Saturday, January 29, 2011

Help! I've Fallen (in love with) Tuscany and I Can't Get Up!

(Prelude to Most Excellent T. A.)
Really, I’m Not Crazy (Third Week of June 2009)
     I have just a few people to blame for this confounding predicament that I am in right now.  I curse the day that I ever heard of them and, if you were in my Italian loafers right now, I think you would whole-hearted concur.   I wouldn’t wish this situation on anyone.  It sucks, to use a disgusting phrase.  It’s fottuto orribileMi dispiace.
     If these writers the likes of Ferenc Mate, Dario Castagno, Phil Doran, and Michael Tucker (that grinning, epicure-o-phile gnome) weren’t allowed to write such sweetly intoxicating prose about the ancient land of the Etruscans, I wouldn’t be in this mess.        
     Rick Steves--there’s another name that I would like to yank out of the mouth of twenty-first century America--just like a rotten tooth or a bad crown.   This world traveler from Seattle has been everywhere, done everything, and seen everything, apparently every year, everywhere in the world!  Now come on.  Is that even possible?  If I hear him on PBS or read in one more of his travel books how to ‘live out your dreams out of one backpack for a month’ I am going to stuff that bag, cloths, shoulder straps and all in his “I so happy to be on the top of the Alps for Christmas” mouth. 
     To an extent I should also point a finger at the grand dame of illusionary Tuscan dreams, Francis Mayes.  Her insidious writings about the ethereal realms of Cortona inebriate the soul and trick it into daring to dream such insane things.  “Why can’t a 53 year old Elementary Music teacher tend a vineyard in Chianti?  I could paint, too, and Marianne, my wife, could quilt.”  They do quit in Tuscany--right?
     I guess I need to blame it on my OCD (totally undiagnosed), but as my wife is quick to point out, “always seems to flare-up the night before we travel and it drives me crazy!” (pazzo, to you in the ‘know’).  I sometimes call it “ODOI”--Attention Deficit … Oooh Italy!  When she says that, I stop and take stock, turn and look at her with a pained, ingrained expression, put there by my sainted mother--which, Marianne points out a lot--‘she wasn’t’, that says “thrust the dagger deeper into my already bleeding heart!  I am the martyr here—and don’t you forget it”. 
     But it’s true, I need to know the night before we head off into the sunrise for a two week journey of untold discovery that the house and property is in order.  It’s an extremely responsible task that I must perform, for the sake of rest and personal comfort.  Maybe the diagnosis is ADD.
    Anyway, so here I am, out mowing our lawn and taking care of my “land” before the much anticipated “journey to the East”—the pilgrimage to the “green heart” of Italia.  Okay, so it’s a 60’ x 45’ lot, with a 1,900 square foot ranch style house on it; that’s about 30 square feet of grass.  However, with that and the tiny border gardens, two 4’ x 12’ raised vegetable beds, and just this May, a potato patch (formerly the iris bed) with Yukon gold’s and French fingerlings—all of which I have done myself, I look on it as my estate.  Okay, I know that’s stretching things a bit much, and yes, I do tend to extend things in my imagination somewhat--yeah a lot, but don’t all 50-somethings?
     It’s mid-June and the grass is green.  In a month it will start to show the first signs of burning to September brown.  Summers in Roseburg are usually brutal.  Hoping the temperature stays out of the high 90’s (100’s in August) is a prayer that usually goes unanswered.  Although in the twenty odd years we’ve been here, July can be rainy, chilly and full of thunder showers.  People, I don’t know which ones (the proverbial ‘they’), have said that Douglas County and this southwestern area of Oregon is much like Tuscany.  Apparently the temperature is also similar.  The summers are uncomfortably hot, but not humid.  Winters are mild with snow once or twice, and so, why, you ask, would I want to go to a country that looks like the place I live.  Good question.  I don’t know.
     In the shaded places in the back yard, the lawn is still lush and long, full of dew and plump (if grass can be plump) grass.  I like to keep it trimmed in a diagonal-weave pattern like I’ve seen the professional landscapers do on the grand courthouse lawn in town.  That lawn always looks content, lush and green with that stunning professionally done weave pattern.  One of the largest and oldest elms in this part of the country resides there in majestic repose.  I am convinced I am not obsessive or compulsive because I have a hard time even remembering which angle I mowed the week before.  Was it from the southeast or from the northeast last time?   It’s really no big deal.  Really. 
     Mowing the lawn always reminds me of the time, in adolescence, when I was accused of ‘bilking’ an old lady out of her pension.  She lived up the street and needed someone to mow her lawn.  I had just ‘inherited’ the job from my older brother, Tom.  She was happy the first time I cut the grass.   I was ‘outraged’.   Blindsided when the woman paid me over a dollar less then my brother had made--because I was so efficient.  I then decided to ‘slow down’ and take my time the second time.  When she came out to pay a beaming me, she admonished me for going over the same spot too many times--taking longer to mow the lawn (a clever entrepreneurial ploy on my part which ‘backfired’) then the week before, “I will pay you what I paid you last time”. 
   I really caught hell when my dad got home from work (the Employment Office).  That unforgiving woman had called him, at work, and told him what I had done.  Later my twin brother, Douglas, asked if I had really done ‘that’!?  And I said yes, feeling I was totally justified because ‘I should have gotten the same amount for the job as Tom had gotten’.    
     Here in lies one of my fatal flaw—a crusading sense of ‘fairness’.  Just give me a flaming sword and I shall right the wrongs of this world.   I am sure it comes from a part of me that doesn’t want to grow up.  At school I hear it all the time, the kids always balk “it’s not fair”!  And I believe them, still, even though I have been trained as a teacher to say, “Life’s not fair, get use to it”.  Oh, and to the kids not trying in class, “can you say ‘do you want fries with that’?”
     As I try to stifle that nearly repressed memory of summer jobs gone bad, I want to know why I can’t experience the same things that those “we-have-life-made-we’re-living-‘la vita dolce’-in-Italy” writers that I have shelled out so much money to read their potential lies.  All those, Mayes, Doran, Mate (with his winery) and their fancy words, like ticking time bombs, that get stuffed into ones ears--whispering false hopes.  They get crammed into ones brain where they explode at times when you least expect them.  Ka-boom! Suddenly I am driving a rented car down a crooked scenic road from Pienza to Montalcino.  (It’s quite breathtaking—ah!  Oh, a hair pin corner and someone’s trying to pass in the other lane…) These dreams incubate, hatch, then burrow and weave themselves, like some linguistic snake--slithering its way through your grey matter, whispering exotic words like, “una gelato, perfavore”, and into our blood veins, and then finally coiling themselves around our hearts and very souls.  I can’t stand it and I don’t want to read another syllable!
     Enough.  If any of us mortal jerks get to go to the land of Brunello and Dante, it’ll be when we’re dead and buried.  Maybe my ashes can be scattered over the farmlands of the Crete Senese. 
     STOP!  I have a lawn to mow.  Reality comes back into focus and the obnoxious roar of the lawn mower yells at me.  I am hot and sweating at 10 A.M. in the morning.  The temperature is promising to get to 100today.  I have the acrid stench of gasoline, burning oils, and dust in my nose.--back to reality.  Today I have promised myself, like last Friday that I would not read anything about Italy and I would not search for anything Italian on the computer.   The plan is to keep this promise, unless provoked.
     A ‘red racer’ suddenly springs up out of nowhere, wriggling out of the long blades of grass and challenges the machine to a territory war.  The nine inch snake can’t understand why this huge smelly thing has invaded his sanctuary.  I try to avoid the coiled snake and steer clear.  I know I will pass back this way and have to fight it off with my shoe-d foot again.  Hope I don’t hurt it.  Once I had to take the BBQ tongs, pick up the snake and toss it over the fence into the neighbors’ yard.  Ah, such is life and dreams.