In Love with France, At Home In Italy

As a lover of language, I'm fascinated by the nuances of difference among these three words, and also by the cultural differences they evoke. While all of these nouns refer to something very good, as is usually the case, perhaps the visceral, hedonistic Italian is winning out over the more cerebral French and English. And maybe that's why I live here. 

WHILE MY COLLEAGUES ARE BUSY EDUCATING BRIGHT, YOUNG MINDS, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF WORRYING ABOUT WHAT TO DO WITH OUR TOO MANY WHITE PEACHES AND THREE VARIETIES OF APPLES THAT, DAILY, FALL FROM THE TREES. IN THE PROCESS, ITALY IS EDUCATING THIS NOT-SO-BRIGHT OLD MIND. I USED TO THINK OF FALL AS HERALDING THE END OF THE WORLD, WITH ME POISED ON THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE. IT'S GOOD THAT IT'S POSSIBLE TO TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS. And speaking of dogs, our rescue dog, Murray, now 91 dog-years old, whose rascally misadventures you may have read about before (See  MURRAY THE WONDER DOG (WHO WILL JUMP THROUGH HOOPS... ) is now on his third summer sojourn in the Italian countryside, where he's become a new "man." Like my favorite childhood animal, Ferdinand the Bull, he's learned to lie back and just "smell the flowers."  He's come a long way from being abandoned on the streets of Puerto Rico, where he was a monolingual "sato," Spanish fo...

I'm looking at where I left off at the end of the past summer here in Umbria. A year of teaching French and helping others write has intervened. I had a large number of pieces pretty much ready to go, but they have been hibernating in my "Notes" Box awaiting the time I could actually finalize and post them. I think this is what can happen to anyone who writes but who also tries to deal with the business of everyday life. Further, maybe others are able to look on transitions as opportunities for excitement, whereas I tend to view them with anxiety and dread. Now who could complain about having the luxury of getting to live in an Italian-style paradise for a good chunk of the year? Non è logico in any language! Yet to write in fits and starts like this makes it hard to decide where to pick up the thread. One thing that's for sure: it's time to stop hoarding these pieces and stop obsessing about the order in which they will go. As an aside, I have to admire my friend...

DESPITE BEING MARRIED TO THE SAME MAN FOR DECADES, I CONFESS TO STILL FALLING IN LOVE QUITE REGULARLY. BUT NOT WITH ANYTHING OR ANYBODY ANYONE COULD BE JEALOUS OF. PAR EXEMPLE/AD ESSEMPIO/FOR EXAMPLE, THE ITALIAN GERUND, AND FRANZ KAFKA. Not to mention Albert Camus and Voltaire, with whom I'm in constant communication by letter. And lest you think I only fall for long-dead guys, I'll add the already married Andre Aciman, who had me from the first line of "Lavender" (See  DEAR ANDRE ACIMAN ).  And also my friend, Jacqueline Raoul-Duval, whose "Kafka in Love" is a revelation. I'm also torn between having an affair with two quite different literary detectives. At first I could never imagine the Sicilian Montalbano having a worthy rival. But then Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti came along, and now I don't know what to do. (See  THE MYSTERY OF HOW I FELL UNDER THE SPELL OF WRITE... )   And on the topic of quirky love affairs, I used to be in love ...

A dear friend who has suffered a lot of hard knocks in recent years has resumed gardening and has even begun to take some lovely nature photos. He sent me these which he took with his Iphone. He called them "Various critters attracted to the deck flowers," and pointed out the bee's pollen sacs. I wrote back immediately:Wow! Bravo! These are amazing! That includes those pollen sacs, which I would not have been able to identify if one bit me on the butt ! (And since I am pretty butt-less, for a bumblebee to find mine would be quite a trick.) And while we're on the topic of butts, if one bit J on the bum, he probably wouldn't feel a thing, after all that his pinched nerve-treated posterior has been through. BTW, the Italian word for "holes" is "buchi," and when J dropped his pants for the umpteenth time to get his ultima puntura (final injection of cortisone), the doctor seemed pretty impressed to see such a butt full of buchi. It's n...

I remember when I first heard about the concept of planned obsolescence. It was in the eighth grade when I read for a book report Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders." I was horrified. But now I'm changing my tune. I see that many of my clothes and personal effects are wearing out, and I kind of like that idea. It has definite appeal for a clutteroholic like me who is missing the throwaway gene and who says, in feeble self-defense, that she sees the poetry in everything. It's hard for me to get to the second step of discarding the "dead" item. But instead of making excuses, I've begun to ask myself, where would I be if everything lasted forever? I'm realizing that the same is true of my old body. As any gardener knows, to give a declining plant a new lease on life, some serious cutting back is necessary. We all get our moment (as my Italian neighbors like to say, "E' suo tempo") and then it's time to make way for new ...

That was the name of the 1960 documentary that as an impressionable kid I was not supposed to watch. The screen was only about a 12-inch window, one of the first console TVs--a blond-wood box with green leather surrounding the minuscule screen, the height of 50s elegance and technology. Maybe there were little holes poked in it, the better to let the sound escape. There they were staring back at me in their striped pajamas--emaciated stick-bodies dominated by gigantic, dark eyes that had seen far too much. It's a wonder they got to see anything ever again, and they would not have, had the liberators not come in time. When my religious doctor dad caught me staring back at them, he did not know what to say. I felt that I had been caught doing something shameful, and in truth I never got over it. But now, six decades later, I know that it is something that should never have been gotten over. And although well-intentioned, my father's plan really backfired. A lifelong hoarder who j...

I am not being fickle when I say I am in love with both these gentlemen. IT MAKES ME FEEL BETTER JUST TO KNOW THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE THEM IN THIS WORLD. Of course they're not really in this world at all, but since I've lived in Italy, they have become part of the interior world of my head. It's true that as an adolescent I went through a crime novel phase, mostly delving for the sex scenes ("And when she took off her clothes, I realized she was a REAL blonde..."). Yes, at age 14, I thought Mike Hammer in "I, the Jury," was a very sexy dude. But once I was a so-called adult, I never went near mystery lit. Until now, that is. I am currently pondering the mystery of how I fell under the spell of Donna Leon's Brunetti, whose "beat" is Venice. At first I resisted, since my heart already belonged to Commissario Montalbano, from exotic-to-me Sicily. But this summer I have worked my way through 22 Brunetti novels, and am already in mourning...

It's that time of year when most of us academics head back to school, only this year, for the first time in many moons, I am not. Instead, I was able to read an insightful NPR piece by Alex Aciman on the 1913 French novel, "Le Grand Meaulnes" ( "The Lost Estate") by Henri Alain-Fournier, killed in combat in 1914, but whose body was not found until 1991. This was Alain-Fournier's only book.  Aciman makes an eloquent, compelling case for why this is "such an appropriate last book for someone days away from becoming a college student....Without ever actually announcing it, 'The Lost Estate' tells a story about feeling inescapably tied to one's life as a student and a child, but hoping that something far more enchanting will come along and distract us." Like the novel's young hero, "we wish we could be set off course." I think I know what he means.  Le grand Meaulnes Oh, Les beaux jours! Does one ever get over the com...

Perils? What perils? What could happen to a reluctant designated driver who gets palpitations at the idea of having to back up en route to home after her husband with the pinched nerve got his last pain shot?  Well, she could run into her best friend coming from the opposite direction on a piece of bumpy, curvy road barely wide enough for one car, and bordered on both sides by deep ditches.  Here's the situation. With J laid up and relegated to passenger-navigator/cheerleader status, that left me in the driver seat. So with him coaching me to "just stay on the road, dammit," when we saw another car approaching, he advised me as usual to stop and wait for the OTHER person to back up.   As I dutifully stood my ground and came to a halt, I was thinking how unfortunate it was for that other person to be caught in such a dilemma at such a spot. Then  when I recognized my friend P at the wheel of the other car, I felt extra bad.  But P has more courage in her left...

Here she is, early in the season, before she became a jungle. Looks pretty peaceful, no? MY ORTO IS LETTING ME KNOW IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS THAT SHE IS NOT PLEASED WITH ME. AND SHE IS QUITE RIGHT. THE POOL MAN LIKES TO SAY THAT A SWIMMING POOL IS LIKE A BABY. SHE REQUIRES CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE. WELL DITTO FOR A VEGETABLE GARDEN. Every time I have abandoned her, she has gotten back at me. Ordinarily a very devoted, even compulsive gardener with zero tolerance for weeds, I am full of rationalizations for my neglect. First it was a period of bad weather. Next a trip to visit family. Then trying to care for a husband with a pinched nerve. But she is not interested in excuses. This is existentialism in action. Good intentions mean nothing. It's only what you do that counts. Today I am trying to make it up to her. We'll see how well that works. INSECT CONTROL: LATEST ENEMY ON THE HIT LIST I'm beginning to understand why they call them soldier bugs. I've spent much of the ...

You try to check on the status of the stool you ordered on Amazon--the one that will allow your pinched nerve husband to remain seated in the kitchen and feel better by cooking us some great food. Although my phone-phobic, hearing-challenged self is unhappy speaking on the telephone in any language, to do so in Italian from our house has been a special trial. When you live as deep into the countryside as we do, in order to get any reception at all, one has to: 1.station herself in front of a particular window 2.NOT move 3.pray to the Telephone Gods that there won't be too much static at the other end, and that the person at the other end will have the patience to stick with you, and that you won't get cut off mid-sentence due to ??? In terms of speaking to the nice lady about tracking your package, you also need to pray that either you or your husband doesn't have "number anxiety" when having to recite long Italian numbers, and that one of you actuall...

(I've been writing about a different kind of shots in the context of J's medical situation, but when I heard two loud bangs this morning, this next post is what came out.) Yesterday our Italian valley was totally tranquil. Today's gunshots tell a different story:it's the first day the hunters have license to shoot birds. That means it's no day for a walk in the woods. My slender brother, Leigh, who last September at 63 died suddenly of a heart attack, loved birds. As kids, we used to watch excitedly what appeared to be the same sparrow family nesting atop a pillar on our front porch. Leigh never outgrew that  passion, continuing to feed birds from wherever he lived. Now he lives in the Sons of Jacob Cemetery in Minnesota. I still love birds, but less loyally than he. On the other hand, at our 44th anniversary lunch which coincided with the ceremony for the unveiling of Leigh's headstone, something made me decline the offer of the guinea fo...