An Handsome Conveyance

Settling into vacation mode always takes a little longer than I expect. Before the vacation begins, I start thinking that I’m going to be in a hammock next to the water with a drink that has a little umbrella in it the moment the plane lands. It’s never like that. As you know, from our last action packed episode, we spent a lot of time walking around and riding in different kinds of vans and buses for the first several hours of our arrival here in BCS Mexico.

D is an amazing planner. She gets all our collective ducks into neat rows and as long as everyone else can keep their act together, whatever she has in mind goes off without a hitch. And this is how we like it – I like things to go well because then everybody’s happy; and D like things to go well so that she can do the thinking part ahead of time and not have to be troubled with running around frantically while trying to sort things out at the last minute in a language she can barely speak. I'm helpful with things like carrying luggage, but when it comes to trying to speak anything other than English I'm really no better than a pack mule.

One of the things she totally organized was a bus ride from the airport to Todos Santos, which would be provided courtesy of EcoBaja Tours, based here in Mexico. Their website made it easy to get set up with reserved seats on their air conditioned bus that would take us directly from over there to over here. The driver was probably super-hot and they probably served cocktails en route while their burlesque troop wowed the passengers as we meandered up the smooth-as-glass brand new highway.

That bit about the highway is true. Zero potholes. Probably because it hasn’t rained here for more than three years.

Anyway, we had the flight snafu you already know about, so we ended up having to do some of that mad scramble in a foreign language thing that we were hoping to avoid. D is fluent in Italian and can understand Portuguese pretty well, and though the Spanish they use in Spain isn’t so easy, she does really very well with the Spanish they use here in Mexico. Far as I can tell, those are all Romance Languages other than French, which is the only thing that isn't English that I can manage at all. And French, if you're wondering, is useless in Mexico.

While we were between flights and hanging out in San Francisco, D sent an email to Leonardo at Eco Baja Tours explaining what had happened and asking if we could use our prepaid reservations on our return to the airport, since we were going to be too late to catch one of their buses with the super-hot driver and go-go dancers. He didn’t reply to the email by the time we caught our next flight, so upon arrival we postponed the hammock-by-the-water thing and instead walked (quickly) to the Eco Baja office, conveniently located at the terminal that isn’t served by international flights. We spoke with a woman there who was really not interested in anything we had to say, but she did convey to us that we could visit the Eco Baja office in Todos and that the helpful people there would be happy to apply our reservation to the return trip.

When we stopped off at the local office in Todos Santos, the woman we spoke to suggested that we call their main office – the one where Leonardo answers the phone (but apparently not the email), and said that she couldn’t do anything for us without our thirty-something digit reservation number (which, alas, we couldn’t quite recall from memory). We returned to the B&B and used their phone in an attempt to reach Leonardo.

Note: Eco Baja doesn’t have voicemail, so if no one answers their phone during business hours, you also can’t leave a message asking them to please read their email. They’re probably busy updating their website or something.

The next day, we went back to Eco Baja and talked to another not very helpful young woman, who said that we should call or email their main office, as there wasn’t really anything she could do for us. D explained that we’d done each of those things more than once by now, and that the woman we’d spoken to the day before told us to come back and bring our reservation number, which we were now happy to provide. We had the number, and wrote it down for her. Then she (the woman behind the counter) explained that she was only a reseller and that although she sells tickets on behalf of Eco Baja, she isn’t employed by them. She also sells tickets for other bus companies. Sort of a ground transport scalper.

Because she doesn’t apparently work for anyone in particular, she finally gave us some advice that was probably pretty sound: D and I should return to the airport and speak directly to the official and bona-fide employees of Eco Baja tours. D managed to convey the pure lunacy of us paying for, and then taking, a two hour bus ride bus to – and then from – the airport in order that we could then secure a bus ride to the airport a few days later, so she (the woman behind the counter) called (finally!) the main office to get someone there to simply say “yes, you may issue the two irritating foreigners a pair of return tickets, thanks for your help,” but no one at the main office answered. I think they were updating their website.

That was yesterday. Today we returned (we’re not going to surrender the money we’ve already paid without ensuring, at the very least, that Eco Baja tours spends ten times the value of our prepaid tickets in labor hours) and we were told a lot of the same things over again (now there were two women behind the counter that didn’t work for the company whose logo is proudly plastered across the front of the building in letters a meter tall, and each of them had some ideas they wanted to share with us). They had the post-it with our reservation number on it that we’d left last time we’d enjoyed the company of their colleague, and it was stapled to another piece of paper that had writing on it that, based on their enthusiasm, must be really helpful stuff for us to use.

On that new piece of paper was a telephone number we could call that would connect us to the Eco Baja main office, where a guy named Leonardo worked. Right above that phone number was an email address that would allow us to send a message directly to the main office, where it would arrive on a computer screen right next to the phone that Leonardo sometimes isn’t very good about answering.

D explained to the two women that we’d already made use of this number and that email address, and she (D, I mean) was getting pretty animated and stuff, so one of them finally picked up the phone and dialed the number, and Leonardo answered.

Which totally means that he’s got caller ID and knows better than to answer when a phone number from Oregon is ringing. D spoke to him, he finally realized who she was, then said he’d see what he could do to switch our prepaid tickets over to the return trip. Half an hour later he called her and asked what email address she’d used last Saturday. She told him, and he confirmed that it was the right one. A few minutes later, he called again and asked her to confirm the email address again. She did.

I don’t know why it matters what email address she used last Saturday – all we want to do is apply the dollars to a bus ticket. I think that every individual we’ve talked to so far could have made this happen, but everyone seems to be more interested in figuring out a way that someone else will have to do it than they are in just getting it done. What no one seems to realize is that if they’d just get it done, D and I would stop bothering them so much.

D says it reminds her of Italy. This is how they roll there. And though each of us has a lot of strong opinions about how things are handled in the US, the priority given to customer service is not among our complaints.

Mexico!

D travels for work a lot – sometimes, anyway. She’ll be around for a few months, then suddenly her employer (and herself) come up with important things for her to do that can’t be done from Oregon, let alone from her home office. Home offices are pretty cool for those who like to attend meetings online or via conference call in their pajamas. The conference calls are even cooler, because they allow attendees to engage in important mulititasking.

Note: if you’re attending a phone meeting while weeding the garden, ensure that you don’t work hard enough that you start breathing heavily to the point that others ask if you’re ok.

Since the beginning of the year, D has been on a repeat whirlwind tour of Points East for some work related stuff. Those of you who use computers or laptops or televisions will enjoy the fruits of this labor in the next several months (and it’s no longer secret stuff, but it’s fun to pretend that it is). Anyway, she went to Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangalore – three stops in two weeks – three separate times. Gone for two weeks, back for two weeks. Lather rinse repeat.

The good thing about this kind of traveling is that D collected a shit-ton (that’s a technical airline term, I’m pretty sure) of frequent flier miles. She also racked up a bunch of compensation days (‘comp days’ to you among the uninformed). At my level of employment, given that everything I’ve ever done to create this mythical thing called a “career” has served only to push my FAIL button, Comp Days don’t exist in my world. You work and you get paid (sort of). If you work more than 40 hours a week, you get paid for more than 40 hours a week. Some places pay you more than the regular hourly rate (many, however, do not, even if you’re working for the family business). Working weekends (if you’re smart like D and work for a company like hers) gives you these Comp Days, so you get to take off a normal day for every weekend day you’ve worked.

D worked for 10 weekend days during her repeat whirlwind tour of the East, which pretty much sucked, but gave the cool result of 1) lots of days she could take off from work; 2) none of those days encroaching on any vacation time she’s accrued. Pretty cool.

After lots of work and long hours in foreign countries and then returning to Portland and its seemingly endless rainy season, D asserted (she’s good at this) that we’d be taking a trip to somewhere the sun shines and the beach is actually a beach instead of the cold clammy thing we Oregonians optimistically refer to as “the coast.” We looked at the Yucatan but it’s supposed to be hurricane season (I’m told this is worse than the rain we have in Portland) so we scratched that off the list. Then we looked at Hawai’i, which sounds great even though I still don’t think white people belong there given the circumstances under which they joined the Union of the United States. Not that the people of Hawai’i were treated any better than the people who lived in what we now call the North America part of the USA, but for Hawai’i, gaining-statehood-under-threat-of-war took place recently enough that I’d like to think we knew better by then, or that we'd have abandoned the whole expansion-through-imperialistic-brutality thing.

Then we looked again at Mexico. We love Mexico, love the climate, love the people, and especially for me, love the food. I could eat Mexican food every day for the rest of my life without any regret. I told my mother in law, G, that my two favorites are Mexican and Italian. G agreed, though she did express that Italian is just a teeny bit better. Makes sense – she’s Italian. But then again, she hardly ever eats anything, so I’m not sure how much she likes Italian food anyway. Maybe she just likes being Italian. Or maybe it’s because she’s never been to Mexico. One thing I do know: when we go to Italy, we gain weight. Kind of a lot of it. When I come to Mexico, I eat as much as I can and I don’t gain weight. Less formaggio and fewer carbs I think.

We decided we’d come to the Pacific side of Mexico to escape the hurricanes. La Paz is really nice, but more touristy than we wanted, and Cabo is nice but WAY too touristy for us. I’ve been there before and watched what happens when a cruise ship offloads 2500 heavyset arrogant loudmouthed American tourists who then flood the market, blocking walkways and thinking that if they just shout “DON’T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” louder than everyone else who’s already shouting it, that the person working the booth might suddenly begin to comprehend.

As you probably know, almost everyone in Cabo understands and speaks English anyway. But the American sloths still use the ‘insanely high volume’ approach to ensure that’s the case. Heaven forbid we use an inside voice and politely ask, in Spanish, if they might speak English.

So we chose Todos Santos, on Baja. Not so big, not so many tourists (we hoped), and it’s about halfway between Cabo and La Paz. Being the amazing trip planner that she is, D figured out our flights (Portland to San Francisco to Cabo) and the bus ride that would get us from Cabo to Todos Santos. We went out Friday night to a going away bbq party for a friend of ours who is leaving the country (the medical procedure she needs costs over $30K in the US but only 1000 quid in the UK – don’t get me started on the horrible scam that is the US health care system) so she has to either surrender her house, or sell everything and leave her dog behind while she heads overseas. Stupid privatized for-profit crap.

Anyway, we went home after the bbq (which was terrific, by the way), did the last of our packing, and went to bed around 11pm. At 4, the alarms woke us up and I was happy to realize I’d properly programmed the coffeepot and that the Go Juice was already brewing. We showered, had coffee, and were one foot out the door when each of our phones rang. Not good. The automated message explained that our flight had been canceled. D called the 800 number and talked to a friendly guy on another continent, who took up 15 minutes of our time before telling us he couldn’t do anything and we should head over to the airport to see if anyone there might be more useful than he was.

We agreed: next time, we’ll call from the car so we’re at least en route while someone is wasting our time being unhelpful.

D drove us to the airport. I think it was the early hour that helped her not realize we were still in the US, as she was channeling her “this is how driving is done here in Italy” self. We made it to PDX in record time even though we drove right past the exit to the long term parking and had to flip a U turn right next to the big sign that says “no U turn.”

Inside the terminal, we found the lines at the United counter quite long despite the early hour. Happily, D is a ‘Platinum Gold Preferred Frequent Flier Goddess’ so we went to that line instead of the ‘normal people’ line. Unhappily, the people behind us were hustled up to the front of the line even though we’d been there a good 20 minutes longer than they had, and the ‘normal people’ line was getting a whole lot better service than our Goddess line. While we stood at the front of our line, we watched as the good people from United helped everyone in the other line. They cycled through that whole big long normal line fully twice while we stood in the preferred line, waiting to be treated preferentially. The long line that wasn’t ours snaked back and forth, and held between 40 and 50 people. I know this, because my passive aggressive score keeping self counted all of them several times over just in case anyone would ask my opinion on how well the staff at the ticket counter had handled this instance of a canceled flight. D was on the phone with the 800 number again and kept saying “we’re not going to make it” and “we’re going to be stuck here” and “it’s not going to work” while I kept saying things like “something will work out” and “it’s gonna be ok.” It’s unusual for me to be the voice of optimism and D to be that of skepticism and we don’t do so well when we get these roles switched around. After about the twentieth time D said “we’re not going to make it,” I finally abandoned my ill-assigned role of The Optimist (wasn’t working anyway) and said, loudly “Fine. If we’re so sure this isn’t going to work, let’s fucking go back home instead of wasting our time here.”

All the nice people in earshot stopped talking and gave me a surprised look. I don’t know why, exactly, because none of them were using very nice words either. D gave me a “what’s wrong with you?” kind of look and went back to her 800 number phone call. And very suddenly, the person on the other end of the phone call managed to get us onto some other flights that would land us in Cabo just a couple hours later than we’d originally planned. Fabulous!

We scanned our credit cards and passports and ran for the boarding gate. This time, the Preferred Goddess line worked like it should and we skipped past the hundred or so Normal People in line, tossed our shoes and bags onto the x ray conveyer, stepped through the DNA scrambling scanner machine so the TSA people could carefully inspect our junk, and ran to the gate, arriving exactly two minutes before boarding.

The airplane, as they called it, was a tiny little thing that took us on a bouncy and noisy jaunt up to SeaTac. I think the stewardess must have had a cabinet open by accident on some other flight, because she was slamming the carry on bins closed with extreme force. Lucky for me, the one that held whatever supplies stewardesses need on the flight from Portland to Seattle are kept in the cabinet above my assigned seat, so I got to listen to this thing slam shut about a million times. She’s a witty one, too – most of the occasions she’d slam the thing shut were timed exactly to match that special moment of peace we feel when we’re still awake enough to realize that we’re now finally drifting off to sleep. Then BANG! we’re not drifting off to sleep.

After flying north to Seattle, we then flew south to San Francisco, then south again to Cabo. By the time we landed, the bus on which we’d reserved (and paid for) seats had gone and the office was closed. There were a couple employees still there (when I get off work I like to go home, but whatever) so D asked one of them if we could either get a refund or use the tickets for our return to the airport at the end of our vacation. The woman said ‘yes’ in that special ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but I do know that saying Yes won’t annoy you as much as saying No so that’s what I’m going with for now’ way. Once that was handled we went back outside to find a way to the bus terminal in Cabo, where we’d catch a Normal People bus from there to Todos Santos. A nice guy set us up with a ride in a very air conditioned van that had super dark tinted windows that would cost US$10 each to get us to the bus terminal.

We rode in the back of the van behind some Americans who were clearly eager to spend some time with like-minded Americans in that fabulous destination that is Cabo San Lucas, listening to their conversation as it bordered on offensive while they talked about how things work in Mexico. We sat in the back wondering what our driver, a Mexican who understands English, might think about these folks. Acting superior and en route to the very best wet t-shirt contests that the American owned bars in Mexico have to offer.

The ride was really interesting. The president (of Mexico, not Obama) was using the same road as us, and we could see the motorcade from our van. The presidential motorcade is lucky – they just cruised right through the checkpoints manned by Federal Policia dudes. I didn’t know there were so many police officers, nor so many machine guns in all of Mexico. They’ve got jeeps and black SUVs and helicopters with rocket launchers and airplanes too. Pretty cool.

We arrived at the bus stop and the driver told us it wasn’t US$10 each. It was US$18. We told him we’d been told that it was ten, so he called someone on his phone and said some words in Spanish, then explained that it was ten bucks to go to San Jose del Cabo, not Cabo San Lucas. We were sure that isn’t what we’d agreed to, but there wasn’t any sense in arguing (and we really didn’t want to be considered as the same ilk as the others in the van) so we paid up. Walked inside, found the nice lady who sells tickets, bought tickets, and asked when the bus would be leaving. “Now!”

We ran out and onto the bus, they closed the door, and we were away.

After an hour or two we arrived in Todos Santos. We knew we were at the right place, because at the prior stop D and I had each turned to the person(s) next to us and asked “Todos Santos?” The guy next to me said ‘no’ and the guy next to D said ‘si.’ So she jumped up with her bag in hand and headed for the front of the bus until everyone else nearby who’d heard us asking said ‘no no – Todos Santos blah blah’ and pointed further up the road. Of course, another Mexican fellow who spoke perfect English was there and he explained it all. Todos Santos was the next stop.

We could tell when we arrived at Todos Santos because all of our new friends looked at us, pointing out the windows in all directions saying “Todos Santos! Si si!” We got off the bus and walked in some direction that seemed promising, then turned right and went up some street that looked promising. We passed by the Hotel California made famous by The Eagles, then the Sushi Bar (we agreed: we are not eating sushi in Mexico. I don’t like sushi and I’m not going to waste a single meal that ought to be Mexican food on some other thing that I don’t want in the first place. I’ll eat Mexican food in Japan but I won’t eat Sushi in Mexico.) We stopped at some little taco bar and ate the best tacos we’ve ever had.

By now it was dark, but D had a hand drawn map along that told us where we needed to go. Simple, really – the lady at the B&B had told us it was a 10-12 minute walk from town to our lodging. So off we went, feeling happy to have arrived and to have tummies full of Mexican Awesomeness. After we’d walked 10-12 minutes we realized that everyone here must walk really fast because we weren’t anywhere near anything other than a dirt road with a barbed wire fence on one side and a very confrontational barking pit bull on the other. About every fifty feet was a streetlamp but no one had thought to turn these things on, so we were really in the dark. I’m happy to say that the pit bull allowed us to pass and for whatever reason, didn’t venture out into the road to greet us up close.

After another 10-12 minutes (are we really walking half as fast as the locals, or did someone overpromote the convenience factor here?), we met up with a very friendly young woman who said something like “Buenos noches, blah blah Spanish asking question blah?” D responded “blah something Hotelito.” Hotelito is the name of the place we were going to stay. The nice young woman sighed, smiled, and said ‘ok,’ and began walking with us. Turned out she’s the caretaker at the place and had been waiting for us to arrive since well before we would have arrived if we’d been on the flights and buses we were supposed to be on. She was very sweet, and took plenty of time to show us to our room and explain where everything else we might need could be found.

By now it was about 9pm and we were exhausted. We kicked back on the giant bed, promptly fell asleep, and didn’t wake for something like twelve hours. Our first day of vacation wasn’t as relaxing as we’d hoped, but the second certainly was.

May You Live in Interesting Times

At first, I thought I'd get away from this blog thing for a week. After a week, I thought 'ah - two weeks are better than one.' And now that it's been nearly a month, I've just remembered that this isn't a burden for me to carry nor some responsibility to escape, but that it started off as something of a release for me. For me. I suppose that because I've recently had little need for any kind of release that things must be fabulous, if not perfect. Things are fabulous. I'm tempted to say that things are perfect, but the word is too loaded. None of us will ever agree on what "perfect" really means. For some, perfect includes good health and a solid enough resource base that one isn't cold nor hungry. For others, it requires material wealth and a swimming pool full of bikini models. We'll never agree on a criteria that might satisfy the demands of perfection. This is unfortunate, because it leaves us with things like "adequate" or "decent" and those things aren't among my aspirations.

The whole Italian Adventure is pretty well over with now. D returned home last week and is now enjoying the tricky parts of readjusting to a different time zone. We tuck in at a reasonable hour, and she's wide awake at around 3 in the morning. I'm not wide awake at 3, nor am I wide awake at 7 when I do finally drag my groggy self out from between the sheets.

There's not much going on in my life that's interesting enought to write about - so for now, you get a quick rundown of the facts, after which I'm going off on another tangent of minor import. Fun, huh?

After I left Italy and came back to the states, G returned to her home from the hospital, and D stayed with her for another three weeks through the last bits of post-surgery-recovery stuff. Most of this was making sure the pantry was stocked, that G would actually eat regularly, and a number of other logistical things. The tasks at hand punctuated an otherwise pretty calm time around the house. Lots of time for Mother and Daughter to talk about things they usually don't have time to talk about. To remember things. To articulate things.

That amphora we talked about earlier was on the dining room table when G arrived home, and her reaction to it was caught on video. Couldn't have gone better. Gluing that piece of old pottery back together is, without question, one of the very best things I've ever done. Not that I was the best person for the job. You know what I mean. It's one of the high points of my entire life.

Part of this home recovery phase included going through old photos and family artifacts - perhaps the coolest such artifacts are a few reels of 8mm that contain footage of D with her Father, taken many years ago. We are beyond eager to secure a projector so that we can see Signor Loi with the young Signorina.

It's funny how something seemingly normal can elicit an emotional response. Or maybe it's funny how easily I respond emotionally to something seemingly normal. D was telling some of us about going through the photos with her Mom, and how she was able to instantly identify those photos of her Mother that had been taken by her Father. Not because G was smiling every time Signor Loi was behind the camera. But that there was a specific quality to G's expression when he was manning the camera. I don't know if this was the face of love, of admiration, of partnership, or some other thing. Whatever it's called, it was a unique thing that only Mr Loi ever witnessed in person and that those of us who come after can only admire across the distance of time as we view these perfect moments on aging yellowed prints.

I spend a lot of my time feeling very, very fortunate. Almost all of it, to be honest. And yesterday was my birthday (each of these marks my good fortune, just as it does yours or anyone else's). Yesterday I celebrated the birthday that D's father himself never lived to see. I talked about this earlier.. rather than revisit that story for anyone who didn't read it the first time, I think it's better that you scroll down the blog page here and read about it. This is a story that deserves not be truncated. I'm not going to offer up any cliff notes now.

So I'm thinking about having turned the ripe old age of 43 and realizing that there's no way I can stretch the decade of my thirties to include anything that happens in this life after yesterday. Last week I was "thirtytwelve" years old, and this week I really am "fortythree." The panicked insightful realization I had yesterday wasn't that I was now closer to 45 than to 40 (though that certainly is true), but that I am closer to 50 than to 30 (which has been true for a couple years now, but somehow I've managed to completely ignore it as a data point). And it means that if I live to be 86, I've completed half of my quotient of laps around the sun.

This 'half done' or 'half remaining' thing reminds me of a glass with water in it. The optimist finds it half full, the pessimist sees it half empty, and the engineer asserts that the glass is twice the size it needs to be. Glad I'm not an engineer. Those guys are no fun at all.

Or maybe not. Maybe a smaller glass would be perfectly appropriate. My life isn't half over, the first half hasn't been lost, and the perceived urgency to "make the best of the rest of it" really is only perception. The truth is that I've never been happier, never felt more fortunate, never been so appreciative. I think the thing I'd like to do (not the right thing, not the smart thing, not the best thing - the thing I'd like to do) is enjoy whatever's left as best I can.

And that's the challenge (pessimist) / opportunity (optimist) / task (engineer) each of us faces. I think a lot of people get caught up in the whole "as soon as" game and often find themselves doing something terrific (like turning 43) only to realize that they've spent a great deal of time and energy chasing goals that they've convinced themselves will unlock the door to this "happiness" thing. Nothing wrong with having goals. Indeed, without goals, we'd all likely be a big crowd of misdirected clowns lacking any cohesion or sense of direction. And we certainly don't want a society like that.

My thinking is that if we choose to postpone our happiness until after some criteria have been met, there's a very good chance that we'll postpone our happiness indefinitely. And once that goal has been realized, the most likely thing will be that we'll replace it with another goal, which will "require" another postponement of happiness. You can see where this is headed.

I'm not going to make a point [today] nor try to convince anyone of anything that I believe [from this podium]. But I just turned 43, and it took me until now to finally accept the legitimacy that comes with being over 30 [ahem] over 40. Truthfully, I've finally realized the farce it is to suggest that with age comes wisdom or credibility or any other arrogant thing. I've finally realized that I'm the same person I was ten twenty thirty years ago. I'm no better or smarter or more valid than anyone younger or older based on the number of years I've logged. I am an ordinary man.

Given that, I have just one request:

Please do not wait for some unrealized expectation to be met before you choose to enjoy all that this life offers you.

Which kind of relates to another brilliant quote (which isn't mine):

Life is short. Eat dessert first.

Best,

Cameron

Hiatus

Today is Friday. For most of you, it's in the morning and for me, it's the evening. Which means I'm way ahead of you. Luckily, you won't have too much trouble keeping up. This time.

G has continued to recover as well as any of us could have hoped and is now waiting to come home. She'll have to wait until next week, though, because over here the good people who fill out the papers that say "go home now" don't typically work on the weekends.

Like everyone else in Italy, they probably don't work between the hours of noon and one-thirty or two, either. And they probably have wine with lunch before their nap. There are some things about this place I really do like.

Everything has turned out well. Through all of this, we've had a niece and a nephew who will start school a week late this year because their mom was here helping with this whole hospital fuss. D has continued to work at full capacity, which means she spends most of her not-at-the-hospital time on the phone or in meetings conducted through some internet portal thing unless she's staying up late or getting up early to be ready for those meetings-through-the-portal. So, for example, that means our Friday evening is spent here at home until nine, when the meeting they're holding on the West Coast of the US will come to a close.

Sometime after nine is the perfect time to go out for dinner, though we'll have missed the best time for an aperitif. Aperitifs are really fun - all the bars compete for your business by including food with your drink purchase. Buy a beer for a few Euros, and they include a basket of chips, little bites of pizza, bread sticks and prosciutto, a dish of olives and some pickled veggies. All of these items accompany your single beer. You could easily go to two bars, have one drink at each, and scarf down enough food to keep you from being hungry for the rest of the night. Especially good if you're loading up on the carbs.

I don't know how they make any money selling drinks. The drinks are expensive, but not that much.

Tomorrow will be the last day I'll get to visit G before I go home. So I won't be here when she comes home and sees the Amphora sitting on the dining room table. I think that's a good thing, given that we didn't ask permission to glue it back together. If she's not happy about it, I'll be a long way away; and I won't see her again until after she's cooled down. If she is happy about it, I think it best that she and D can share that moment. D was the one who had the misfortune of tipping it over, so it seems fitting that she be the one to present it once again.

On Sunday, D will take her sister, the niece and nephew, and the brother in law to the airport. I can't go along, because the cars here in Italy are too small to hold that many people along with all their luggage.

And then on Monday, I will return to Portland. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I want to stay so that I can do whatever I can to be helpful - I can't converse all that much, but I can carry things up the stairs and help with the dishes. Truth is, though, that kind of help isn't really needed at this point and there isn't much reason for me to stay. D can handle anything that comes up, and G is closer to autonomy than we probably realize.

This has been quite a trip. Our week in London coincided with riots and looting. Some of the violence was just a couple blocks from our hotel (though I may not have made this clear before now - hi Mom, hi Dad). We didn't have any trouble, but it was certainly an interesting twist.

When we left London bound for Edinburgh, we took a detour through Oxford and had a short visit with one of my roommates from college. I don't feel qualified to have friends who have moved to Oxford to do post doc research on MRI stuff but it turns out that I have friends of a pretty high caliber. Braniac quotient. Who'da thunk.

In keeping with odd coincidences, our week in Edinburgh happened to be during the Festival of the Fringe. This is the largest arts festival in the world, and pretty much ensures that all of the hotels will be booked, everywhere you go will be crowded, and that the level of activity everywhere will bring you to a near overwhelm state of being. The population of the city doubles during the Fringe.

From there, we headed for Italy to surprise G for her 75th birthday, which was a terrific fun thing despite finding that her health wasn't so good and - as you already know - our plan to stay for a week was replaced by another plan that would see me remain for a couple more weeks, and D for three more after that.

These weeks have seen us - all of us - engaged in activity we hadn't foreseen. Everyone has been busy taking care of logistics that don't usually exist while taking care of themselves and one another in an arena largely unfamiliar and fraught with challenges none of us could predict. Add to this our collective concern pre-and-post surgery, and I'm afraid you'll find us a weary, though grateful bunch.

Times like these are usually taxing for everyone involved; times like these without being able to participate in conversations; or run an errand in a car; or succesfully order a plate of food; or ask directions to the bathroom without waving your arms and shouting a very desperate and panicky "Dough vay TOILET??!!" in a room full of people (actually, this is pretty cool now that I think about it); or to really do much more than smile and try to be useful... times like those are uniquely so. Taxing, I mean. Throughout these days, my hope has been that whatever utility I might offer has outweighed the burden I place on the household's resource base. The most frustrating part is that my 'usefulness barometer' doesn't work over here. At home, I can pretty much tell whether or not my efforts in any given direction are worthy. I can assess this based on my own criteria and usually that of others (though my own judgement typically serves me better than theirs). Over here, not so much.

While I set out to be the solid rock upon which everyone could rely and to remain commited to our mission without being encumbered by emotional stress, I now find that I am not the superhuman I intended.

Fortunately, I'm not alone. Each of us has had our moments. And even more fortunately, we're now closer to one another than we've ever been before. What there is to accept, we've accepted; what there is to forgive, we've forgiven.

We've each contributed a great deal to making this whole thing work and we've managed to do so with a shared objective. And everything - every last single thing - has turned out remarkably well.

We're family. Like never before.

And we're dog tired.

Have a great weekend -

Cameron

Ninety Seconds

Way back when this effort began - which we can almost count in hours instead of days, my thinking was that I'd find a welcome release in writing that would then allow me retain some level of sanity and clarity of thought. To prevent the loss of "too much" perspective. Given that I didn't start off with "too much" perspective, I don't really know how much there is to spare nor what might happen should I find myself running short. You can imagine my dilemma.

I also figured that I'd be writing a little bit about what's going on over here, and interspersing those entries with things that happened long ago that I (or someone) thought ought be immortalized in a medium such as this. Today is such a day. There's little to add about Temporary Life In Italy just now, and what little there is can be neatly summed: G continues to improve; D and I continue to endure; the weather is still hot; everything is going well. D reminded me today that stressful times bring out the best and the worst in people. She mentioned that amphora thing to remind me that I haven't completely gone off my rocker; and I'm still sitting here, hours later, wondering at what time she might demonstrate her worst. Something to look forward to.

Behind every good man is an even better woman.

Not long ago I was amazed to see that this blog had reached 200 visits. In the last 24 hours there have been nearly a hundred more and views are now coming in from seven countries on three continents. In the midst of what have been some trying times, this is a much appreciated ego boost. Thanks, all. I couldn't ask to be in better company.

So. At this point, you're up to date on the medical events over here as well as my thanks for your interest. If that's all you're after, you need not read further. Starting now, I'm heading off on a tangent. There’s a lot to this, and if I were better prepared I’d 1) make it into a few installments or chapters; and 2) make it funnier. There’s a lot of room for humor in here. But I also want to keep it somewhat concise, as neither of us has a whole lot of time to spare with these trivial blog things. (And yes, I realize that if I stopped talking about keeping this short that it might actually be short. Pff.)

While I was in college [this is called "university" by people outside the US] money was tight. This is true for most college students, though I had friends whose financial challenges consisted of waiting for a substantial check from home to arrive in the mail each month. At the end of one school year, a friend of mine suggested that we sign on to become Wildland Firefighters. The pay was pretty good, and with the very long hours we thought this would be a fine way to earn some much needed money to get through the following school year. And so we did it.

The training consisted of us learning about different kinds of equipment, how to guess which way a fire might go (this is not as simple as "downwind" or "uphill" or even "where it hasn't already burnt stuff." You'd be surprised what fire can do).

This was before people had cell phones or GPS, so keeping in contact with family was very sketchy. To make things even trickier, we never knew where we were going until minutes before we departed. Of course, we never knew when we might depart, either, so each of us kept our gear packed and ready to go, next to the front door. Bills were paid in advance, laundry was done ahead of time, and life at home consisted of having as much fun as possible because - literally - at any moment you could be called away for a period of time ranging from one day to three and a half weeks. Federal law stated that after fourteen consecutive days of work we had to get one day off; and that after seven more consecutive days we were required to have three days off. These rules were duly enforced by the casual question "y'all taking time off like ya should?" to which our response was a convincing "uhh yeah."

There were rules about things like "fresh drivers," meaning that if you'd just worked, for example, 120 hours in one week that they didn't want you to then drive a three ton truck full of chainsaws for twelve hours overnight on your way back home. Naturally, we always had [cough] fresh [cough cough] drivers on hand [cough].

The first [post-training] thing you learn as a Wildland Firefighter is that fire is really scary. Not for you (you're super macho and eager to be near - or in - the fire), but for the people who handle funding and resource allocation. Should a fire threaten a human population, state and federal entities will throw endless amounts of money around. If it costs a lot, it must be effective, right? Upon arrival at a typical fire camp, you'll usually see several million dollars worth of firefighting equipment, (if you were extremely fortunate) tractor trailers converted into kitchens or showers or laundry facilities, dozens (if not hundreds) of portable toilets, and scores of firefighters.

Firefighters, at least during the time that I was among them, came from a variety of different backgrounds. Many were displaced timber workers. In the Pacific Northwest (where I lived and my company was based), timber had been a very strong industry for a very long time. As the trees thinned out, timber workers were displaced - part of this was the result of a long and bitter battle between the timber industry, who had been cutting trees down on publicly owned land for decades, and conservationists, who believed both that publicly owned resources shouldn't belong to private industry; and that industry ought to leave some forest areas intact for the rest of us and for subsequent generations. I'm drastically simplifying this whole 'forest debate' issue - it was a really big deal. For an excellent read on the subject, pick up a copy of Showdown At Opal Creek. It might be the only in depth book that people on both sides of the issue feel accurately depicts their own perspective. More on Opal Creek another day.

Anyway, many Firefighters shared the perspective of conservationists while equally many were former loggers who had lost their livelihoods, thanks in part, to our efforts. Now throw in a few score of National Guardsmen, and several busloads of inmates from various state prisons. Keep them in close quarters for a week or three, living on institutional food (most of us carried our own tabasco - it makes everything taste better) with three or four hours of sleep per night and you have a recipe for excitement. Fistfight over who gets the last paper cup for their morning instant coffee? Sure. Someone getting tipped over while in a portable toilet because they snore too loud? Yep. Members of each group had reason to dislike members of most of the other groups. With so little sleep and such long hours, we didn't really need any reason to dislike one another. Everyone pretty much disliked everything. Despite this, we were somehow able to work together (usually) and I often found myself in the odd position of readily allowing my life to depend on someone I completely disliked and hoped to never meet again. It was during this time that I learned that I can trust someone even if there's no single thing about them that I like. But I don't really like anyone that I don't trust. One of those A equals B and B equals C but C doesn't equal A things. Or something like that. Algebra isn't my strong suit. Nor is logic.

About half of the fire camps didn't have showers. About one in four didn't have kitchens. Thus, there were many times that we'd be out for two or three weeks at a time without once having a shower nor a hot meal. Of course, we each had only one Nomex [fireproof] shirt, so clean clothes were also out of the picture. We were a snarly, smelly, rude bunch of crass and impatient toughs. We were also really fit, which was kind of cool.

There were federal crews, which consisted of federal employees. These had the nicest gear and the newest trucks. There were state crews, which consisted mostly of firefighters who usually worked in rural areas but had been called to whatever conflagration deemed their presence. There were military crews, made up of young men and women who'd been assigned to this typically civilian activity and could work all day long but often didn't have any relevant training nor experience (which did little for their status among the rest of us, I'm afraid), and there were the inmate crews. I never did work alongside the inmates.

At the bottom of the barrel were those of us who worked for private contractors. We had the crummiest gear and the worst trucks, and the additional burden of being in competition with other private contractors. Whoever did the best job stayed on site the longest, and thereby earned the most money. It was in our best [financial] interest to work hard. Unfortunately, some companies took this competition a little too far. I can honestly say that we never sabotaged anyone else's vehicles, equipment nor work. I can also honestly say that spending three days setting up gear in the woods only to find that someone has demolished your water pumps and cut your firehose into bits is beyond frustrating. Should you complain to anyone in the command center, you're quickly identified as a whiner and sent home. Same thing if someone removes the drain plugs from all the oil pans in your trucks. I was stunned to realize that we had to smuggle spare ignition parts and cases of engine oil into our camps in order that we could undo any sabotage that might happen in the night. Fortunately, firearems were strictly forbidden in the camps by anyone other than law enforcement. Even if you had a concealed weapons permit, you were not allowed to bring your guns to the firefight. This was enforced every bit as effectively as the "day off" and "fresh driver" requirements.

A single season of firefighting holds more than enough activity, treachery, idiocy, heroism, drama, luncacy and profanity to fill a book. Indeed, there are several books already written on the subject. I've already typed up more today than I intended - I set out to tell a story of one single night, but because I want you to have some frame of reference I went ahead and filled out the preceding paragraphs.

One afternoon, my crew was called to a fire that had started the prior night, just about an hour from Eugene, Oregon (which is where I lived and we were based). The area to the east of Eugene - near Oakridge - often experienced dry lightning in the summer months, and after many decades of the ill-advised practice of fire suppression, those strikes no longer caused brush fires that would flash through an area and leave big trees intact. These were fires that fed on substantial amounts of fuel that had accumulated over decades. Twigs burn in seconds and trees don't mind. Downed logs take much longer, and the fire stays in one place long enough to dry out - and ignite - standing trees. It's a little ironic that the reason our forest fires include such complete burns is that we've spent so much time preventing fires in the first place.

Anyway, we went up into the hills outside Oakridge and were very promptly dispatched to some area on some hill, accessible by a logging road. We drove to the top of the hill, with the task of moving downhill as we made a fire line that would meet with another crew's fireline that was moving up the hill toward us. A few miles away there was a fire that was expected to move in our direction - putting fire lines in place is how you go about containing a fire (and they like to put lines behind and alongside the fire, too - not just out in front). The idea here is that you cut a swath through whatever the forest has in front of you, then dig into the dirt until there's nothing burnable (that is, no fuel) between where the fire will be allowed to burn, and where it won't. This is the equivalent of drawing a line in the sand and daring your opponent to cross it.

We worked in a line, with different roles along the way.

The first firefighter is the sawyer. He (or she, though I never did see a female sawyer) stomps into the woods and cuts down anything that's standing up. He  walks a fairly straight line and cuts whatever he can reach to his left and his right, with a 36 inch (that's about 7cm short of one meter, for the metric thinkers) blade fitted to his chainsaw.

Next in line is the swamper. This person's job is to hold things so that the sawyer can cut them, and to move things out of the way once they're cut. Crew members who have scars caused by chainsaws are most likely sawyers (or former sawyer who have learnt their lesson and realize the wisdom in carrying, say, a shovel).

After the swamper are a few people with pulaskis - those things that have a narrow hoe blade on one side of the head, and an axe on the other. Though these are the most macho looking of the hand tools, they don't make a very good hoe nor axe.

Then come the grub hoe people. These hoes are stout enough that you can swing them with your full force a million times, and heavy enough that they'll cut through roots and branches a few inches in diameter.

Last (and smartest, I think) are people with shovels. They throw all the loose dirt and bits of fuel out of the pathway (which is now ten feet/three meters across) and leave behind nothing but mineral soil. Something that won't burn. A line in the sand.

My job was that of swamper. So I had a backpack full of gasoline and two stroke oil, and was busying myself by staying as close to my sawyer as I could, without getting hit by his chainsaw. I kept one hand in the middle of his back most of the time so he'd have an idea where I was. With a crew of twenty, our pace was As Fast As The Sawyer Can Walk Downhill And Cut Everything Smaller Than 8 Inches Across. We managed about two miles per hour, which is really, really fast.

As our shift had started in the evening - about 7pm - we were destined to work overnight. This was fine with us, as it's not nearly so hot at night as it is during the day. It was dark before long. We stomped down the hill, leaving a nice wide swath of dirt, and in short order met up with the crew that had been working their way uphill. Once we met, they went back down the hill, and our job transistioned. Now, we'd lay out some hose, fire up the pump that was at the top of the hill next to a zillion gallons of water that had been brought in by tanker, soak the 'not to be burned' side of our fire line with water, and as the fire approached us, we'd spray it with more water to slow it down. When this works, it's really fun. Once you stop the fire, you can just sit there and look at it and take turns sleeping (which isn't a good idea, but that's what we usually did anyway).

The problem was that when the sun went down, the temperature changed, and a bunch of magic weather stuff that has to do with inversions happened. During the day, the inversion kept the smoke low, near the ground. After the sun went down, the heat of the fire poked a hole in the inversion layer and a Whole Lot of smoke went upward. If you've used a fireplace, you know the importance of a good draw up the chimney, and you also know how that creates a nice strong breeze toward the fire. Because our fire was bigger than the one in your fireplace, our wind was substantial; which gave the fire lots of new oxygen, which made it feel all bold and daring. Below us, down the hill, we watched the fire burn across the fire line as though none of us had done any work to stop it.

This wasn't good.

Now the fire was stronger than ever, and it was on both sides of the line, with nothing between it and us other than Fuel. We began to evacuate. All of the people and all of the gear went uphill. I was thinking about how cool it was to be carrying a plastic jug of gasoline through all this when we finally reached the landing above. We found that our vehicles had already been evacuated, which meant that we were now on foot.

This wasn't good either.

But it really wasn't that bad. We'd done a pretty good job of soaking the area around our line, so we walked back down the hill until we found a place that looked tame enough that we could run through the fire to the other side, where it had already burned. It's much safer in "the black" than it is in "the green." We had some trouble, though. While the fire between us and the black was only five or six feet (two meters) high in some areas, that was enough to give a few of us pause. As the fire moved up the hill on the green side (and it was much, much hotter there) some of us didn't like being faced with running through the fire or standing in it. Those of us with long hair tucked it into our hardhats or under our shirts and we ran. We ran sidehill across the loose debris we'd tossed aside as we dug our fire line, through flames nearly as high as our shoulders, through ankle deep embers that would have been perfect for roasting marshmallows at the beach.

This would probably be the worst possible time to trip and fall.

We got to the other side of the front and continued on until we found an area of ground that had burned thoroughly enough that we could sit and rest. A few people wanted to sleep, but we really couldn't - the problem now was falling trees. It's amazing how readily great big old trees will fall over after a fire has passed by. We sat, eyes upward in the dark night, and every minute or two we'd hear one start to crack. We'd jump to our feet and try to guess where this falling tree might be, and hope that if it were nearby that we'd be able to get out of its way. It’s easy to tell – when you hear the tree hit the ground and you realize you’re not under it, you know you’re safe. ‘til the next one, anyway.

Eventually, we all really did feel pretty safe. The fire had burned through this area pretty well and we could see daylight teasing its way upward to the east. Once it was light, we knew they'd send our trucks back up and we'd be able to get back to camp where we could brag about being 'burned over' while dining on the finest powdered eggs and potato flakes.

About the time that we could turn off our headlamps and rely on the dim morning light, the winds changed and we heard the familiar sound that pine trees make when they're crowning out. A tree that's "crowning" is one whose pine needles or leaves (or whatever fuel it grows that will burn in a single moment) have ignited. It burns from the bottom to the top like a roman candle; and trees that are a hundred feet tall can be destroyed in a matter of seconds. Crowning produces a huge amount of heat and wind; and once finished, the fire often remains to continue burning away at things like bark and branches. Just as often, the needles burn off and the skeleton remains, charred but without flames. It’s a big whooshing roaring kind of sound, with a lot of ‘campfire crackle’ thrown in.

The fire had switched direction and was now burning the canopy toward us. In this scenario, there really isn't anywhere to run - you can NOT run faster than a fire, regardless of what Tarzan may have demonstrated. Forest fires outrun horses, which can totally outrun me or you. People started yelling. A few ran off (which you should never do). As the fire came toward us, I sat next to an old hippie named Bob, who had leaned back against the slope of the hill, and we watched the fire approach. In very long and slow words, I said "Hollllllllly Shit, Bob, this is innnnntense. But I'm not going to panic until you do."

We stood up and watched the fire approach. It makes a roaring noise, and you can see smoke rising through the trees. Beneath the fire, burning branches fall to the ground. And the canopy above burns. Everything above you is fire. It’s hot enough to singe the hair off your arms. It’s loud enough that you can’t hear a person yelling from ten feet away. It’s exhilarating.

Before it got too loud for us to hear one another, Bob looked at me and said “I’m not one to panic, Cameron. But this might be our day.”

Words to live by.

The fire did as we knew it would; it burned directly over our heads; roaring loudly down at the helpless fools we were, and drawing oxygen so quickly that when we inhaled, we filled our lungs with whatever air contains that isn’t oxygen. Not useful.

So we scratched a hole into the ground, stuffing our faces down and pulled oxygen from the dirt (this actually works pretty well and the air is nice and cool). Bob and I took turns. One would bend over and stick his face in the dirt, sucking in some of that sweet sweet oxygen, while the other would brush burning twigs off his shirt. Others did the same.

In only a few moments, the fire was gone again. It would sound really dramatic for me to tell you that we were trapped there for hours, but it wasn’t even minutes. We were stuck on the hill overnight, but really only trapped under the fire for as much time as it took for each of us to get about three turns of breathing in the dirt. Maybe ninety seconds.

Ninety seconds.

Exhilarating.

Cheers –

Cameron

Things That Go Bump In The Night

Didn't post anything yesterday - the day really turned out differently than planned (actually - that's not quite true - it started and ended as planned, but the middle went a little sideways). There's nothing quite like being genuinely afraid for one's life (for a second time in as many days, no less) and then being abandoned by the side of the road 24 kilometers from your temporary "home" in a foreign country. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, despite postponing the entirety of our own lives and dedicating our existence to the assistance of others, all we can manage is to profoundly offend. I use the "we" here instead of the "I" because it offers me the illusion of distance from my own life. And right now that sounds pretty good.

And today will likely be pretty short. After receiving a few emails asking about a recent post I put up on Facebook (the one about having a "Reservoir Dogs" night here at the hotel) I figured I'd share a bit. To be honest, I chose to wait on this until we'd checked out of the hotel because people who care about our well being are reading, and I didn't want to say "this is what's happenING where we're staying." It's better to say "this is what happenED before we left."

Ever since Henry Ford created the five day work week (one of the few decent things this otherwise horrible man managed to accomplish - and yes, I mean that bit about horrible) the working class has enjoyed this thing we now call "the weekend." Probably because it was created in the US, that's the same name they use for it here in Europe. In France, they say "le weekend" with a perfect French accent, for example. They call it a similar thing in Italy, but I'm annoyed with Italy right now and am not in the mood to give it credit, even for copying something invented somewhere else by a horrible person. Les weekends are typically the times that the working class is able to kick back and/or stay up late. The upper class gets to do this, too (and they drink fancier wine, I guess), and the unemployed are sometimes stuck with being able to do little else. Another one of those "everybody wins" scenarios.

After we'd fallen asleep in our room here at the Ripamonte Residence in Milagnano (I share the name in order that you can remember to avoid this place) and were well on our way to catching some good Eyelid Theater, we started hearing noises coming from the room directly above ours. First, it sounded like kids running around and stomping a lot and hollering. We heard the sound of someone moving heavy furniture across the floor, with stomping on either end and wondered "why are people moving furniture at this hour, especially in a room so small?"

And then the hollering became shouting. I was practicing my Struggling to Understand Italian Words but couldn't pick anything out. About all I could tell was that one Loud Male Voice was really really angry at the other Loud Male Voice. D, whose hearing is better than my own, was the one who was able to discern that this was English, spoken with either a British or Australian accent. It's hard to tell through the ceiling, even if they are as loud as these fellows. The third Male Voice wasn't as loud as the other two.

So we listened to the one guy yelling angrily at the other guy while they shoved this heavy piece of furniture back and forth across the floor and ran around it in circles directly above our own rented bed, wondering what was going on. Something really big and heavy fell on their floor/our ceiling. And then one of the voices started yelling "Don't shoot me!" He yelled this more than once. The other voice was yelling questions and demands - we could understand parts of them, but we couldn't tell what they were actually talking about. Hearing this was really unsettling.

The furniture had stopped moving but the yelling went on. And then we heard someone dishing out some physical violence against another someone. D called the front desk and told them that something was going on; they replied promptly to "not worry" and that "they'd take care of it right away." And they did. It was only about a minute later that we heard the doorbell upstairs, heard the voices cease, then the door slam shut. Things went quiet.

This all happened in a very short time. Probably less time than it took for you to read my description of it. It's not like we were hanging out listening - more like we were awakened, wondered what the hell is going on here, heard someone pleading for their life before receiving a beating. And that was the end of it.

We didn't sleep very well for the rest of the night, and we didn't sleep in the Ripamonte the following night, and we checked out a few days earlier than planned and will now be driving from Cremona to the hospital for our visits.

And there's good news. G continues to improve and now looks as healthy as she did before any of this fistula stuff started. She can walk by herself and we appear to be on schedule for her return home. Cremona remains a beautiful town, the weather is fine and D and I continue to enjoy good health while we remain aware of how very fortunate we are. Though not always the way we want it to be, the bottom line remains:

Life is good.

Cameron

Amphora.

Some days ago you were assigned a bit of homework. You ought be grateful that this was specified as “google” homework, as that would allow you to cut or copy, open a new tab, then paste this word you may well not have recognized and probably couldn’t pronounce into the search box of everyone’s favorite internet search engine. I’m not trying to be demeaning. I myself didn’t know how to pronounce this word nor to what it might refer until fairly recently. Like you, once I saw a picture of one, I thought “oh yeah – one of those."

Many years ago, like way before you were born (that easily includes the oldest among you), D’s Grandpa (her Mom’s Dad) found a few relics that were left over from what we now call the Roman Empire. Among these was an Amphora (spelled “Amfora” in Italian which makes it a real pain in the ass to google first time around) that had spent some centuries beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea before coming into Gramps’ ownership. Centuries.

Ownership is probably not the exact proper term here. In Italy (which includes Sardinia, to the chagrin of at least a few of the good people who live there), the rules state that if you find a significant antiquity, you’re required to immediately inform the authorities so that they can halt whatever project had you digging in the first place, then send out some people to assess the relative worth of the site before deciding whether or not you’ll be allowed to put a swimming pool in your own backyard. In the US, this kind of rule would probably lead landowners to sit in the front yard with a six pack and a shotgun while shouting about their rights… but this is Italy, where people aren’t quite so indignant. Over here, they’re more likely to keep things quiet, to abandon the notion of a swimming pool, or to just accept what could easily become a 5 year delay on their capital improvement. There’s an odd mix of urgency and – dare I use the term – laissez faire – in this arena.

This “report your antiquity” rule didn’t exist back when Grandpa Persico found the Amfora – that rule (or law - or guideline, depending on who you ask - is really only about thirty years old). Whoever might currently own a similar relic is well within their legal rights. And once the item is on your mantle, nobody’s going to ask questions anyway. But here’s the rub: given that everyplace in Italy is Italian, you can count on finding something really cool just about any time you stuff the head of a shovel into the dirt.

Take an evening walk through Cremona (or any other town anywhere within the seabound borders of this odd squiggly boot) and you’ll certainly see some ruins to remind you that at one time, this was part of the Roman Empire. In Cremona, there’s a couple sidewalks covered with Lexan (or some kind of super stout plexiglass type stuff that you can walk on) that allow a view about fifteen feet down, displaying what was once the road to Rome. Not far from here is a parking garage (?!) surrounding another group of remnants of this former glorious time, complete with a well, and a really impressive mosaic floor. I used to lay tile. I know what a top tier mosaic looks like. This one kicks butt.

There are a few different generations of Amphorae (you’ll remember this, no doubt, from your homework). The earliest versions were narrowest, with relatively thick walls, and held the least amount of water or grain or oil or wine. Later versions had thinner walls and more bulbous shapes, such that they could carry a higher net volume without unduly increasing the gross weight of vessel and contents. The two handles at the spout end to allow for easy pouring while the pointy bottom provides easy stacking (as well as the ability to poke the vessel into the sand or dirt without it tipping over). Apparently sand and dirt was more plentiful than these “table” things of which we’ve grown so fond in the last 2000 years. I can picture these things stuck in the garden, full of wine and ready to quench a fellow’s thirst after a hard afternoon of weeding but the notion of stacking them one inside the next for transport does seem a bit of a stretch.

So Grandpa found one of these things along with a number of other similarly old cool things. This one spent enough time under the sea that it became encrusted with sea critters – things that look like coral, other things that look like clams, and a bunch of those cool hollow things that look like a hard-shell parka for a worm. It’s not one of the earliest versions, and it doesn’t exactly match any of the photos I (or you) have found among the ‘google images.’ This one had a flat bottom, as though the pointy end had been cut flush. Probably around the time that really smart dude invented The Table. As near I can tell, it’s not more than two thousand years old, but everything I can find tells me that it’s more than 1800 years old. If you’ve found anything more precise, please please please let me know.

Anyway, Grandpa gave it to G, who put it in a three legged holder so that it could be proudly displayed, near the bottom of the stairs, in the home she shared with her two daughters. There it sat, for years, decades after he’d uncovered it, on this rickety metal frame. Over and again, one of the daughters would bump the thing, it would teeter this way and that, G would holler something like ‘Guarda dovai vai’ and life would return to normal.

On the day that D had finished her studies at University and was to become a bona-fide architect (all that remained was her final presentation), she was running late. And running down the stairs. And running into this nearly two millennia year old handmade piece of history. It teetered. It tottered. It fell down and broke into twenty-one pieces [plus little shards and bits of grit].

She was devastated.

The pieces went into a box and stayed there until last week, when we came across their container while digging through storage stuff. And we decided that although this item can never be whole again, that it can at least be displayed once more.

If you know me, you know that one of the things I enjoy most is bringing derelict machines back into service. To this end, I’ve owned more than two dozen motorcycles and scooters and – at last count – sixty-seven cars. The experience of being the first one to take apart something that was assembled by its creator years ago is a unique one. Reassembling it with more care than the factory afforded that first artisan is more than a simple task or exercise. It’s an expression of one’s desire to excel. To demonstrate to a faceless, perhaps long deceased, mentor that you’ve benefitted from her or his expertise at the same time you leave an unwritten example of your own for the next lucky steward. If you do well, your workmanship will outlast the carbon based machine you call your “self.” This taking a turn at stewardship isn’t something that readily meets description. Its aesthetic value can’t be conveyed in mere words. Your hands either have an appreciation for what other hands have created in the past, or they don’t. You either wish to leave an example of the quality your own hands can produce, or you don’t. Some of us make things. Others of us write checks.

Tricky thing about that old terra cotta stuff: it’s not readily repaired. I can’t make this amphora whole again, nor can I make it functional or useful. And though it may have been a valuable thing unbroken, its designed utility is now millennia obsolete; its financial worth as an antiquity is lost. What was once as important and as common as a kitchen sink will forever more be nothing other than an ornament. I've made no effort to hide the fractures, as doing so would diminish its authenticity. It's a really old thing that was broken and has been glued together. In the practical sense, it's this and nothing more.

In a more aesthetic sense, however, it's an ancient thing of handmade beauty. For that reason alone, it deserves to be displayed. Putting it back together – though not with the same level of expertise as a Smithsonian curator – has been an honor. To feel the contours of the interior as they were made nearly twenty centuries ago and to think of the hands that had carried it, the contents it had held, and the role it played in someone’s kitchen – or the corner of their garden – is a tactile and emotional experience that cannot be expressed.

Tomorrow, we’re taking it back to Cremona, where we’ll display it in G’s house. She doesn’t know it, but when she gets home from the hospital it’ll be there waiting. Something for her to look upon for the first time in nearly twenty years.

Welcome home, Mamy.

Cameron

Cessation of Praise in Favor of Truth

It’s an interesting phenomenon, the human characteristic that leads us [humans] to speak highly of others during times that we’re in want. A perfect example of this is the high praise I had a few days ago for the health care people in the hospitals over here. I built them up a little because I was worried about G’s surgery, and by overstating nice things, I was manipulating hoping to influence the outcome. I want G to be healthy, therefore, these apathetic nurses who need prodding to do their jobs are really top notch.

The truth is that many of them really do a fine job and several of them really don’t. Should a patient be in pain and execute the offense of ringing for the nurse, for example, that patient may well be greeted with the words “Who is bothering me?” spoken through a mouthful of still-chewing food. The patient has their revenge, however. Upon this nurse’s departure, G’s roommate asserted that the nurse “was probably from the South.” Some Italians from the North think quite poorly of those from the South. Racism exists here, just as it does elsewhere. G’s other roommate is much less subtle in her ignorance and doesn’t hesitate to use what we’d consider profoundly offensive terms. Maybe that’s why she got hit by a car and ended up in the hospital. Maybe her inability to say nice things manipulated her own outcome.

Perhaps this “speak nicely” characteristic is a cultural thing. It might not exist everywhere. But as I think back to the time that former President Richard Nixon’s death was announced, I was surprised that for the first time (other than my 11^th grade humanities class) people were actually talking about the good things he’d done. Now that he had died, he was no longer fodder for ridicule. You’d think a civilized culture might see fit to make note of the good while the fellow was still among us rather than to appease his next of kin with an abrupt change in our collective tune. At least that’s what I’d think. I guess we badgered him his whole life until he passed, and at that point we realized we’d badgered long enough. Hm. Guess we made our point. Time for a new scapegoat.

Yesterday we spent another day at the hospital. G is doing well, and was spending her day in the transition from “fully sedated” through “having a fine time on Morphine” and into “base level pain management.” The first thing she asked is “how much longer until the surgery,” and it took some convincing for her to believe it had already happened. Then it took a little more convincing for her to believe that it was Friday and not Thursday. Shortly after, she wanted her wedding ring back (D had kept it on her necklace), then her wristwatch. It’s a tiring process, this healing-your-recently-opened-self, and the doc told us that starting now, we have to follow the 1 Guest At A Time Rule. It was shortly after this (our following the rules laid out by the doc) that we encountered a snotty little thing of a woman who must be Italy’s own version of Nurse Ratchet. (Or is that “Ratchett” with two “Ts?” Can’t remember.)

The elevators in this hospital open into a pretty big hallway – probably twenty feet across and eighty feet long. On each end are entrances to different units – Gynecology on one, Pediatrics on the other. Along the sides of the hallway are entrances to the stairway, some service elevators, a window, and doors leading to two other wings – the “Day Surgery” wing (which is the only sign in the whole building that’s in English) and the “Surgery” wing (which is where G is). At our end of the hallway (which is shared with Pediatrics and Day Surgery, there are four plastic chairs, one of which is broken so it’s really more of a stool posing as a chair. At the other end (where the only ward is that for Gynecology), there are twenty chairs, eight of which are upholstered, and a coffee table. Nice comfy squares of foam rubber under heavily stained and well-worn red fabric that had the pleasing feel of an old potato sack. Designer Burlap.

As we were the only people in the entire hallway, D and I sat in these red chairs next to the only coffee table so that we could read while we waited our turn to go inside and visit. It was then that we encountered Signora Ratchet. She didn’t ask us to sit in the chairs nearest G’s wing – she scolded us and told us to get out of those chairs because those were reserved for the Gynecology patients. D pointed out that there weren’t any other people in the hall and said we’d be happy to make the seats available if any came along and this only increased Ratchet’s hostility.

At times like these, it’s probably a good thing that I don’t speak Italian very well. Once in a while someone does something that really isn’t that big a deal and I find myself instantly in the mindset that I’d very much like to meet them head on, and provide triple the hostility they’ve offered as their opening volley. It doesn’t happen much, and thus far, I've managed to not follow through on this primitive urge.

For the next hour, D and F switched off visiting and sitting on one of the three unbroken chairs. As the day progressed, more people came into the hallway and pretty soon there were fourteen of us, some of whom were pulling those IV stands that look like coat racks around, tubes sticking out of their arms. Each had been scolded out of the empty chairs near the elevators and ended up gathering together, standing, at the far end of the hallway. This made things really tricky for the people wheeling beds and wheelchairs in and out of the service elevator, as we couldn’t help but block every door in or out of our end of this long and relatively narrow room. The elevator door would open, the word "Permesso" would waft out, and like a sedated school of fish, we'd all bundle one way or the other to make an opening from one door to another before filling the void once more. 

Fortunately, the Gynecology chairs remained empty for those patients who must certainly have been waiting right outside to suddenly burst into the room and need them right away. Not wanting to be part of the “ousted” crowd, I stood in the narrowest part of the open area – between the phone booth and a row of empty chairs – in order to provide an obstacle to cheerfully greet everyone who passed. Being courteous as I am, I moved out of everyone's way. And being economical with my calories, I moved only just enough to allow their passage. Whenever anyone said anything (which might have been “why are you blocking the walkway, idiot?”), I smiled and said “E o no pARlay e-tall-e-ON-o.” Which probably led them to think something like “uh-mer-i-KAHN-o stoo-PEED-o.” Everyone wins.

Eventually, nurses from other wings (and doctors and orderlies and paramedics and an old guy in a wheelchair and a woman with one of those strollers that holds twins plus a 4 year old with a soccer ball) got tired of us all blocking the way and one of the nurses asked the crowd to make use of the empty seats on the other end of the hall. Everyone explained, all at the same time and without taking turns talking (this is how things are done here), that we’d been given the boot by the mean lady over there. So then the head nurse was alerted, and she came out to see for herself. By now we numbered over 20 people squished together, some of us too old to walk without assistance, and all of us wanting to rest our feet. The head nurse went away and returned with a doctor. Doctors are the bosses of Italian hospitals. Lots of people who work there squabble and fuss, but Doctors only have to say things once. Boss.

D went and spoke directly with the head nurse and the doctor. If you know D, you know that she’s completely fair minded, and not one to whine nor complain (she also doesn’t put up with whining or complaining, not that I’d know this firsthand or anything). She also has a very strong sense of justice and zero tolerance for people who needlessly treat others poorly.

She explained to the doc our experience, with the assertions that we didn’t mind being asked to move but we didn’t like being spoken to so rudely; and that we’d have been the first to surrender our seats to anyone who needed them.

Others wanted to join in the conversation to help D make her point (obviously, they didn’t realize that the best thing to do is stay out of her way) but the doc had heard enough. They told us not to worry, that they’d take care of it, then they went and talked to someone, who did something, and we didn’t see Mz Ratchet for the rest of the day. She doesn’t realize how fortunate she is. Then again, neither do most of the rest of us.

Today I'm staying in the Residence Hotel while D and F drive past the prostitutes, park in the bargain shopping lot, and spend the day with their Mom. Things have quieted down nicely, at least from an emotional perspective and we can finally live out of our suitcases in our college dorm sized room with a bit more calm than we've had for the last few weeks.

Best,

Cameron