A Trip To Italy

6:45 AM Dublin, Ireland NYC → DUB

5 ½ hours until hotel check in.

Dublin so far is…. There’s a lot of drunk people on the street still. They’re slipping on all the trash on the cobblestones. When my plane touched down at 4:30 this morning the sun was risen and happily sunning. It was cold in that way that Europe is cold. Pleasant and such.

It’s Sunday morning so not much is open. Might not be for a while, according to my cab driver. He taught me Irish words on the way into the city but I can’t remember any of them. I spent the time and brainpower wondering how many times he’s had that particular conversation, and whether he likes it. People’s accents aren’t so hard to follow. Must be Scottish that’s the tough one. The zombies are being friendly to their friends. They’re parting ways on the street with a clumsy hug and saying “Aiwrigh’ mayte - see ye, then.”

After 1+ hour of literally aimless walking I’m on Dame Street, at a coffee chain called Frank and Honest. Lots of chains around. Even Starbucks isn’t open yet. Went into a grocery chain called Spar and bought a pack of Gummy Babies shaped like real babies, a newspaper, and some cigarettes- so, ya know, day is looking up.

Ciggies are $9.40 here. This pack has a picture of a man on his deathbed surrounded by his grieving wife and children. The caption reads “Quit…for your family!” Others have: a close up of a tracheotomy hole on an old woman’s neck, a haggard wretch coughing up fake blood, and a fetus drawn in ashes. Seems obnoxious to me. Who, after making the clerk open up the huge safety-deposit-box-like-machine that holds all the cigarettes, would take a look at the packaging and declare, “You know what? They’re right!” and walk away??

This neighborhood’s called Temple Bar, btw. It’s named because a Bar is a fake sand bank that you engineer to build houses on, and Temple is the guy who figured out how to do it. Has nothing to do with bars. It’s the cultural center of Dublin according to John, the gentleman who just sat down briefly next to me. He’s going to Michigan in 3 weeks to visit a Christian missionary friend of his, though he’s not a Christian himself. They just know one another from volunteering. I mentioned I’ve done some missionary work myself, but he did not seem very interested. Wonder if he struck up conversation w/ me because my new haircut makes me look like a soccer hooligan? Hmm…

4 ¼ hours until hotel check in.

Ice cream shop on Dame Street

9:00 AM Dublin Mercantile Hotel

Incredible brekky at Mercantile Hotel. Two pucks of pudding with really heady Fall flavors- like the heavenly version of my mom’s Thanksgiving dressing. Bacon that just sang with porky goodness. Fresh-ass bread that puffed flour when touched with the butter knife. Perfect sunny-side egg, great coffee that reminded me of Turkey. Even the potatoes were clean and bright and lovely tasting.

Real down-home, ernest type waitress, too. Susan Sarandon could dig for 100 years and not capture this woman’s ‘working soul’. $13.

When the check arrived I thought, Hmm. Do I bring this up? Will she come get it? Not too sure of the etiquette here. So I asked her “Sorry, do I tip?”

“Where ye frum?” she asked

“America…”

She laughed and sort of looked at the ceiling (not rude enough to be an eye-roll). “Only Americans tip.” Then literally everyone in the restaurant laughed at me.

11:55 PM Stag’s Head Pub Dublin

Lovely Dublin plan has gone off without a hitch. Made friends with a girl named Claire through my hostel. We exchanged numbers and after a quick nap met up for drinking in Temple Bar. Forgot about Whatsapp and miracle-like-ease-of-twenty-first-century-communication.

Claire’s from Nantes (pronounced NANT!, she insists). Very pretty, young, studied in 3-4 countries through college. Over Guinnes she showed me pictures of her day-to-day life: Friday morning pancake breakfast with her social media firm. Sunrises her boyfriend Joshua sends her from the cruise ship on which he works.

I love this glimpse into the world of a total stranger. The park scenes and the group dinners. Kind of hard to explain, but there’s this “head out of the sand” feeling whenever I’m reminded that other people really are living lives, and not just extras in a TV show all about me. It’s like, on the television of my life, I’ve just flicked past her channel, and caught a couple seconds of whatever show was on. That show was happening before I passed by it, and it’ll keep going on whether I’m watching or not. So it’s not so much that our lives affect one another’s, but they have intersected. For a brief moment we were together, and now…we’re apart again! It’s very nice.

This of course happens back home hundreds of times a day but I don’t really register them. Perhaps that’s part of my problem. Perhaps it helps that she was foreign? I suppose the point of traveling is the opportunity to look at life from an outsider’s perspective.

“Try to realize you’re really only very small and life goes on within you and without you.”

-George Harrison

6:00 AM Cormons, Friuli, Italy Paula’s House

Very awake. 20,000 birds all making noise at once (seems like). Sunlight. Cool breeze. Church bells.

Things I Can Do With So Much Time Now That I Am Awake

Pick cherries from the tree in the back yard

Ride bike up the mountain to see the castle

Go for jog along the vineyard rows like I used to do when Eleanor lived here

Literally just heard a gosh dang rooster crow!!

10:00 AM Town Square Osteria Caramella

Cormons smells almost entirely of Jasmine. I just learned what that smell is called, so now I’m gonna say it everywhere. They say that artists and designers see more colors because they have names for them all. So: everywhere you go here smells of Jasmine. Or very big leaves. They use grapevines like hedgerows in this town; to mark the line between each house. Every property seems to have a little vineyard on the side. The local grapes are called Tocai. Madai, the town fascist, is out on the square canvassing for votes in a wife beater and flip-flops.

Cormons is so small it takes only about 30 minutes to cross by foot. Then you’re in the vineyards and rolling up the road around the hill. Five minutes after that you’re in Slovenia. The views at that point become unbearable. The Dolomite Mountains rise in the background, jagged and young and grey- hanging about like attractive-but-intimidating teenagers in the town square. Below that the green, green hills roll down their feet in an emerald canvas, red and yellow towns spotting up like mushrooms on a forest floor. The views are disgusting and captivating and are making me question my entire life. “What am I doing living in dirty New York City, rushing around everywhere and trying to add up?? Don’t I know that for a very small fee I could be living out here and spend the rest of my days in splendid beauty?” I want to dial my boss and tell her I’m never coming home. I want to drop dead. I want to stand still and look out at these hills forever- determined to soak it all in and somehow indemnify the drain around which I’m circling.

Cormons sits right at the base of a hill up against a big wall. It is literally the last hill of the chain before the land levels out and is flat all the way to the sea. On my walk this morning I came upon part of the wall that had been papered over in portraits. Having seen something like this in other European towns, I assumed that these were all photographs of townspeople who had died. Some of the pictures were black and white, some quite new looking, some single portraits, some entire families and I’d have to guess who the feature was. I looked over each picture carefully and with somber respect “Ah! He had children,” I’d think to myself. Or “She was so young, so beautiful. What a shame.” I stood at the wall for quite a while, saying a quiet prayer for the citizens of Cormons. Later, while driving past, Eleanor told me that it is not a memorial to dead townspeople but an advertisement for the wine store across the street. Well, anyway.

Il Cuc

I keep saying to myself “Maybe if I have a nervous breakdown in the 3rd quarter I’ll come stay a month for sabbatical.” Then I take some moments to imagine my life in that situation. Duolingo Italian lessons at the kitchen table. Jogs every morning up the hill. Daily walks to Caramella’s for $1 wine. Maybe write? What is it that I do wit my life now that would not translate?

In The Grapes of Wrath, which I have been reading, nobody has money. All their wealth comes from the land. In my time it’s all about money- nobody owns nothin’. My wealth comes from what I can do for somebody else’s dream; for a company and a bank that nobody owns but it owns us. This is why I stare out so long at the hills.

Dinner last night at Al Confine was a trip. Five years ago for Eleanor and Pipo’s wedding rehearsal we had dinner here as well. “That was when they’d just opened, and we really just came as a favor to them because we were friends with the owners Denis and Sabine. Now this place is very popular.” Eleanor has this way of speaking wherein you automatically know that (a) she’s an expert, and (b) she’s understating just how cool and important this particular topic is. It’s as if with every factoid she she should be tapping the side of her nose and giving a wink ;-)

The gentleman who met us at the table and waited on us all night was the owner, Denis. He was a young, handsome guy in a comfortable short sleeve button down and cargo shorts (basic Cormons uniform, really). We ate out on the patio and all night he was greeting and schmoozing everyone who came in. Everyone kind of literally knows everyone here. The restaurant sits on a big piece of land that was owned by his wife Sabine’s family for generations. They didn’t do much on it, just sold grapes to other landowners to squish in with their own. Before marrying her he was a truck driver, but when he saw the property and what they could do with it, he encouraged them to turn it into a restaurant and make something grand of the family legacy.

For dinner we had frico baked in cast iron. A little unusual for the area, but it gave it a sweet cheese crust which Eleanor pronounced “brilliant”. Next course was blecs in cream with sage and prosciutto. Then a wild boar which was cooked with polenta and arugula and smoked ricotta.

Later we moved inside for dessert and digestivo. Dinner rush was dying down so El and Pipo and I hung out at the bar. Denis and Sabine were running to and fro in the front of the house, phasing the last remaining guests, and intermittently stopping by to sip Lemoncello and joke with us. In American restaurants you usually have a chef who designs all the dishes, and then an army of “cooks” in back who prepare them over and over. Seeing as this food was so incredible, I asked how it worked here at Al Confine. Denis rolled back the door to the kitchen revealing two grandmas bending over the bubbling stove. “That’s my mama, and that’s her mama,” he said. This food is literally made by Italian grandmas, from grapes and wild boars caught and skinned on the property.

Nowadays the wine they make there is called Il Cuc. A cuc is a fox-like animal that steals other animals’ eggs. In Friulian, though, it seems that almost all words have two meanings- one real and one tongue-in-cheek that I suspect the Italians engineered expressly for the purpose of making puns. In this case Il Cuc is also a funny word for a man who goes to live with his wife’s family. Denis is the cuc who found his wife, found his passion, and made it all happen. In the picture on their wine bottles, fittingly, he is over the moon.

Like Vines

“I’m finding it hard to remember what it was we were all so eager to run away from.”

-Laura, on the eve of her departure

Things certainly are very pleasant here. I’d never be so ignorant as to say that life is easy, but there certainly is a lovely lilting cadence to it; one which, if you let yourself, one could float upon for a very long time.

The people I know who are my age have this thing about running and running and running and trying to get ahead. It seems it is unpalatable for us to grow in place. Whenever I ask someone how they are, I’ve started qualifying it in my head with “and let’s just assume you’re looking for a new job.” I used to think this was a Millennial thing. Then I decided it comes from a more universal Grass Is Always Greener mentality. But recent dips into 19th Century literature lead me to believe that this insuperable push upward is simply a young person thing, and very human at that.

But I know a lot of people who are in pain right now because of it, and I don’t really know if this atavistic push is supposed to hurt quite so badly. Perhaps it comes from the lie we middle-class Americans have been told that we somehow “deserve” or “are entitled to” a stature in this world. Go to school for X amount of years, get a job in Y field, multiply by time (T) and you’ll be making Z amount of money. What my ilk increasingly find, however, is that this formula does not work- never did from the start. The killer job and apartment we’d been promised on Friends isn’t materializing. Our hearts sweat and break as we feverishly try to figure out why that might be, what we’re supposed to be doing with ourselves, and how on God’s green earth do we do it?

Cormons doesn’t seem to have this problem. No one’s running around here, desperate and freaked out because they’re not living up to their own made-up expectations. That’s part of the spell my sister and I are falling under this week. The pace of life seems to beckon “Come in! It’s nice here! See we have a pool and jasmine and greenery? It can be like this forever…” Our years and years of striving make that seem, in this moment, like a pretty sweet deal. “Have I found it at last?” mixed with “Why was I so stupid to miss it?”

If you peel back the curtain, though, everyone’s calm, smiling face has a long and usually painful story behind it. Cormons is small enough to literally have townspeople, and I’ve been collecting their stories all week. Andrea was heavily overweight and incredibly lonely. His pain drove him to develop an eating disorder. He eventually broke down, bought a dog, got in shape, and re-emerged proclaiming himself “Foto Modelo!” Now he’s a regular figure around town and has a tattoo of the dog on his calf.

Stefi, Madai’s younger brother, was involved in a car accident with Pierpaolo’s brother Diego that resulted in his death. To this day Pierpaolo and Madai have a strained relationship because “my brother survived and yours did not.”

Elena runs the Enoteca and has tried for years to kickstart the region into the 21st century. Still outwardly a youthful beauty, she says of herself, “I am tired.” The town resists progress at every turn. They think WiFi a nice-to-have; tourism a silly nuisance. Fabulous, knowledgeable winemakers who are steeped in tradition and up to their elbows in delicious Pinot Grigio do not want to be famous. They do not want to be visited in their cellars, made to tell their stories to German tourists, and handed foreign money.

This is a town and a people stuck in time. Each day is the same, so that you can see them coming up and stretching behind as endlessly as the row upon row of grapevines surrounding us. Every morning you have lunch at Caramella’s and wave to the neighbors. Then a little later you go have white wine spritzes and speck at Porchi’s pool. Later that night maybe you slink off to Paradise Bar and make some minor mistake that will end up making no difference to your life once the sun comes up and the process starts all over again.

Whether this tedium sounds like death or salvation to us, the Striving Youth, in a surprise twist it might actually be that “Life” thing we’ve all been looking for. I’ll give you an example. Our friend Robi’s first marriage did not end up well, we’ll say. Torturous. His second marriage also did not work, and left him in a low, low state. Robi turned off from the world. He found himself riding that aforementioned endless stream of days. Each morning he left his house in the hills and drove down to Gorizia for work at the clerk’s office. Each morning he stopped at the train station café for coffee and brioche (and cigarettes). Each day he saw the same people, the same faces, and this one particular dark haired, heavily-lidded woman with sparkling eyes at the bar, waiting also for her train to work. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and Robi and Daniela saw each other, and smiled, and wondered together in that hillside cafe, but they never spoke. Without exchanging a word, over time their hearts began to grow and creak and soften in on each other. Eventually Daniela got so freaked out at this love- this newfound, unexpected, unusual love for this man that she did know and had never spoken to- that she pulled out completely. She stopped coming to the cafe and told herself “Maybe he’ll go away. Maybe I’m crazy and it’s just me.” Finally, of course, she did go back in- she had to see if the spell was real! When she did Robi was waiting for her on his usual stool at the bar. As Eleanor tells it, for a second she stood in the doorway and then bolted back out into the street. Robi chased her, ran out to her car and pounded on the window shouting until she let him in (imagine it is raining at this point and he’s in a leather jacket). They kissed right there in the parking lot and have been together ever since. I’ve have always known this Robi, who is quick with a lighter and always has this huge grin on his face which shows off his big gap teeth.

This kind of romance, I suggest to you, dear reader, cannot happen in the story that a life-hungry 26-year-old might be trying to write. If one flits and flies from lily pad to lily pad trying to figure out what she’s supposed to be wanting, what she’s got will literally pass her by. And if there is a young man who, every time things slow down and get annoying, his solution born from overperceived value is to move on- “what’s next” never becomes “what’s here?”. This kind of love story, quite to the contrary, requires something that we young people really don’t like at all- a very long time. In short, it requires Life, being lived as Life must be lived- one day at a time, unfolding as delicately and intentionally as a grapevine.

–

Good grapes need stress, Eleanor says. They have to be strong in themselves. A good vinedresser, therefore, knows not only how to protect his vines from the elements, but how to deprive them. He knows 10 different ways to string them up so that they get shade when they’d rather have sun, and sun when they’re weak and bored from the shade. If the plants need water, the vine dresser holds it back. If they’re drinking and drinking he pours on the more. This treatment forces the grapes to toughen up, fortifying root and branch and skin so they can fend for themselves. When the water finally does come, or the shade, or whatever, the hard work of growing up is over. Now instead of the basic metabolic functions of life, the grapes can turn those excess sugars into tanins, and acids, and all those wonderful little compounds that separate a good wine from a great wine.

Jesus said “I am the vine, and you are the branches, and my father is the vinedresser.” It is God’s job, then, to tend to us in this same manner. If the wine is good, it becomes more celebrated, coveted, sought after, and paid for. Jesus, as the vine, has reached perfection. And God, as the vine dresser, has made it so. We, as the fruit, have no job but to grow and wait and be stressed out. Because in the end, it will be this waiting, this stress, that separates a good wine from a great wine. And a good winemaker from a great winemaker. And a good God from a great God.

7:30 AM Marco Polo Airport VEN → NYC

Reflecting on how exotic Friulians’ names are as I wait for this plane home. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Mauro Devinar

Allessandro Musina

Alessio Kurtin

Paolo Bon

Fabuo Stecchina

Isabella Fabris

Daniela Pinat

Ludovia Cecot

Anna Filacorda

Pierpaolo Cecot