Gelato, Palio, and Groupon

    Last year I went to Italy with my 79 year old mother.   The outlook for this vacation was grim the moment we arrived in Lucca,  because traipsing up and down the cobblestone streets it was clear to me that she really couldn’t walk too well anymore.  I guess this is a moment that happens to any daughter confronting an aging parent, but at first it really angered me.
    “Why did you let yourself gain so much weight, why haven’t you kept up with exercise?,” I said to myself, and to her, in slightly less direct language.  But what I really meant was, “When did you get old?”
    But once I resigned myself to the limits of her impaired mobility, I was able to concentrate on where we actually were, instead of all the possible places we could have gotten to, had we the infinite energy I always imagine I have.  I still forced her up  third floor walk-up hotel rooms, and through the long halled museums and into each nave of every cathedral, but she got to lie down when I perambulated the streets of Sienna and take the train rather than the hike at Cinque Terre.

    I know my mom was mostly miserable on this trip and she swears she will never travel to Europe again, but we did have at least one pleasure in common, our daily gelato.  I know you can get gelato in the US, but in Italy there seems to be a gelato stand on every corner and they all seemed to offer a wonderful product.  This was the only moment each day for which Mom found a smile that wasn’t a grimace.  Sorry Mom!  I should say that when she went home, months later she actually visited a doctor and got a diagnosis that wasn’t the fault of her sloth, and could be mitigated with the right stretching exercises.
    Meanwhile, I looked at the art and architecture, especially taken with the splendor of the churches and the towns, and art so devoted to religion.  What amazes me about Europe is how much of the structure of the Renaissance and Baroque era is still there and how unified society seemed to be in the old, old days.  Surely, the pervasiveness of religion must have been stultifying in some ways, but compared to the cacophony of modern civilization, the symmetry of society seems retrospectively attractive.

    We spent several days in Siena, and I witnessed one of the pep rallies for the Palio, the horse race that would take place in the bricked square later in the summer.  Hundreds of townspeople gathered in the square to take part in and witness a ceremony of trumpets and flag tossing and singing of songs was both stirring and touching.  Of course, many Oregonians engaged in similar behavior for the recent Ducks football championship. But the fact that in Siena the tradition stretches back to the Middle Ages, gave the scene a little more majesty.

    Our society today, seems to find very little to agree upon and yet as we engage in conflict we fear its incendiary nature.  The shooting of Arizona Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, is the most shocking evidence of the animosity hanging in the air.  The fact is,  we are united more by the products we share, than by any central truth.  Is it possible that while commercial speech aims to join us together in pursuit of a common expenditure, such as Groupon does, political speech is focused on splitting us down the middle?  An old friend called me to talk to someone she was sure would share her views on recent political events, but we ended up disagreeing on taxes and government, differences I never knew were there.  Sometimes, I wonder if it would have been better in Siena in the 1500's.   Then I remember the Montagues and Capulets and realize it has always been this way.

First Travels

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep



Going to the beach at the end of our block was the place I traveled to most often as a child. That short trip allowed me to leave our overcrowded home and see the limitless horizon. From the age of six or seven we were able to go outdoors to play anywhere we could get to safely by foot or bike. I remember getting up early on sunny Saturdays, heading to the ocean by bike, riding to where the concrete dead-ended into beach plum and rosehips. I would drop the bike into the sand and walk up to the top of the dunes to check the waves. Even though I was never a surfer, I learned to notice what made good prospects, waves a decent height with a long clean roll, so that I could report back to whomever might need to know. If I was going back to the house for breakfast, I might meet a fellow early riser walking his dog who would ask, “How are the waves?” “Pretty choppy and broken up,” I’d say, instead of hello.

The beach was a place where I could walk all day if I wanted, although my feet would start to complain after a couple of miles of sand. Sometimes a group of us would travel too far along the edge, around jetty after jetty, to walk back. Then we would decide whose parent might be most willing to come rescue us and use one of the payphones on the boardwalk or in any close fast food shack to beg for a pick-up.

Although we lived on an island, I never felt like there was a limit to exploring and the ocean offered new possibilities of treasures on each stroll. Even the way the tide changed the texture of the beach would be different each day. A low tide might create a stretch of hard sand, great for running or drawing elaborate games of hopscotch. A high tide washing up against the soft sand, creating a little cliffs that would make walking tough, might offer the perfect timing to play a favorite sand castle game, where we tried to defend a walled city against a rising tide. We would imagine that we were protecting New York City and it was up to us to keep the millions from drowning. Inevitably, the water always won, but the struggle was as exciting as any disaster movie we imitated.

Maybe growing up with the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the street instilled my need to go outside in order to see what is inside. Going over the dunes to check the waves is a way to see which way my own tide is pulling and what treasures have come ashore.