Having left America two years ago for Italy, having used the money from selling our house in San Francisco to buy a smaller less expensive house in Italy and live here for a while, maybe for a long while, having fled, as it were, as if the place were on fire, having felt tremors like an earthquake in the social strata, having seen our city, once a refuge, turn against us, having felt suddenly and inexplicably apart from, now safe in Italy in the centro storico or old city center of this ancient Tuscan hill town, listening to Vermont Public Radio via my Roberts Internet radio, sitting on the couch under a blanket because we are not really supposed to turn the heat on until November 1, trying to get my bearings, preparing to spend the next two hours studying Italian, having celebrated, last night, my wife’s acquisition, after much work–many months and much expenditure of time and money on lessons and drivers school and government fees–of an Italian drivers license, listening to a Chinese-Canadian woman resident of Vancouver on NPR talk about racist tension in the U.S. filling her with fear, being here in the profound Sunday afternoon quiet, feeling as usual profoundly displaced and profoundly not-at-ease, fighting constantly my need for control, for the familiar, for life to proceed at American pace rather than Italian pace, fighting my impatience, my insecurity, my fear and discomfort, my lack of prestige, my lack of community, the absence of a constant chorus of like-minded, like-speaking, like-thinking Americans to remind me that yes, I fit in, I am one of many, I am a normal and understandable person … feeling all of this I stop, turn off the radio and try to take stock of what has happened in the two years since November 2015 when I watched the car donation service tow away our green RAV4 and had the two truck driver drop me off on the freeway bus stop in Mill Valley where I would get the bus to the airport and fly to Florence and rent a car and drive to Castiglion Fiorentino where my wife was waiting in the small apartment at Le Santucce where she had been living for a month, having come there directly from France after the Chateau du Pin workshop in Champtoce sur-Loire.
All that. Did all that. Sold everything, gave things away, sold the books, the furniture, the doodads, held going-away parties, held our going-away last writing workshop in the house, had prostate cancer treatment at UCSF, lived out of a suitcase for two months and then on November 15, 2015, showed up at Le Santucce with my suitcases and began a new life. We found an apartment by January and lived there for a year, during which time I completed the Finishing School book. During that time we found a house about a hundred yards away or even less, and with the money from our San Francisco house we bought that house and we live there now. We’ve been living in this house since January 2017. In January 2017 TarcherPerigeePenguin published our Finishing School book, the one I wrote with the very talented and professional Danelle Morton, a writer whose name often does not go on the most high-profile books she writes, a brilliant writer and professional collaborator who taught me a lot about setting deadlines and finishing manuscripts, and in January 2017 I flew to San Francisco to have the launch of that book at that bookstore at Book Passage in the Ferry Building where they were very nice to us and gave us nice stationery which they didn’t have to do but did just because they are nice, and where I had such a terrible, terrible cold that I could hardly speak and so Danelle carried the event and I have no recollection of it, so sick was I, and stayed sick for a month while I cleaned out our storage locker in Daly City and arranged for the shippers to come and put it on a boat and ship all our stuff to Castiglion Fiorentino, where it arrived, most all of it though there is an odd vase we thought we had, and an odd tool chest where I thought I had a crowbar … but these things are minor.
I wish I could tell you something profound. I will tell you only how I feel. I feel as though I had gone into hiding. When I listen to the news I feel as though I am hiding under a desk or in a closet in a foreign land. My heart goes out to my loved ones, friends and family who are still in America baffled, frightened, outraged at what is occurring. I voted in the election. I believed the polls and the pundits. I thought there was no way Donald Trump would win the election.
I listen to the news. I try to write a book.
I try to write a book that begins with 21-year-old Mirella and her twin on a train to Milan in 1951. Walking to Bar Maro this morning for a cornetto con marmelatta and a doppio espresso Norma and I ran into Mirella and I told her I need to interview her some more. She will come over to the house and we will interview her. I need to stop now and write down all the questions I have for her. If this is all I write of this blog post, that is OK. I have lost all sense of what is proper and what is interesting. I have lost all sense of what makes sense to my American comrades now. I am just at the point of pouring out my heart, feeling stupid and wounded, lost and happy though, happy that I am here and not there, cradled by Italy and Italians, cradled by the cradle of democracy and fascism …
… And yes I do go on, I go on and on and on, breathless and afraid to stop lest the voices stop, lest I lose the feeling it is so hard to maintain, that feeling that came over me, quick, run and get the laptop, write this sentence, stay with this feeling, Having Left America, Listening to NPR in Italy …. quick, and then quick, write down those other things, and then quick, make WordPress file all workable … Quick, Set Featured Image … me on that bridge in Florence with the Arno behind me and that beautiful sky, yes, use that one, where I am looking quite contented because I had not yet left the United States and did not yet have any idea what the next two years would hold, how lost I would be, how my mood swings would increase, how I would plummet from OK to dark and lost, how I would struggle with the espresso and the pasta and my blood sugar, how I would struggle with the language, how I would be lost and afraid and up and down from elated to depressed and back again, how unexpected events would fill me with joy like walking up to that brick church at the top of Maesto di Mammi and meditating on the low brick wall of the porch of the church and the hunters get out of their two cars with their guns and Zorro comes walking by and says “cinghiale” so I ask the hunter, “Cinghiale?” and he says “No, lepre,” they are hunting hare, not wild boar.
These men, the source of the constant gunshots we hear all autumn. Source of the delicious hare and wild boar we eat.
And that is a big thing and a way to end this post: The way we eat. Italy is teaching me how to eat. We eat in long strides. We eat in long hours at the table. We book a table at a restaurant and it is ours for the night. We do not get bumped. We do not have people looking over our shoulder wanting our table. We do not have people, rudeness of all rudeness, potential patrons looming over us like drivers wanting our parking space, waiting for us to leave. We do not hurry over food. We eat, like human beings, like civilized people. We eat.
