Baci

I'm riding in a train compartment on a train traveling from Milan to Genoa, Italy. I just finished a late-morning snack, a kind of chocolate and hazelnut candy from Perugia called "baci", or "kisses".
Inside the wrapper of each piece of candy is little piece of waxed paper with a saying, relating to kisses, written in several different languages. Mine say, "Lovers can live on kisses and water." It doesn't explain whether it is referring to the kind of kisses made of chocolate and hazelnut or the ones composed of lips and saliva.
Our train compartment contains an interesting mix of people. There are two Russians who speak no Italian, but a little English. They have tickets which say that they don't have assigned seats so they are here until someone comes along to claim their rightful place. Although there is also a bona-fide Italian man in the compartment with us, it had fallen upon me to use my best guessing ability and limited grasp of the Italian language and train culture to explain to them why they have paid the same amount as me, but are treated as squatters here in our compartment.
For awhile we also had a cute Italian college student with us - my cute American college student daughter has been assigned to a seat in a different compartment. The Italian student had a shopping bag from a store called Stradavarius which had a symbol of a treble clef as a logo. I wondered if she had a small three million dollar 18th century violin inside but she informed me that Stradavarius is actually a clothing company. That explains the smallness of the bag.
The most interesting occupant of our compartment, who was only here for about 30 minutes, was a wild-haired Italian woman who had strong opinions about everything which she delivered in rapid-wide Italian regardless of the nationality if the individual being addressed.
Her observations included a disdain for railroad rules that required her to sit in railcar 8 when she was perfectly content with us in car 5, a dislike of restrictions in general, an apology for Silvio Berlisconi and a skepticism about his being removed from running the Italian government for good and an unrestrained (and unanticipated) enthusiasm for Americans.
"Viva l'America!" she said as she left us.
To which the American replies, "Baci per l'Italia!"

First Game

It was the summer of 1958 or 59 and my dad was taking my brother and me to our first Giant's game. I remember finishing a French twist donut at my grandmother's apartment on San Bruno Ave. and then catching the 25 Bryant bus on the corner.

      The bus fare was ten cents and you dropped your dime into a big metal hopper next to the driver. As the bus bounced along the driver would occasionally pull a handle on the hopper and you would hear this chugging, jangling sound as the fare box digested and sorted the coins. Sometimes as the bus lurched down Bryant St. the coins would noisily resort themselves without the aid of the driver.

      Soon we arrived at Seals Stadium at 16th and Bryant, across from the Hamm’s brewery. There was a giant pilsner glass atop the Hamm’s building with yellow and then white neon lights that lit up steadily from the bottom of the glass to make it appear that the glass was being forever filled and refilled with beer.

      To enter the stadium, you had to walk through a dank dungeon-like area under the grandstand and then open some swinging doors that brought you to the bottom of the stands. Instantly, your eyes were greeted by the brilliant green of a carefully manicured field like none that I had ever seen.

      My dad showed our tickets to an usher and we climbed to our seats, choosing not to rent an optional seat cushion - thousands of which we would later see being hurled into the air at the end of the game.

      The Giants were playing the Cincinnati Reds that day and Johnnie Antonelli was pitching for San Francisco. My dad told my brother and me to pay particular attention to the Giant's center fielder because he was a great player - I was so young that I hadn't yet become aware of Willie Mays.

      As the game went on I became distracted by a couple of black men sitting several rows behind us, with empty seats between them and us. They seemed like they were angry with each other and kept arguing.

     My hometown had a population of 1000, none of whom was black. I had once seen an itinerant black man in my neighborhood. In my small-town little-boy confusion, I was convinced that he was returning from the Civil War.

      I couldn't resist turning my head to watch the two men at the game. They were mad at each other, weren't they? They sounded like they were ready to fight, but they kept smiling while they were doing it. One minute one of them would be poking the other one in the chest just like my brother Jeff did to me right before he popped me one, and the next minute he was slapping the other guy on the back and they 

were both laughing.

      I turned my head all the way around to get a better look.

      "Don't look at me like that," one of the men shouted at me. "I'm gonna come down there and choke you!"

      I turned my head and aimed my eyes toward centerfield. Willie Mays made a basket catch, his hat flying off and landing on the neon grass. I didn't look back again and when the game was over, kept my eyes on the steps as we made our way to the exit, trusting luck that I wouldn't get hit by a flying seat cushion.

      I didn't look up again, except once, to catch one last look at the giant bubbling glass of beer before climbing back onto the 25 Bryant.

El Camino

We arrived at the hostel in Los Arcos in groups of two or three, registered at the desk, and prepared to spend the night before continuing the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim route across northern Spain. The host, a Spaniard in his sixties, welcomed each pilgrim in Spanish with a smile, mixed with a few words of the traveler’s own language.  He asked how our Camino, our pilgrimage, was going and offered words of support and humor.  On the desk sat a simple plate with several walnuts in their shells – the unspoken message was to help yourself, you are among friends here.

            Later, several of us sat on the porch in front of the hostel and chatted in Spanish.

            There was a Spaniard from Cadiz with a gruff look, short-cropped hair and a three-day old beard.  He had his shoes and socks off and was looking at the huge blisters on his heels that had formed after hiking a dozen miles a day for several days.  Actually, they were no longer blisters – the blisters had broken and he had tried to drain them and trim away the flesh so that they would heal, leaving him with deep open sores.  Now he was explaining that he had had a tough day of walking and was planning to return home for a week or two so that he could spend some time healing before returning to the Camino. 

A Brazilian man, about sixty years old, was talking to him in a loud voice, almost as if he had had a glass of wine or two.  He spoke Spanish slowly and loudly.  He was like the comedian, the storyteller in a bar who wanted everyone to listen to what he had to say.

            “They’re not so bad. I think you’ll be able to continue!”

            “I don’t think so.  It’s time for me to go home.”

            “No.  Not at all.  They’ll be better in no time.  You just need to rest overnight!”

            “Whatever you say.”

            “It’s really no problem,” insisted the Brazilian.

            Other people nearby were grinning, amused by the false optimism of the Brazilian.  “It’s no problem for him,” someone said. Meanwhile, the man with the blisters continued to scowl.

            Soon the Brazilian launched into another topic - extolling the virtues of a type of liquor produced only in Brazil.

            “It’s very good, very strong. Sort of like grappa, but with a stronger finish.  You must try it sometime.”

            “Sounds interesting,” said the man from Cadiz in a flat voice.

            “You know, there is something else we have in Brazil that’s better than what you will find anywhere else in the world.  You know what it is?”

            “Las brazileñas?” joked the Spaniard with the blisters, looking up and smiling for the first time.

            The Brazilian started to explain that this wasn’t what he meant, that he wasn’t referring to the beautiful women of Brazil, but his speech was lost in the good-natured laughter from the rest of the group.

            “Why are there so many Brazilians walking the Camino?”  asked a man wearing a red and black track suit.

            “It’s because we have a writer in Brazil – Paolo Coelho – who walked the Camino and then wrote several books about it.”

            “So that’s why so many of you have come?”

            “Yes, but I don’t find the Camino to be the way he described it,” added the Brazilian.  “He’s a strange writer.  It’s as if he’s writing about his dreams, nothing appears the way he has described it.”

            “It’s like the American writer, Hemingway,” said another.  “He wrote about Pamplona and now all of the Americans come there.”

            “I like Hemingway,” said the Brazilian in his usual straightforward way.  “He’s direct and clear, easy to understand.  Not like those crazy dreams of Coelho, who must have been on drugs.”

            “Yes, Hemingway was just drinking all of the time,” I said.

            “You’re American?” asked the man in the track suit, recognizing my accent.

            “Yes, I’m from California.  But I need to go home now.  I’m taking a bus to Logroño and then on to Madrid for my flight home. I don’t have time for any more walking.”

            “Too bad.  You won’t be able to walk the entire Camino.”

            “Maybe like me, you’ll come back and finish some day,” said the man with the blistered feet.

            “I hope so.”

            I stood up to leave, looked at the group as they looked back at me.  I hesitated for a moment, not quite knowing how to put my thoughts into words. “Buen Camino,” I said, wishing them luck on their pilgrimage.

            “Gracias,” they answered. “Buen Viaje – have a good journey home.”

            I hoisted my backpack, remembering how to walk in such a way that my own blisters hurt the least, and headed toward the bus.

Chinatown

The guy who works at the parking garage thinks I’m Bruce Springsteen.

“Thanks, Boss” he says when I hand him my seven bucks as I drive out of the garage.  Or maybe he thinks I’m his immediate supervisor.  He seems to believe that we have a relationship, a friendship, a connection.  Maybe he remembers me from last week?  The truth is, I need his advice. If he’s my fan, my employee, a colleague, surely he’ll help me.

I only want to pay three dollars and maybe he can tell me how. On Saturdays you can park all day if you have your ticket validated by one of the participating Chinatown merchants. Buy something for three dollars, have them stamp your ticket and parking only costs three bucks. Your total cost is six dollars instead of seven and you get a wooden backscratcher or a Chinese finger handcuff as a bonus.

How many backscratchers can one person use?  I only have one back, and it’s rarely itchy. I could use one backscratcher, though, since my daughter and her fingernails have gone away to college.

A finger handcuff is a handy thing to have, but once you’ve incapacitated your index fingers, it’s really overkill to apply additional units to the unincarcerated digits.

What are other possible three dollar purchases? Maybe the parking attendant who thinks I’m his boss could help me.

I could tell him what I’ve tried already.

The fortune cookie factory where the cookies are baked in a rotating oven where each cookie pops out of a die and a seated attendant places them on a wooden form while still pliable and jams a fortune inside before forming them into the familiar shape and allowing them to cool. The sign informs me that it will cost me 50 cents to take a photo and the supervisor further advises with an almost violent waving away gesture that (if I read his body language correctly) we don’t do any stinking parking validation here that’ll be three bucks for the cookies though.

The sketchy and not-so-clean Vietnamese restaurant with the oh-so-scrumptious Bon Me sandwiches – as long as you avoid the infernally hot peppers – that at $3.50 seemed the best solution and which was on the list of validating merchants but unfortunately the almost-nice but also strict and scary waitress had never heard about.

The bakery with the almond cookies that are sometimes given to you at Chinese restaurants along with fortune cookies, these being bigger ones, costing exactly three dollars with validation but filled with Crisco, not very tasty, but despite this forcing me to consume all of them despite my self-disappointment, before I arrived home.

Or the bakery with Dim Sum pastries and these fluffy pork buns that are my favorite with the tasty barbecued pork center, like the sweet filling of a Twinkie, buried in a white flour and sugar fluff which I also devoured, this time before even returning to my fan/employee/friend at the parking garage.

What should I do? I might ask him.

Buy something mundane each week, like a half-dozen apples?

Bring a soiled dress shirt to the cleaners and pick up last week’s clean one?

Purchase a Mao hat and present it to a different friend or relative each week?

Go to an herb shop, tell them what’s ailing me and have them select the items to brew in a tea that will cure me until next week?

Or buy a weekly backscratcher and, after keeping one for myself, give one away each week to the first homeless person I encounter.

This is what I would do, Boss.  One of two things – but whichever one you choose tells a lot about you. I’d either take the easy way out and pay the seven bucks. Or I’d make a game out of it each week.  Let the item find you – it’s out there waiting for you.  What kinda guy are you, Boss?

That’ll be three bucks.

One more bit of advice. Take that thing off your fingers before you try to drive home.

Boss.

Just a Smidge

A story of miscommunication, wine glasses, and international intrigue

            It’s kind of ridiculous, really, to get that worked up about the size and shape of a wine glass.  I’m not talking about my brother-in-law, who leaves a set of special huge bowl-like stemmed wine glasses at our restaurant so that he can adequately enjoy the hearty taste-like-the-soil-they-were-grown-in super Tuscan reds that he favors. He maintains that it’s necessary to swirl the wine and then burrow into the glass with your nose and inhale deeply.  Then you loudly slurp the wine into your mouth and siphon it through your teeth, swishing it round your mouth before allowing yourself to swallow. Then he smiles while he describes the licorice and leather while you marvel at how quickly his teeth became temporarily stained.

No, I’m talking about how worked up I get about my own preference in wine glass. I prefer drinking wine out of a glass without a stem – what some people might call a tumbler, although that term is now sometimes used for glasses that look like stemmed goblets with the stems removed, and that isn’t at all what I’m talking about. What I like best is a glass that looks like it might have contained Smucker’s grape jelly in an earlier life. At the fanciest, I will accept the kind that’s short and tapered and fits perfectly in your hand.

In fact, that’s just what I found on a recent trip to Venice. I stopped at a little wine bar near St. Mark’s and ordered a glass of local white wine. In my just-adequate Italian, I asked the waitress to serve the wine in a small glass. She explained that they usually only serve the house wine in a tumbler and that this is called an “ombra”, but that she would serve my wine this way if that’s what I wanted.  Later I found out “ombra” means “shade” and that in the old days, the wine had to be stored in the shade at sidewalk cafes in order to keep it cool. An unpretentious neighborhood bar might serve your ombra in a tumbler, while a fancier place would serve the wine – always a small portion – in a stemmed glass.

I remembered learning that it was important to drink white wine out of a stemmed glass – and to hold it by the stem – so that the heat of your hand wouldn’t warm the wine. I like the feel of cupping the glass in the palm of my hand though, and figure that I’ll finish drinking it before it gets too warm. The little tumblers seem like something that my Italian grandmother would have used – they’re unpretentious and friendly – something you would use if a friend dropped by with a bottle of wine and you quickly grabbed a couple of glasses from the shelf.

Later in my visit to Venice, this time with my son, we stopped by another wine bar and again I ordered some white wine, requesting a pair of tumblers.  The waitress told us, without a trace of a smile, that that would not be possible, and poured the wine into stemmed wine glasses. I tried to explain to her and a nearby waiter that it was a quirky preference of mine, that I own a restaurant back home and that the waiters all know about my curious tastes in glassware. The two servers consulted and the waitress agreed to switch glasses for us, but the stern face never changed.

As we sipped our wine, my son pointed out to me that someone was talking to me. There was another waitperson on the other side of the room, preparing some food. He was staring at me and speaking directly to me, in Italian.  I couldn’t understand everything that he said, but I picked out the words “cattivo”, “vino” and “bicchiere” – bad, wine, and glass. He seemed to be scolding me, telling me that it was bad to drink wine out of inappropriate glasses.

I was a little taken aback and didn’t know how to respond. I tried to explain in a playful, joking manner why I was amused by drinking my wine out of a humble, ordinary glass, but I didn’t have the adequate grasp of Italian to state my case. The man’s expression and the way he spat the words at me conveyed that he was not in the mood for a lighthearted exchange of wine-drinking philosophy.

Needless to say, we finished our wine rather quickly, paid our bill and fled from the decidedly unwelcoming atmosphere.  As we walked the streets of Venice, in a kind of delayed reaction, I became angrier and angrier and more and more puzzled until my son had to tell me that I was making way too big of a thing out of a little wine glass.

As often occurs when something unsettling happens to me, I went over the event again and again in my head. I tried to figure out what had happened and worked out different scenarios of how I might have responded. First I had to consider why the bar employee might have become so incensed.  This is what I decided:

1.     He felt that I was not showing significant respect to the wine. I could not adequately appreciate the delicate aromas and flavors if it were not allowed to breathe properly and if it’s temperature were negatively affected by my sweaty foreign fist

2.     I was putting on airs by claiming to be a restaurant owner who knew better than the proprietors of a Venetian enoteca how best to imbibe an Italian wine

3.     I was suggesting something that was not the usual way of doing things, was contrary to the rigid standard of how food and drink is served in Italy and was not to be taken seriously, especially when accompanied by bad grammar and weak repartee

4.     The American restaurant dictum “the customer is always right” which would require an American restaurateur to allow a customer to drink his Chateau Lafit Rothchild out of a soup bowl if he so desired, was not something that was adhered to in Italy.

5.     The person who was speaking to me was simply a boorish, irritating and contemptible fool

My ruminations didn’t just stop there, though.  That wouldn’t be any fun.  After returning to the U.S. I often told friends about my adventures – which were 99 percent of a positive nature. Eventually, though, I came back to the sad story of the wine glass, because it still wasn’t resolved in my head. The more I talked about it and the more I played the scene out in my head, the more I was able to develop alternate endings to the confrontation.  Here are some of my favorites:

1.     I return my adversary’s glare and hiss, “Are you talking to me?” in a Joe Peschi accent as I vault over the bar, shattering wine glasses – all of which will soon be stemless as I make my way toward the terrified wine shop flunky, grab him by the lapels and curse at him in flawless Italian as I explain to him the concept of American-style hospitality.

2.     I invite my wine-etiquette expert to join me for a glass of wine. Using the “kill him with kindness” approach, I suggest that he convince me of the merits of using the traditional stemmed glass. We become best of friends and ever after exchange Christmas cards written in Italian.

3.     After becoming frustrated with trying to explain myself in what must sound like the conversational ability of a three-year old, I explode in a fifteen-minute English rant all roughly formulated on the concept of the wine tumbler, but really just an excuse to feel fluent once again. I circulate amongst the other patrons of the bar, speaking to no one and everyone, just enjoying the sound of my own voice until my horrified son and I are physically removed to the cobblestones outside.

So now months have gone by and I’m almost over it. I found a local restaurant that serves wine in even tinier versions of the “ombra” and call it a “smidge”. I order wine in our restaurant and the waiters serve it in my preferred vessel, with a smile. And on Christmas day my daughter gave me my own set of wine tumblers.

Did I make a big deal about a little thing? Yes, I did. Have I been obsessing about it for way too long?  For sure.  Have I been driving friends and family a little crazy with all of the telling and retelling and asking of opinions on the subject? Most definitely. Am I going to go back to Venice some day and order many glasses of wine? I’m thinking so. But now I have a new question to ask my friends.

Should I put my tumbler in my carry-on, or the checked bag?

An incredible trip comes to an end

Early tomorrow morning I board a plane to fly back home, sad to be leaving Joe and this incredible country, but happy to head home again. Some final thoughts. These are some if the ways that Italy has changed since I was here 30 years ago: The lira is gone, you rarely see men greeting one another with a kiss, the women seem to be less domineering and the men less preening, and you don't often hear people speaking in a dialect. Ways that Joe is changing: He talks about being sad about returning in December and wanting to stay longer, today we visited the cathedral in Milan at his suggestion, he has visited 10 cities in Italy and can't wait to see more of Italy and Europe, yesterday he let a non-English speaking Venetian woman give him an Italian-style haircut, and he's proud to have cousins in Italy who now considers to be friends. How have I changed? I've learned that I can speak Italian even with a 30 year layoff and that I love the way it sounds when Italians speak, that travel can be so much more meaningful when you plan well but then reach out to create something unexpected, that my son is even cooler than I thought and that I haven't forgotten how to write! When I read what others have written or when I myself write, I'm always most interested in the questions, "What was it like to be there, in that place, at that time, in that situation? What did it feel like?" I hope, dear blog readers, that these stories of the little things that make up an adventure have given you a little feel for what these two weeks were like.

An open window in a blues club

The little bar near where we were staying in Venice had a blues band playing last night. Joe and I stopped in and enjoyed how the lead singer explained each song in Italian - getting the names almost right: Johnny Hooker, Sony Boy Williams, Little Richard in place of Little Walter) and then singing in flawless bluesy American English. We found a spot inside next to an open window, with people on the other side listening, drinking and smoking. As is often the case, we were observers, too timid to interact with the people around us. Finally, though, my curiosity got the best of me as I watched the young students hand-rolling perfect cigarets. I asked for a demonstration and the young lady summoned a young man, who was the expert of the group who had taught the others. He was a German architecture student, studying in Vienna along with his friends, who were Romanians. They had all taken an eight-hour bus ride down to Venice to attend the architectural exposition - the Biennial. Josef, the German, had led them to this bar and they would soon board a bus for the eight hour return trip. He let us try our hands at rolling a cigaret - hold the filter (he had a little bag of them) in your mouth, spead some tobacco evenly on the rolling paper with the glue strip away from you leaving room for the filter on the right, squeeze and roll the paper back and forth until the tobacco is compressed into a cylinder, then start rolling from bottom to top, inserting the filter as you go, just before you finish, lick the glue strip and squeeze to all together. Then we stepped outside to the smokers' side of the window to enjoy our cigarets with our new friends (who had to help us light them in the breeze). Promising to give up smoking after that night, we enjoyed our tutorial and were glad that we decided to not just stand and watch, but to talk with someone on the other side of an open window.