In Love with France, At Home In Italy

As fate would have it, on the plane ride back there were no crashes, thanks to my magic travel shirt--the one Z told me to buy that keeps the plane aloft, and without which I could go nowhere. Further, of the many films on offer, I first chose a sweetly sentimental French one, "La Tete en Friche," starring Gerard Depardieu, and then "Eat, Pray, Love." Not yet having read the book, I had heard that the Italy section was the best, and I could see why. But as an Italian resident, although I loved it as much as the next person, I found it maybe even more sentimental than the French film. One line from "Eat, Pray, Love" rang out as so memorable that I had to write it down. "A ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation." It is an opportunity to create something new that builds on the old, paying it due homage, but making it your own. When we first met with Luca at the bank about getting a mortgage, all of the nuances of that vocabulary were ...

 This being Italy, today started out great. And then there was no electricity. As on most wintry mornings, to warm up my bathroom, I turned on the wall heater whose swinging lever swung right into action. Next, I turned on the little-but-effective space heater I bought from Lidl and got ready to face the day. But then suddenly, all of that nice flow of warm air came to a halt:trouble in paradise!     Of course I figured it was all my fault. But I had done the same thing every morning without incident for the past few weeks, so for once it didn't seem like a case of mea culpa.     I hadn't yet eaten anything, but fortunately for me, someone had left the fruit salad out of the fridge, so there was no need to open it and jeopardize all the stuff jam-packed within. But then N got a hankering for some of those delicious Slovene beans perfumed with the neighbor's sausage, left over from yesterday. He pulled them out of the dark fridge quickly, ready to cho...

I call before the holiday weekend to tell the gas people that our meter is down to 15. “Non c’e problema, signora. Plenty of time. We will come tomorrow.” The Xmas holiday comes and goes, and nobody shows. When we next look at the gas meter a few days before New Year’s, it reads ZERO! Uh-oh! I am not great at being demanding in any language. I like to leave that to my husband. But in his Italian classes, he hasn’t yet gotten to the lesson that teaches how to be indignant—not that that would ever work in Italy, anyway. So unless our son is here, who knows just the right noises to make to get the natives to do what he wants, that job falls to me. Usually it works, since I manage to say things that are more comical than offensive;for example, I told the gas company “we are at ZERO, e zero non e buono!” Apparently that line was memorably funny, and they said they would send someone right away.  When it started getting dark with no sign of any gas, I was unanimously elected to call b...

While on that post-"Tuscan Sun" breakthrough trip to Italy, I stumbled on an out-of-date "Oprah" magazine that someone had (fatefully?) left at our rental house. In it was a letter from a severely risk-averse person who eventually decided that she could handle "a risk for the week." Or maybe even two. That got me thinking that rather than obsessing about everything, I might be able to handle some risks for the week. I also began to see the hypocrisy of preaching in the classroom for 43 years about the need to allow oneself to be "marked" by new things, to take a risk, and to figure out how to navigate in a culture other than that of my beloved France. So that's part of how a nose-plug type like me ended up plunging into an Italian adventure.

In my French classes, I always emphasize what will be the key words of the semester: marquer, se débrouiller, and se depayser. I tell my students that my mission is to "mark" them with a lifelong passion for French, and that our classroom is a place for them to get out of their element--to free themselves to invent a French persona that may be completely different from their usual self. Maybe in their mother tongue they are a shy person. But in French, this does not have to be the case. Sometimes a name change helps. I have had reserved Heathers (unpronounceable in French!) who became Gabrielles, and nerdy Sammys who became suave Pierres. For me, one of the most exciting things about speaking a new language is the opportunity to become someone else, and I am told that I have a different personality in each language I speak. If by some accident my students overhear me speaking English, their shock is palpable. In any case, the key to survival in an any language is to be able...

I've reached an age when it's time to consider more closely the Big Questions--whether to go gently into the night having poured my soul into painstakingly crafted emails to friends, or to aim for something in another form. In my field of French literature, I find sobering the image of bookstore remainder tables filled with hard-won works of scholarship by my famous colleagues who have (as L, who died this week, put it) "cast their lot with the profession." In using that phrase, she had been referring to a particularly ambitious and briefly successful (before they burned out) wing of the independent scholarship movement. What does it mean that our own little independent scholars' group that has always had more modest aspirations is still going, even if L is not? I am also haunted by the image of a famously talented writer who was said to have "wasted her brilliance writing copy for cereal boxes." An inveterate clutter-bug (my family is missing the t...

Once upon a time there was, as the French like to say, "une femme d'un certain âge"--and a very risk-averse one, at that--so much so that she would rarely leave her nest. But she had a husband who did not suffer from this problem, and a prince of a son who is an expatriate writer who thought she needed a project. As a birthday present from my husband, I received Under the Tuscan Sun --the book that first pried me out of my nest for a trip to Italy. If you can swing it--if your generous 91-yr-old mother-in-law, the only member of the family with any money sense--leaves you some dough--you can see if two nests are better than one.