A Posting from North Dakota

Wednesday, July 8

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when somebody says “North Dakota?” I think of prairies, sod houses, buffalo, and the movie Fargo. Apparently, from what I’m gathering– and I’m still on the plane– the reality is kind of different. Granted, we’re simply going to Bismarck (via a flight to Minneapolis and then an 8-hour drive in aunt Bunny’s SUV) for Kirk’s family reunion, and that’s all wonderful– Kirk’s family has never been less than stellar– but I am getting the impression that I’ll have to be buck up and act like a cowboy rather than like the over-indulged spoiled brat that you have come to know and love. And this has nothing to do with the family reunion; after all, I’m Tusacn, and the blood of nefarious Medicis and Borgias courses through my veins, and we all know what they were like. Instead, my mind is akimbo at the prospect of a trip to Medora.

Medora  is even further west than Bismarck. Bismarck, after eight hours’ driving, will seem like Ultima Thule, but there’s a lot more beyond that town and we’ll be driving towards it. Medora is almost to Montana, which is almost to China. Do you see my point?

In Medora they stage a Broadway-style revue which, via music, dance and yodeling, covers the history of  The Flickertail State. I’ve looked it up online, and it’s very well done– I’m sincerely looking forward to it– but it’s the meat and the horses that are beginning to give me pause. (Even if I am well into my second gin and tonic up here in Business Class. Don’t you love it? In those halcyon pre-politically correct days, the seat I’m comfortably lolling in used to be known as First Class, which is exactly how one feels after two gin and tonics.)

In Medora there is also a big feed involving steaks that have been mounted on the tines of pitchforks and then plunged into boiling oil. It’s called “Steak Fondue.” Thousands of people line up for this culinary health challenge, which is accompanied by mounds of starch and a few balancing vegetables. You sit at long tables with strangers (possibly the same people who coughed on you during your flight) and heartily dig in until the cows come home; apparently, we get to eat those, too. I was telling my friend Martha about this, and she and her husband were appalled, he being a nutritionist-dietician. Can you blame them? Why not just swallow a tub full of Snickers bars coated in strawberry-flavored trans fats? I asked Kirk if I could get a salad instead, and he replied with that stoic sense of Midwesterness that gets him through things like overflowing toilets and hurricanes: “Cowboys don’t eat salad. They eat meat. You have to act like a cowboy on the prairie.”

Then there are the horses. There is a slim chance that I may have to climb up onto a horse and have my picture taken while wearing the family reunion tee shirt. Now, horses and I aren’t exactly the best of friends– they have big teeth for biting, and big legs for kicking, and if I need to go anywhere I hop into my Ford Focus rather than onto the back of a horse. They’re large and frightening, okay? I admire people who can deal with them, but I’d rather not. Suppose the horse bucks and sends me into the next county? No thank you. The only horse I was ever on was actually a pony. An old Italian man would bring it to our block in Brooklyn and give rides to us children; for a dime his poor sick animal would be led around a manhole cover a few times while he spoke to it in his dialect. What was he saying? Who knew? “Hey, little horse, why don’t you reach around and chew the foot off this frightened little boy? Why don’t you bare your teeth at him? Come on, little horse, don’t disappoint me or it’s the glue factory for you!” Lois, remember how he smelled? Didn’t we cry? [If Lois is reading this, she will post a reply-- 'No, YOU cried, you big baby! And the horse didn't smell... that was you from when you messed your pants!" I love my sister.] Maybe there’s a behavioral guidebook I should read first before setting out? (About people like ME, not about horses.)

Thursday, July 9

Settling in, mainly, and a drive to downtown Minneapolis with Aunt Bunny. I found a favorite used bookstore and bought an item (a Latin Missal from 1954) and was unusually impressed by the sheer numbers of people working in and running around downtown. There was a huge farmer’s market occupying Nicollet Mall, and office workers raced by carrying bouquets of flowers and bags of beans. You definitely get the sense that Minneapolis is a city on the move. And as big as it is, it manages to nourish a very welcoming, small-town aspect. Mary Richards would be so proud! In fact, there’s a statue of her that you can pose with while throwing your hat in the air.

Friday, July 10

Well, here we are in Bismarck. We drove today from Minneapolis to the Best Western Ramkota Hotel, which is very nice. (The woman who checked us in is a dead ringer for Sarah Palin– the hair, the glasses, the smile.) We just finished a great meal, a perfect ending to a genuinely wonderful day. The nine-hour drive was beautiful– the countryside here is green and prosperous and peppered regularly with small farm towns with names like Tappen, Mapleton, McKenzie, and Ayr. Interstate 94 slices through this breadbasket, and it’s satisfying seeing how much land is under such good care. From the SUV, silos and cows and sheep and wheat and alfalfa fields raced by, and bales of hay in orderly lines gave a sense that all is well in the heartland.  Of course, the caffeine in Diet Coke and the two Snickers bars that I’m enjoying may have much to do with my sense of well-being, but still; I’m just saying. But it really IS beautiful: a thousand shades of green and gold rest under a blue sky interrupted here and there with enormous storm systems.

A stop in Jamestown at the Frontier Village presents us with a statue of the world’s largest buffalo, which we obligingly pose in front of. (This time, I am proud to say, I did NOT administer the “cough test” while standing beneath the beast, like I did in 2000.)

Luke, our waiter here at the Ramkota’s restaurant, was a Viking swimmer who was honestly interested in the ingredients that went into the Manhattan I ordered. And he wasn’t unusual– everyone in these parts is just so damned friendly, the only exception so far being the counterman at a Subway who grew impatient at my lack of ordering expertise. I’ve never ordered a Subway before, but the choices are mind-boggling. How did Jared manage?!? Anyway, Kirk went upstairs to wind down, and I stayed behind to settle up with Luke and order a couple of drinks to bring back up to the room. He asked if I wanted something carry them with, and I said yes, and he gave me a circular tray draped with a white cloth, crowned by my (second) Manhattan and Kirk’s (second) glass of Merlot. I signed the check, picked up my tray, and left the restaurant.

Now, the Ramkota Hotel consists of two buildings which are mirror images of one another, connected by a check-in area and a commons. Do you already sense trouble? Calm down! Calm down, everyone, because this architectural fantasy is the simple explanation for what went awry– it’s a rabbit warren, this hotel. Just checking in involved negotiating a series of hallways and elevators, and it was like reaching Candyland when we finally located our room. (And we weren’t the only ones involved in this prairie version of  Lost.)  Try doing that fueled by a Manhattan, and the stakes are different. I couldn’t find our room in the correct building, and carrying a tray with two drinks perched on it only added to my consternation. I went up staircases and down strange elevators; I traversed hallways I knew nothing about, and four times I walked through a wedding reception that had spilled out of its designated banquet room and into the adjoining common area, thereby further confusing my progress. Soon I was asking gowned women if this was the Manhattan they had ordered. Being polite Midwesterners, they simply said “no, thanks,” but there were plenty of people whose eyes lit up as I came near them with my tray. “Room service,” I explained. “Coming through!” After my fourth pass they must have decided I was either crazy or from New Jersey. I ended up on the sidewalk between the two identical buildings (one of which didn’t even contain my room number) and encountered Uncle Jerry, who was cruising by on his scooter. He had no idea where I was going, so I called Kirk for directions. While he was explaining how to get back to our room, a train went through town, complete with horns and whistles, and I couldn’t hear a thing. I almost broke into tears, thinking that I would never get back to Kansas again!

Eventually I arrived at the proper third floor, drinks in tow, without having spilled a drop. (The bartender had thoughtfully stretched a piece of Saran wrap over each glass.) And here I sit, quite tired, and ready for bed. Tomorrow is the reunion picnic at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. Think I’ll survive? Stay tuned.

Twitter, Facebook, and My New Friends

The comfort of an age !

This technological age continues to amaze me, though what I most want the current epoch to do is leave me behind, preferably in a dark bedroom with a cool rag over my eyes. It’s not that I’m technologically challenged– it’s just that I’m the type of guy who was quite happy being one of the many consorts of Ma Bell and her limited options. Remember? You made a call, and the line was busy– you either breathed a sigh of relief or called back in ten minutes. Long distance calls were rare and only dialed so the caller could deliver news about important things like breech births, or that your neighbors were Communists or– even worse!– divorcing… period! And the one phone you had in your house was Bakelite, molded in a foreboding black color, further precluding its use.

Everything is different now– nobody even uses the word “telephone” anymore; I will leave it up to my readers to recall the current terms. And not only are we expected to burden ourselves with these new devices… we are also expected to use them to log online every three minutes in order to let the entire world know what we are doing.

Let’s examine that phrase a minute, and let’s be honest– isn’t “the world” limited to those people we have allowed into our Facebook and Twitter and AOL lives? And aren’t these simply walls to further hide behind while we try and fool ourselves into believing that we are being global? WHAT is so global about letting my 103 Facebook friends know that “it’s a beautiful day in downtown Orlando?” And what is so global about reading that one of my exclusive circle of friends is on her way to Publix to do a little shopping? And do I need artichokes, because they are on sale?

I think it’s all crazy, yet I’m just as guilty as everyone else in thinking that I am in constant reach of  “friends.” And THAT word has been hijacked by the online community to infuse ourselves with a false sense of popularity and belonging. When I really think about it, I have like a dozen true blue friends– and even a few of them are on probation (you know who you are). A friend is someone you can call and ask help to paint your garage door; a friend is someone who will drop everything in order to drive you to the airport; and a friend will donate a kidney to you.

And then there’s Twitter, which came along because Facebook and AOL were considered too damned slow. Twitter limits your posting to less than 150 characters, which means you had better be extremely skilled at letting your friends know what you’re up to. And now that we’ve gotten past the sniggering related to the past tense of the verb twitter,  it has turned into a very big business indeed. Remember when it first started a few minutes ago? Thousands of innocuous  messages related to beautiful days in downtown Orlando and artichokes clogged the ionosphere; now the application is riddled with 140-character commercials about aluminum siding and penis extensions.

I could end this essay with one of those typically unschooled closings:  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must alert my readers to this blog update and, if I have a few seconds, I’ll Twitter about it as well.”

But I won’t. Instead, you’ll find me in a cool, dark room, patiently waiting for a black Bakelite phone to ring and let me know that my Communist neighbors are divorcing. Now that’s exciting !

Michael Jackson and the AOL Message Boards

Even though I should know better, I periodically check the comments on the AOL message boards when I’m curious about how the public reacts to a news story that I might be interested in. I know what you’re thinking: “are you crazy, Jim? Those people are lunatics and do not represent the well-informed and educated public!”

When Shirley Jackson published the famous short-story ”The Lottery” in The New Yorker in 1948,  thousands of people wrote the magazine to vent their spleens about Jackson’s supposed anti-populist views. After reading much of the correspondence, here is what Jackson said: “I have all the letters still, and if they could be considered to give any accurate cross section of the reading public of  The New Yorker, or even the reading public of one issue of  The New Yorker, I would stop writing now.” Not only was she accused of witchcraft, she was accused of something infinitely worse– anti-Americanism! (And one darkly humorous inquiry from a Southern woman: “Why couldn’t they have made Mrs. Hutchinson Queen for a Day or something nice like that before they stoned the poor frightened creature to death?”)

The AOL boards are quite a snapshot of the American public, and I have to say: these people scare me. They are parading on Michael Jackson’s grave, trampling the sod before it even has a chance to take root. Not only are many of them rejoicing at this “pervert’s” death, but they are wishing upon his head the punishments and tortures of a vengeful and hateful God. (Yes, many of the posters are self-professed Christians.) I try to rationalize this population, manufacturing excuses as to why there are so many of them:  They are middle schoolers with access to Daddy’s computer and too much free time; or they are fringe people, sociopathic termagants with computer access who either transmit their views from home of from the local library; or they are the terminally unemployed and bitter, raging against the world; or they are perhaps even quite standard-looking, just like the people living next door to you. And none of them can spell, let alone tell the difference between there and their and your and you’re.

Who are these people to judge? Granted, they no doubt lack the rational ability to rein themselves in, and in that respect they are like untreated infections. Appallingly, these same voices also rise to the surface like pond scum in order to spew their bile about the President, gay people, Jews, Muslims, Roman Catholics, African-Americans… I wonder– should this be considered hate speech? Is this allowed? Should these people be censored, their computers taken away and their mouths washed out with lye? And does considering such measures make me as bad as they are? I’m all for free speech; I’m just against free hate.

Shirley Jackson’s central character was stoned to death by the regular folks living in a small village, apparently a sacrifice in hopes of a good corn crop. She describes the horror the poor woman experiences as her neighbors– and family– move toward her, their hands filled with stones. “And then they were upon her,” Shirley Jackson writes.

Are so many of us really villagers?

A Trip to Italy– Part Three: Mama Drama

Mom in Italy with cousins, 1950. Age 18.

Okay; I’ve gone on and on and ON about getting ready for this trip, both here and here.  And there was talk of my mother possibly coming along with me for this looming Italian trip– talk which, in a Northern Italian woman, is spoken silently but nevertheless reverberates along the horsehair-and-plaster walls of her 1912 semi-detached house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We’d always spoken about making the crossing together, a trip I know she’d love. After all, Mom hasn’t been to see her cousins since 1950.

That trip was captured on film, all stored in yellow Kodak boxes and annotated by my family in various handwriting and spelling: “Porto Gallo” my grandfather wrote on the box that featured the ship’s stop in Portugal; “Le fabbriche” notes the Italian town he grew up in (”The Factories”); and another box is labeled “Marlia,” the small village on the plain below the Apuan Alps, which shares a box with “San Cassiano,” both done in my mother’s handwriting in which the dots above the letter “I” are really tiny circles. Even though I long ago transferred these 8mm films to VHS tapes, and then over to DVD, I can’t part with these old cardboard boxes with the postage stamps still attached.

My mother in 1950 is eighteen years old, and she wears voluminous New Look skirts and a short haircut. She’s clearly having a great time in these movies, and you wonder: did she vow to return every year like we all do when we visit someplace special? She had no way of knowing it would have been her last visit to Italy; and now, at almost 78, she claims she won’t be going back.

I can believe it, and I don’t push beyond a brave “oh come on, why don’t you come along?” when we decide to talk out loud about a possible return. But she won’t fly. “Why don’t we take the boat?” I suggest, but what boats ply the Atlantic like the old greyhounds? She wouldn’t want to cross on one of the cruise ships that ply the Mediterranean coast: “Who wants to eat with a bunch of strangers five times a day?” I had a taste of this when we all piled aboard a gambling ship for my sister Lois’ 40th birthday. It left from Palm Beach and anchored in choppy waters a few miles offshore; we pitched and bounced amongst the waves while we played the slots and consumed Manhattans by the pitcherful– we were fine, but an above-decks walk for some fresh air presented us with the spectacle of 90% of the boat’s revelers groaning and heaving in the dark dampness. “Oh my God,” Mom said. “Look at them… it looks like a hospital ship full of cholera victims!” The buffet line was a gymnastics event which had us all slamming intometal railings as we tried in vain to reach for our dinner and desserts. By the time we sat down we were bruised and exhausted. So no boats for Mom. I’m sure she’d have no trouble on the Berengaria or the Mauretania or even the Andrea Doria, as they all featured private cabins, showers, and endless cups of bouillon soup served on deck. Now that’s a crossing, and chances are you might even have run into Barbara Stanwyck or Princess Grace.

Even though she’s terribly afraid to fly, this mother of mine is basically fearless. The past winter in Brooklyn had her worrying about who would shovel the snow from the steps and sidewalks in front of her house, now that her older brother had died, so she hired itinerant “foreigners” with shovels for $20 after they offered their services. After they were done and walked off, the man across the street called Mom. “Vel, take a look outside: those guys didn’t do the sidewalk in front of your garden. Go catch them, they’re at Sylvia’s now.” I can just picture her dressing hurriedly, yet warmly, with the heavy coat and the wool hat and the gloves and scarf and boots– and she went after them with that shrill voice that she used to use on me when she asked me to take out the garbage for the fiftieth time. “You guys… you guys, you didn’t finish!”   “Oh, we finished,” they said.  “You call this finished?! You didn’t even touch this sidewalk and I want my money back!!”  “Oh no, no money back!”  “You’d better finish this sidewalk like I paid you for! Is this why you came to this country, so you can cheat everyone?!?”  So she’s yelling at these guys– and they have big shovels– and she doesn’t budge. And they finally relent, and she forces them to finish shoveling her sidewalk without them sticking an ice pick under her ribs. But she won’t fly.

And yet simple things she hesitates doing, things that would naturally provide endless entertainment for the rest of the family in their re-telling. Her friend Grace, who is a native of Croatia, has been haranguing Mom to start going with her to pre-wedding reception cocktail hours, uninvited. Grace figures they would eat the appetizers and have a few drinks while pretending to be friends or family of the bride and /or  groom. Sounds daring enough, but Mom questioned this chicanery: “You mean I gotta buy a new dress?”

She wasn’t afraid to scoop up Frank Sinatra’s discarded cigarette butt at the Copa one night when she was there with my father– fearless Mom said to Dad “dance me over to the floor by the piano where Frank just put out his cigarette.”  And Dad did.  “Now dip me.”  And Dad dipped her and she snapped up Frank’s cigarette butt, “that I carried in my purse for years!” She loved Frank. But she won’t fly.

So maybe someday we’ll go over to Italy together. I think it would be great; she cracks me up most of the time and doesn’t embarrass me in public, and you know? She’d probably slow dance with me in the ship’s nightclub, even without Frank crooning and smoking  in the room.

A Trip to Italy– Part Two: The Shopping

Do you like to shop? I don’t. I like to go and buy the things I need, checking them off a list as I go along from store to store, not doing any comparison shopping or wielding coupons. I mean, it’s not because I’m rich or anything, but I’ve felt that time is more valuable than anything else– time is the one thing you can’t see, and so I’m loath to squander it.

So, to make this as streamlined as possible, I’ve made a list of all the things I will need to bring to Italy in mid-July, which is cross-referenced to the things I’ll need to bring to North Dakota when we go there in early July for Kirk’s family reunion. (A lot of people running around with pudding.) Since I will have only two days between trips, with one day devoted to work, I will have only one day to do laundry and then transfer items from the North Dakota list to the Italy list. The laundry day– a Wednesday– will also serve as my shopping day, to replenish the things that I will have used up while in Bismarck listening to Sigurd Henriksen tell about the time the chickens danced in a circle under a full moon.

And my lists are exhaustive; there’s not a place on my body that doesn’t need some sort of attention and something to shop for: ears, eyes, nose, teeth, fingernails… with all the rigmarole, you would think that I was somehow going to conjure a replica of myself and then send him on vacation. Maybe I should! This way the REAL me can sit in the back yard here in Winter Park while the FAKE me deals with customs and Helen Olsen telling about the time she used bad eggs in her meringue and ended up poisoning the entire Lutheran choir.

I do need some clothes, but not many. I tend to dress simply and preppily, which means that everything sort of looks the same. You bring a handful of solid color Lacostes with you, they can last three weeks…  Still, just to be sure, I suggested to my second cousin once removed, Nicola, what clothes I should bring for an Italian July: shorts, a set of dress clothes for Mass, tee shirts, and jeans?  ”Perfect,” he said, and then checked with his grandmother (my first cousin once removed). Giuseppina also suggested a “swimming costume,” and I immediately pictured myself dressed as a mermaid, or Popeye– you know, something nautical. I certainly am not going to be able to get into the candy-striped number I cavorted around in circa 1984 at Lido di Camiore, so perhaps I should bring along the notorious red shorts featured a few blogs previous. Just what are stylish middle-aged men wearing to the Italian shore these days? Maybe we won’t even get to the beach; who can say? Maybe it should be a surprise. If it turns out that men are wearing fishnet bikinis, however, I’m staying at the house!

So I’ll soon be in Target with my lists, looking for tiny bottles of shampoo and toothpaste and roll-on, and miniature packages of Q-tips. And isn’t it amazing how expensive those miniatures are? And I need things like batteries and contact lens solution, which is something you need a LOT of, but the airlines only allow you a thimbleful. Then I need my allergy medicines, and some sort of preventative against germs and colds because we all know that it’s everyone ELSE on the plane wheezing and sniffing and sneezing and spreading toxins. Think about that for a minute– there’s no new air coming into a plane, so you breathe recirculated air. At least in the days of smoking, the nicotine killed everyone’s germs!

In the final analysis, knowing myself as well as I do, there’s a good chance that my adult-onset ADHD will kick in and I will grow bored of my lists and needs, leaving everything to do the night before the trip. You’ll probably find me in Wal-Mart at three a.m., wrestling the last miniature tube of Pepsodent from the hands of someone who desperately needs that toothpaste more than I do. And that’s probably all I’ll end up traveling with– but at least customs will be a breeze!

Read more about my upcoming trip here and here.

Lido di Camiore, 1984: My sister Gina; and me in the bathing suit that's NOT returning to Italy.

Walking In the Rain

It’s been raining a lot lately, earlier this year than usual. And I never fail to think of  “Walking In the Rain.”  That’s a great song by the Ronettes, and the reason how I came to move to Florida in 1978.  It all started in the Summer of 1970 when the Crescitellis of Brooklyn traveled to Massachusetts to visit relatives in Milford and Mansfield. I think we stayed in a motel rather than move en masse into somebody’s house (albeit temporarily). I mean, there were six of us from my family alone, and no matter how much your cousins love you, they tend to develop glints in their eyes after three days– and you just know they’re wondering when the hell you’re going back to Brooklyn where you belong.

So there we were, eating in new restaurants by day, and sleeping on strange sheets by night. In between, we lounged around my father’s cousin John’s pool. It was big, and built in, and so naturally we were very impressed. Our pools in Brooklyn tended to be assemble-it-yourself above ground models with metallic walls that grew blazingly hot in the sun. Though these walls were festooned with innocent, cartoonish images of sea life, they were lethal. The pool liner itself– basically a large, blue plastic bag– gradually developed wrinkles so that it felt like you were stepping on bodies while romping. It was almost the best way to stay cool in the Summer, a close second behind cavorting in the huge geyser from the fire hydrants that the older kids used to uncap for us. Thirty five screaming  little kids in their underwear, running around in the gutter as the water pressure steadily dropped in all the houses on the block: priceless!

Compared to our watery diversions, the built-in pool in Mansfield was the height of glamour and sophistication. There was a diving board, and they even had painted something on the pool’s cement floor, some sort of graphic that I can’t recall. How cool was that? We were very humbled.

So there I was, swimming away in my silly bathing suit, wearing my black plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, and trying to coax myself into attempting a dive– something my much younger cousins did without thinking. I could never be like them; they were suntanned and breezy and white-blond, and I was thin and white and asthmatic. I had to be careful; anything as exciting as jumping off a diving board into six feet of water might easily kill me.

I relaxed onto a lounge chair across from my father’s cousin Claire; she was cool because she had once been sent home from school because her skirt was too short, an unforgettable episode from 1963 that I witnessed personally. Claire had the radio on and I immediately noticed the most beautiful song being played: it had thunder in it, and glorious choruses, and a winsome lead singer. Winsome! I asked Claire what this song was, but she didn’t know; a minute or so later the dee-jay said that we had just heard “Lady Walking In the Rain” by Ronnie and the Ronettes.

Well,  back in Brooklyn I embarked on a wild goose chase for this new record. In those days there were “record stores” scattered throughout the city, and I went to a few of them in pursuit of the elusive Ronnie and the Ronettes. Nobody knew who I was talking about! I even had to sing a bar or two for some of the clerks, which embarrassed me horribly. (And them, as it turned out.)

Finally, my father found a copy at the House of Oldies in Manhattan. It turns out that it was an “oldie” from 1964, and cost him seven dollars… SEVEN DOLLARS! That was a lot to pay for a single 45 back in 1970. And the song was called simply “Walking In the Rain.” I was beside myself with excitement, which is how I reacted to anything I became obsessed with in those days. Naturally I made him tell me everything about the place, and asked if the clerk told him anything about the Ronettes. It turned out that they were “black chicks,” Dad said. Black chicks! Was I cool, or what? I liked black music!

“Walking in the Rain” was produced by the notorious Phil Spector, and featured lead vocals by Veronica Bennett, the woman who would eventually become his second wife. It was their fifth chart hit; three more records would follow, none of which reached the Top 40. By 1967, the Ronettes were already musical history.

And the song brought me to Florida. In those pre-Internet days, there were a lot of publications dedicated to record collectors. I had, by 1973, become a fanatic girl-group aficionado, especially taken by the productions of Phil Spector. Older cousins let me sift through their stacks of 45’s , and I unearthed gems by the Crystals, more by the Ronettes, the Chiffons, the Shangri-Las… it was an unending mother lode of musical butterscotch. One collector’s magazine featured want ads by people looking for certain records to buy or to trade, and in September of 1973 I struck up a correspondence with a collector in Winter Park, Florida that turned into a friendship and eventually a relationship. Things can be intense when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty… even through the U.S. Mail!  And by 1978 I was living here.

Not everything lasts forever– some things do, but not everything. Our situation changed and I went off in another direction which lasts to this day. Phil Spector is in jail on a murder rap (he was always loose with the guns), and I still play those songs occasionally. (One never really grows tired of “Da Doo Ron Ron,” especially played at full volume on a Ford Focus CD player.)

And every time it rains, I think of the Ronettes and their thundering little three minutes of teen-aged longing. It can snap me back thirty-eight years in an instant, which proves one thing– rock and roll keeps you young !

A Trip to Italy– Part One

The Walled City of Lucca

I finally decided to do it– after 25 years, ritorno in Italia ! That’s not bad, this going to Italy every 25 years. At this rate my next trip will occur when I’m 78 years old, and who knows? It may be in a box! (Just kidding; I plan on living past 100 because I want to see if the Democrats achieve a 100% majority in both the House and Senate.)

My friend Eugene and I were talking one time about the town of Cazzolungo, in Sicily. In the 1960s the town found itself, thanks to emigration, with a large cemetery that wasn’t being used. They decided to extend a hand to all the families of the Cazzolungans who’d left the town over the years and settled in America, offering to re-inter their deceased in a free burial plot in Il Cimitero della Vergine Piangente. (The Cemetery of the Weeping Virgin.) Well, being Italians and hearing the word “free,” hundreds of families responded to the offer; they had to rent a destroyer to ship all the expired thousands over to Cazzolungo. It was a momentous day when the ship arrived, its decks covered with coffins draped in Italian tri-colored flags. Today, the population of Cazzolungo is 17 living and 6,776 deceased.

I had an opportunity to go to Italy with my high school class back in the 1970s, but I didn’t even bother asking at home because I thought we were poor. When my grandmother found out, she yelled. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have paid!” She used to go back and forth to Tuscany every few years, by boat. I remember all of us seeing her off on the Constitution, which my father referred to as the Constipation because of all the old people who were aboard. And even though was just one person from our family going to Italy– my grandmother– nine thousand people had to see her off, all ooohing and ahhhing at the amenities of her tiny stateroom. She brought me back a faux marble model of the leaning tower of Pisa, priced on the bottom 600 lire– a dollar ! I still have it of course; this house is like a museum.

I’ll be traveling to the north of Italy, to stay with our family in Marlia, a country town between Pisa and Florence. It’s close to the town of Lucca, which is one of those Italian jewels that tourists miss because they’re so busy running around in Pisa and Florence. Lucca is surrounded by very wide medieval walls, which are now covered with trees and parks where people walk and bicycle and relax. It’s also got these great churches filled with astounding works of art, which I saw on my last visit in 1984. My sister Gina didn’t get to see inside any churches in Lucca because she was wearing short shorts, a halter top, platform shoes, and a pocketbook slung over her shoulder. With each church we entered, an ancient priest would rush at us from the gloom: “Va via!” “Get out!” they yelled at Gina, thanks to the fact that she had decided to dress like a puttana while visiting these churches. So while I was inside marvelling at stained glass and marble altarpieces, Gina would wait outside on the churches’ steps, smoking cigarettes while the promenading Luccans stared.

I hope to also venture up into the high hills above Marlia, where my grandmother Giorgia was born. She came from a tiny group of villages called San Cassiano di Controne; she was from La Chiesa, the hamlet that centers around the church that was built in the 1200s. Postcards of La Chiesa show the house she was born in. Close by, in the hamlet of Cocolaio, her aunt had a house which we visited in 1984 as well. It was hundreds of years old, and we used to tell everyone that “our family has a villa in Tuscany.” We had lunch there, and Gina wore a dress and nice shoes, not realizing that we would be hiking in the quiet hills that afternoon. That’s my sister Gina– to visit the exquisite churches of Lucca, she dresses like Charo; to go hiking, she dresses like Princess Di.

The church at San Cassiano di Controne

I will be staying with my mother’s cousin Giuseppina, who shares the house with her son Massimo. Next door lives her son Adriano, with his wife Simona and their son Nicola, who is eighteen. (He is my second cousin once removed.) Giuseppina has a sister who lives nearby, and she has two children, and three grand-children. There are relatives galore to catch up with. I asked Nicola if the women still gathered in the kitchen every Sunday to make pasta by hand, and he said “nah. The people who knew how to do that are all dead.” I guess they buy Ronzoni at the local market. Maybe I will treat them all to hand-made pasta, but the measurements in Italy are metric so I’ll have to be careful.

When Roots was hot, I asked my grandmother’s sister-in-law Nella to tell me some things about the family up there in the hills. (She grew up in a town not far from San Cassiano.)  “Don’t ask too many questions about who what where,” she replied. “Let me just say that you have more cousins than you think !!”

So I’m very excited about this trip. I’m sure I’ll have many interesting circumstances to report, probably starting with my first foray through customs. Imagine bringing only three ounces of shampoo for ten days in Italy? I’ll have to shop for some at the market in Marlia. And I guess I’ve got to remember to bring my electric plug adapters; I don’t need any exploding personal devices.

Enjoyed this post? Read more about my trip to Italy here and here.

A Day Off– and An Off Day

From 1935 to 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a newspaper column called “My Day.” Six times a week she wrote this! She never missed except for when Franklin died, and then it was only for four days that Eleanor was away from her typewriter. In her writing, she covered many, many issues: the war, race relations, the rights of women, outer space…she had an opinion about everything. It was amazing what she could come up with each day– a one-woman, world-saving dynamo!

Let me tell you about my day, a day off which should have had me doing nothing more strenuous than looking at the ringing telephone while laughing crazily because I didn’t have to answer it.

It began after I’d had my first cup of coffee, which involved boiling water in the kettle; mixing a batch of creamer from powdered milk because we never seem to have any ready-made on hand; wrestling the lid off the jar of Folger’s De-Caf Crystals because it had apparently welded itself shut overnight; and hacking the last mummified micrograins of sugar from the sugar bowl because I am too lazy to walk three steps and refill the thing. This first cup was easy, and so I decided to have another, with vague thoughts of maybe going on a nice, long bike ride. I refilled the kettle again, and wandered off to the computer because I like to play on Windows Live Maps. Have you ever tried that? It’s fascinating– you can zoom in on your friends’ properties and see how messy their yards were the day that the aerial shots were taken by the Russians and then sold to Microsoft; you can climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower or investigate rocky little hill towns in Tuscany; you can navigate the fjords of Norway and you don’t even have to wear a sweater! I get so involved with this program that I forget about the real world and things like tea kettles that are whistling away atop the kitchen stove. Whistling tea kettles are fine, but I must remember to install my ear devices in the mornings, or there’s going to be a fire one day.

Not minding the lack of a second cup of decaf, I decided I would forgo the bike ride. It hadn’t rained for seventeen months hence, but the day I decide to go get some fresh air, it threatened rain. One thing I do not like being is far from home as the sky blackens above me. Instead, I decided to go to Palmer’s Garden Center for some ground cover because there are bald patches in my yard that are beginning to annoy me, though they are pleasing to the pigeons who like to dig up my flower seeds.

After perfunctory ablutions– I had been mildly toiling out back– I dressed in a tee, flip-flops, and a longish pair of red shorts with the pull string, gathered my things and headed for the car: wallet, phone, sunglasses, ball cap, little note book, and… KEYS, I remembered as the door slammed behind me. Isn’t it amazing how that gung-ho feeling immediately evaporates into helplessness when you lock yourself out? I called Kirk, a good 20 minutes away, and he started on his rescue mission. With all that time to kill, what do you do? I chased some squirrels out of the rose bush… I recited the Alma redemptoris mater… I moved some potted coleus… I recited the Ave Regina caelorum… I watered the coleus on the sly, because it was past my legal watering time… I recited the Salve Regina. I paced– I noticed that something felt unusual as I walked, but couldn’t quite place it. Maybe it was the heat and all that Latin. Soon Kirk drove up and, after listening to many clever comments about my adorable silliness, I was finally on my way. My Day was finally beginning.

I had to buy Lotto tickets, which means I had to go into a convenience store. I hadn’t really had THE shower of the day, so I felt right at home. I always feel like such a snob in those places; just what are those whitish things floating in that glass jar– eggs?! You’re kidding me! No no, no pig’s knuckles for me. And how old is that cheese in the cooler– it looks like it’s grown a beard. THAT’S your wine selection?!– who knew that vinegar could come in so many nice colors!

I filled out my Lotto cards, taking care to stay within the tiny lines which I could barely see, and I brought them to the counter. Everything went fine until I felt my longish red shorts sort of loosen in back and, thanking God that I was wearing my Calvins, discreetly tried to tug on the pull string– but there was no pull string. I looked down, and saw that both pockets were turned out and facing front, and that’s when I realized that my longish red shorts were on backwards; the pull string was obviously tucked in back. Nice, right? This being a convenience store with things like chewing tobacco and suppositories on the counter, nobody noticed, but I nevertheless slipped into the men’s room in order to right things. It was quite acrobatic trying to right things while not letting anything except the soles of my flip flops touch that floor! But I managed. And you know3 something else about those longish red shorts? In another time and place, and on another sex, they would be called “culottes.”

Back in the car, I realized I’d forgotten to cash in a Powerball ticket that I’d won a few weeks ago. Don’t get excited! Don’t get excited, everybody; it was only four dollars, but still. I brought it back inside and gave it to the lady behind the counter, who fed it into her machine for verification. Well, it kept spitting back out; she punched numbers, she fed, she punched some more, all the while giving me a running explanation of the entire Lotto system since its inception. And still the machine wouldn’t work. Of course, since I hadn’t put in my ears, I didn’t hear a thing that she said. There was something about Tallahassee, and writing and sending things, but who can say? Better to pass on the four dollars and use the ticket as a bookmark.

Off to the nursery I went, where I loaded up my trunk with purslane in various shades, and I paid without any mishaps– the debit card went through; there was a big, flat box for the plants that fit nicely into my trunk; all was well– I should have known.

I next stopped at the house of some friends so I could see about their cat while they were away. My compensation for this week of cat-sitting was a HUGE bag of pistachios, and an almost-full box of Godiva chocolates. But you never see this cat– you fill the bowl with treats, and the water bowl with fresh water with a little gin in it, and place a dollop of fishy-smelling paste on a plate… you call out the cat’s name, you make tapping sounds on the can like in the commercials, but no cat ever appears. Whatever. I thought I saw it one day in the shadows, but it turned out to be a dust bunny.

As I entered their house, I stopped to gather the day’s mail from the floor in front of the slot, and brought it to the table. I began stacking the mail in size order, and was suddenly assailed by the sound of the house alarm shrieking through the peacefulness– even with my ears out, I could hear every WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP as the neighborhood was alerted to the fact that the castle walls had been breached by Huns. Calmly, I approached the control panel, whose graphics suddenly looked as if they were written in Cyrillic. Calmly, I tried disarming it as usual, and it worked. Then the phone rang, and some woman asked me all sorts of questions as to my identity. Apparently she believed me, because a visit from the police was diverted. Can you imagine? There I would have been in the paddy wagon, my longish red shorts down around my knees, smelling of cat food, accused of petty theft. And they would have used my high school graduation photo in the newspaper story.

I drove home in a downpour, my trunk filled with flowering purslane, my pants resting sensibly around my hips. At home, the rain stopped and the plants went in the ground with not a squirrel to be seen. Nothing unusual happened the rest of that day, but I couldn’t help wondering if Eleanor Roosevelt, in between resigning from the DAR and fighting for feminist issues, had ever put her pants on backward. One can only hope!

Fiestaware– An Obsession

The Original Six Colors, Introduced By 1937

When I moved to Florida in July 1978, I stayed at a friend’s house in Winter Park because my apartment was not yet ready. Well, it was clean and vacuumed and painted and empty, but it did not yet have furniture. That’s how we did things in the 70s– we up and moved someplace new, figuring that things would work themselves out, and they always did. Rent was $175 a month for a large one bedroom in Winter Park, and plastic milk crates borrowed from Publix served as bookshelves and record album holders. Soon I would buy a sleeper couch, and a table and four chairs and I would finally be able to sit down or sleep in my new place.

While staying with Richard’s family, I noticed they were eating off brightly-colored dishes that immediately caught my eye. The family was from West Virginia, and these dishes were manufactured by the Homer Laughlin China Company, in a town called Newell. The line of dishes was called Fiestaware, they explained, and the lady of the house was happy to show me what she had: a lot of dishes, some cups and saucers and bowls, a gravy boat… the colors were mostly Forest Green, Rose, and Chartreuse, though there were some brighter colors that had been manufactured earlier in time– Yellow, Red, Ivory, Turquoise… I was fascinated: they had a “deco” look about them, and there was something happy about eating from these dishes designed with concentric, graduated circles incised on their surfaces.

The Colors Introduced in the 1950s

I bought my first piece a few years later at the Maitland Flea Market, a 7-inch plate in Turquoise. I kept it on a bedside table in our new condominium for many years as a place to hold a coffee cup. And, as I prospered, the collection grew a little here and there, but by no means in a big way- Fiesta had become a highly-desired collectible, and it was getting expensive. Still, I managed– a Light Green pitcher, some plates and bowls, teacups… I’d always dream of coming across “the mother lode” in some forgotten little rummage shop out in the country, but by then it was all priced very high.

Sometimes magic happened– Susan, a friend of a friend, was told of my growing collection, and called me when it was time to sell her grandmother’s estate. Apparently there was some Fiesta in the kitchen cupboards;  and when I arrived at the house and was ushered inside ahead of the line of very curious and suspicious antiques dealers, Susan showed me a set of ten perfect Fiesta water tumblers, all produced in the 1930s-1940s. Beautiful! I showed her the latest price guide, made an offer, and she sold them to me for even less. We boxed them carefully and then I went out the back door, though I still had to pass by the even longer line of earlybirds, who were all watching me and my box with intense curiosity.

Some Relatively Unloved Late-1960s Fiesta

Fiestaware was manufactured from 1936 through 1972, and then production ceased due to a number of factors. However, it resurfaced again in 1986, with a palette of six new colors, and the world of Fiesta collectors was revitalized. New colors soon appeared regularly, as well as companion items made by licensed companies. Limited edition shades were introduced, like Lilac and Sapphire and Chartreuse, and intense competition and scrambling arose whenever the factory announced a limited number of, say, Chartreuse sugar packet holders. The rise of online auction houses and messages boards gave rise to closely-knit collectors’ communities who vied with one another for rare pieces, and spread the news about new colors and shapes.

Richard, my West Virginia friend, got heavily involved with the new line of colors and, being a self-admitted practitioner of OCD, decided that he had to have EVERY piece in EVERY color; you can imagine what his house looked like after awhile. It was amazing to go in there– someone aware of the craze would stand openmouthed at the racks and racks of rare Lilac and Sapphire pieces from the 1990s, which had gotten very costly. He had lamps… drawer pulls… licensed enamel casseroles… decals. Candles… cheese knives… tidbit trays… he had it all! Everyone told him that he could have opened his own shop, but I knew he was doing it because he liked to accomplish having complete lists of things.

When he died in 2003, I inherited it. It was like being willed an entire wing of Macy’s. Did I have room for the more than 3,000 items? Of course not! For years, my house was stacked with boxes which, by 2009, had dwindled to around 150 pieces. It took almost six years of yard sales, eBay, and shipments to friends and family to move it all. I loved having it at first, but after awhile I had to ask myself– do I need fifteen handled serving trays in every color of the rainbow? Or eighteen Lilac platters, six each in the three sizes they made? Or eight teapots? And wouldn’t it be nice to have the guest room shower stall free of boxes?

A Few of the Colors Introduced Since 1986

Fiestaware is still manufactured. They just announced their latest color, a light chartreuse called Lemongrass, and they finally introduced a true red– beautiful bright Scarlet. The palette is gorgeous, and you can become engrossed coming up with color combinations for dinner every night, as some very dedicated people do: check out their postings at http://mediumgreen.proboards61.com/

Once Fiesta gets in your blood, it never quite leaves. While I don’t have 3,000 pieces anymore, we do have a very manageable collection of old and new colors, all put to good use when the occasion calls for it.

As Mom says, “you can only eat from one plate at a time!”

Vegetables Can Kill You

That’s what I thought when I was a kid. For many years, I refused to be in the same room with vegetables, let alone eat them. “Are you really part of this family?” people would cry as they tucked into heaping plates of breaded escarole soup, while I sat meekly in front of a plate of macaroni seasoned with butter.

I don’t know how it all started, but I abhorred anything that grew: lettuce… all types of salad ingredients… anything green… every sort of pepper… cauliflower– you name it, I hated it. It’s a wonder I managed to thrive on macaroni and meat, but I did somehow. (That  probably explains why I am a sucker for any type of carbohydrate these days.) Christmas Eve at our house was a particular nightmare: every fish dish was seasoned withsome sort of vegetable flavor, and so I sat– again– withmy plate of buttered spaghetti. I used to actually wonder if I hadn’t been given to the wrong family at birth: I was born in Sister Elizabeth Hospital in Brooklyn, which is now Lutheran Medical Center, so I may really have been meant for a family named Larsen or Svenson or Knutsen.

Lima beans were an especial horror when I was growing up. I mean, why give something like that to a kid when you know he’d rather tuck into an egg salad sandwich? Instead, I would be faced with a serving of those bland, washed-out beans, which I refused to eat. Mom got so mad at me one night at supper that she banished me to the enclosed porch to eat my meal in solitary; I couldn’t reappear until I’d finished every bean, but instead I buried them in the soil of Mom’s potted plants. (She always had some philodendron growing.) Years later I discovered that my sister Lois used to do the same thing!

[Lois was often particularly troublesome at dinner, for reasons I don't recall. Often, I'd get so mad at her that I'd angrily pack a little suitcase for her and put it by the door, with orders for her to leave NOW. Sometimes she was sent out into the hallway to eat by herself, tucked into a tiny folding ladder that served as a stool. Above her dangled a bare light bulb, making her seem like a cross between Jane Eyre and Baby Jane Hudson.]

Mom tried. One night she served us from a bowl of something mashed and white and creamy, which was delicious. We couldn’t get enough of it! “What was it?!?!” we demanded at the end of the meal, only to be told that we’d been tricked into eating cauliflower disguised as mashed potatoes! Ironically, the South Beach Diet features this as a palatable way to eat cauliflower– Mom was WAY ahead of her time!

These days I’m much more flexible in my vegetable habits; the previous post credits my shrinking taste buds, but maybe I’ve just grown more adventurous. Kirk actually made me dictate a list of vegetables that I would eat, one day while we were driving to Key West. The conversation began thus:

Kirk: Hey, look over there… that’s the plant nursery I went to with Mark.

Jim: You went to a nursery with Barb?

Kirk: Who’s Marv?

I laughed for the next 400 miles, but the conversation eventually led to the aforementioned vegetable list, hand-written by Kirk, which is still Scotch-taped to the inside of a kitchen cupboard door:

“Peas, corn, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, lettuce, string beans, black-eyed peas, baked beans, beets, some fresh garden tomato, artichoke hearts, potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, creamed spinach, lima beans.”

I re-read this list on occasion in order to remind myself how grown-up I’ve become, and I can even add things like romaine lettuce, fresh spinach, and the kinds of greens you find in those “mixed salad” bags at Publix: who could resist something called BUTTER lettuce?

I swear, I’m going to live to be a hundred!