Here in the last dregs of winter, we are celebrating Carnevale with dancing and drinking and masquerades and parading through the streets. The upshot of this is that the car and the house and the pockets of my winter coat all have little sprinklings of confetti in them.
We went to the big parade in Viareggio two Saturdays ago and to the little one in Pietrasanta last Sunday and to Ireland in between, first stopping in Pisa to see a Hokusai show at the Palazzo Blu, which is a museum now, but once was the house where Byron lived by the river. My favorite piece was a painting on silk called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon." I would like to live my life in such a way that my biography could also be called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon."
Ireland was windy and wild and romantic, if you can still feel romance after eating so much fried fish and chips. We went briefly insane at Aillwee and bought kilo after kilo of Irish cheese that we have now in the refrigerator.
I almost had a nervous breakdown driving the microscopic almost-but-not-quite-as-wide-as-one-car roads that were nevertheless two way streets among the encroaching hedgerows in Western Ireland on our way to the Cliffs of Moher and then on to Galway. I has assumed the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road skills that I picked up living for a year in the Cook Islands 20 years ago would come back to me. It is always entertaining to discover that you have assumed incorrectly while driving at high speeds through a mirror-image roundabout.
But we survived the hedgerows and the baked beans for breakfast and the incipient scurvy and the pints of Guinness and the wind that made me buy a hat and ended the serviceable life of our umbrella. Besides cheese and hats, we bought books in English and Irish seaweed snacks. We listened to traditional Irish music in a traditional Irish pub and also even managed to see a second Hokusai show in a museum in Dublin.
Our Moldovan cab driver on the way back to the airport our last day in Dublin, having lived for a while in Italy himself, exchanged emails with us so that he could send us info about making our own grappa (we had given a rousingly vivid description of our life here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea). Yesterday, we got this email from him:
Hello Jonathan and Jonathan's wife :),I hope you had an easy flight back to the Italian community and the big family!
Above all, I want to mention the moment that touched me the most. After you got into the car, you both exchanged a glance and smiled at each other with such deep respect and love. In that instant, I saw that you were truly united and happy as one. I’m so glad I witnessed that.
I hope that one day, when I reach your age, I will experience such a moment with my own wife.
Thank you for the inspiration!
To this letter, I am attaching the books we discussed about self-distilled spirits.
