Traveling Home

Two weeks in Italy have come and gone and I am back sleeping aboard GANNET2 and glad to be home in

my van with my wife and dog enjoying the cooling coastal breezes of the central California coast. 

Layne was pleased to see me no doubt but Rusty hasn’t let me out of his sight. He didn’t mope while I was gone but he pushed his face into mine when I got into the back seat at the airport and let me know he had waited patiently but was glad I was back. And just like that Italy was in the rear view mirror. 

Something changed this visit and I found some inner equilibrium missing on past journeys to the place where I grew up. Previously I had landed among my family as a man on a mission wondering where my retirement might lead but this time my visit to the beauties of central Italy was an interruption in my fully formed retirement life. 

Seven days of Covid isolation confirmed in my head my desire to get back to where I wanted to be. The Immigration officer smiled at San Francisco airport when I said I’d been in Italy two weeks. “Was it enough?” “You don’t know my family” I replied as I swept up my US passport. “More than enough.” 

I very brilliantly gave my 75 year old sister (the one on the left in the 55 year old picture below with her twin and our mother) my dose of Covid and in the land of free health care they kept her isolated in the hospital simply as a precaution. Ironically she went home none the worse for wear the day I flew back to California. 

I have no family photo of this trip, everyone was living their routines and my presence, now that my sister was in the hospital was incidental to those lives lived farming and running a hotel and being busy. I had a rental car and the will to use it. 

It was all strangely liberating.  I did my rounds checking out the castle I grew up in, still austere, still there filled with memories of  gothic loneliness, my mother dead, my sisters busy as always, inherited their own preferred homes on different hills among our hundreds of acres, my father indifferent in London and fifty rooms all to myself. I caused scandal not wanting to live out my inheritance, the last male in the family rejecting the anointed role. 

Nowadays no one cares, my escaping to America an object of curiosity and envy even and I finally understood that. My self conscious return to my roots has been a matter of supreme indifference to those around me. My scandalous behavior has been superseded by so much more interesting gossip in the intervening forty one years. 

These spaces I remember from my  childhood are populated by the ghosts of my memory and the people I met on the ground were almost all visitors, a few people spending summer vacations back where their family roots are in these villages, but others were purely tourists walking the woodland trails suddenly made popular by savvy marketing. I saw lots of over heated exhausted “trekkers” in the hundred degree heat: 

I met people from my youth, people who knew not what to say as I appeared as if by magic from a distant past. I smiled and asked how they were doing and we talked about the passing of time and how young I look and is America nice and we avoided the details of my youthful despair and sudden departure. 

I met Carletto at the village store, an 80 year old man in sound health but the strapping tractor driver of my youth was still visible inside the cheerful (despite the photographic appearance) pensioner today. Below with his father decades ago: 

I live in a van.  I drive around. Not words you expect to hear in a place rooted in tradition and learned, expected behaviors but even my brother in law nodded his head wisely at my retirement lifestyle. Smart, he said, you avoid paying the government property taxes. Then we moved on to the much more important subject of how migrants and refugees are ruining Italy. I didn’t even think of disagreeing or having a contrary opinion, I just breathed a sigh of relief and let the rants flow over me. 

You’d think I’d have figured out my insignificance years ago, but for far too long I’ve carried that burden of having let my family down.  In my defense as might seem obvious, I’ve never really had proper training in the social niceties, so it takes me more time and self torture to figure out what is obvious to my neighbors. You don’t care and I don’t matter. I live out of sight and out of mind and it’s time I understood that. 

In the spirit of the new me I spent time at the hospital with my sister, the one who always asks me to visit and I established a cheerful friendship with her eldest son, the happiest most fulfilled member of the family. Everyone else got a wave in passing and my best wishes for happiness and fulfillment. 

I’ve got some driving to do.

The past is another country: they do things differently there. 

Another Country

I have never treated my telephone as anything other than the miracle it is. I have listened to people curse the mobile telephone world we live in as though it is somehow an implement without an "off" button. To like one's potable phone is somehow to epitomize  the life of an anti-social, hermit freak, someone who lives without true friends who exists only in the ether on"social media." Yet for me, my iPhone is so much more. It is a camera, a library, a compass, a navigator, a flashlight, a telegraph, a fax, a radio, a television, a publishing house, a weather station, a notebook,a gramophone player, a news stand,an archive,a Dictaphone, an atlas and so much more. I grew up in a world which lived by actual horsepower, that expected people to live in homes with (hopefully) cold running water and communal televisions, a world where oxen plowed fields and walking was the main means of locomotion.

I was a child of privilege fully equipped with hot and cold water, indoor plumbing and servants, but I who grew up speaking three languages no more imagined portable telephones than I could conceive a world where everyone in these villages owned a car.

I first noticed the mobile phone transformation when we traveled, my wife and I, on a three week road trip behind the recently removed Iron Curtain. The countries of Eastern Europe in those days of the mid 90s went straight to cell phones and skipped the whole landline dilemma, which we clung to for a decade longer. Our Western rental car out performed the two stroke Trabants we encountered but the young people in Czechia and Poland walked around with phones glued to their ears. Texting was still just over the horizon. In the picture below you can see an outline of my mother watching the procession from the shadow of the kitchen window in the castle where I grew up. We had a TV and the rest of the village shared a TV for the single channel broadcast in Italy at the time. We children democratically preferred to watch television with the children of the village rather than alone in one of our several living rooms.

Before she left to live a month with my family in Italy my wife took me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to download one more application on my phone. I whined but she was relentless. WhatsApp uses the Internet to make phone calls and unlike the cell signal my wife uses in the lonely mountains of my youth the WiFi at my family's bed and breakfast gives us a perfectly clear signal on which to talk. It is amazing. In my childhood the task of calling my father in England when my mother and sisters and I were on summer vacation in Italy was an all night affair. There were no cinemas within 45 minutes drive on gravel roads, so for entertainment we went to the next village which had a phone and sat for hours in the cobblers shop where Carletto repaired shoes and waited for the various operators to connect lines from our home in England to our village in Umbria. Our world in Italy was limited to a few villages in a narrow radius.

These days there is an app for everything, including travel bookings, such that travel agents are pretty much vanished for ordinary folk. Newspapers struggle  with electrons and writers struggle with free content. Cable TV is overrun by streaming content. Change is everywhere; food delivery is real, electioneering by Facebook is commonplace. Yet to me the simple fact that I can talk to my wife in Italy for free on a  crystal clear internet phone line from the phone in my pocket still seems like a miracle. I could even do a video link if I so chose but we are old and prefer our phone links to be audio only.

"The past is another country; they do things differently there." That quotation from L P Hartley has haunted the second half of my life, every time I think about my bifurcated youth, half in a proper English boarding school, half let loose in the empty countryside of my Italian vacations, I think of how much the world has changed. My wife spent months with her telephone studying Italian on a Duolingo App (of course) and now she is away for three weeks in a classroom setting every weekday, learning to drive without me, to order food without me, to talk to my Italian relatives without me, learning to function without me as her interpreter I am connected once again only by my iPhone.

When I was a child the phone booth in the 1960s was installed in this man's shop (above), Lorenzo was the cobbler and his shop smelled of glue and leather and I sat at that well worn table playing with tacks and lumps of dried glue while my mother handled the phone and tried to get a connection to London. If, after hours of calling back and forth the connection was made my father's voice came down the wires reverberating and distant as though he was on he moon. Even then my little mind was boggled imaging our distant connection putting me monetarily in the living room at home in England, lifting me out of Lorenzo's workshop in Morre, all along the length of a tiny piece of wire. After the call my mother and sisters and sleepy little me staggered out into the night once more immersed in Italy and Italian and dirt roads and faint street lights and outhouses, a century behind our orderly English life. 

Gravel roads and a beast of burden, a human being, in the good old days:

I don't know if phones are stunting our social skills or if Amazon will destroy our middle class insecurities as we know them. But I do know its nice to be able to call half way round the world on a whim and to be able to hear the voice at the other end as though she were here. At least I am getting something slightly useful out of the revolution before it destroys us.

Generation Gap

This visit to my family in Italy has seen me spending more time with my brother in law than in years past. He has retired from a lifetime of farming and has handed the land over to his two sons. He cultivates his vegetables and watches them innovate from a distance. 

He is of the school of thought that doesn’t hold with debt or cultivation planned by outsiders. His sons are growing dedicated fields of wheat for pasta makers who offer higher than market prices for wheat grown to their specifications. Something old man Vincenzo would never countenance. 

I sipped grappa and left them to debate the merits. I have never had an interest in, never mind passionate feelings about farming. That’s why I ran away to America 36 years ago, but these points of view rank high on the scale of importance in the valley where I spent my childhood when not in school. 

Young Daniele has embraced renewable energy which his father views with some suspicion. Solar water heaters and electricity from photovoltaic cells and wind generators are part of Europe’s commitment to reducing carbon. For old man Vincenzo it is an innovation and thus clearly not sensible. 

He knows every trail and hidden water source, the names of plants and the uses of old ox drawn farm

implements.

His eldest son Daniele educated at a farming college and now 42 applies for grants and loans from the European Union for what is now his farm. He doesn’t listen to the wisdom of his father’s generation as he seeks a better return from his fields using techniques learned at conferences not at the school of hard knocks.

Since I never had the farming gene I caused quite a ruckus when, after many family arguments I got on my motorcycle one night in 1982 and rode away never to look back. I don’t regret it. My brother in law after decades of anger, these days says I was brave to go away. I think his son is brave to stay and work out how to make a living from mountain land and deal with the second guessing from the peanut gallery. 

The mother and wife, my sister says nothing. She told me who she supports inside her own head but I don’t think I’m meant to tell. We are both passive observers. 

Tradition is supposed to be the way of the Umbrians a people who pre-date the Romans and taught the Etruscans of Tuscany a thing or two, but these days tradition is more of an advertising slogan. I avoid the farm, farming and talk of farming. Even in church I stay to one side since my brother in law found religion.  He does nothing by halves and doesn’t need to know I shed Catholicism with farming on that flight to San Francisco 36 years ago. 

I am glad it’s someone else’s turn to be the family rebel though I can’t tell if that is the role of the father or of the son. I watch and wait for the dust to settle. And I fear very much there’s only one way that will happen in the fullness of time. 

A traditional funeral notice:

Did I mention Umbrians are stubborn?  Look no further than my family. I made the mistake of mentioning out loud I thought a new neighbor from Rome might be gay, wondering how she fit in. Well it turns out that stupidly thoughtless line of conversation landed me in a hell hole of 19th century prejudice which clearly sees me bound for eternal damnation. I trust my gay friends will forgive me if I confess I did not fight the fight, I cursed myself silently for not knowing when to shut up and I listened to the diatribe which ran on familiar and futile ground.

Umbria is beautiful and that’s all we need to know. Keep it superficial and keep on keeping on. Advertising slogans rule: “Umbria, the green heart of Italy.”  

If you would like an outsider’s view of this strange place forget My Villa in Umbria and other such rose tinted tripe and read about a neighboring village in stark detail. The family in Marcus of Umbria is known to my relatives and boy were my nieces surprised when I told them the American with the dog wrote a book. 

Available in digital format. 

The Past

Life in my corner of Italy has changed a lot and not at all. If you are my sisters who have resisted the advance of technology all their lives things have not changed at all. They are twins and ten years older than I and color television was the beginning of the end of civilization for them. The internet has wrecked the picture postcard habit. They like the old ways and adhere to them with gentle stubbornness. 

The married couple on the left, the widow on the right, me taking the obligatory portrait. My sisters this year fade into the background as my brother in law Vincenzo has made 2018 the start of a new more intense relationship with me. 

Thin and wiry he grew up a farmer and married my sister the heiress over fifty years ago. He told me yesterday for the first time he married her because she found beauty and joy in the place she lived. Not because of her land; I had never thought of him as a gold digger. They thought of selling their land but they could think of nothing else to do so they raised their boys there and now the old folks are sidelined, the boys farm and their wives run the bed and breakfast. 

We take long walks in the woods talking about the past and it’s mistakes, the future in a country that can not straighten out its politics and a present that is hedged in by rules and restrictions that deal with issues that have never been problems. 

Every activity Vincenzo used to undertake has now been stymied because of regulations and European restrictions and health and safety rules. He enjoys retirement with his dog Caramella and his vegetable patches and watches his sons work as hard as he once did. 

Italy he says is a country without a purpose. Italians have lost motivation and he too finds petty bureaucracy maddening. He warns me against living in Italy. Taxes are high and services don’t work. In this Byzantine world where every message must be understood on all levels I find myself trying to parse hidden meanings. 

Does he mean I’m not wanted here? Is he expressing his discontent? Who knows. I listen and am glad he confides in me so I can unravel later the hidden meaning. He is doing me a favor and reminding me how complicated life is here. But he is also confiding in me so I have somehow earned his respect. You brave to go to America he says. I was desperate I say and he shakes his head. 

I like being a visitor. Perhaps I am irresponsible perhaps I am lazy but for a week I get time to not care about the big picture. We talk of the past, of people we knew. The night I arrived he had to go to a funeral. So far we are the lucky ones he said. So far.