Oh Lucky Man!

It looks like Paradise Lost: I could have lived among these rolling hills these past 25 years, but I chose America instead. I never wanted to confront the outcome of my choice until this past summer when I went home to Italy for the first time.
They write novels about what happens when prodigal sons go back to the place of their birth a generation or two later. These books are popular in North American literature, land of migrants and displaced people par excellence. Americans want to recreate their roots and imagine a better, more comfortable life in a world left behind. Those that know me are polite but incredulous when they discover I come from Umbria the land of hill towns, castles and a panoply of saints. There were no saints in my family, but there is a castle.

I left Italy for the last time in the Spring of 1982, I rode away one night on my motorcycle never to return, and arrived in California in the Fall of that same year after ditching the Yamaha for an airline ticket. I returned to Umbria in the summer of 2007 and found myself in a world that looked very similar even after the passage of 25 years, but was subtly different in more ways than I expected, not least because of massive alterations in my perspective. The first thing I had to get used to was seeing many faces I remembered as living people, now posted as photos in the cemetery next to my mother's own grave. My sister is an old woman now and her husband of 40 years is almost as old as his father was when I lived here. I am no longer the impetuous stranger my sister says she remembers. I am the American.

On the surface my sister and her husband were delighted to see me back in the village whence I had fled a quarter century ago. I rode out of town because life had become too painful, I was into adulthood just seven years and my future looked bleak and featureless, an unravelling of the decades in the same place doing the same thing, over and over again. We lived on the land and the cycles are unchanging, ploughing, sowing , reaping as the seasons turn. They made a movie about this syndrome called Groundhog Day, wherein the main character relives the same day over and over again without explanation. My sisters, twins and ten years older than me, relished the prospect and they grasped the rural life with a hunger that was frightening to watch. They stomped any obstacles to their desires and I was clearly not acceptable because I was miserable as the anointed figurehead, the only male in a family wedded to the land whose demands on me I loathed. Farming was not my mistress- little wonder I took to living on sailboats in California!

Such an unpromising start gave my life an urgency that can be off putting to those around me who fondly pretend that life is an endless circus.

Its not, and watching my mother make a painful transition out of this world when she was just 49, and not ready to go, has always been at the back of my mind when someone blithely says: "Oh, there's plenty of time."

In those same novels I mentioned earlier the young migrant lands on the shores of the New World filled with hope and a determination to succeed, and thus far my life agreed with the script. Where it all went very different than the script was in my definition of success. For me that came not in money accumulated in the bank, but in memories accumulated in my mind, the place that was always mine, not susceptible to moth nor rust, and eminently portable. I needed to create memories, to live more than one life within the span of however few years I had. And to be able to keep those memories wherever I ended up. A true Nomad.

On my own terms I was successful, however a Buddhist watching my progress would have had a serious case of the head shakes. This constant need to plan change, to prepare for something different, to quit and move on was the very opposite of the notion of mindfulness. My requirement was to live in the future, failing completely to appreciate the moment. I have suffered most of my life from a total incapacity to appreciate the moment, and this has forced me always to plan and project the future on the screen of my mind.

As an exercise in Buddhist serenity my life has been a failure but I have found that my frenzied formula has worked for me, inasmuch as I am learning, late in life, to settle down, to be mindful, to cherish the moment. I liken my situation to that of the fictional immigrant of literature who has accumulated a fortune and now wants to spend it buying the life he passed by on his way to racking up his financial security. I have stored up all the different phases of my life in America and this past summer was the time when i had to go to the bank and start withdrawing them to pay them down against the memories of my youth in the countryside on the banks of the Tiber River, that same river mentioned in the histories of Rome, upon whose banks Western Civilization built many of its foundations. To me, as a child, it was a muddy place to splash away the oppressive heat of summer.

There has been method to my madness because at a time when many men are going off the rails in a "mid life crisis" so called, my mid life crisis is the impelling desire to settle down in my job, not flee from it. I ride a motorcycle not because I want to appear younger or sexier or more attractive but because in a world where personal travel is a constant requirement, moving on two wheels keeps the mindfulness at maximum pitch, which is a pleasure as opposed to the dreariness of droning along in a line in a car.

Lots of motorcycle riders hold safety as the prime concern when they ride; for me mindfulness is what counts. Enjoying the moment is critical and part of the enjoyment comes from paying attention to my fellow travelers as they pass by, using their time in their cars to read phone eat talk doze or dream. Anything but focusing on the moment. Mindfulness keeps me aware that tomorrow a wreck may end or cripple the life I never take for granted. I felt that most clearly recently when I was stuck in a commercial airliner! I was riding into Fort Lauderdale airport and the plane suddenly opened up its engines and clawed back into the sky for a second attempt at the runway. Death seemed real close right then and, paradoxically, a long way from my motorcycle!

The home I grew up in, a home that was in reality a twelfth century castle, was a place I couldn't wait to escape from. Romantic for sure, but uncomfortable and unnecessarily huge, which in a world of suburban conformity makes me sound churlish and narrow. I among millions of dreamers have actually lived in a castle and have made the trade to a 700 square foot stilt house on a canal in the Keys. Palazzo Paparini in all its faded glory, no longer mine to worry about:50 rooms, seven bedrooms in my apartment alone, and only three of those spaces centrally heated. Water flooding the basement, an electrical system as medieval as the 12th century walls all covered by a leaky roof the size of three tennis courts. Not to mention a basement area huge enough to store grain for a ten year siege and wine barrels large enough to live in:That this beneficence was not enough for me caused massive ructions in and around my family, and my desire to live a fresh life made me feel ashamed. The arguments, the insults and the scorn are ignored in polite conversation now in the village, but they burned a scar on my soul. I am old enough to keep the scar covered in polite society now, and that made my return possible.

To be a prodigal from Umbria is to be cast out from one of the newly hip places on the planet, to be a refugee from Eden, to be a Displaced Person, with a cardboard suitcase and a name tag tied to one's collar. That DP is a displaced person to be pitied by fellow travelers who get to see Umbria through the rose tinted lenses of a wide eyed tourist. The story is that Adam and Eve suffered torment after their expulsion, my story is one of expulsion that led to great good fortune that could never have been replicated living alongside my sisters. Even if that life were lived in a castle.

There is a widely held belief that la dolce vita exists on the sidewalks of Italian cities, a languid lifestyle of slow food, friendship and endless witty conversations helped along by manic hand gestures. Not so. I remember vividly when my childhood buddy who grew up alongside me came to California and witnessed all the folks reading and swallowing pastries in a local coffee shop mid morning on a weekday, and he groaned in envy. " I wish I had time to live like this," he said. He doesn't even see it as a possibility for him when he retires as the Italian state pension system is running out of money and retirement age keeps getting pushed back... not very dolce at all. My sisters on the other hand, live day to day with no definition, no goals, and no sense of time, and they have learned to vegetate successfully, noblesse oblige, I suppose. My life would have driven them mad years ago, as theirs did me, and so one cannot say that life is better or worse one way or the other. But I do know this: I should have withered years ago had I remained down on the farm, and my dread-filled visit home after a quarter century absence confirmed in me the validity of my choice. I have no doubt they would not have wanted their life any other way. It was Morruzze all the way.And that is true fortune, to have confirmed by Time, the aptitude of one's youthful vision. Filmmaker Federico Fellini died wishing more people shared his vision, he wanted his weird and complex dreams to be as popular in his words as Steven Spielberg's simplistic, cheerful fairy tales. I know that is impossible because I have lived a portion of both visions and I know which one is more completely livable. I escaped from Amarcord and cracked a whip like Indiana Jones, and have had tremendous fun exploring the souks of my mind along the way.

I am a Lucky Man.