Category: Uncategorized
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Getting Verbal
An incident at the Rimini Autostrada automated drive-through pay station. Tizi and I were driving back to San Marino from Pesaro. At the Rimini exit, my ticket was repeatedly rejected. Three times a gentle automated female voice told me to introduire il bigletto, that is, introduce (insert) my ticket. I did, to no effect. But…
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Memento Mori
Tizi says, “Shall we go see Mario?” We’re in the Serravalle cemetery. It’s a sunny weekday morning. She’s made her rounds–to her paternal grandparents, to the crypt with the older Canduccis she never knew, to her aunt’s family chapel, and to her aunt and uncle. In a six-week stay in San Marino, we’ll come to…
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Exactly. What?
“It’s Allesandro,” Tizi says. “Remember that.” The name of the waiter at La Marianna trattoria di mare, in Rimini. He’s more than a waiter. He’s like the field marshall in the room. Below him is one other server and 4-5 sub-servers. Seafood in Italy often means little plates, lots of them. Lunch is a coordinated…
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Freaky Fast
Down the road from the memory unit where my mother stays is a Jimmy John’s sub shop. We slip away at lunch time and go for a sandwich. These are her last days, maybe her last hours. She’s 92 years old. She had a stroke a few days ago. She can’t eat or drink. The…
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Don’t Do It
I just re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And was struck by the fact that, at multiple points in the story, Huck and Jim actually get in the water. They swim, they float, they bathe in the river. And they are unharmed. I’ve crossed the Mississippi multiple times. Looking from Lacrosse to the Minnesota bank of…
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Groovy Was Big
This would have been 1968. I was in tenth grade. I wore an orange Nehru shirt. And I was not embarrassed. As far as I knew, no one in school had a Nehru shirt. I would not have worn it to school. I couldn’t see myself sitting in Mrs. Davison’s civics class wearing an orange…
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Just Chuck
It happened more than once. I’m sure it wasn’t anything they wanted to talk about. In the weeks before Christmas the envelopes arrived. I walked up to the house every day from the mailbox, cards in hand. Here was one from The Hertz Family, one from Santiago-Hoge, one from the Costakis family. In decades of…
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Good Egg
You had to wonder if Fred got anything out of The Great Gatsby. This was 10th grade English at Freeland High School. This was Fred Conway, a kid everyone made fun of, a kid who was brutally picked on and mocked by guys (of course it was guys) for talking slow, for not being very…
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Full Blast
“Music without dynamics is not music.” That’s what Mr. Nemvalts said. We had asked him to listen to our new band. We called ourselves the Freeland Bean and Coal Company. To the usual ensemble of guitars, organ, bass, and drums we had added a trumpet so we could play “Groovin Is Easy” by The Electric…
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Arrivederci, Teresa
When I asked what was good, she pinched my shirt between her thumb and forefinger, pulling me to my feet, and led me to the little kitchen. She went down the list. Today we have the ribollita, pasta fagioli, pappa di pomodoro; for second, there is vitello roast, rabbit roast, pork ribs, the famous Fiorentino…
A Legacy Project 