Getting it Right

Seldom, seldom do I ever entertain the longing to live my life over again. It exhausts me to even think about scraped knees, lunch room spitballs, pimples and training bras, the debilitating queasiness of high school , the arbitrary hierarchies that compel us from point A to points Q, V and Z—all our so-called achievements based on fickle standards of beauty or intelligence or competence. I am grateful to have arrived at mid-life even as modestly intact as I am intact. I am not dead yet. That in itself seems a miracle. I am also living exactly where I want to live doing exactly what I want to do with exactly the people with whom I want to be doing it—this too seems such an unexpected flourishing and boon, that I sigh outright and knock wood and try never to look over my left shoulder. Sometimes the end does in fact justify the means.

Then arrives a day that seems delivered straight from heaven, a day it’s nigh’ impossible to describe without clichés and rhapsody: The sun a steady orb in the sky delivering light without the heat that can be so irritating. The sky--oh my God the sky!--what Icarus heights can be imagined through all that bluer than blue, what oceanic depths, what navigable nether-spheres, what promises of eternity radiating from that boundlessness as a breeze caresses the planet, runs it fingers through the grasses, unsnarls branches, dreadlocks, ordinary ponytails, breeze just enough to keep us ever aware of how alive we are in our goose-pimply skin as we gather around the elegantly appointed table at the edge of Lago Trasimeno, lake water lapping luxuriously as we stare into each other’s faces for the first time and suddenly find we know each other.

I am here on una gita to the lake’s Isola Maggiore with four students and former school director, Charles Jarvis. It doesn’t get better than this, resounds the cliché when words fail us, even the word for the fish with grill stripes filleted before us—il menu pesce only 15 euro but delivering Troncia, freshly caught from the pier that extends just beyond where we sit, at the end of which is even a little table set for one, whimsically it seems as no one is sitting there but we all proclaim, if one of us were alone, she’d have chosen to sit there—dramatically, hair whipping in her face. Amid this togetherness, amid this resplendent pranzo-hour sunshine, amid the flapping edges of the table cloth and umbrella cloth that shields us from glare and possible heat, looking from Jeanette to Diana to Brianna to Ashley and back again to Charles—I am overcome with the certainty that the rightness of this present moment ensures our getting all other moments right, as even the preceding moments that at one time seemed so unlivable in the living of them may have been right enough to get us where we are.

These young women just amaze me: Diana who, at 21, has just recovered from Malaria after striking out on her own for a farm in Kenya, to help plant a vegetable she never learned to name in English. She has been wandering around the world through WWOOF, that extraordinary organization that encourages experiences in sustainable gardening by providing room and board in exchange for work. I’d have never had the courage at 20 to fly alone to Kenya, move in with a Kenyan family in a village far from contact with other Americans and work day and night planting a plant I couldn’t name while also helping the family learn to use a computer and the internet. Jeanette unpacks a digital Canon with a telescoping lens and talks about her experiences at Eastman museum in Rochester. She’s the delicate red-head of Norwegian descent who instantly updates my course reading list with new travel narratives, hitherto unknown to me—an Ella Maillart with waist-length dreadlocks, ready to kick off the rest of her life to follow her photographer’s eye wherever its sure twinkle leads—for the moment it's led to my class, the hike she asked me to organize, this spot on the edge of an island we will soon climb to find thousand year old olive trees, the souls of which seem palpable, their presences more present than the human shades that flicker by them. Brianna is seeking out her Italo-Romanian heritage; she suspects her forebears were gypsies as she feels the gypsy in her blood and wants to trace the feeling back to real origins—that’s why she’s here and why she’s picked up Italian so fast, the need to penetrate all barriers to knowledge gathering urgency as time goes on and allowance funds start to drain. Only Ashley is quiet, perhaps because she finds herself a guest of Brianna, coming along to come along, and shy before the others and yet the mystery of her finding herself at this table complicit with the rest of us dazzles her face and turquoise-flecked eyes.

“Ah, to be thirty years younger,” Charles looks across the table at me and I know what he means for the acute moment of his saying it—I want to be striking out for Kenya, taking photographs with a good camera, discovering the origins of my gypsy blood—want to live with possibility before me in the way possibility exists for them at this moment of their lives. But then the moment opens up for me as a many petaled thing and it occurs to me —it does! Possibility does exist for me as it does for them as it does for Charles, not the same possibility, but when is possibility ever the same between any two of us?

How suddenly allegorical our visit to the island seems —as we make our way past lace-makers poised in lawn chairs like the fates with their hooks and string, past the convent where a woman with a flashlight likewise waits poised in her lawn chair with a flash light, offering a chance for a tour of the castle and the hidden frescoes within, up the crest of hill that is the arching spine of the island where another mythic woman sits also in her lawn chair within the 14th century ("Nessun flash, senza flash!" she calls to the girl with camera) church with a yard full of recyclable graves—the dates on the headstones all as recent as the 1980s and 90s and 2000s. I see us there, making our way past the church and the sentry of watching olive trees, the four girls breathless and fleet-footed, ahead of their teachers who trudge lazily, but contentedly behind.