In Love with France, At Home In Italy

Huh? Even though you probably knew I was bad at math, you may be saying what's she talking about? For a start, I am recognizing that although I turned 66 on December 25, this is my 5th birthday year in Orvieto. Here's the sequence of events that culminated in the rough night that produced these musings. Getting ready to leave home I was not entirely recognizing myself in the old woman who actually had it together to go to her tap dance class the very morning of her flight, but when her son heard about it, HE did: "Mom, why should you be surprised? After all, by going to Italy, you are going to your second home." He was the smart one who had figured out that his transition-averse mother might be able to travel without freaking out, if it meant going from one nest to another.     Lessons from baseball The poetry of baseball is as old as the game, and literary evidence of the desire to return to home base goes back to the Greeks and beyond...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...