While Mimmo was here this morning working in the yard, Jonathan went out to chat. There are three things we can always talk about here: olives, food, and Italian bureaucracy. Usually, Jonathan and Mimmo talk about olives -- today they talked about Italian bureaucracy. Jonathan told Mimmo about how it has been almost four months now and still no sign of his driver's license. His second temporary permit is about to expire. Magdalena at the driver's license place just sighs when he calls. It is not up to her, she says -- it all depends on what they do in the administrative office in Lucca.

"Yes," Mimmo said. "There is someone sitting in an office in Lucca with a giant pile of driver's license applications on his desk. When yours gets to the top, he takes it off the top and puts it back down at the bottom."

I was inside the house, but even so I could still hear Jonathan laughing. But, you know, ruefully.

I am making a deck of Tarot Cards with Tuscan images on them. This is the Ten of Staffs. It makes more sense when you see the whole deck.

And I am in the process sending my new manuscript out into the world, poor little thing. I hope that people are kind to it. While it is busy touting itself on the streetcorners, I have begun working on a new book -- set, this time, in Boston, where I spent many years and learned, eventually, to speak the language of the natives, which is many things -- colorful, jocular, r-less -- but is not English. Here is a bit of the book:

The quickest way from Tower Street to I-95 is to go to the end of the block (the opposite one from the cemetery), turn right on Washington, and then take the first left onto the Arborway. The Arborway is a wide street that runs right next to the green and extensive Arboretum, filled with all sorts of exotic and educational trees that would probably have been lovely to drive past if I wasn’t so busy trying not to die. The fear of being slammed into by a crazed Bostonian driver took the edge off my aesthetic appreciation of the trees, one of which would almost certainly be the very last thing I saw in this life as I hurtled into it, rammed from behind by the tightly-wound descendent of some hasty-pudding-eating Puritan.

What I am saying here is that Boston drivers are crazy. I was surprised to find this out, having somehow associated Boston with decorum and grave deliberation. Ha! People who will burn their neighbors to death as witches on the say-so of a bunch of hormonal tweens will flatten your sorry ass without a second thought if you even so much as pause at a stop sign. They will run you down and will flip you off as they do it.

The key to understanding this behavior is that all Boston drivers want to be first. They want to be the car that is first – the car that is in front of all the other cars ever. You could try explaining to them that there really is no such thing as “first” in general city driving, but they wouldn’t hear you because they would be too busy honking at you to drive faster and then flipping you off. It’s the “can do” spirit that is to blame for so much of American history.