Rick Bailey's Blog: Stuff happens, then you write about it, page 9

Ciao Many Times

This ad pops up on my cell phone–for a moisturizer called Bava di Lumaca Miracolosa. Miraculous snail drool. Really? I have a hard time picturing a fashionable Italian lady striding up to the cosmetic counter and stocking up on drool. But who knows? Maybe drool is a thing over here. Your skin looks divine. Thanks! It’s this new drool I just started using.

Snails are very much in evidence around here. You see them snailing along the sidewalks, you see them stuck to walls and fence posts. You see them on the menu, snails coming by land and by sea. We eat sea snails whenever we find them. I did not know they drooled. It could be that their bava contributes to the sauce, as well as moisturizing a lady’s skin.

Now, about the ciao. Lately I’ve become aware of the multiple ciao at the end of an Italian phone conversation. Tizi’s friend Adele calls. We talk a few minutes, make arrangements to get together, and she closes the call saying Ciao. Ciao ciao ciao. Ciao ciao. Ciao.

Over and out. And then some. 

She’s not the only one. A cousin’s wife, she’s a bunch of ciao, too. Or you’re sitting in a coffee bar. At the next table, a call comes to an end. Ciao ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao ciao ciao.

Imagine, in American English, you’ve said your piece on a telephone call, the business is done. The caller closes:

G’bye. G’bye g’bye g’bye. G’bye g’bye. G’bye

This many-ciao thing is weird. And I love it.  

Adele called us yesterday inviting us to an unveiling. It will be the second unveiling this week.

A new fresco has been discovered in the Santa Croce convent (above) up in Verucchio. Verucchio is a twenty-minute drive from our apartment, a hill town with a fortress and a church dating back to the 14th or 15th century. There will be a guided tour of the convent with an art historian. We’ll be among the first to see this fresco, which must be hundreds of years old.

When we said yes, we’d love to come, Adele got off our call immediately, after her 6-8 ciaos, because she needed to call to make sure tickets were still available. It’s hard to imagine that much demand, that many fresco fans, but this is Italy. And it must be some fresco. We’re going Tuesday night. It’s likely I will miss most of what is said–I speak lunch Italian, not art history Italian–but I love events like this because the speakers are always really smart and literally dying to have an audience and an opportunity to tell you everything they know.

The fresco is the second unveiling. The first is the bomb.

It’s the main topic of conversation in the bars up town. A World War II era bomb was discovered this week in Serravalle, from the time the Allies drove German forces north. It could be an American bomb, it could be a British bomb. There it is, somewhere on the edge of town.

“That explains the thing I heard this morning,” I say. We’re sitting with Fausto and Bruna, old friends of the family, in our coffee bar (we also have a pastry bar, down around the corner). “What do you call a car with speakers mounted on top?” And inside the car, a man–always a man–with a microphone.

“Auto parlante,” Fausto says. A talking car.

Usually it’s politics. This morning the car drove by our building, on the road down behind us. I heard the metallic male voice. So it was the bomb he was talking about, not politics.

They’re taking the bomb away today. There’s lot of nervous chatter about it, lots of nervous laughter, but it’s not funny. Lots of police presence, restricting traffic and guarding against entrance to the potential blast zone. We’ll be gone. If there’s a safe way to drive out of town, we’ll be elsewhere.

The Fat Tuesday festivities are ramping up. This was Fano, yesterday. This afternoon, a parade, somewhere.

This Time

Your better judgment can be over-rated.  

Last night I thought: There’s going to be traffic. I thought: We’ve had no sleep. And of course: We’re likely to over-eat. I didn’t think that. I knew that.

But we went anyway. To Rimini, in search of food. Tizi said we can go to Biberius, what used to be Ricky’s, and have a glass of wine and it’s Thursday and maybe they’ll have that polenta again. Or to Marianna, and have some fish. Or to Nud e Crud for piadina and vegetables. Or to Meris and get a couple cassione and go home. That all sounded good. Except it was early.

I said, “It’s early, you know.” It was a little before 6:00 p.m. The trouble is most Italian places don’t start serving food until 7:30, at which point we should have been fed and on our way back up to San Marino.  

She, determined: “We’ll find some place.” 

I took back roads, driving in the dark. She dozed at my side. I leaned over the steering wheel, driving down through the hills on two-lane roads, minding the shoulder and the no-shoulder and the impatient headlights behind me, down to SP258, the provincial road, where cars lined up, stopped and started, going and mostly not going toward the state road and Rimini. Motorcycles passed me on the right, taking advantage. Motorcycles passed me on the left, taking their lives in their hands.

Awake now, Tizi said, “Are you okay?” I affirmed that I was, leaning further over the steering wheel, checking in with my better judgment. Whoa, we passed a person on a bike, riding the shoulder, a person dressed in black.

Getting into town, getting to the parking lot was bad. Parking was good, in a lot where you usually wait, in a lot right across the road from Nud e Crud and Marianna and from Biberius. Biberius pouring, pouring glasses of wine. Passing out bready-looking aperitivo fare that we did not want. Marianna not serving yet. But at Nud e Crud they were open. We got the first table of the evening and learned the name of the manager, Gennaro, and had two of his specials, the cannellini and cavolo nero soup and the meatballs with mashed potatoes. Which, of course, was not enough. Bring also please the erbe saltati in padella (sauteed greens) and squaquerone (creamy dreamy spreadable cheese), and piadine. And a quarter liter of red wine.

It was so good. And driving home we were so tired. At 7:30 there was still traffic, and I still leaned over the steering wheel, thinking go slow go slow, driving up the winding two-lane roads, minding the shoulder and the no-shoulder, wanting to be asleep but happy that we ate, We were back in Italy. Heat and hot water were waiting for us when we got home. Once again, but carefully, very carefully, I had slipped this adventure past my better judgment. This time.

Take Two

I’m blessed with the ability to eat bad food.

I would never have said it to her face (because I was a good boy and because, in truth, I did not know) my mother was not a great cook.  I remember salmon patties for dinner, and still to this day, when I think of them, I feel a definite shriveling sensation. Unfortunate Tuesday or Thursday nights, malodorous shingles of overcooked liver. Sunday after Sunday  roast beef for dinner after church, a fatty cut of meat that metamorphosed in the oven into a stringy, leathery horror. And there was chicken that I kind of liked, because it was all I knew about chicken. What does a kid know about food but what his mother gives him to eat? 

So, as a sometimes friend to bad food, tonight I was able to eat not one but two Delta Airline Chicken in a Bathtub dinners. 

Tizi will not eat airplane food. That’s an absolute in her life. Like she will not eat anything with mustard or mayo, ever. She turns an cold shoulder to pickles 

“How can you eat that stuff?” she asks now.

I’m hungry.”

“I know, but–.”

“–But I’m hungry. And furthermore, it passes the time.”

We’ve reached our cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. We’re sailing along at 590 mph, helped by a 50 mph tail wind. It’s 85 below zero outside.

“Pasta or chicken?” the flight attendant asks. 

“Nothing for me.” You know who says that.

“Chicken, please.”  

Never the pasta. Never. At one time I might have. Not any more. Even I have standards.

“On second thought, I’ll have the chicken, too,” Tizi says. She does this for me. She freely gives me her Chicken in a Bathtub.  That’s love. Sort of love. It’s also curiosity, I might even say fascination with the exotic, with Midwest American gothic, she bears horrified witness to the gustatory  grotesque. 

What bathtub?

It’s the shape of the dish. I thought “boat” as I was eating, but once I’d licked the first plastic receptacle dry and tucked into the second one, I knew I was looking at a bathtub.  

It is an oddly named dish. MC Chicken. Does Delta mean Motor City? Does it mean Mother’s Crazy Chicken? Does Delta mean McChicken? Whatever the case, there’s further oddity. On the wrapper I see Chicken in Butter Sauce. In the bathtub, I see a turgid tomato sauce that could be, but is not burnt and terrible. It’s really quite good. With these flavorful morsels of chicken in questionable butter sauce is a serving of rice with roasted garlic and cilantro, neither of which is anywhere in evidence, at least to the eye, and I’m not sure I taste either one either.  Once I’ve dispatched the chicken, I dredge the rice in the leftover non-butter, turgid tomato sauce. It’s tasty.  

Always accompanying one of these dinners is a little dishling of something else, a green salad, a canned fruit mix. Today is quinoa , chopped tomato, green onions, and dill, a sprig of real dill I can pick up and hold in my hand. It’s a revelation. Quinoa? Delta is bringing it. 

“Want mine?” Tizi says. She means the whole shebang, and yes I want it.

You can’t not contemplate the miracle of it all. We’re way up in the air. It’s now 90 below zero outside. Hot food comes to us in hermetically sealed dishes, in this case bathtubs. I picture the industrial process, consider how industrial chickens lived out their brief lives and were raised up to 39,000 feet, I picture the food plant with conveyer belts, mechanical hands depositing cups of rice, mechanical ladles dishing forth Chicken in Butter Sauce, mechanical fingers delicately tweezing sprigs on dill onto the quinoa. I picture each bathtub sealed with an industrial kiss, crated, transported, loaded onto the aircraft. The best and worst of modern times all rolled into one. 

Would I eat MC Chicken any other time or place? Not on your life. It’s bad. It’s full of chemicals and unnatural flavorings, enhancers and preventatives, additives and subtractives. It should be marked: Contents not meant for earthy consumption. 

And in the air, two is my limit.

Tupperware and the Vitruvian Man–from And Now This

Aside from the parties, which usually featured lots of appetizers and white wine, I’ve always hated Tupperware. I think of this because my wife and I are preparing to go on a little vacation. In a few days we will go to the airport, and, for reasons of economy and bonhomie, we will invite friends to ride with us. Four of them, two of us, all six with luggage packed with enough stuff for seven days. My wife is convinced we can get all of that in our van. 

“No problem,” she says.  “Don’t forget, I’m in packaging.” 

Technically she is not. She’s in design, automotive, engine. When you think of packaging, you think of guys putting the new refrigerator you ordered into a big box in Iowa, with some wood and wire, lots of Styrofoam, probably a couple bushels of that synthetic popcorn that packaging people love so much. She is not in that kind of packaging. She draws pictures of engine parts, figures out how to maximize the flow of fuel and air through tubes, usually before that mixture explodes, though I’ve heard her talk about post-combustion exhaust and emissions, too, and cam lobes, pistons, rods, compressors, jackets, and pumps. Sometimes in the middle of the night she has waking dreams about flow. She talks in her sleep about gromets and tolerances and mils.

She’s in packaging in the sense that those engine parts have to fit in a very tight space. The days of the straight six are long gone. Under the hood of the Ford Maverick she drove when I met her there was enough space for a six-cylinder engine and for a picnic lunch and a sleepover. Under the hood of whatever she’s working on now (top secret, not yet in production), space is at a premium. Dipsticks the diameter of toothpicks. Everything crammed in a space roughly the size of a large suitcase. She helps the auto industry put a refrigerator in an envelope. 

“We can all fit,” she says.

“There’s not enough room for us and all that luggage,” I say.

The problem is that they are round. Since classical times the circle has been regarded as a symbol of perfection, a representation of God, no beginning, no end.

We had a Tupperware party shortly after we were married. My wife invited a few pals from work. My friend Ludlow came. He and I swilled Chablis and ate cheese thingies while the Tupperwoman made her presentation. Ludlow bought a green plastic device that enabled him to do something with olives. My wife and I loaded up on containers, lots of sky blue and mustard yellow containers, most of them round, with the signature Tupperware seal that ensured your leftovers and steel-cut oats would remain fresh until the apocalypse. These cursed things are still with us, in the basement, in the kitchen pantry, in the mudroom pantry (we keep our mud in Tupperware), and in the garage. Most of them are empty. Tupperware, anyone who has the stuff has probably discovered, is best used to store other Tupperware.

The problem is that they are round. Since classical times the circle has been regarded as a symbol of perfection, a representation of God, no beginning, no end.  Leonardo’s Vitruvian man brings the circle and square together. “The square,” he writes in The Magical Proportions of Man, “symbolizes the solid physical world and the circle the spiritual and eternal. Man bridges the gap between these two worlds.” I wonder what Leonardo would have made of Tupperware. Circular, it participates in the divine, while gobbing up physical space in the square confines we call cupboards.  Plastic, it lasts forever. If he’d had the stuff, I bet Leonardo’s credenzas would have been full of Tupperware full of Tupperware.

I could get rid of our Tupperware, but I feel it is not really mine. Were we to separate, which seems less and less likely all the time, my wife would definitely get the Tupperware. It seems less and less likely we will separate because I’ve learned in forty-some years of marriage not to get rid of her stuff.  

I’ve also learned that when it comes to matters involving spatial relations and visual thinking, she’s way smarter than I am. When we moved our son to Atlanta, he and I started throwing stuff helter skelter into the back of the van. Then I thought, Wait, maybe there’s a better way to do this. Where is our packaging expert?

Six people, luggage packed for seven days, one van. We’ll see. At least luggage designers know enough not to make suitcases round.

For riding with us, we could gift our friends with Tupperware. Hand them round packages, favors, each with a card: Just a little something for you. I can see curiosity getting the best of them.  They shake their packages.  Hmmm, something inside. They pull apart the wrapping, crack open the trademark Tupperware hermetic seal. Peek inside. What’s inside yours?

Oven-Roasted Fennel

There are four steps in this recipe: DIY breadcrumb mix, slice and season fennel bulb, roast, and eat.

I can’t say enough about homemade breadcrumbs, though there is partial fraud in this statement. I buy plain breadcrumbs and then season them myself (1 – 1.5 cups) with parsley (a handful), garlic (1-2 cloves), and olive oil (tablespoon) in a food processor. That’s way more breadcrumbs than you need for this recipe. Just what you need to season a fish tomorrow or a tomato you’re going to put in the oven the day after tomorrow. The crumbs stay good in a covered dish in the fridge.

Trim and slice the fennel bulb in half. Leave the base intact. I used to cut it off (it doesn’t look appetizing), but the base holds the slices together.

That’s a flat cookie sheet shown below. With parchment paper on top. I like to paint both sides of each fennel slice with some olive oil. Then lightly salt. Then dump and spread some breadcrumb mix on each slice.

Into the oven at 350 for 30-45 minutes. When the crumbs look crispy, lay the fennel slices on a platter. Good hot, good warm, good cool.

You have the breadcrumbs. Now try some oven-roasted tomatoes.

The Honey Room–from American English, Italian Chocolate

“I’m taking a yogurt break,” I tell my daughter. She’s come downstairs dressed for a friend’s wedding. Six months pregnant, she’s becoming abundant. Her husband is at his parents’ house a few miles away. When they fly into town, out of old habit, they still go to their rooms. The yellow dress she’s wearing is long, diaphanous, and, I won’t tell her this, probably a mistake.

“What do you think?”

“Nice,” I say.

She looks like she’s dressed for a prom, except for that volleyball, my eventual grandson, underneath the dress. Her mother and I didn’t want to know, game for surprise. Our daughteer is a planner.

I dump walnuts in the bowl. “Your mother won’t eat this,” I say. “She’s impervious to yogurt.”

“I’ve got another dress upstairs. Should I try it?”

She decides for herself, rushing pregnantly up the stairs, leaving me to my snack. Yesterday my wife came home with a quart of local honey. In our mudroom we have a cupboard full of old honey, crystalized souvenir honeys she brings home from trips—clover honey, walnut honey, truffle honey. I break into the new stuff, still liquid enough to stir into my yogurt.

A bedroom door clunks shut upstairs. For twenty-five years there was a construction-paper heart taped to that door, my daughter’s name written in the middle, in red and blue crayon. I don’t remember taking it down, but I know it’s gone.

The problem upstairs is zipping the dress shut. It’s black and, if we can get it closed, better than the lemon parachute.

“A delicious treat,” I say to no one.

My mouth is full of sweetness when they both yell up there. Yesterday I found a hairy millepedey-looking bug an inch long. I hope it’s not one of those.

“Can you help us?” my wife yells.

She doesn’t even eat honey. Flu season, she’ll put some in her tea. Otherwise, it’s strictly ornamental, over there in the honey room.

The problem upstairs is zipping the dress shut. It’s black and, if we can get it closed, better than the lemon parachute. The dress looks serious, formal. It takes two to make a daughter; now she’s pregnant, two to get her dressed.

“Pull here.”

“I am.”

“Not there, here. Pull it together.”

“I’m trying.”

“It’s too high. Let me pull it down.”

“I can get it.”

“Does it hurt? Is it too tight?”

“I’m huge.”

“You’re all right.”

I admire her shoulder blades. When she was little, I told her that’s where wings would grow.

“Now try.”

“Hold it together.”

“I am.”

“Farther down.”

“Ugh.”

“It’s all right.”

“There it goes.”

“Stretchy.”

“Got it.”

A few minutes later she’s in the car, going to pick up the husband. My wife and I stand at the window, watching her back down the driveway.

“She shouldn’t back up,” my wife says. “She should turn the around car first. One thing your father said I agree with: Never back up when you can go forward.” She thinks a minute, then says: “What’s that smell?”

“Yogurt,” I say.

“Is she sleeping here tonight?”

“A delicious treat,” I say, “with our new honey.” Too good to save.

The Quality of Your Sleep–from American English, Italian Chocolate

I’m lying in bed reading a short novel by Gianrico Carofiglio on my Kindle. Guido Guerrieri, Carofiglio’s funny, sad, world-weary lawyer from Bari, is standing in the doorway of a woman’s apartment. He holds two bottles of wine and smells dinner within. Since his wife left him, he’s been in a deep funk. His sleep is bad. He’s given to spontaneous bouts of crying. In the interest of getting his life back together, he moves to a new complex, and discovers one day this woman, Margherita, who lives two floors above him. Or rather, she discovers him, and invites him to dinner.

During this chat in the doorway, he makes a joke. “Rise,” Guerrieri says. Meaning, in Italian: She laughed. Rise. Sempre con quella specie di gorgoglio.

My Italian is good enough to understand that Guerrieri hears something funny in her laugh. What I don’t get is “gorgoglio.” She laughed, once again with a kind of…what?

I touch the word gorgoglio on screen. Kindle highlights it and goes to its Italian dictionary, which I decide to bypass. Reading the definition of a word you don’t know in a language that you only sort of know can be dicey. Plus, it’s nighttime. I don’t want to work. I touch “More” in the dialog box and ask to see the translation in English.

Hubble.

She laughed, once again with a kind of… hubble ?

I’m not sure what laughter with hubble sounds like. I touch gorgoglio again and drag-select the whole sentence; then More, Translation.

She laughed, once again with a kind of gurgle.

Got it.

Guerrieri notes this detail and steps inside. Margerita shuts the door.

While I read, my wife stirs beside me. Her back to me, she is mostly asleep. I hold still, lying on my back, careful not to disturb her.

I’ve been reading on this Kindle in bed for some months now. It’s backlit, which means I can read in the dark. There’s a childish pleasure in that, a throwback to the flashlight under the covers. Except this is different. Two or three times a week I’m likely to wake from deep sleep at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. In a moment, I’m fully awake. What do you do? Lie there and wait for your thoughts to dissipate and sleep to return? How long do you wait? Pre-Kindle, after 20-30 minutes, I would get out of bed and go downstairs, lie on the couch and read. A couple pages of The Faerie Queen can be as good as an Ambien. Now I stay in bed. The device weighs 7.5 ounces. If I want to, I can bring the complete works of Spenser and Plato and Shakespeare to bed, without worrying about crushing my chest.

Don’t take naps. Avoid spicy food and alcohol in the evening. Smart phone, computer, tv: shut them down an hour before you go to bed.

There’s lots of advice these days on how to sleep—how to go to sleep, how to stay asleep. Exercise. Seek bright light during the day, avoid bright light at night, to calibrate your circadian rhythms. Don’t take naps. Avoid spicy food and alcohol in the evening. Smart phone, computer, tv: shut them down an hour before you go to bed. Use your bed, the National Sleep Foundation advises, for sex and sleep only.

One day I ask my friend who is a sleep doc, should I be getting more sleep?

“I get, like, 4-6 hours,” I tell him. “Seven if I’m lucky.”

He turns his head, listening in his doctorly way, and says nothing, which I take as a request for more information.

“Maybe 4-5 hours uninterrupted. Once in a great while six.”

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Good,” I say. My biorhythm bombs every day around 4:00 in the afternoon. I tell him that. “Shouldn’t I get eight hours?”

“You feel okay,” he says.

I nod.

“If you feel okay, I’d say you’re probably okay.”

Eight-hour sleep may in fact be a modern convention, an error. Gregg Jacobs, a sleep disorder specialist at University of Massachusetts Medical School, observes, “For most of evolution we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.” Historians point to hundreds of references to segmented sleep—first sleep, then second sleep–in medieval literature and medical texts. Back then, it was dark at night, very dark, all night. Nightlife, such as it was, could be dangerous. At sundown, people went to bed, slept soundly, then woke for an hour or so, for reading, for prayer, for sex, after which they went back to sleep. Then came light, and more light. In the 1650’s Paris began to light the streets. In the 1690’s London did so as well. Nightlife became a thing. Around this time, the word “insomnia” makes it first appearance in the English language.

Then there is electricity, and a lot more light.

By the twentieth century, our thinking about sleep has made a dramatic shift. There is sleep resistance. To sleep begins to seem like a waste of time. (I remember saying, as a college student, probably right after reading Jack Kerouac, that I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to live, I wanted to burn bright, I would sleep when I was dead.) And now there is the new normal: sleep eight hours. In our time, segmented sleep is an aberration. Today, when we wake up in the middle of the night, something is wrong. Sleep needs fixing.

Sometimes in the dead of night, you lie awake and there is a riot of thought, a profusion of images, memories. It’s your wild mind coming at you, a mixture of mystery and the mundane.

Can it be fixed?

Should it be?

I read a few more minutes. Guerrieri’s dinner with Margherita is fraught, confessional. She opens his wine, pours him a glass. They eat. For a digestivo he drinks brown tequila. Then, smoking his cigarettes, one after another, which explains her gurgling laugh, Margherita tells him a long tale, of her drinking problem, of her troubled courtship and failed marriage, and now of a period of recovery. Poi restammo li’ a parlare, ancora, fino a notte. They hang in there. They talk and talk, into the night.

I close my Kindle, its light goes out.

And I am awake.

Sometimes in the dead of night, you lie awake and there is a riot of thought, a profusion of images, memories. It’s your wild mind coming at you, a mixture of mystery and the mundane. Why am I alive? Will the lawnmower start? Am I a good husband? a good father? Did I forget to thaw the chicken? What is it to die?

Before their second sleep, people once lay awake thinking thoughts like these. It must be normal human psychology. I can’t imagine them thinking, Drat, I wish I could go to sleep. They must have thought, How curious, and sad, and funny, and dreadful. How wonderful to be so wide awake.

The Dope with the Camera–from The Enjoy Agenda

This morning I took a picture of my breakfast. I didn’t do it to remember it. I took the picture with sharing in mind.

We’ve come to Bread, Etc., five consecutive mornings.  It’s a French place–baguettes, pastries, Edith Piaf singing “Chanson d’Amour” on the sound system the last three mornings–in the French Concession area of Shanghai, near our kids’ apartment. Bread, Etc. is a knife and fork establishment.  There’s not a dumpling or chopstick in sight.

Here they speak Chinese, not French, so ordering has been a struggle. (Even with enthusiastic pantomime, it took a while to explain jam, do you have jam, we would like jam for our bread-that’s-almost toast.)  But every morning the Chinese waitkids dressed in their blue untucked gingham shirts and navy chinos smile and wave at us, hello, good morning, and the manager has now saved our order on her iPad. Farmer’s omelet for the lady (no dressing on the salad, no butter on the toast, no salami in the omelet–try to picture the pantomime it took to explain all that), avocado sandwich for the gentleman.

I’m not sure anyone saw me take a picture of my sandwich. Not that anyone would care. And not that anyone would care to see it, either. My picture taking, like most people’s these days, is wanton, an example of ordinary excess.    

These images are souvenirs. The clothes hung out to dry above a storefront; on the same line, next to shirts and undies, three large eels, also drying. The London plane trees that line the streets in the French Concession, more than 100 years old, cropped and pruned, their bark blotchy and peeling, so like the sycamores we see on Via Tripoli and Via Pascoli in Rimini. (By now I’ve stood in the middle of Xiangyang Road ten times or more, at various hours of the day, in various slants of light, trying to capture the look and feel of those trees.)    

More souvenirs: I want to take home the storefront signs, with their odd use of English. Fashion Warm Pants.  Urban Jungle Real Estate. Food Fun Delivered. Seewant.  King Man Spa. Flower Fingers.  Gag Story. Beast Tattoo.  I want to remember faces. The man mending shoes on the sidewalk (he waved me off–no photo).  The man at the foot-powered sewing machine on the sidewalk (he waved me off–no photo).  The man slicing open and cleaning a huge eel (he said yes!). The hundreds of people in front of the Wanhua Tower in the Yu Yuan Garden, with hundreds of cameras seeing the sights before the seers.

At 11:00 a.m. there was already a crowd. At every display, the locals pressed themselves to the glass, small children holding cell phones to take underwater pictures and video, not so small children holding cell phones to take surface level pictures and video, adults holding cell phones to capture, from their altitude, more global pictures and video of the display.

The ubiquitous camera. How does it alter the moment of perception? Does it absent the viewer from the fullness of experience?

Years ago, when our kids were small and went to birthday parties, the video camera was just making its first appearance. It was a machine about the size of a microwave oven that dads rested on their shoulders while shouting directions at children. Sit down! Darcy, stand behind Tanya! Blow out the candles! Now! Blow!  Lights, camera, action! I remember thinking: These dopes, they’re not really here. They won’t see the party until they get home and turn on the TV.

Walker Percy, in an essay called “Loss of Creature,” pokes fun at the American tourist who goes to the Grand Canyon, measuring its beauty against countless postcard and poster and brochure and televised images he has seen. If it looks like the postcard, Percy says, “[the tourist] is pleased; he might even say, ‘Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!’ He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be.”

In On Photography, Susan Sontag echoes this idea: “Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a let down.” As if anticipating the cell phone and its camera and today’s take-a-picture madness, Sontag remarks on the “insatiability of the photographing eye.”

Oh yes.

A few Sundays ago we took the kids to the Shanghai aquarium, said to be the largest in Asia.  It’s big.  And do they have the water creatures: arapaima gigas, lepidosirens, electric eels, freshwater sawfishes, archerfishes and the famous melanotaenia maccullochi; cichlids, thiania subopressa, green water dragons, sphronemus goramy, and a few exotic species like the bluegill (no kidding).

At 11:00 a.m. there was already a crowd. At every display, the locals pressed themselves to the glass, small children holding cell phones to take underwater pictures and video, not so small children holding cell phones to take surface level pictures and video, adults holding cell phones to capture, from their altitude, more global pictures and video of the display. Nowhere have I ever seen such an orgy of picture taking.

The exotic will do that to you. You want to capture it, to save it.

You get used to the look, to being foreign.  Sometimes, however, the locals lose it. Particularly when they see a Western child.

On a daily basis since our arrival, I’ve felt like an exotic species. Walking down the sidewalk, we get the look. It lasts a second two. At home we are ordinary as bluegills.  Not here. The look lasts just a moment longer than normal. You’re not from around here.  Then, every so often, on the same sidewalk, because this is an international place, we see someone that, well, looks like us.

It reminds me of when our kids were small.  When my wife and I went to watch them play little league baseball, there was always a mom and dad who brought the family dog to watch Steven or Katie knock one out of the infield. The dog sat leashed in the bleachers, bored to tears, waiting for someone, anyone, to hit a foul ball. Inevitably another mom and dad would show up with their dog, let it loose, and the two animals would just go bonkers. They were surrounded by humans, lonely in the isolation of their dogless situation, when, suddenly, another one of their own species appeared. Hey, you’re one of us. An ecstasy of eager dog diplomacy would ensue, circling and sniffing, licking and nipping.

On the sidewalk in Shanghai, we are the dogs. Suddenly we look up and, with surprise and pleasure, we see another Westerner. Look, a French poodle! Or, Here comes a German Shepherd! Or, Hey, that guy might be an Alaskan Huskie!    

You get used to the look, to being foreign.  Sometimes, however, the locals lose it. Particularly when they see a Western child.  Kathy Flower, a British radio and television producer, observes in China—Culture Smart, “Westerners traveling with their children will find them the center of attention. It can be a bit overwhelming for very young Western children to have their cheeks pinched and their arms stroked almost beyond endurance. They may have to pose for endless selfies…” This is not an exaggeration, and it’s no joke.One day our daughter is stopped on the sidewalk by a young woman who gapes at our grandson and asks, in pretty good English, if her friends can take a picture of him, with her.  Our daughter is about to say no when the boy, feeling surprised and flattered, says yes. The girl claps an arm around his shoulder and hauls him close. He freezes, totally weirded out, if not terrified, a wooden smile on his face. A few days later, at the Yu Garden, seeing our three-year-old, a woman squeals with delight, rushes toward him, lowering herself to his level. My God, I think, she’s going to hug him. When she holds out her arms, I turn him away from her (he already senses the impending assault), and tell her no. More like: No!  You wait, fully expecting, How about a selfie with him, then?

In the next few minutes, I notice a camera with a giant telephoto lens following us, a man aiming at our boy.  No.

The camera lens is more invasive, more penetrating than the eye. Stares are not cool. The shutter clicks open and shut like a trap.

These are not mean or terrible people. Far from it. They are simply not mindful of boundaries (nor am I at times), and I have every reason to think it has to do with the device they hold in their hands, a technology that makes every interesting thing in sight (fair, curly-haired three-year-old American child, waitkid dressed in blue, untucked gingham shirt and navy chinos, stooped arthritic shoe repairman on the sidewalk) into an object one would enjoy capturing, saving, and sharing.

Before we leave Shanghai we will go to the Long Museum to see a Rembrandt exhibit.  If photos are permitted I’ll have my iPhone cocked and ready, my finger on the trigger. I like to photograph faces; I like to look for small details in the corner or bottom of paintings, the eels on the clothesline. Camera-wise, I won’t be alone. In gallery visits these days we always have to wait for people to photograph a painting before we can get close to it. Why take pictures of paintings? Why not just look at them? Maybe I’m not fully present. Maybe this is secondary seeing, not as rich and full and satisfying as unmediated viewing.

A recent study by the American Psychological Association suggests otherwise, arguing that taking pictures might even enhance our experience–of a Rembrandt, a street corner in Shanghai, or an avocado sandwich. The researchers, Kristin Diehl, PhD, of the University of Southern California; Gal Zauberman, PhD, of Yale University; and Alixandra Barasch, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, contend, “Relative to not taking photos, photography can heighten enjoyment of positive experiences by increasing engagement.”

A secondary question: Must we share?  Thanks to social media we are profligate in this regard, some people more than others. Okay, the pleasure I take in my avocado sandwich is enhanced, maybe a tiny bit, by my taking its picture. But restraint is called for. I should keep it to myself. Take a bite, savor and swallow, leave it at that.

No Secrets, Victoria–from American English, Italian Chocolate

I was surprised recently to see this image appear every time I went to the Wix website: Heidi Klum, holding underpants. It’s a delicate subject, underwear. Personally, I’d rather talk about something else.

Wix is a let-us-host-your-website site. You would think images would scroll, to advertise a technical feature of their web-composition kit. They don’t. It’s all Heidi, all the time, stretching those shorts. They look very stretchy. Which got me thinking about microfiber.

Some years ago I took a group on an excursion in Italy. We went to churches and museums in Florence, and rode around Tuscany a little. It was a see, eat, shop, and relax trip. Among the travelers was one of my co-workers and his wife. He was a humanist who also happened to teach welding. One day over a dish of pasta he announced he had just bought some microfiber underwear. His wife Pam nodded. Both had an unmistakable twinkle in their eyes.

“What’s that?” I asked. I thought of myself as a sophisticate at the time, but when it came to underwear, I knew I was hopelessly retrograde and low fashion.

“High tech,” Don said,

“Lightweight,” Pam said.

“Durable,” Don said.

 Then they looked at each other. Again, the twinkle.

 After lunch we went to the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. It’s a church not everyone gets to, across the Arno, well worth the walk, famous for the Brancacci Chapel. Inside the church, begun in 1268, Don pointed at a column, shook his head, and commented. Artists and architects, he said, get all the credit. Think of the man who worked on that column, coming to the job every, carrying his tools, hammering away at tiny details in just one part of the church. How many columns did he detail in his lifetime? Did he have days off? Did he bring his wife and kids to the worksite so they could appreciate the scope of the project and see his small contribution? Did he live to see the doors of the church open?

From there we went to the chapel, where we saw the Masaccio frescos, known in particular for an image of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. On their faces is a devastating look of grief and shame. They know they are lost. They know they are naked. Thus begins, in human history, our life of toil, our knowledge of sin and death, and, as the other Masaccio frescos in the chapel show, humankind’s need for the New Adam and the Church.

Thus too begins, it could be argued, the history of clothes. And underwear.

Think of the man who worked on that column, coming to the job every, carrying his tools, hammering away at tiny details in just one part of the church. How many columns did he detail in his lifetime?

Underwear history is sketchy. The Egyptians wore loincloths, the Romans an undergarment called a “subligaculum.” In medieval times men wore “braies,” from which we get the term “breeches.” Braies looked a lot like shorts, with a draw-string at the waist, a garment that could be pulled down and drawn up, explaining the term “drawers.” The history of women’s underwear, a problematic subject given gender politics, is sparse. Did they or didn’t they? The skirt and miniskirt had not been invented, making an answer to the call of nature, with long voluminous dresses and shifts to manage, a complicated task. Pants were out of the question. (See Joan of Arc.) It was thought, until a recent exciting discovery, that perhaps women wore no underwear at all.

Then in Lengberg Castle, in Austria’s East Tyrol, comes a trove of textile finds. The contents has advanced our understanding of underwear history. The castle dates back to 1190; in a fifteenth century castle-improvement project, a second story was added to the structure. In this second story, in 2008, a vault was uncovered, revealing medieval bras and underpants. Beatrix Nutz (that’s her real name), an expert in medieval and textile archeology at University of Innsbruck, has studied this find and speaks to its advance in brief history. She asserts, “Trousers and underpants were considered a symbol of male power and women wearing them were pugnacious wives trying to usurp the authority of their husbands, or women of low morality.” For the historical record, Nutz notes that both Eleanor of Toledo and Maria de Medici owned underwear, as did Elizabeth I. In an effigy of the great queen of England, there is mention of a corset and drawers.

A day or so later, we were getting ready to board a bus, taking to the hills around Greve to taste some wine. Don had a special look on his face.

“Today,” he said with a broad smile, “I’m walking with ease and comfort in my new microfiber underwear.”

“Cool,” Pam said.

“It’s a weave that breathes,” Don said.

Well all right then, I thought.

I found some at the outdoor market in Piazza Santo Spirito. I made a couple loops around the piazza, looking at cookery, dishware, linens, food, until I found socks and underwear. I pointed and said to the vendor, “Do you have microfiber? Medium, I think.”

She laid out a couple pair of briefs on the table, all black, then picked up another pair and gave them the Heidi Klum stretch. “Three for ten euros,” she said.

I picked up a pair. They felt soft to the touch. Lightweight, as Pam said.

In white print across the front of the briefs was written, in English, in a font way too large, “SEX. KISS.” I handed them back. “Is this all you have?”

The vendor nodded.

Could I do it? Could I buy underwear with those words emblazoned across my (lower) abdomen? What on earth were Italians thinking? What would my wife think?

The Italians I know over there, in fact, seem to have a special feeling about underwear. I’ve been to a number of birthday parties, dinners where gifts were presented to the happy lady, almost always including dainty, minimalist lingerie. And she raises them aloft for all to see; and we toast her and her underwear. No secret, Victoria. It’s simply a different attitude about sex, kiss than we have in the US, especially the Midwest: playful vs puritanical. On beaches in Italy men opt for briefs; American men are more likely to go with the baggy look, what Italians call, with a small hint of sarcasm, braghe (see braie).

I bought them.

In white print across the front of the briefs was written, in English, in a font way too large, “SEX. KISS.” I handed them back. “Is this all you have?”

Don was right: comfortable, lightweight, technologically up to date. In further Italy excursions in the years after that, I used to joke with travelers who joined me that, in the interest of traveling light, I took only two pair of underwear with me, the ones I was wearing and the additional pair in my suitcase. “Miracle fabric,” I said. “Wash when you go to bed. They’re dry in the morning.”

So: I can wear SEX. KISS. (I might even be wearing them right now.) There remains this worry, a sorry cliché but a worry nonetheless: What’s if I’m in an accident? I’m sure heathcare professionals don’t bat an eye as they scissor underwear off an injured person. It’s not as if they look, and make a note, of what the patient was wearing. If they do, these days, the digital medical record might look like this: Underwear: (Happy Face, Sad Face) Please check one.

This Too Shall Break

I’m washing a white bowl in the kitchen sink. The bowl is round, twelve inches in diameter, five inches deep. Hands down it’s my favorite bowl in our kitchen, useful for mixing pasta with a sauce, the perfect size for a big salad. In the cupboard where it’s kept, three smaller bowls nest inside it. They’re all three fine, serviceable bowls. But white bowl is in a class by itself. I use the other three bowls. White bowl I need.   

While I wash the bowl, Tizi sits at the kitchen table placing a call to English Gardens. It’s Christmas time, the season of lights. And glitter. I hate glitter. I hate the way it sticks around.

We’ve lugged the tree upstairs. Every year I tell her this is the last year I’m doing this. It’s a handsome tree. It came in three pieces that we could store in its huge forest-green durable plastic body bag, but Tizi doesn’t want to disassemble it. “You’ll smash it into its bag,” she says, “and the lights won’t work next year.” She’s probably right, on both accounts. So the tree stands in the corner of the basement eleven months of the year, fully assembled, and is then, with its dangling light cords, carried up the stairway in its three pieces, in an awkward, back breaking exercise of strength (“we can do this,” she says), a contest of wills (“next year we’re not doing this,” I say) (“Yes you are,” she says). 

She’s calling English Gardens to look for lights identical to the ones she bought 3-4 years ago, lights to illuminate her swags and runners outside.  This morning, something wonderful happens. 

She reads the English Gardens telephone number out loud, then taps the number into the phone. As she dials–that is, as she taps the numbers on the keypad–she says them outloud: 3-1-3 (reading), then says them outloud again: 3-1-3 (tapping). But this morning she doesn’t say them. She sings them–to the tune of Three Blind Mice: 3-1-3, 3-1-3, 2-7-2, 2-7-2… In 46 years of marriage, this has never happened before, and it is one more reason I am happy that we are married.

I would like it if she always did this Three Blind Mice thing.  If she did, I would ask her to make all the calls, do all the dialing, all the time, whatever the number. “Can you call Kroger for me?” “It looks like we’ll have to call the plumber. Can you please dial his number?” “Let’s give David and Dana a call and see how the baby is. Would it please you to dial the number?” 

And she would three-blind-mice the first six numbers, whatever they were: 2-4-8, 2-4-8, 6-7-2, 6-7-2….  

I would like it if she always did this Three Blind Mice thing.  If she did, I would ask her to make all the calls, do all the dialing, all the time, whatever the number.

Things would quickly fall apart in the dialing song after that. She would never get to “they all ran after the farmer’s wife.” Sure, you can think of numbers that work, for example 6-8, 4-7, 11-18.” But that’s not a phone number. You’re calling no one but the Verizon lady: “I’m sorry That number can’t be called as dialed.”  

Back in the dark ages, to control costs, we used to make calls to Italy with a service called Penny Talk, first tapping the ten-digit Penny Talk number, then tapping the four-digit Penny Talk password, then tapping the Italian number (country code + regional code + the person’s actual number). It was a headache. It took forever to dial. Sometimes I would flub the country code or regional code and I would have to start all over. A little Penny Talk song, to the tune of Three Blind Mice or maybe Row Row Row Your Boat” might have helped get through the whole dialing ordeal error-free, though something tells me we wouldn’t have made it to “she cut off their tails with a carving knife” and “did you ever see such a sight in your life.”  

I’ve rinsed and dried white bowl when she says, “Good news. They have the lights.”

One year we bought a beautiful ceramic bowl in Italy, outside the Gradara Castle, famous for Paolo and Francesca’s fatal dalliance. This bowl was art. It was ten inches in diameter, four inches deep, cylindrical rather than an overturned-spherical-cap-shaped bowl. It had little lion’s feet and bucolic scenes depicted in an artist’s capable hand, then glazed and fired. The lady in the store bubble wrapped it, then she double-bubble wrapped it, then she wrapped it in the store’s decorative paper and placed it in one of the store’s decorative bags. 

“I’ll carry the bowl in my bag,” Tizi said.

“You should carry the bowl in your bag,” I said.

“I’ll carry it with me on the plane,” Tizi said.

“You should carry it with you on the plane,” I said.

The bowl traveled 3000 miles. It made it all the way to Metro airport. It made it through US Customs. We piled our bags on a cart, which at that time you could roll out of the terminal to passenger-pickup parking, where your ride was waiting. It was dark, I remember, the parking lot lit by lights on tall poles. Ten feet from the car, the front wheels of the cart rolled down into a shallow crevice hidden in the shadows, the cart bucked, and the package slipped off onto the asphalt, making an audible tink. It didn’t explode. But the tink was unmistakable.

The lady in the store bubble wrapped it, then she double-bubble wrapped it, then she wrapped it in the store’s decorative paper and placed it in one of the store’s decorative bags. 

We never unwrapped it. It stayed in its bag for a year. Tizi wasn’t inconsolable, but she was pissed. I guess it was my fault.

“Don’t touch it,” she said.

“I think I can fix it.”

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “There are services you can pay to fix broken items.”

Pay. I didn’t really like that word. Why did man invent glue if not to solve problems like these?

Here’s what I learned in a covert operation. I could fix it. I could kind of put it back together. I also learned you can’t glue dust. 

“You can stick a plant in it,” I said.

“It’s not the same.”

Alas, shit happens. Stuff breaks. I woke up this morning remembering something I read 50 years ago, the mutability cantos. If I didn’t actually read them, I learned about mutability–nothing lasts. Checking this morning on the cantos, by Edmund Spenser, I find this: “Dame Nature presides over the conflict between Titaness Mutabilitie and god; she concludes that all things in life may fluctuate, but their essence remains constant.” Great. Essences.

I opened a glittery Christmas card a week ago from a friend I had lost touch with this year. Thank heaven, I thought. She’s still alive. I read her note, detected her kindness and characteristic wit. It was a gift.

I opened another card, first noting on the envelope, on the return address label, not Mr and Mrs, just the single Mrs. 

Bill died February 28, 2023. I will miss his kindness and characteristic wit. 

Washing white bowl, holding it in my hands, I think, “This too shall break.”  The blue willow dishes in our cupboard are showing their age. We find blue willow replacement pieces, plates and soup bowls and dessert dishes, at Home Depot. And lots of beautiful white serving pieces. White bowl can be replaced. But washing it, drying it, putting it away, studiously avoiding the tink, I like to feel I have my hands on something that will endure. 

Then, in a certain slant of light, when I least expect it, on the floor, on a chair, on my pantleg, I detect glitter.

Season’s Greetings.