Italy

As this page appears on my blog I ought to be switching planes in Berlin, with my arrival planned for lunch local time, barely breakfast time in the Keys. Between now and the 18th I will with any luck spend my days getting ready to go for bright sunlit rides. Perhaps somewhere like this, Bramante's (attributed) Church of Our Lady of Consolation, la Consolazione, in Todi, province of Perugia.

I am posting these pictures, taken on several trips since 2007 as a frontispiece to what I hope will be essays from Italy. However wireless Internet access is surprisingly iffy in Italy, especially among the Web rejectionists among whom I live, while there. Neither my buddy Giovanni, nor my sisters care much for connectivity. I will do what I can. This is Positano to which we rode in 2007, Giovanni and I, on the Amalfi Coast.

We also went to Pompeii which I had longed to see all my life. This floor in a doorway to a Roman villa says Cave Canem - beware of the dog- proving some thing haven't changed in thousands of years. I will already be missing Cheyenne who will treat me as a stranger when I get home.

The village kids when we were growing up in the mid 1960s. Mopeds and bicycles were a critical part of our isolated lives. I believe I was the wobbly photographer here. One of my sisters, Patricia is on the right in white. She is ten years older than me, and she and her twin are married and inconceivably old, 66 now after a life spent in this very same spot.

The countryside of my youth. I started rising the gravel roads of these hills in 1970 when I was twelve years old on an orange Vespa 50. My mother bought it for me after my parents were divorced. She loved motorcycles while my father hated them. Here I learned to tour on two wheels at a young age:

Giovanni the cardiologist never gets a break from his patients. "Signora, I am on vacation for a few days..." Italians are hypochondriacs so he has plenty of EKG work in his private office. He also works in the local hospital to pay back his state medical education and also to get a state pension. His father was a cardiologist before him and he has been one for the twenty years five i have been goofing off around the world and yet he smokes! I used to help him hide his cigarettes from his disapproving parents when we were teenagers riding together.

The brothers by different parents, as we describe ourselves, trip planning. Giovanni has lots of ideas where to go, we pick a direction based on the weather, then we ride. He is a state employee with a very nice home. Free health care doesn't make doctors impoverished, and he firmly believes in the right to single payer. He appreciates Americans paying through the nose for second rate care as he gets the benefit of NIH research. Italy is rated as the second best health care system in the world by the UN. I think more and more about retiring here as old age and American anti-aging bias impinge.

Giovanni and his dad. Hid Dad Melito looks as old as Giovanni's grandfather used to look when I was a kid. Temps fugit.

And his very energetic Mom making us a feast of left overs for dinner. She used to give me severe takings to when I was abandoned at home by my warring family, telling me to ignore the chaos and keep studying, and then she'd give me lunch and I craved the order and peace of Giovanni's family home. I love eating real Italian food where it's all about the freshest ingredients.

My brother in law has got over my desertion from the family farm and he enjoys showing off his grand kids. His home is a haven of peace these days. He cures his own meat, makes his own olive oil and takes his grand kids to church. He got drunk once fifty years ago and hated it so much he never drank again. He makes a decent barrel of wine when has a mind to. Since Italy passed a helmet law a few years ago he refuses to ride his Vespa anymore, saying he'd feel stupid wearing a helmet on a machine that doesn't go over forty miles an hour. He is stubborn beyond anyone I have known.

Here he is from about 45 years ago when he was courting my sister on his Vespa. He still has the Vespa and they are still married. I used to ride on the front holding the handlebars while my sister was riding side saddle on the back...

Nowadays Giovanni and I ride and stop from time to time for coffee and cigarettes (him) and pictures (me). We talk about the past and the present, politics which in Italy are too complex to explain, and his hopes for his boy and girl,and the prospect of no real retirement. Work and riding are all he does and lots of family vacations.

And we stop for a "quick lunch" which turns into... And Giovanni has the same sweet tooth I do so we end up with dessert.

I do enjoy the riding too on motorcycles absurdly more powerful and better equipped than the motorized bicycles of my youth. My first motorcycle purchased used in 1975, an MV Agusta 350 (photo below from the Internet), which cost me half a million lire ($300). I rode it to Austria, Germany, Holland, Britain and France over the two years I owned it, camping along the way. Totally inappropriate touring motorcycle but I loved crouching over the long red tank with its decal "World Champion Motorcycles" ( as seen at the Barber museum)...

 

...while imagining myself and my luggage alongside Giacomo Agostini, world champion factory rider! I suppose it's little wonder I am impatient with modern riders who need the exact right motorcycle and the exact right gear, and a lot of it before they go riding.

Modern riders like this oaf and his 170 horsepower electronic everything equipped BMW K1200S. What a ride! 125 mph on the freeway felt like 55 on the Overseas Highway on my venerable Hinckley Bonneville.

From the road to home life. Giovanni's wife and daughter, Rossana met Giovanni just before I emigrated and she remembers me a lot better than I remember her. I think Giovanni has more wistfulness about what might have been than she does. His dream has always been to become a general practitioner in a small western town in the US. He never learned fluent English as a kid and his father had his life planned for him and he the dutiful son put his shoulder to the wheel.

The square in my village has been renamed in honor of my grandfather. He had a wild life which came to him rather than him going to it. He kee five years before I was born but everyone said I looked just like him as a youth. I was supposed to be baptized Cesare but living in a bi-lingual family they had to find a transnational name for me as Caesar in England is reserved for Julius of historic fame. So I was named for my celibate great uncle a priest whose vocation kept the family land holdings from being split among descendants. My grandfather loved cars and motorcycles and when I was a kid they told stories about how he kept one step ahead of the Gestapo by riding into the mountains on his pre war Harley Davidson. He drove coast to coast across the US in 1925 in a Packard convertible. When it was stolen while he was at lunch he went to the nearest dealer and bought a replacement to complete the trip to San Francisco. That any of his fortune was left was thanks to World War Two which ruined lives but made farm products highly valued commodities and he owned all the land you could see from the top of the castle.

I used to never talk about my childhood or of my rather imposing ancestral home when I ran away to California by way of Key West in 1981. I stayed away for 25 years making my own life in the new world where I didn't have to be Cesare's grandson or Maria Luisa's son. When I went back in 2007 for the first time I was a real anxious prodigal son. I needn't have worried, as everyone seemed quite pleased to see me, even if at first they didn't recognize, some of them.

Where we used to gather when we were kids. Hardly anyone lives in the village anymore. Of the seven in this picture two are dead and only the guy sitting on his brother's knee still lives there as the not well liked local cop!

And this was before they paved the roads in 1973, when running water was turned on at the public faucet two hours a day. Seeing women with jugs on their heads was a common sight in the 1960s. The Vespa in the background, an inconsequential background detail to my sister taking the picture of her friend Dolores doing her chores, would be a valued by modern Vespa fanatics in my adopted country.

When I was a child farm workers commuted on rough gravel roads on these mass produced little red motorcycles and they were quite ready to abandon them where they stood when their children old afford cars. Now they are little red cultural icons stored and revered in places like the Barber Mueum in Alabama. Sometimes I feel as old as Methuselah, a relic from a distant era. And I'm only 55!

And the other side of my life was at Hogwarts in England where they tried to turn me into a proper English gentleman. I'm the black haired eight year old grinning widely in the middle of the group, in the back row.

It didn't work! Which is hardly surprising as I spent my summers in a Huckleberry Finn delirium of endless summer days riding empty mountain roads, by bicycle first and Vespa later, walking fields and trails with my home made slingshot ambushing innocent shepherds herding their biblical flocks or springing with deadly intent on housewives hanging laundry on the line. If I got into town, Todi, now a tourist Mecca for the well traveled sophisticate but in those days hardly know to anyone but art historians, I would come across lost Americans wrapped in bright clothes and an air of fearful anticipation and I would delight in popping out of the crowd, startle the shit out of them by giving them directions in my plummy English schoolboy accent before melting back into the crowds like the little street urchin I was.

I preferred my Italian wilderness. And I still do especially on two wheels.

It would have been tough for me to settle down in Umbria with the wanderlust I was born with, not to mention the uncommunicative melodramatic family I was born into. I was half pushed and half leapt out of the life of privilege I grew up in and I don't regret a minute of it. I am growing older and wiser and though there are things left undone that can no longer be done I did the best I could with the hand I was dealt and I face old age if I'm lucky and death if I'm not, with no qualms. I have a happy home and valuable patient friends and my dog who I miss even before I am properly out the door. I have even found a motorcycle that suits me perfectly after a lifetime of looking and one day soon I hope my new/ancient Vespa will be restored and returned to me for another great nostalgia trip. All that and a job I love. Could I have found all that in Italy? I doubt it, and now I'll never know.

So be it. Così sia.

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RIP Solares Hill

 

 

It is churlish I suppose to say that for some time now I haven't made it a practice to read Solares Hill, the weekly magazine wedged into the Sunday Citizen between the advertising fliers and the sports section. But to deny it would be a lie. I suppose it was inevitable that in a world of diminishing print news a weekly magazine owned by the daily newspaper would lose it's raison d'être in a circulation as small as that of even the entire Florida Keys. Mark Howell has been let go along with his assistant Nadja Hansen and even the venerable Sports Editor Ralph Morrow a fixture for 20 years in the main newspaper.

Mark Howell, the Welshman, is an excellent writer a great observer of humans in action and editing the newspaper was for him apparently a secondary skill and it seemed inevitable to me that when the newspaper lost its most interesting voice to editing and hunting advertising it became perforce less worthwhile.

 

There were contributors, Diane Roberts with her one note humor on the corrupt foibles of our leaders in Tallahassee, and C S Gilbert reviewing culture with a resolute eye, but so much of Solares Hill was given over to the chummy name dropping of the film reviewer and empty how to articles from the insider cliques I started just drifting through and over and past the few thin pages that lately seemed to lack trenchant political comment and critical thinking. I guess the owners got the message, for in their note mentioning the imminent demise of the magazine (last edition Sunday September 8th) they said it was lack of advertising income that did for the paper. I guess I feel lucky that despite any and all shortcomings a town as small as Key West still puts out a full daily newspaper that lands with a thud in my driveway every morning before dawn. Can you say as much where you live?

The Key West Citizen will cease publishing the Solares Hill, The Citizen's Sunday magazine section, as of the Sept. 8 edition.

Publisher Paul A Clarin made the announcement to the Citizen staff on Wednesday.

"Over the past few weeks, we made the difficult decision to stop publishing Solares Hill," he said. "As with many publications these days, there simply has not been enough advertiser support to sustain the feature-rich section."

Clarin said, "Solares Hill was quite popular with Citizen readers and has always added a unique voice to the paper. From insightful observations of our town and the Florida Keys to our links to the Bay of Pigs training sites, the editor and writers of Solares Hill always looked beyond the obvious and dug a little deeper. It's a tragic fact these days that reader interest does not guarantee the financial success of a publication."

The Solares Hill Editor and Associate Editor's positions have been eliminated. Mark Howell and Nadja Hansen will be leaving the company.

In other Citizen newsroom reorganization, the Sports Editor position has been eliminated and editor Ralph Morrow will be leaving The Citizen.

"As we move forward, we will merge some of the Solares Hill columns and features into our Sunday newspaper. This will be an evolving process over the next few weeks, part of our continuing efforts to keep The Key West Citizen a strong, financially successful publication," Clarin said.

 

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Vacation Nostalgia

Umbria, Italy, land of farms, rivers and millennial traditions. It's where I grew up and learned to ride.

Today I board an Air Berlin flight from Miami to Rome. I return September 19th and I know that it won't be enough time and it will be too much time all at the same time. My wife got free mileage tickets and Giovanni, my brother by other parents will put me up so it will be a cheap-ish vacation.

The best part is my sisters really wanted me to visit, they were freakishly insistent as I haven't been back since 2011 and they felt it was time. This from two twin older sisters who used to treat me as though I were a carbuncle on the face of the planet. We didn't worry about emissions back then, or waste disposal or recycling. We expected electric lights, running water at least wo oes a day and a newspaper in the town thirty minutes away by motorcycle. Todi was our market town where the sophistication of the city offered us restaurants and a movie theater and lawyers offices. Today Todi is a cute artsy town where Americans go to experience the "real" Umbria away from the tourist traps of Assisi and Orvieto and Perugia. That's been a change I've had to cope with, my home town a destination?

We got a package of something or other last week at home and I was astonished to see a small, perfectly mailable box inside a bigger box with brown paper used as packing material. What ever happened to waste not, want not? Bloody idiots, they seem so out of touch in the 21st century America where I now live. When I was a kid I wouldn't have noticed.

Back to my vacation expectations. Giovanni tells me he has secured the use of a rather decent touring BMW motorcycle for my use during my stay, like the one he was riding above in 2009. Last year he bought a new 1600 six cylinder BMW and he loves it. Giovanni rides a lot and does a fair bit of freeway riding too, he drives an Audi but prefers to ride as do I when he can; we've been riding together since 1970, before that when we only had pedals. I leave Cheyenne in my wife's good hands and I will miss her half as much as she misses me.

Giovanni and I took different paths. My mother married an Englishman and I learned English from infancy which gave me a huge leg up in the emigration stakes. Besides I always had itchy feet, I wanted to see what was over the horizon, where Giovanni had a career path mapped out by his cardiologist father. He settled down, married and had children and a career while I goofed off to Northern California. I used to ride to this deserted mountain spot to show girls the prowess of my moped 40 years ago. Nowadays the hill climb seems like a bump on the modern motorcycles I ride, and riding the with Giovanni for company is somehow less enticing than the company of those distant days of fumbling exploration.

Key West stays behind of course, and when I get home I will have the prospect of soon getting back to my preferred night shift, the days will be shorter but still warm, my wife will be happy to see me and my dog too. I will be exchanging my borrowed BMW for my 76,000 mile Triumph and getting back to my torn up commute on the Boulevard.

I don't know where the fourteen year old kid with a stammer and an early smoking habit went. He became a cardiologist and still smokes. He's traveled the world but always came home to Central Italy where he belongs, and by belonging becomes my anchor. We neither of us are men's men, we don't do sports, we don't drink to get drunk, we don't play cards, we just ride motorcycles and talk about the meaning of life and our shared history. Giovanni isn't a great philosopher, he fears death and doesn't like to talk about it. So we make the most of our time together and ten days together is sufficient to exhaust us emotionally and mentally. I'll be ready to come home always with regrets. There he is in jeans in the summer heat in the late 1960s roughly. We knew nothing of the Vietnam war or draft cards.

Key West stays the same for me, a refuge, a spot almost off the map with perfect weather and not enough of anything but just enough of everything. I have a refuge in my home and I have a refuge in my job, a fact that surprises me when I think about my job. I like the life. I don't know that Italy would have given me the opportunities to experience life the way America has. In fact I'm sure my life would have been far more constricted, and for that I am grateful.

And when I think back to the little brat I was (the one in the hat) my whole life ahead of me I wonder what the hell I expected. Honestly I think I've lived most of my life in a fog, no planning required, drifting where the mood took me. Until 2008 when the conomy crashed and I was suddenly a difficult to place middle aged worker I always felt I could go anywhere and get a job and make a go of it. So I did. I learned how to apply for a job and rent an apartment, I lived in California because that was where Hollywood said one should live. I learned to like homosexuals and think of them as ordinary people, I learned to de-objectify women as much as my hormones allowed (and the chance of getting laid required) and I got into sailing. I tried hang gliding and learned that was not my sport, nor was scuba diving, too complicated and time consuming in cold dark water. I hated the coastal California weather but I loved the life. All that came to the little boy in the silly hat when he found the nerve to leave his family and home.

I have been getting a bit antsy worrying that I am in the final leg of a life that has taken me round the world, quite a lot of it on two wheels. Is this where it ends? I ask myself. Maybe, but it's not bad as a place to wash up. I have regrets, how could one not? On the whole though I did as well as I could with hand I was dealt. I've been married for twenty years (thanks to her patience) and I am actually eligible for a pension, after a life lived outside the boundaries of a conventional career. Weird that.

I know my wife is jealous of my trip and she is planning a three week extravaganza next year and what she knows I will be enjoying is home cooking at the hands of Rossana, Giovanni's long suffering wife. She'll show me round her garden, she'll confide in me her hopes and fears for the future, their children struggling to find work in a failing Italian economy, her irritations at her work as the doctor in charge of the local medical lab. I met Rossana before they got married and then I disappeared out of Giovanni's life and now she puts up with me stealing him away to go riding. Then she feeds us when we get home.

I went to see my bike mechanic Jiri on Stock Island and we had a little chat, he struggling with his wife who has family obligations in Michigan and he who,loves living on Stock Island. He has aing parents in Czech and when I tell him of my return to Europe to ride his eyes light up and he says "I've got to do that." He goes home to help his parents maintain their home, replace their furniture and ease them int a dignified and comfortable old age. I go to Italy to ride. I am a grasshopper, he is an ant. I saw him taking off up Highway One road testing a K1200R, a 170 horsepower rocket I rented in Italy in 2007 and which blew my middle aged socks off.

Italians love to sit around and talk and when I was a kid it made me crazy. It was like I was the only passenger on a train who liked to read a book, and sitting in a compartment with a bunch of people nattering would drive me to each for hours in the corridor on fold out stools for the chance to read, albeit uncomfortably. To sit with my nose buried in the pages of a good read was considered rude and I lived in a culture where making conversation was the highest art. I can't wait to escape I told myself. Now they look quaint and part of who I might have been when I see them at the cafés doing their Italian thing.

I know when it comes time to leave I won't have seen enough, talked enough with my sisters and their husbands, talked enough with Giovanni or his family ( seen here with his Dad, a shockingly old man who was in his prime when I left in 1982 for the last time), but I know I will have made best use of the time I had, which is in itself a lesson for the rest of our lives.

This will be us in a few decades, if we live that long, and we too will be reminiscing, perhaps about the golden age of motorcycles when they ran on gas and you could ride around the world. I read about the ghastly effects of climate change "...by the year 2050," but 2050 is long past my sell by date. I figure I will be lucky to see and be aware of 2035 for by then I shall be 77 or so and quite ripe I am sure. So I do my reminiscing now to make sure I enjoy as much of everyday life as I can.

I wonder about people who don't love their lives as much as people who don't love their dogs. It's so easy to love a dog and it's so easy to not love one's own life. Time is running out for us, for our way of life, and change which could be for the better isn't always seen that way. It's change and it's inevitable, but I still look back and miss the glory days of my youth when everything was perfect and motorcycles were great. Sometimes Stock Island in all it's third world glory looks like the Umbria of my peasant youth.

 

I could go on, I have a treasure trove of pictures gleaned from my precious trips since 2007 when I started revisiting my old home. Suffice it to say I will be riding and enjoying great food in fine company and I will miss my current home and all it contains.

We never had motorcycles this good in my perfect youth. Nostalgia, what a fickle mistress!

 

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Stock Island Walk

Perhaps by the time I get back from vacation the old fire station, as crumbling and picturesque as it may be, will have been replaced. The new fire station has been in the throes of construction for a while and is still only an empty cement shell behind this inadequate building.

Stock Island has been threatened with major revamping for along time. Before the economic crash of 2008 developers were trying to up the whole island a d the future of its numerous low income housing solutions was in limbo. Small businesses and light industry have flocked to Stock Island so they can be close to Key West, the city with the greatest demand, but at the same time pay less rent or smaller mortgages.

There is land to spare on Stock Island and all you need to get to a job in Old Town Key West, five miles away, is a scooter and fifteen minutes of your time, depending on traffic conditions.

Before the Crash housing on Stock Island had its own boom and modest houses set in the avenues, a dozen streets devoted to housing, could set you back more than six hundred thousand for a really nice home. This at a time when a cottage in tourist Key West needed a million to buy. Here as elsewhere the banks have kicked out the bankrupt owners and perfectly good housing is left to rot.

Villa Patricia they call this collection of 1960s style units. I doubt you could rent one and get change out of a grand, and they look nicely kept.

For Cheyenne abandoned flower beds are treasure troves of abandoned food, and they make her happy.

She also foundation bag of home made tamales, wrapped in leaves and tied with string. I would have fought her for them has they not been marinating in a ditch. I can only imagine some drunk spent their hangover wondering there they put their lunch and dinner on their way home. Cheyenne found more than she could eat.

I was admiring the long range planning going into this hull of a formerly glorious cabin cruiser when finally I too noticed the fearful cat. Cheyenne looked up once and move on.

A typical selection of Stock Island small businesses.

This collection of apartments seems like it should have passed its sell by date, but I do believe people live here.

It's not Old Town by any means but Key West wouldn't function without it. you can check it out as you zip in to the waterside Hogfish Restaurant in Safe Harbor.

These are the places where Cubans and Haitians make their homes so they'd an commute to all those jobs that make the tourist industry in Key West work, it's the unglamourous side of Paradise.

There's an earthy authenticity to Stock Island and when I'm walking here in the land of chained dogs and security fences and dusty weed strewn lots I think of Hemingway's descriptions of early 20th century Key West in To Have And To Have Not.

I don't feel at home here but I am glad it is still available to those hardy souls who can live here and wash your bed sheets for you and send some money home to keep the family in food. My hat's off to them.

 

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