For a long time, living here felt like being on vacation -- like Jonathan and I were only playing at living in Italy for a while. And then, someday, we would go back to our "real" life at "home."

But real things have started to happen here now and real life -- a life that doesn't revolve around marveling at the produce or gasping at the view -- has begun to ground us here. We are not on vacation.

Many months ago, I first noticed a white-haired, quiet, and frail-looking man among the more boisterous crew at the pub. He was often in the company of his son, who is maybe 50 or so years old, and also inclined to be quiet -- but kindly and shyly friendly. They are very sweet with each other. Our assumption has been that L, the son, is caring for his aged father.

But now we find out that, in fact, L has cancer -- every treatment has been tried, even the most experimental ones -- and after a period of remission, it has returned, very virulent. He can't work anymore or drive and he hasn't much longer. It was not what we thought -- that he was taking care of his frail old father. It is that his father is taking care of him.

And so, sometime soon, a face will be gone and hearts will be broken.

So yesterday, I was paying for my (obviously egregious) sins committed in a previous life by having to go to the Post Office. While I was waiting*, an elderly woman finished her business at one of the counters and as she left, she said to the room in general "Ciao, bimbi!" ("Bimbo" is Italian for "baby" and the plural of that is "bimbi," so this rather ancient woman basically said to the whole room full of the damned [i.e., people waiting their turn for customer "service" in the Post Office], "See ya, babies!")

Then this morning while I was in the Frutta D'Oro buying this lovely garlic braid and a fairly large quantity of apricots, an elderly man came in and said to the room at large, "Ciao, bimbi!" ("Hey, babies!")

So I feel fully justified in going ahead and unilaterally calling it now: this is the Hot Bimbo Summer. #Feelin'It

(*Jonathan was told that he would need to submit Form 251c in order to mail a birthday card to the US. As God is my witness, this is the truth. In the end, they didn't make him do it, but it was touch and go there for a while.)
 

 

We've had a short snap of cooler weather -- temps in the low 80s or even high 70s. Having assiduously acclimated ourselves to Inferno Italia, naturally we now feel chilly -- so much so that I wore long pants and a jacket to go down to the market in town on Saturday morning when the temperature was a mere 82 degrees. I'm not saying that it's logical; I'm just saying that it's real.

At the market, we bought extremely local honey from the road just below ours off the lovely Via Capriglia and also a big bunch of sunflowers. It is possible that our very own bees from right here at the house may have played a part in the production of both. 

Saturday night was the annual performance of the Cappezzano Monte Chorus, held in an abandoned quarry behind the church. Our friend Valerio gave us very specific and detailed directions for how to find it. "You can't miss it," he said. 

We missed it. But our adventures in the bustling metropolis of Cap. Monte (pop. 355 -- so half again as large as lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea) turned out okay in the end when we we rescued by the director of the chorus herself, who led us through their rehearsal room where all the singers were warming up and where Valerio smiled and waved and, if he wondered how we ended up there after his very careful instructions, didn't say anything about it to our faces.

The concert itself was lovely and, although we won none of the raffle prizes (including a gift certificate for a free haircut), we were only one number off from winning the 5-litre can of local olive oil, which is probably the best outcome possible.

Since then, I have made a painting of one of the sunflowers, which is, I believe, legally required of of everyone who stays in Italy longer than six months. They check at the border when you try to exit and you are turned back if you haven't made at least one (photographs can also count, but nothing involving AI is accepted.)

And I am still plugging away on my new novel. I have no idea why. Maybe it doesn't matter why. Another piece of it is below.

We neither one of us even stayed in the state of Arkansas, which, for all its spacious piney woods and river bottom land is still not quite big enough for us and our mother at the same time. Brother teaches English 101 and Beginning Composition at a junior college in Oklahoma City and I managed two fried catfish houses in Memphis. It was hard work, but I liked it. Plus, there’s not a single alley cat in a 50-mile radius that wasn’t my friend.

            But the real reason I lived in Memphis is on account of my husband, Caleb. He’s the database administrator at the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center. He started out as a nightshift network administrator and worked his way up. The first time I ever laid eyes on that man, I knew he was the one.

            It was high summer – the 4^th of July – and I was visiting my friend Betty at her folk’s place in Marked Tree, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis. It really tells you something about Babbitt that folks from there would vacation in Marked Tree and consider themselves lucky to do it. There was nothing in Marked Tree but about seventeen churches and a Dairy Freeze. And the Dairy Freeze looked to be about on its last legs.

            Still though, Betty’s folks lived there in some bottom land off Highway 308 and they were having a big 4^th of July barbecue and there I was, standing in a patch of boysenberry brambles and swatting away at the State Bird of Arkansas, the mosquito. Mrs. Dewlap, Betty’s mother, had sent all us young folks out to pick boysenberries down by the river for her famous boysenberry cobbler. Betty had already snuck three cases of beer down there to help fortify us for the task ahead because she still had hope then that some of us would come to visit her again someday. Betty was nobody’s fool.

            So we were swatting and picking and fortifying ourselves. Betty’s brother was there with a bunch of his friends from his job in Memphis and, let me tell you, those city kids were suffering. The only reason they think they have mosquitos in Memphis is because they have never been to Marked Tree.

            So this boy there who was originally from Louisiana and was pretty well fortified already tells this story about how one time back home he was walking down the road and he came up on two mosquitos that were in a ditch eating a baby cow and one mosquito says to the other, “Let’s you and me carry this baby cow over behind the barn and eat him there.” And the other mosquito says, “Nah, if we carry it back there, the big mosquitos will take it from us.”

            That boy was not Caleb. Caleb was a different boy, standing there listening to the story about the two mosquitos and then laughing. He laughed this bright, sharp laugh and his eyes crinkled all up. Well, a girl notices a man who laughs and his eyes crinkle all up. But that wasn’t all.      

He was kind of quiet, for one thing, which was unusual at that stage of the fortifying, and when people talked, he actually listened to them, paid attention to whatever foolishness they were saying. A man who will pay attention in such circumstances will surely pay attention when it comes to more important matters.

To tell you the truth, there was maybe not as much berry picking going on right then as Mrs. Dewlap might have hoped, what with the swatting and the fortifying and the foolishness, but this boy Caleb was doing more than his fair share. I watched him, his hands going gently through those brambles, slow and easy, one berry after another, careful so as not to bruise them, but firm. Those were some fine hands and that boy clearly knew how to take his time with them. Lord, I almost fainted right there in the mud. It might have been on account of loss of blood from the mosquitos, but it sure felt like passion.

I spent the whole rest of that day kind of sidling up next to him and then getting chicken and sidling off. But I kept on looking at his crinkled eyes and his slow hands and feeling faint and I knew he was it. It was long after midnight, after the cobbler and the bottle rockets were done and even the fireflies and Betty’s brother had gone to bed or at least passed out and only the katydids and the bullfrogs and the stars were out that he finally kissed me. That was almost thirty years ago and, even now, seeing his eyes crinkle all up when he laughs is still the one thing I miss most about being dead.

 

It is hard to write about summer. Pietrasanta is jammed with sunburnt Germans and Americans looking hopelessly for parking places and open tables, but nothing much is happening up here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea. Of course, we are not hosting a crucifixion up here like they -- apparently -- are down in town. So that may account for presence of the more boisterous crowds down there.

It continues to be sweltering ("inferno" is the Italian word for "hell," incidentally) and we have been given conflicting information with regard to the prospects for this year's olive harvest. Mimmo is quite downcast, saying that we got too much rain in the spring and not enough now. The old men in the pub, however, assure us that it is no problem -- that the olives like the sun and that they can easily go as much as four months without water. Given that Mimmo spends his time farming olives and the old men spend theirs drinking wine under the shade trees, we have resigned ourselves to disappointment.

The summer sound is katydids. They seem to have an "on" switch that is suddenly hit every morning when the temperature reaches a certain point. They are so loud that they drown out even the birds (but not the singing that floats up from the pub sometimes in the late afternoons.) This is the sound of my own childhood summers (the katydids, not the Italian singing) and when we also catch sight of fireflies in the dusk-shadowed woods around our house, I am eight-years-old again in Arkansas and twilight is magic and the future is still only a jumbled-up dream.

We are not cooking much because of the heat, but eat salad after salad. The fruit spoils fast these days, even in the fridge, so I made peaches and apricots and lemons into a crostata. And I work away on a novel. I am at the place in the writing process where I have given up all hope over it, but work on it anyway -- perhaps from some sort of inner compulsion, perhaps just because it is too hot to go for a walk. Below is a section of it that is an actual true story that really happened to a high school friend of mine. He is an attorney now.

There’s a speed trap out on the highway at the edge of Babbitt, just before you get to the new feedmill, right where the Sonic Drive-In used to be before the emanations from the new feedmill significantly dampened down folk’s enthusiasm for outdoor dining in those particular atmospheric conditions. Jud sits out at the speed trap most afternoons in his police cruiser with the radar gun propped up on the dashboard and a good supply of international intrigue thriller novels in the seat next to him. He says he doesn’t mind the emanations now that he’s used to them.

            Jud loves those international intrigue thriller novels. He says they’re the reason he decided to go into crime prevention as a profession. There is no bookstore as such in Babbitt, but Darlene at the hardware store can get them wholesale from the same magazine distributor where she gets her Farmer’s Almanacs every year and she always does right by Jud whenever the magazine distributor comes around and, therefore, goes as fast as she wants out on the highway. She says she hit 120 one time, but Jud says she exaggerates and that it was only 115. Not a person in the world was surprised when they announced their engagement.

            Everybody in town knows about the speed trap and makes sure to slow down whenever they get close to it (which they can tell by the emanations) and to wave at Jud. Given this, it is unclear just how much of a trap it actually is, but Jud says he’s really there to catch the out-of-towners, the big-city speeders running through here with their tinted-window cars and their fancy high-octane engines like wild dogs through a cat’s pajamas. But there is nothing in particular in Babbitt for the fast-living jet set to come for – especially since the Sonic Drive-In closed down – and it’s not even remotely on the way to anywhere in particular, so Jud has himself a fairly relaxed beat out there at the speed trap. At one point there was even some talk of using town funds to get him a recliner to put next to the cruiser, but nothing came of it after Booty Cox took his driver’s license test.

            What happened was that Booty, who was known for having been kind of high-strung, was driving along with the certifier from the county DMV there in the car with him. He had already demonstrated how he could stop and start and turn right and turn left and merge onto the highway and was doing about as well as a high-strung person could be expected to do in a situation of uncommon tension like that when Jud saw him go by and, knowing how het up Booty was over the whole thing, waved real big at Booty for encouragement.

            Well, Booty didn’t see Jud wave on account of how tense he was having to look at the highway lines and the speedometer needle and everything else all at the same time, so Jud just tapped his horn to get Booty’s attention and waved real big again. But when a police cruiser taps its horn at a high-strung person like Booty Cox, all good intentions aside, it does not help the situation. In fact, it startled Booty, who thought Jud was waving him down and thought he had better stop. But in the excitement of the moment, he hit the gas pedal instead of the brake and went straight head-first into the drainage ditch by the side of the highway at about 60 miles an hour.

            He said later that it happened so fast he was hoping maybe he could fix the situation before the certifier from the DMV noticed. So he threw the car into reverse, kept his foot down hard on the gas, and shot backwards out of that drainage ditch like there were saber tooth tigers down there. He was thinking so hard about the gears, in the commotion, that he clean forgot that he needed to steer the car and lord only knows where he would have ended up if he hadn’t by chance backed straight into Jud’s cruiser going so fast that his car just kind of bounced off the cruiser and went directly right back into the ditch. Jud says he never would have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

            When they finally came to a permanent stop, Booty asked the certifier from the DMV if this one incident would mean that he failed the test, given how well he had done with the stopping and the starting and the turning right and turning left and the merging and all, but the certifier wouldn’t even speak. Jud drove him back to the DMV in what was left of the cruiser and we heard later that he retired that very afternoon and moved away to Tulsa.

            Booty eventually passed the test six months later when the county DMV managed to convince another certifier to get into a car with him, but the town council decreed that Jud had to keep a lower profile from now on, so that was the end of the plan for the recliner. Folks felt that it would be conspicuous and might distract other high-strung people like Booty when they were out on the highway. For a time, people in Babbitt maintained a lively discussion among themselves as to who else in the world there could be who might even begin to do such a thing. Although several names were floated as possibilities, Booty was always at the pinnacle of the heap.

            All of this is just to say that the closer Brother and I got to Babbitt, the slower we drove, so that if Jud was out at the speed trap, we had absolutely no fear of a ticket. We weren’t going more than 20 miles an hour by the time we got to the Booty Cox Memorial Drainage Ditch and it still seemed too fast.

 

Wednesday night was Nonno's 89th birthday party down at the pub. We were worried about arriving too early (we never know what time anything starts -- a cultural mystery) and so ended up arriving a little bit late. But we were greeted with affection and given instantaneous wine. 

There were probably 40 or 50 people there -- not only our familiar friends from our long afternoons in the shade on the terrace, but also a whole intertwined cabal of the Viviani family from Capezzano Monte -- cousins and in-laws and nieces and people whose multiple and over-lapping ties with Nonno were so dense and complex that is impossible to say who, exactly, they actually are.

It was lovely at the long table under the trees out back and the spontaneous singing of traditional drinking songs that burst out between courses of the meal were often hilarious (more so as the night and the wine went on) and always breathtaking. The clip below is a song about who is going to pay the tab for all this booze, but you would never know it if you didn't understand the words.

I felt very happy to be included in the crowd sitting at the big jolly table -- not a cousin, of course, but not so much a stranger any more, either.

The meal itself had course after course with the main dish finally being individual stuffed quails sitting in nests of roasted potatoes. I have seen Babette's Feast, so I know that I am supposed to crack open the skull with my teeth and eat the little brain, which is apparently a delicacy. But I myself am also quite delicate and blessed with a very vivid and visual imagination and once actually fainted out cold merely at the very thought of something particularly gruesome (long story), so I did not eat my brain. Now, days later, sitting safely in my house where the scariest foodstuff around is an elderly carrot in the back of the refrigerator, I am beginning to regret my timidity. But not much.

 

Daniele told me last night that I am going to have to stop crying every time he talks. But I can't help it.

We went last night to a little benefit they held at the pub for a local organization that helps people with eating disorders. Daniele gave a really beautiful speech about how food is love and that, in feeding others, we share love across time through generations and also across space when we think about all the people -- from the farmers on up -- who work so hard to feed us. When we eat together, when we do it with love and attention, we are part of a community and connected to the whole world. He made an analogy with a little piece of garlic that can seem so small, but when added to a dish, can have so much power to infuse everything with delight. He said it much more poetically and profoundly than I ever could, of course.

So it's not like I sobbed uncontrollably or anything, but I did get a little bit misty-eyed. This has happened on two previous occasions when he's been talking about food and love and feeding the soul and giving love to everyone.

I think the thing is that he reminds me of my dad, who also wanted to give love to the entire world. The last several years before he died, he used to volunteer once a week at the soup kitchen in my home town. He was in his late seventies and his eighties then and kind of past it as far as actual cooking was concerned. So he decided that his job would be to stand at the door when people came in and give everyone who came for lunch either a handshake or a hug (their choice). 

"No one ever touches homeless people," he said. "Because they don't get the chance to bathe or wash their clothes too often, so they're dirty and they smell bad. But every human being needs to be touched. They wither and die without it." There were people who came to the soup kitchen on his regular day as much for the hugs as for the food.

So you can see why I might get a little teary. Daniele told me to cut it out, but he also gave me his visual aid as a present.

One good thing about this relentless heat -- it has turned the loft in the guest bedroom into an excellent food dehydrator. We could make jerky up there, if only we had the meat.

Instead, I have been drying lavender -- some for sachets in the drawers with sweaters and the boxes with blankets stored away, some for making lavender and lemon cookies, and some for lavender oil to rub on our mosquito bites.
 

 

A tragedy is unfolding around us as the intense heat continues with no respite or rain in sight. A survey of our olive trees confirms that most of the baby olives have died. There will be no grand harvest this year -- perhaps not any harvest at all. For a while, the forecast promised rain for Saturday, but now that has evaporated. Jonathan and I stay mostly inside in front of the fan drinking ice water with the shades drawn against the sun. The birds are more silent than they were. The news now is of emergency rooms filled with heat stroke victims and of deaths. Only the little lizards seem happy. They do not understand the gravity of the situation.

 

Quite an uproar at the opera Friday night!

Jonathan and I went to Torre del Lago to see the premiere of this season's new production of "La Boheme" at the annual Puccini Festival. As one does.

It was a lovely evening. The theatre is open to the stars and the breeze comes off the lake. So elegant, so genteel, so sedate.

But no!

Apparently, a right-wing undersecretary of culture, recently appointed by the new Fascist Prime Minister, had denounced the production, whining that by setting the opera during the French student riots of 1968 (rather than its original setting of the French Revolution of 1830), The Puccini Festival Society was egregiously mixing art with politics -- something he only agrees with when the politics in question are right-wing.

The conductor of the orchestra, who had not been part of the production but was flown to conduct in only two days before it started, apparently agreed with the Fascist undersecretary. (When we told the regulars down at the pub about it, they were vociferously united in their disdain for the undersecretary, who is, they say, a buffoon. "Even a donkey," said Nonno, who is one week shy of his 89th birthday and, therefore, holds the place of highest honor and respect among the all-day drinkers, "Even a donkey, if you let it loose in the street, has sense enough to find its way home. The undersecretary hasn't got the brains of an ass!")

So the conductor, an apparent fan of the Fascists, to show his displeasure with the production, walked to his podium at the beginning of the show and put a black blindfold over his eyes, saying tat he didn't want to even see such a travesty. (There was also a fair amount of xenophobia mixed in here as well because the set designer was apparently French -- the horrors!) When he did this, the audience erupted in boos and catcalls. (Side note: one should not piss off opera aficionados -- many of them apparently have very strong lungs.) 

Jonathan and I were completely bewildered. We knew none of the backstory and only managed to catch the conductor's speech up to "I'm wearing this blindfold because..." We are so consistently clueless that Jonathan said later we are like the people who show up to the book burning with s'mores.

After the intermission, when the director reappeared for the second half, the screaming was even louder: "Vergogna! Buffone! Scemo! Vai via! Leccaculo!" ("Shame! Buffoon! Stupid! Go away! Ass licker!") "This is getting ugly," I said to Jonathan, still completely in the dark. "Is this where they start throwing things?" The chairs, however, were all attached to the ground.

At the end of the production, the cast on stage held up signs: "There is no Planet B," "Look Up," "Save the Earth" and other pro-climate-activism slogans. The crowd cheered and clapped for the cast and crew, but when the conductor came out to take his bow, almost all the clapping stopped, the yelling was deafening, and most of the audience very pointedly high-tailed it towards the exits. The conductor continued to take bows to a miniscule scattering of applause as elegantly-clad opera buffs stormed towards the exits.

Jonathan and I tried to eavesdrop on the conversations around us on the way out, but to no avail. We feared that this negative response was perhaps to the rather mild gesture towards climate change activism, but even for someone who just published a book about people going berserk over art, it seemed to be a disproportionate reaction to a sign saying "Look Up" (although I guess no more than the things I wrote about in "Outrage" -- people purposely stabbing Impressionist paintings with their umbrellas and fighting a duel over The Rite of Spring. I wrote a blogpost for Stanford about how the things I talk about in the book are back with us with regard to banning books, drag shows and abortions -- the link for that is here: https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2023/07/anthony-comstock-rides-again.html#more )

The next day we went down to town for the newspapers and figured it all out. It is comforting to know that if there is going to be a rampaging mob of enraged opera-goers, they are rampaging on our side. (Another side note: Don't mess with ladies in spike heels -- you could lose an eye.)

We have changed to buying our bread at a new bakery because the (Swiss) owner of our former bakery re-emerged after having been absent for nine months and went on a pro-Trump rant when she heard our accents. The new bakery is a bit out of our way, but seems very nice. And someone has spray-painted "Fascista Merde!" on the front of the garden supply store that is run by people who are, in fact, Fascist shits.

We are still having an unprecedented heat wave, but the air is not all that is getting hot around here.

 

A podcast with me on it is up at the New Books Network is up at https://newbooksnetwork.com/outrage

I will never hear it because the sound of my own voice makes me retch. Also, God only knows what bullshit I said in the heat of the moment. Fortunately, it's all a blur.

It's a shame, though, because the host had a fabulous Irish accent and the whole time, I thought that maybe I was secretly talking to Saoirse Ronan, although the possibility that Saoirse Ronan has a secret double life as a scholar of (according to her bio) "post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars" is admittedly slim.

 

Okay. So I don't want to belabor the point, but DAMN, y'all -- it's HOT!!! This is the report of actual current weather conditions as they are at 5:10 p.m. our time.

Now, I just want to say, by way of excuse in case I seem whiny about this, that we do not have air-conditioning here and also (to re-iterate) there was a big SNAKE sunning itself on my front porch last weekend. 

"What does the snake have to do with anything?" you may ask.

Look, it's hot. We are all just going to have to significantly lower our expectations with regard to productivity, comprehension, and coherence. 

 

We are waiting to acclimate to the heat now and lie together side-by-side in bed gently sweating through the night. The night air through the open windows is heavy with jasmine.

As a consequence, we are happy to hear the recent news about new studies which seem to indicate that afternoon naps have substantial health benefits. It is always comforting to have your vices affirmed by medical science.

 

The reception for my new book happened Saturday afternoon down at the pub, out on the terrace under the tree leaves. As Jonathan and I left the house to go to it, we ran into (not literally, thank god) a big snake sunning itself on our porch. We decided (not immediately, I admit) to view it as a good omen -- the adrenalin certainly helps to put you into the pepped-up party mood and the screaming warms up the vocal cords wonderfully.

Because I have truly debilitating stage fright, fortuitously combined with truly abysmal Italian language skills, I wrote out the presentation in English (and also, you know, the book itself), but Jonathan did the translation of the presentation into Italian and then gave the presentation speaking as me. It was lovely. He did all the labor while I just sat and gazed at him adoringly. Easy peasy. The we all ate a lovely buffet that Daniele and Alice had put out for the occasion. Also, I had my hand kissed for the first non-facetious time ever in my life by an elderly European gentleman. It was pretty swoony, I have to say. Not everyone could get away with it.

But now I am ready to go back to being part of the furniture, which is how I like my life best. In furtherance of this, I have been taking long afternoon naps so as to preclude any future achievements that would end up in public receptions. I can't accomplish too much if I spend all my time drooling into my pillow. A clever tactic.

Besides which it is very hot. Very, very hot. Mimmo is a bit worried about the olives. It is too hot too soon for them. The trees have lots of baby olives the size and color of peas on the branches now, but if we don't get rain soon, he tells us that the baby olives could all drop off. This would break my heart.

And not just mine. The weather made for a bad harvest around here last year and put a real strain on the olive farmers. Olives have been cultivated on this land for at least two thousand years, but global climate change may be bringing it all crashing to an end -- not just the olives, but a whole way of life. None of us had anything that we can do about it personally and individually -- it is beyond our control. So I just watch the sky for signs of rain and hope.