In Love with France, At Home In Italy

So now that I have been back home in Umbria for three weeks (after a short academic year that felt like a long one), I'm wondering where to begin to resume this blog whose last posting corresponded to the previous university vacation. Despite the long list of topics that have been waiting for their moment, I find myself floundering about where to start. As a general topic, I'm thinking of my answer to the question, "But how do you spend your time over there in the Italian countryside? What do you do?" It was posed by the wise Dean of the the college of which I am a Fellow, and whom I have quoted several times in this blog. After thinking for a moment, what popped into my head was "I'm catching up with myself." To catch up with myself has been an ongoing project--one that I expect to continue throughout my lifetime. An overly precocious child, I recall how my father used to brag about how "ahead of myself" I was, and it was only later that...

Last night when we visited our daughter-in-law's super-nice family for a most delicious dinner, I asked her very cute adolescent brother about the accordion on his bed. He had just started taking lessons four years ago when we were here for the wedding, and he already sounded good then. Ditto for our daughter-in-law, who never had a lesson, but is very talented at most everything, including music. An accordion is an essential element of a popular style of this country's music that's referred to as "beef music." I realized I had goofed when I asked Jan if he liked "cow music," and got a perplexed look. Once I corrected myself, we both agreed that we liked it. It is invariably cheerful and smile producing. Kind of like the tap dancing I still do. Many Slovenes seem to make fun of it, but there is even a tv station that I'm watching right now that plays it 24/7. The singers wear what look like liederhosen, and every once in a while the...

We are getting to know our son's adoptive country, and as helicopter parents with a first grandchild on the way, we expect to be spending increasing amounts of time here. Even though it's a seven-hour drive from our Italian home, this will not be such a sacrifice. This is a beautiful place that feels exotic to us, and about which we still have plenty to learn. For example, just outside our charming B&B, the church bells go bonkers with something like regularity. They seem to go into overdrive at quarter of the hour, and they like to get an early start. A few minutes ago, at 8:45AM, I counted 145 bongs. That must mean that it's 145 o'clock, and all is well. Or could it mean that once the bonging stops, we have only 10 minutes to get to 9AM mass? We are a family of theorists who likes to think there's a method even to things that look like madness. We  have a family saying for when we have no idea what might be behind any given phenomenon:...

 We just arrived in Slovenia, a knockout country whose pitched roofs, while practical for snow, seem designed to give the unsuspecting person who is not a dwarf a loch in kop (that’s Yiddish for “a hole in the head”—something no one needs). On arrival at our cozy B&B, the same one as last year, it took J about five minutes to repeat his feat of bonking himself on the bean. He bent over the bedside table to pick something up, and WHAP!—just like last year.  Our kids have rented an adorable apt that has many similar hazards. It's on the top floor, which means that each of the three rooms has parts that can do serious damage to those who commit the folly of entering the place without a helmet. Somebody put my coat on the bed in the little extra room designed for those under three feet tall. Of course after I bent down to pick it up, the inevitable happened:I womped myself a bit.  Those previous two words are key. To survive here it is important not...

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...

The Dean of my residential college is a man of many parts--adviser, psychologist, teacher, wordsmith, disciplinarian, but mostly philosopher. During any given year, four hundred students look to him for whatever they are missing from home. Every Sunday night, he sends something he modestly calls "Notes and News," whose ostensible purpose is to forecast events and opportunities. But the highlight is always a thoughtful essay about how to live. On the cusp of returning to my academic home, I am thinking about an idea he brought up in last week's message:the concept of the liminal zone--the place where both expats and college students dwell, perhaps without even realizing it. "Liminal zone" is a fancy term for being poised on a threshold--neither here, nor there. As someone who has given her heart to more than one country, I like to think I know something about that. France started off as the love of my life. I teach her language and literat...