The Italian Writing gods and The Lotto (July 2009)
It wasn’t the first time I had done the emailing ‘thing’ to writers in/about Italy. Michael Tucker (Living in A Foreign Language) got one as did Phil Doran (Reluctant Tuscan) and Dario Castagno (Too Much Tuscan Sun). Castagno had been an occasional Facebook ‘friend’ who most freely imparts Tuscan wisdoms to me, non-gratis. He was a tour guide throughout his native Chianti, Siena, and Tuscany for several years. I found him on his own “prosperous-looking” web site, selling olive oil, Tuscan retreats, and tours with a “knowledgeable staff”. “Cool”, I thought when I clicked through it. His known dislike of all things “Florentine” was still evident in his tour offerings.
Dario is part of the Caterpillar contrada, which won the Palio in 2003. That’s the short bareback horse around the piazza, Il Campo, in Siena. It is an absolutely ‘pazzo’ event that happens twice a summer. Dario’s first book clearly details his passion he has for his native land. He takes the reader through a year, and a crazy herd of foreign tourists, and gives us the real story on Italy. Sadly, the last time he emailed things weren’t going well. He told me wouldn’t be attending the second Palio of the summer and he thought he might be waiting tables by next summer. Bad economy everywhere, I guess.
The work at the church caused me to be late for my appointment with the Red Cross. Yes, I give blood—sometimes often. There the new blood drawer couldn’t get the needle into my good vein and so I was sent home. I ask you, is saving a life worth this kind of hassle?
After a 5:30 P.M. meeting, Marianne and I headed out to get a quick meal. With the drive thru lines running long and full color ads screaming specials deals at the over-stimulated, weary consumer. Delightful poetry like “BK BBQ Triple Decker Stackticom!” All this for a meal we will consume it five minutes or less.
We are glad to pull forward and wait in line to pay and get our food. I hand Marianne my wallet to get money, and I caution her to leaves a few one dollar bills so I can buy a Powerball ticket tomorrow. As I always do, my mind races to do the mental math to determine how much could actually be won off of the $74 million dollar jackpot. I figure about $24 m or so. I ask her how much is a quarter of 74, and she reconfirms it.
“Do think we could live on $24 m?” I ask her, tossing it off as a silly pipedream.
“Yeah, we could just move to Italy and resolve it all, “she immediately answers.
I try not to appear shocked and startled, but she had just, again, after 24 years said the very thing I had been thinking. Sometimes we are so intimately aligned that it’s spooky. We have always had that connection. That’s what makes me fall in love with her--over and over again.
We are asked to wait 3 minutes for my food to cook, because I ordered the chicken, not the whopper. So we wait in the parking lot. Our chit chat is light.
“Am I the only one in this town that eats chicken?” I muse. “Oh, wait, what am I saying, its Roseburg isn’t it.”
“Notice how, when men think that this is 12 inches,” Marianne quips, holding her pointer fingers about 7 inches apart to illustrate, “that BK thinks 10 minutes is really only three?”
We both laughed.
Later, at home, Marianne calls to me from the TV room that the final “Jeopardy” question is about Dante. “Longfellow was talking about who when he wrote “Thou art the Tuscan poet who dwells in gloom.”
See, it’s like this all day, every day. I don’t want to think about this thing, this trip to Italy, but I am constantly reminded. Here it is, mid-July and we have eleven months until we can take the trip. How can a sane man stay sane for that long if he is going to be ‘beat over the head’ with this stuff 24-7?!?
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