the rental car documents. I also tell him, with some trepidation, that I have a photograph of my passport on my phone. Would he like to see that?

“That won’t be necessary,” he says.

Why did you pull me over? I would like to ask him, but it seems impertinent. The stop seems totally arbitrary.  Did I do something? Are you looking for a car like this one (gray late model Hyundai, four door econo model)? Is there a miscreant or a fugitive that I resemble on the lam? 

“Where were you born?” he asks, before joining the cop at the trunk.

“Don’t offer stuff they don’t ask for,” Tizi says.

She’s right.

“What if he wanted your actual passport?”

She’s right. I tell her I read somewhere, photograph your passport. And she should remember that the photo of my passport was sufficient in Rome, when we lined up for tickets at the Forum.

“This is different,” she says, “Don’t offer stuff.”

We wait ten minutes while the Carabinieri look for what they’re looking for. Tizi says she wonders if good looks is a requirement in this line of work. It’s the boots, I think, black leather knee-high boots, fitted pants, waist-length jacket. These cops are stylin’. And there might be a height requirement. I could never be a cop over here. She tells me not to say anything else. She means don’t engage in conversation, which I am inclined to do, testing my Italian on anyone who will listen.

He comes back, hands me the documents, says I can go. No explanation. 

Lots of checkpoints this year. They’re on the lookout. There’s an Italian expression: Non c’e’ due senza tre. Meaning bad shit happens in threes. I might get stopped again.

The road to Babbi is a state road. Italy is well along in the process of eliminating stoplights on state and provincial roads. Between the Cesena south autostrada pay station, where I happily tapped my payment, and the Babbi warehouse, there are more than a dozen roundabouts connecting a confusing network of roads, streets, and lanes. 

“Do you know how to get there? Tizi asks.

“Not really,” I say. “But Google Maps does.”

This suspicious Hyundai I’m driving was manufactured before CarPlay appeared and became ubiquitous. We can connect my phone, but the “screen” on Hyundai’s dash display is the size of a stick of gum. It is not a SatNav buddy. So Tizi holds the phone, watches, and helps with directions.

Italians love their roundabouts, and so do I, but a stoplight has its merits. For example, you have to stop. When you stop, if you’re wearing your glasses you can read road signs. You can consider your options. On a roundabout, on the other hand, you’re sharing space with other cars and other drivers, most of whom want to go faster than you’re going. There’s multiple lanes, there’s free-flowing counterclockwise traffic fading toward the exit or moving toward the center. It’s easy to miss your turn. And right now Google Maps lady has gone silent. She would be telling me what to do, but I did something and shut her up. Tizi doesn’t know how to get her to talk. So she has to tell me.

“Just tell me,” I say. “Tell me what to do next.”

“Here! Left.”

“Give me a little lead time.”

“We’re being re-routed. Wrong turn. Can you go back?”

Next roundabout, we go back.

“Tell me what to do.”

“It’s hard to tell.” She swipes at the phone screen, thumb and forefinger, trying to enlarge the image.

“Don’t look at the map,” I say. “Just tell me what it says. At the top of the screen, it says what to do. Just look at that.” 

She’s swiping. “Go right, HERE.”

Babbi closes at six. We’re close.  We’re very close. 

“What next? As soon as we turn, tell me what’s next, how far we go and then left right or straight.”

She’s swiping. I realize what’s going on. She wants to see the map. Tizi is visual. I’m verbal. I want to hear “2 kilometers, then right turn.” She swipes too hard and closes the app by accident. We pull over and open it. “Don’t look at the map,” I say. “And don’t swipe. Just tell me what it says. How far, then what. As soon as we turn, give me the next distance so I know.”

We do a mini-tour of Cesena, taking a very roundabout route to Babbi, getting on each other’s last nerve. It’s supposed to be fun, being here. But sometimes you don’t know where you’re going or you don’t know what you’re doing. When we park the car at Babbi, the smell of chocolate is in the air. That helps. They’ve got the dark chocolate wafer fru-fru Tizi likes and palates of stuff we don’t want. We’re here late in March. The warm months are coming. Chocolate is a cool weather delight, so the inventory is depleted. 

“Big box or little box?” she says. “Or two little boxes?”

“You decide. I’m just glad we’re here.” 

Back home, I mean back in the States, we’ll be glad we came to Babbi. We’ll have Italy on our kitchen table. While she decides, I click to Google Maps on my phone, activate Google Maps lady. It’s ten minutes to the autostrada. At Rimini south I’ll tap and pay. Then we’ll be home free.

Ride On

Tizi almost got run over–by a bike. Because watch out, they’re everywhere.

On mercato day, when the streets are closed to auto traffic and the vendors’ stalls and tables are heaped with merch, we saunter, dawdle, and sidle along, looking at stuff.  This day we had stopped in mid-stream, pedestrian traffic flowing past us on either side, when she gently veered left, without checking behind her, and stepped in front of a bicycle. The rider hit the brakes and presented us with a severely condescending shrug. Idiots, it said. Watch where you’re going.

To my mind, they ride too fast. But these riders are confident. For them market riding is skiing in the trees. They watch 5-10 feet ahead, look for openings, and GO. You’d think it was impatient youth peddling through the maddening crowd. It’s not. It’s all ages. Well dressed business men in jackets, slacks, and stylish loafers; women wearing dresses and skirts, swathed in scarves, their knees chastely pointed toward each other; younger riders one-handing the steering while thumbing texts with their free hand–they’re going to work, they’re going home, they’re going for coffee. And they’re going there fast. To them it’s not speeding. It’s their normal velocity.

That’s bike traffic in town, in the market. Then there’s bike traffic on the streets and roads. 

“I’m more nervous driving this year,” I said to Tizi the other day. She said she could tell. On city streets, all times of day and night, the bikes will come out of nowhere, people on utilitarian rides, home from work, home from shopping. I’ve taken to hanging over the steering wheel, watching, searching, anticipating.

On country roads on weekends it’s legions of riders, six, ten, fifteen, twenty at a time surfing the edge of the road. A narrow road. Often a curvy narrow road with no center line and not much shoulder. Sometimes they ride two abreast, enjoying long bikerly chats, and you have to wait. You have to chill. In the US, we can only take so much, the road belongs to cars. We blow a horn. Move the hell over! Here there is more respect for bike traffic, because almost everyone rides, including those who drive.

A favorite destination for joy rides in these parts is the town of San Leo. 

San Leo is a town on top of a hill. From an elevation of 522 feet in Pietracuta to 1950 feet in San Leo, it’s a 6.5 mile ride, all of it uphill. Some stretches of the road the riders barely exceed walking speed. They defy gravity. They’re able to go just fast enough to keep from falling over. It’s awesome to watch, and it’s hell to watch. You wonder why. Why are you doing this? Define joy. Okay, joy: I didn’t give up. I didn’t fall over. I made it to San Leo.

Last Saturday Tizi and I hiked to the top of Monte Carpegna, beginning at the Cippo, with our niece Nicki and her husband Mirko. This is a famous hiking trail because weaving up the same mountain is also a famous road, where Marco Pantani, an Italian biker known to be an elevation specialist, preferred to train. “Carpegna mi basta!” translates “Carpegna is enough,” suggesting also “it’s all I want,” maybe even “it’s all I can take.”  

The climb on foot was steep. It took a few hours to reach the top. We stopped to breathe (and enjoy the view) a number of times. It was all I could take. Mirko, who runs marathons and has finished eight Iron Man competitions, got to the top first. I’m pretty sure he could have come down the mountain and carried me the rest of the way. 

At the top we visited an eremo, a hermitage, a holy place where we could give thanks for having reached the top. The question then was: How do we get down? Mirko had a surprise for us. He pointed at the ski hill rising from the eremo. “The road down is up there,” he said. 

Up we went, defying gravity, walking uphill, traversing, trying not to fall over. 

The ride downhill on a bike must be exhilarating. It must be a schuss, a terrifying blast. We walked down, challenging our old knees. A few bikers passed us, on their way up Pantani’s road, most of the riding at crawling speed. A few of them Mirko pointed to. “Electric,” he said. 

That would definitely be my preference. “Carpegna mi basta!” It was more than enough for me that day.

Adventures in Offal

When I got up this morning, I asked Tizi, “Is there such a thing as a tripe hangover?”

She said she didn’t think so.  

We went out to dinner with our friends Mirko and Anna from the bookstore last night, to a new place in Rimini called Trattoria San Giovanni (old in Rimini, new to us). Mirko said they’re known for their tagliatelle, which were recently rated #2 by the Confraternita della Tagliatella, of which there are 33 members (by statute), among them a Prior, a Chamberlain, and a Gabbeliere (which translates as “excise officer” or “tax collector”–we might think CFO).

Tizi and I know of the Confraternita because her cousins’ tagliatelle at their restaurant, Trattoria Delinda, took first place two years in a row. These people–I mean the Confraternita in particular and the people in this part of Italy (Romagna) in general–are that serious about this famous pasta dish. A Prior? A Chamberlain? In Zen and the Romagna Tagliatella, author and pasta-phile Marco Galizzi speaks (in translation) of tagliatelle as “a crossroads of roads… for an initiatory journey, an endless departure…”  I’m not sure what this means, but I couldn’t agree more. I’m all in on the endless departure.

At San Giovanni, the tagliatelle were more than good. They were excellent of their kind. When we’d finished off the platter, Mirko said, “Shall we have some tripe?”

Why not?

Well, because it’s tripe. That’s why not.

I first said no to tripe in the fall of 1977, at a San Marino club picnic held on a Sunday afternoon in a park on the edge of Utica, a northeastern suburb of Detroit. Tizi and I weren’t married yet. I was very much in the initiation stage of our relationship–being introduced to Italian culture, the language, the food, the noise, the love, the multiple pleasures of the dinner table. Or in this case, the picnic table. And I recall a vat, bigger than that, a cauldron, a tub of tripe! and a stout late middle-aged woman ladling it onto white plastic plates, chunks of that stewed waffle-like matter in a smear of oily tomato sauce. It was an initiatory moment before an endless departure.  

Tizi’s dad took a plate. Also her mother. Tizi just said no. I did too. The term “mouth feel” had not yet been coined, but I was told to expect rubber. Endless departure delay.

Last night Tizi begged off. Anna begged off. To be polite I told Mirko I’d try it.   

Tripe is a cow’s stomach lining, from its fourth and final stomach. It stews for a long time.  They cook the hell out of it. First it requires rigorous cleaning. When I read up on this cleaning, the first step was “using a knife scrape away any impurities.”  I clicked away.

“It’s street food in Florence, you know,” Mirko said, “At one time men pushed carts with pots of lampredotto. They made sandwiches of it. You ate on the go.” In fact, I think I had one of those famous Florentine sandwiches once at the Florence Mercato Centrale, at a stand called da Nerbone, with a four-ounce glass of red wine, at ten o’clock in the morning. And it was good. 

The tripe we ate last night was stewed in tomato sauce, that being the regional approach. Mirko said he’d had it white too. Well, all I could think was ew. Tomato can make things taste good.

It was chewy. It was rubbery. The sauce mopped up with bread was delicious. The tripe? Mirko was in heaven. Me, not so much. It’s most definitely a mouth-feel thing. An acquired taste thing. Unfortuntately I have only one stomach. Possibly stewed fourth and final stomach of cow needs more than one stomach to digest. When I got up this morning, my stomach felt funny. Was it still in there? After while the feeling passed.

Next time tripe comes along, I’ll probably pass.

What to See in Rome

Of course you know what to see: the Sistine Chapel, the Colisseum, Piazza Navona. The question is how to organize your steps and stops to see as much as possible. Here are a few half-day walking/Metro itineraries. We were just there. We saw a lot. We ate successfully.

Where you are, that’s your point of departure in Rome. I compiled these notes for a friend staying near Piazza del Popolo. If you have questions, drop me a line.

I. To Campo de Fiori: From Piazza del Popolo, take the stairway up to Pincio Terrace. Then proceed down to Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Piazza Navona, and Campo de Fiori. (3 hrs). If I was tired, thirsty, and hungry, I’d look for a place to sit along Via del Governo Vecchio.

II. To Sistine Chapel: Take the Metro from Piazza del Popolo to the Ottaviano (St. Peter) station, for a short walk to Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica, Castel Sant’Angelo. (4 hrs)

III. To Colisseum: Take the Metro from Piazza del Popolo to the Colisseum station.
See Colisseum, Forum, Palatine.; Via dei Fori Imperiali, Trajan’s Market, Piazza Venezia, Campidoglio. This is your hardest outing, after Sistine Chapel. Soul-crushing crowds. Long lines. Skip-the-entrance ticketing is offered online, recommended especially for Colisseum and Forum. Note: You can get good views of the Forum behind the Campidoglio. When we were in Rome, late afternoon there was no line to get into Trajan’s Market. Consider Trajan’s Market an alternative to the Forum. (4 hrs)

IV. To Baths of Caracalla: Lots of walking here. Of course. The baths are worth it. Take the Metro from Piazza del Popolo to the Circo Massimo station. Walk to Terme di Caracalla (the baths), walk back to Circo Massimo station. (3 hrs)

V. To see three big churches: After the Circus and the Baths, take the Metro from Circo Massimo to Vittorio Emanuele metro stop. Walk to Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni Laterano, Santuario della Scala Santa, Take the Metro from San Giovanni back to Piazza del Popolo. (3 hrs). Note: nice walk up and/or down Via Merulana.

This trip to Rome we had really satisfying lunches. We ate three times at ai Balestrari, near Campo de Fiori (Via Dei Balestrari 41 | Campo de Fiori, +39 06 686 5377). The service was not the best, but the food was very good. We also ate twice at da Gino al Parlamento (Vicolo Rosini 4, +39 06 687 3434).

Delicious Bologna

We plan a trip into Bologna to coincide with returning a rental car and picking up another rental car at the airport. It’s a swap. It’s a pain. But you can only rent a car so long, for reasons I won’t go into.

After traffic and car complications, we got into the old city around 11:00, with a 1:00 lunch reservation at Teresina, a place that discovered us years ago. Usually we’re on the street at 10:00 and go directly to Enoteca Italiana for a sandwich and a glass of white wine. We did that today, at 11:00. Late for a morning sandwich. In this enoteca, the bread, Tizi says they call it a tartaruga (because it looks like a tortoise shell), the bread defies description. It’s the Platonic ideal of bread, a bread other breads wish they could be.

The sandwich is thin sheets of mortadella on the sliced tortoise shell. No sauce, no condiments, no lettuce or tomato. It’s heavenly bread and fragrant mortadella. That’s all. I asked one of the guys to recommend a white wine. Did I want one that was profumato? Or one that was aromatizato? Geez, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t know the difference. I said I’d go with aromatizato. What the hell.

We sat on stools and noshed, holding back the tears. The sandwich. The cold white wine. My mother would have wagged her finger: you’re spoiling your appetite, you won’t be able to eat lunch. My mother had never been to Bologna.

We wandered around our favorite blocks near the cathedral, I’d call it the glutton district, and got to Teresina a little after 1:00. We may tell ourselves we’ll skip the pasta. We might even believe it when we tell ourselves that. But when the server said, First? meaning first course, primo piatto? He said, First? and we’re in Bologna, so we said, Why yes, bring us what’s off menu today. It was tagliatelle with a veal ragu. We got one plate and sort of shared it. Other stuff came after that. Tizi heard the word carciofi (artichoke). We’d seen heaps of them out there in front of the fruit markets. I asked the server, Artichokes today? He said, Salad. I didn’t ask for it, but he brought it. And I ate the artichoke salad, thinking, Roughage. I’m taking on roughage. That’s good.

After lunch we walked a little slower, past other trattorie and restaurants, past people enjoying food, past locals going about their business, going home for lunch. We had done what we came to do.

Message Minus

I want my messages. I don’t want my messages.  

When we come to Italy I take the Verizon SIM card out of my iPhone and insert a TIM SIM card. With TIM, a popular cell service provider here, I get unlimited calls, unlimited data, and unlimited messages for about $17 a month. And the price seems to be dropping. (A year ago I paid $21 a month for all that unlimited service. Someone should tell Verizon.) In addition to being cheap, the Italian number keeps me in touch with friends and family over here. They know me as 3312219489. They’ve got my number. But the thing is, with the SIM card swap, I no longer receive all text messages to my US Verizon number: iPhone messages yes, mostly; non-iPhone no, none. There are times I need that connection. Yesterday I needed to receive, via text message to my Verizon number, an American bank code to validate a hotel reservation. I want my messages.

I thought I solved the problem before we left the US a few weeks ago. Verizon invites users to download an app called Message+.  You download and activate the app, enter your Verizon number, and messages come to the Message+ app.

I read up on the app before I tried it. Buggy, one reviewer said. Another described it as finicky. A third user, in a review entitled “Necesary Evil,” wrote, “Like most people, I don’t tend to write reviews for things I like. I also don’t tend to write reviews about things I don’t care for, but this application deserves a review.”

I thought: this will be a Hail, Mary. Let’s see if this thing works.

We’ve been here two weeks today. In that time, on Message+ I’ve received three messages. I’m beginning to think it should be called Message-. 

But it may turn out to be a gift. Maybe I don’t want or need my messages. Maybe this is a vacation from messages. 

We live in an age of hyper connectivity, ushered in decades ago by America Online. I remember the initial thrill of firing up the phone line connection between my computer and AOL, hearing the long scratchy, staticky handshake, then the greeting, “You’ve got mail!” Every login was Christmas. For me? I’ve got mail?  

That was then. Today our inboxes are bursting. Some mornings Tizi comes downstairs and finds me poking at my phone or tapping keys on my computer keyboard.

“What are you doing?” she asks me. 

“Deleting email.” 

“I’m setting aside time later today to delete email, too,” she says.

It’s a daily chore. Like washing dishes or taking out the garbage. Currently I have 7800 messages in my gmail account, 780 of them unread. I better get busy. Or not. 

The Economist estimates you will spend almost a decade of your lifetime looking at your phone. Of that time, you’ll spend six weeks deleting messages and email. Who wouldn’t want a six-week vacation?

A few days ago we visited a mountain-top hermitage nearby, a sanctuary with a little 13th century church and rectory. Santuario Eremo Madonna di Saiano is accessible only by foot. The walk up is steep. Just before the final rocky approach, with the church in sight, visitors are asked to remain silent. 

Besides us there was one person up there, in the church, praying. Outside the church, Tizi and I communicated in hand signals. No one would have heard us say “Hey, let’s go over there…” But we kept quiet. In the valley was the Marecchia River. Across the valley, Torello, another castle perched on a rock spur jutting upward. I felt something up there–a vibe, a presence. Tizi would say it’s a holy place. I remember the American poet Robert Bly saying one time, “There is a sadness in nature. There are certain gardens in English, when you enter them, you want to weep.” 

This wasn’t sadness. Maybe it was holy. It was more like peace. A long pause. An exhale. A relief. Anyplace you’ve been, it’s been there forever. The patch of ground beneath your house, it’s been there forever. The river passing under the bridge you’re crossing, it’s been there for all of recorded history, and then some. But here were traces of ancient time. It was a long vibe. Saiano from 13th century Italian Sasso di Giano, from Saxum Jani in Roman times, Jani for Janus, the god of beginnings, looking backward and forward. 

We stayed, stood and looked out over the valley. Afterward we felt a kind of hangover–both of us mentioned it, how that feeling–of the vibe, of the holy–stayed with us. We’ll go back for more.

I now think it’s probably good that my message app doesn’t work. It’s the gift of malfunction. I can’t think of anything that needs my attention today, or yesterday or tomorrow, more than that valley. 

In today’s Washington Post Michael J Coren writes of reviving a 2,600-year-old spiritual practice, putting work aside. No email, no news, no social media, he observes. “Sometimes, I just lie on my back in the park enjoying the sun. It has rekindled a sense of joy I last felt when I was a kid with nothing to do.”  

You don’t need a mountain-top sanctuary. A backyard or park will do. You stop, you sit and listen, you come to rest. There’s no message. And maybe that’s the message.