HELP! I’VE FALLEN IN (love with) TUSCANY AND I CAN’T GET UP

The Long Slow Summer (Late July 2009)

     So we were at Costco in Eugene, Oregon on a cool, cloudy weekday in late July, and we were waiting for our turn to get up to the pump.  The fancy Maxima in front of us had just pulled up to the pump; we waited while a rather short middle-aged man got out.  He apparently had no waist because his belted slacks were drawn up so far past his navel that the belt bucket was touching his chest.  It was obviously an attempt to disguise his pot belly.  Before I have a chance to say anything, Marianne speaks.

    “He’s Italian.”

    I take her at her word, having grown up back east with lost of them.  I thought he looked like a New Yorker, but what do I know, I grew up in rural Idaho.  The guy hands his cards off to the attendant, Bill.  I ask Marianne why some men actually try to hide their paunch with the high belt trick.  As quick as ever, she says, maybe he likes the feel of his underwear hiked up against his balls.  I think I blew the latte in my mouth through my nose just then.

    Bill, the attendant, seems to have has taken this new ‘bubba-do’ look to an uncomfortable extreme.  A ‘bubba-do’ is that sleek, trendy look so many ‘twent-thirty-plus-ers’ are sporting these days—the totally shaved heads with the moustache and goatee.  It would have been passable for Bill, a very personable, hard-working guy, except for one thing…he really didn’t have the right shaped head for the look.  Now I know that sounds harsh, but some heads are great bald, and some should wear hair (even balding hair) forever.  I should know--mine is like that.  So, Bill’s head was not all there.  What I mean is he seemed smart and a good soul, but the back of his head seemed to be missing.  A ‘well-rounded’ guy, maybe 250, with a full neck, Bill’s side profile was noticeable; the line of the neck continued straight up to the rather pointed crown at the top of his head. 

     “If it were me, I wouldn’t be caught dead doing that to my head,” I said.  The Jones boys, all four of them, have perfect ‘peanut’ heads and everyone knew this until we were about 11.  That’s when mom and dad decided to let us have some length to our hair instead of the burr cuts with front-bang cowlicks that she could always get to stand up by vigorous brushing or a little spit.  Spit was also good for cleaning a kids’ face.  Just a little on a hanky and a brisk rub could remove any extra dried-on food residue that might collect on a young boys face.  The red rash left by the rub however lasted a few hours.

     Looking at Bill, a distant but familiar tune popped into my head.  Now my younger brother Matthew, the doctor, who is one of the quickest wits I know, has a name for someone like this.  It’s ‘Bullet Man’.  Now B. Man was a stupid toy that was around for a very short time in the late 1970’s—kind of a weird headed super dude that could fly.  There was even a silly jingle that went with the ad that I can still sing, “Bullet Man the Human Bullet”.  Did you hear that?  I sang it perfectly—and so did Matt whenever he saw someone with a slightly torpedo-shaped head.  As it turned out, in college, he and I shared a room in a two bedroom apartment off campus for a semester.  The third roommate was a guy whose nose was unusually large—his profile was amazing, and he had little to no sense of humor.  My brother would go around singing that catchy jingle whenever Scott was not around, and he will still launch into it whenever the guy’s name is brought up to this day.  “…faster than a speeding bullet.”
     I decided not to follow suit, knowing the odd shape of my head.  Those who look really look like a Charles Schulz cartoon character should not throw stones.

      I woke on a late July morning, realizing that in a little over a week we will be traveling north to my home town in North Idaho—Sandpoint.  It is one of my favorite places in the world, but ‘progress’ and greed have started to take a toll on my once pristine childhood home.  Our cat, Maggie Mae, has already rousted me from a fairly deep slumber at 5:30 A.M. to try and get out of the screens to go after a stray Siamese-mix causally perusing our backyard.  I tried to fall back into dream-land for at least an hour, but by 6:30 that dog, a little Silky named Phoebe (a rescue but the sweetest animal we’ve ever had—even though she is a terrier) jumps on the bed and tries to give me a “French” kiss.  I pull the sheet high over my head to avoid the attack.  She snorts a few times and jumps off the bed—what fun is next she’s thinking.

     Immediately the same single-minded fanaticism begins to take hold of my mind, and soon I am wide awake worry about who will take care of the lawn, how the flowers and vegetables will be watered and tended, and a few dozen other items, while we’re gone for about two weeks.  I start thinking about why we have not heard from the apartment owner in Florence, Italy—dreading that there really isn’t an apartment or a Mr. Andrea, and that we have lost a $100 bucks to Marianna and Massimillian, the brokers.  This is after I had the gall to ask her if they had any references.  She ‘offense took’ but apologized in the next email and gave the address of the Florentine version of their Chamber of Commerce.  Yeah, that was a good ploy by the scam-artist to make the victim feel like a jerk so that they will send the deposit quicker.  The things you think when waking up.

  So I was up and getting dressed at 6:30, even earlier than I would be during the school year.  I water the lawn and plants, because today is the start of the next heat wave--mid-90s until we get to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the 100s.  Ah, summer.  I do like the higher temperatures (mid-80s-90s) and it’s great to feel the sun or your back as you work in the yard, just like my dad did, but the 100’s are just cruel and adversarial if you ask me.  My plans for our vacation next week proceed during the day as I put the Italy trip onto the ‘back burner’ for a while.  The computer awaits.

Internet Espionage  (Late July 2009)

     I need to make a confession here.  I have been using the internet to ‘eavesdrop’ on some of these Italian writers to see where they live.  I know it must be a sin of some kind.  I plead no-contest to the charge.  I found Google Maps(Satelite-view) a few years back, but the spy camera technology from space is getting incredible these days.  Originally, I started innocently by looking at houses in places around Tuscany that I thought would be great to live in.  My tastes were simple, on a wooded hill away from population centers, but near a good road, and not to far from civilization.  Come on, let’s be reasonable…you have to be practical when you dream about living in a foreign country.

     First, I found some great areas around Lucca.  One did turn out to be near a friary, so it probably wasn’t for sale.  The ones down in Umbria, while breathtaking, were too spendy.  Then, when I found the podere in Chianti that I had been lusting after for months, I thought I died and gone to heaven.  It was not only a working podere (farm), but a casale used as an Agriturismo destination.  From the air it’s a huge property; there are so many hectares of land, a pool, vineyards, oil trees, etc.  Since I had a recommendation from Dario Castagno, who had stayed there once in high school, I have daydreamed about retiring to that very spot.  

    Then I got a little too ‘focused’ on finding things.  I have found all of the spots we plane to visit on our sojourn.  Found the B & B in Magione, the apartment in Firenze, an art studio in Chiusi, and countless other places.  They appear to be real now, and not just places I have read about.  Here’s where it kind of takes a ‘kinky’ turn.  I have been trying to find some of the homes of these authors that I have been reading.  Some are well-known enough to already have it marked by some considerate contributor to Google earth.  Even Ferenc Mates’ winery is listed, although I know that the indicated spot on the map is not a winery, it’s just a bend in a road.  Bramasole, Ed and Francis Mayes’ Cortona home, has a handful of possible locations, but if you know what you are looking for, you’ll find the right one. 

     Now, Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker’s (the Tuckerberry’s as I refer to them) remodeled ‘rustico’ was a little harder to find, but no challenge is too great for me.  I found a blurry, but old shot of it on Google Maps.  The Italian site, PagineGaille.ItVisual has the best close-up view and it’s an up-to-date satellite image because you can see the pool and the new addition on the Tuckerberry’s casa.  It is not as Michael Tucker wants you to imagine, near Spoleto.  It’s near the tiny village of Poreta.  I hoped I could one day see the estate.  I could imagine all the things that the Tuckerberry’s and the Jones’ would have in common—mainly theatre and food.  Maybe we could stop in for a visit next summer?

     I have also had the Weather Underground site permanently set on Magione--Ponte Felcino, Perugia, Umbria.  This is where the B & B Bella Magione (Fernando and Rosetta) is located.  It has surprised me how Roseburg’s and Umbria’s weather patterns are so similar.  Of course they didn’t get the record heat blast we lived through earlier that week, but there time is coming.

     Why, you ask, would I do this?  Why did I spend this much time looking for these places?  I guess it’s to try and take myself out of the place I have always been and imagine a life in a place far away.  You see, it was not real to me yet.  Yes, I’ve read about it, I’ve seen the pictures, communicated with it’s people, but until I set foot on it’s soil, breath it’s air, and deal with it’s reality for myself, Italy won’t be real, to me.   Recently I saw a video of Rick Steves sitting down to dinner with an Italian farm family and I wept a little because it was so wonderful.  I wanted to do that.  It was the act of stepping out of my existence and touching the life of someone’s half a world away that hit me square in the heart.  I wanted to live ‘larger’ than rural America and finally be a part of this world I lived in.  Not politically, not with an opinion, not with any pretexts or prejudices, but just as one being to another.

   And I wanted that for us.  I wanted it more than I could say.  Maybe it had been a long journey, through childhood hopes and dreams, through the vicarious pleasures of others, but we had to go.  We had to experience Italy.  Marianne and I are doing this for us.  Something most people rarely do.  Our lives get tangled up in doing for others.  Don’t get me wrong, I believe it’s the way to live.  I just think after 30 years of ‘their’ time we needed a big ‘our time’.  The Italian saying really applies: Chi si accontenta gode: “Contentment is happiness, or enough is as good as a feast.”