Virtual Nonna

Every afternoon around four, I settle in the chaise lounge on the terrace with my computer on my knees. Even the dogs know it’s time for the daily video chat with Finn. Desiree, after tedious years of watching me lose myself in the computer, usually shows no interest, but during the Finn hour she is known to even attack poor Evangelina if she does not get a front row seat. All dogs participate. Desiree closest to the screen, Evangelina climbing up my neck out of fear of her mother’s rebuke but also to get up high enough to see; Gazou tucked cleanly under my arm so he can see the production askance and safely. “Ciao Finn,” I switch over to the baby talk (I’m a believer in it) and start flailing my hands. Then suddenly there’s Finn’s gummy, three-toothed grin filling my computer screen and my heart. He knows me! He recognizes his Nonna, even though I am a waif on a screen, a digital configuration of dots. He knows me and flails his hands back.

I have been told the one thing in the world that might charm me more than Italy, that might lure me back to the States, is the mysterious thing that gets stirred up when face to face with a first grandchild. “You’ll see,” certain friends, who don’t get me or my life here, have said on more than one self-righteous occasion. And I will confess that it really did hit me on Christmas, when four day old Finn responded first to my smile and then to my tears with first clear delight and then clear concern—our bond extended beyond what made sense for such a brief acquaintanceship. Of course reincarnation came to mind, the sense that here were two long lost friends or siblings or lovers who’d been, through his birth, reunited. And it certainly did surprise me, the primal jealousy I felt toward anyone who would be able to spend more time with him than I would, given I lived so far away. I didn’t think I was that kind of person or would be that kind of Grandmother. I didn’t think I much liked the company of babies, despite having loved three of my own. But for a few days after his birth, I went a little crazy and, then, Life took care of me, began to show me my place in his life and in my own.

My daughter has told me I am “Birthday Nonna.” That means, it’s my responsibility to plan the birthday parties. Finn had the good sense of being born on the Winter Solstice when my Fall term is clearly over and I am always free for him. He must have planned his life that way: he knew about my cake fetish and the kinds of parties I like to give. I was Birthday Nonna for the solstice. Then summers after he is, say, five, I can be Auntie Mame Nonna who teaches him that “life is a bowl of cherries and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.” I can teach him Italian and take him to the Crypt of the Capuchins and the Tarot Garden. But as for my quotidian responsibilities, I am Virtual Nonna, the woman who pops up on the computer screen like a favorite Cartoon and entertains him as long as I am able.

When I was a child, I had a Virtual Nonna, too, even long before computers existed for daily use. I watched Romper Room and loved Miss Sally and believed she spoke directly to me through her magic mirror: “And I see Martha, and I see, Christy, and I see Janey and Joe, and I see….Cindy!” she would say, and I had no doubt she spoke directly to me and not just to some generic Cindy or even to one of the other five Cindy’s in my nursery school class. I loved Miss Sally and believed she loved me, too. I’d get this milky feeling inside…that I attributed it to the special milk they served the children of Romper Room, sweeter than the milk I knew and thicker, too, a kind of spiked elixir that satisfied the soul. I could taste it as the children drank from their snowy black-and-white TV glasses and Miss Sally held the mirror full of swirling lights up before her face and did the role call: “I see Timmy and I see Margaret and I see Finn.”

It’s not a stretch, therefore, for me to believe in the power of my cyber visits with my Grandson. Of course I wish I could smell his head daily, and feel his downy white hair against my cheek. Of course I wish I could feel a drooley kiss or tickle him with my actual fingers. There are times I also worry that I may be the agent of some strange escapist addiction to video games or television, the virtual Nonna who yanks him out of the sensory world into a cyber-Narnia of White Witches and Turkish-delight insatiable desires. Do I make too much or too little of the window through which we reach for each other? Who’s to say? Who’s to know? The possibilities must be lived in order to be understood, and at least I’m living them.

Gypsy Afloat

“Where do you find these people,” my friend Ann wrote, truly incredulous. I described for her the intricate network of connections. Adriana had sold the Dutch woman, Wil, a house, and Rian was Wil’s friend, who had parked the sailboat in the Caribbean to fly up to Italy to visit Wil and her husband, Maarten. Rian had not gone hiking with us, but Rian’s husband, Herman had gone hiking with us, so Rian and Wil’s husband had met up with all of us, just for dinner, and Rian had wound up sitting across from me at dinner. Quite ordinary circumstances, actually, for one of the most extraordinary encounters of my life: I’d met my living double! I’d met the woman living the life I lived in imagination but she fulfilled it in the world….the life I had intended to live, had in fact dreamed up for myself and tracked through literature, but never actually, yet she did. My unlived life! She was living my unlived life.

I first got wind of my unlived life when I read Ella Maillart’s Gypsy Afloat. It’s the true story of how the Swiss Adventuress first set out on her life's true course, hitchhiking around the world on sailboats. She had been a French teacher in England when the restlessness overcame her. She wanted high sea adventure. I can’t quite remember the turning point, how she got the nerve to just abandon the drudgery and, without a cent to her name, hitch a ride on a sailboat and volunteer as crew. This was back in the 19-teens or twenties, certainly before World War II by which time she was living in India on an Ashram writing about cats as true teachers of Zen. And I don’t know for how many years she was at sea before she then started traveling the Middle East with the photographer Ann Marie Schwarzenbach, one time lover of Carson McCullers and acquaintance of my Grandmother, which is how I came to know about both Ann Marie and, through her, Ella. I read Gypsy Afloat and thought, that’s the life I should be living. I was in graduate school at the time writing a novel called An Open Boat. One night I dreamed of a ship's prow cutting through water and woke up and had to paint it. I decided that, after grad school, I would go to work on an Alaskan fishing vessel. The woman I lived with at time told me such work would kill me. I wasn’t as athletic then as I am now. I knew she was right. Work on a fishing vessel might kill me, but not life as a Gypsy Afloat.

Instead I decided it time that I focus my reading on sea narratives: The Odyssey, of course, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Moby Dick, of course, and Conrad and Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. For about a year I read all 21 of Patrick O’brian’s High Sea Adventure novels and even bought his glossary and book of navigational maps. I tried to understand my passion through Bahktin and the Dialogic Imagination. Sea narratives are really about timeless Time, Chiaros Time. Time is not linear when one travels by sea. There are sudden gusts and hurlings forward and sudden periods of absolute stillness. Yes, I thought! That’s exactly how Time works for me. Getting somewhere is not a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I live at the Mercy of Winds and Gods—in timeless Time, hence this sense that I live on an open boat. I tried to convince myself that my longing for high seas adventure was entirely an imaginative need. Lord knows I didn’t really want to be cast alone out to sea in a small sailboat, victim of The Perfect Storm. It was this imaginative craft of my reading and writing work I wanted to navigate.

But suddenly, Sunday night, the paradigm shifted. I found myself eating a pizza with Rian who has been sailing around the world in a 49 foot boat for the past 5 years and imagines she will keep sailing for at least another decade. From Granada, where the boat is now docked, she will sail to Patagonia and then up the West Coast of South America, then North America, to Alaska. That leg of the journey alone will take—she estimates—seven years. They stop often she reminds me. They want to see everything worth seeing, plus she is an Art Professor and is in demand on the lecture circuit.

I’ve had this feeling of strange cahoots only once before in my life, when I met my sister’s friends Tom and Barbara who were building a luxury sailboat from scratch in the middle of the North Carolina mountains. They, too, planned to sail it around the world and keep sailing. It took them more than a decade to build it. They live in Maine now and do sometimes take the boat out to sea for brief adventures, but have never made it around the world or even to Barbara’s native Estonia.

“Well,” Rian explains to me, after I’ve told her everything I know about our mysterious parallels, about Ella Maillart and about Tom and Barbara’s building project. “There are Builders and there are Sailors. During the decade they were building the boat, I was learning to navigate the sea.”

And what about me? What have I been doing while you all have been out there doing the real work of building and navigating? Suddenly my own work seems specious and unnecessary—the work of fantasy, escapist, unreal. I have to resist the urge to throw myself before this stranger who is not strange. I have to resist the longing to beg her to take me with them. I’ll be the crew. I’ll be the cook. I’ll be the gypsy who’ll sleep on deck and keep the pirates away while they are land lubbing.

I get home from dinner that night later than I ever ever allow myself to stay out, half believing I will go with her...that this encounter was a harbinger of unforeseeable change, a gust, a hurling forward....but toward what, in what mysterious vessel?

My Noble Steed

I don’t know what came over me the day I bought the bicicletta. When would I have time for bike riding, or stamina to crank up the hills of Spoleto? Why spend money on something destined to spend weeks and months at a time, parked in Marisa’s garden, rooted to the earth as though the vines tangled in the spokes had sprouted from the bike's very wheels? I already have one bike, a good bike, a Raleigh mountain bike I inherited from my daughter when she broke up with the boy who had been into bike stunts, which bike has been parked in one of those climate controlled storage places among books and other things I don’t miss, serving no purpose in anyone’s life, least of all mine. I did not need a bike nor even want one, though now and then, the yearning for the sense of snappy wind-in-your-ears freedom a bike can give would catch me by surprise.

More and more I am sure that my Imp of the Perverse governs my destiny. We talk these days about the power of intention, but what about the power of the thing that one does not intend though it flits around the edges of the mind like some bug of summer night around the terrace light: casting flickering shadows with its wings, disrupting silence with its papery flutter-sounds and buzz, yet still only modestly distracting, not compelling enough to claim full attention let alone intention to get up and turn out the light or shoo the imprisoned creature away from the binding electric halo. Most of my bright ideas hatch from a similar kind of inattention. To hell with the things I really want, the lovers that elude me, the other objects of my longing or goals of earnest self-application. Sheer whimsy is the gift-giver of my delight and the hand that holds the golden compass directing my unchartered passage.

The story itself sounds truly quotidian: I needed to get to Campello, but don’t have a car and the trains no longer stop there. I made a comment to Iolida, who lives there, that I bet it wouldn’t take anytime to ride a bike those 15 k. “They have bikes for 100 euro at the Coop,” she proclaimed. “Why don’t you get one? I can see you on a bike.”

As owner of a Raliegh-I-never-ride, I sneered at the thought of buying a bike in the grocery store. “I’ll look at them, “ I lied. Then thought of the bike shop on the Via Marconi that I see from the window of the “B” bus, men in florescent lycra standing around like creatures from another dimention, space-aged Mercuries with winged sandals, their helmets flashing silver in the sun. I can smell chain-grease just looking at them and hear the smooth mechanical ker-clunk of gears shifting. I would not call what I’ve felt as I pass the store longing exactly, not even attraction, certainly not the tingle tingle of destiny, but merely the kind of curiousity one might have regarding a dream one remembers for no apparent reason. It’s there like an itch, like that bug in the light, flittering its shadows not quite enough to beg real attention.

“Go get the green bike for her,” is the first thing the Bike Man said to his assistent when I walked into the shop. I am sure there were preliminaries, but I don’t remember them. I can’t imagine that I asked to buy a bike or that , if I did, he took me seriously. This was a hard core bikeshop. The bikes within were not even put-together. Hanging from the ceiling were frames without wheels without chains or gears or brakes or seats or even handlebars. The wheels were elsewhere, the handlebars elsewhere , the seats of various cuts and padding were sealed in cellophane sacks. I do recall that he said it possible to rent a bike. I am sure I told him, I wanted one for keeps but didn’t want to spend the 2000 or more euro the bikes he sold cost. He brought out the green Cinelli and told me he would sell it to me for less than the bikes at the Coop cost. I took a spin around Spoleto basso. The bike felt made for me. It felt like destiny. I felt the way Don Quixote must have felt when he first encountered Rocinante: Onward Noble steed to picaresque adventures.

And onward we did in fact go within 15 minutes of my impulsive purchase: Onward to Campello, to Spello, to Assisi, to supermarkets I’d never been able to reach before; onward to the Wonderful Outlet on the outskirts of Trevi, to the Chinese restaurant in Foligno. I became instantly tranformed into a woman known around town as “la Ciclista”: I wore a silver helmet and calculated distance traveled in miles and kilometers. I bought the pants with necessary crotch-padding, bought the shirt with the kind of wicking that doesn’t absorb sweat. With a change of wardrobe came a change in diet. Why diet? How diet? Did you know that 3 hours on a bicycle burns the calories of a full day of sedentary life? Ravenous hunger besieged me. Bring on the long forgotten carbs: Snickers Bars and Coca Cola, all the power bars and carb gels and powdered salt-balancing drinks my new best friend, The Bike Man, sold at his mysterious negotio. I’d stop by nearly daily to hang out with the other enthusiasts so I could learn about new piste/or bike paths. I was a little disturbed that there were no women among them—and why no women? But these creatures in lycra were not really men, or at least their manliness did not count. They were the archetypal pedal-pumpers attached to the bicycle…human agents of movement, human engines, and I was fast becoming one of them, or so I believed.

The rude awakening happened Monday night, when Milena, Cizia and I were at Calder enjoying a gelato. I’d ridden my bike earlier on the pista ciclabile/the bike path between San Nicolo’ and San Giaccomo. I’d chained it to the wrought-iron fence that marks off the Calder garden from the Viale Trento e Trieste. We were sitting there enjoying our cones and the evening breeze when Milena noticed a group of young men standing around admiring my bicycle. “It belongs to her,” she pointed out to them gleefully. “Ma Dai!” they said to me---the English translation “You’ve got to be kidding” cannot quite convey the extent of their incredulity. “This bike is a classic, a true antique. The 1986 Cinelli!”

What? I looked at them confused. My bike an antique! My bike nearly 25 years old? I'd thought maybe last year's model or maybe even the model of five years ago, but 25 years old. An antique?

“People search all over for these old things. And this one is impeccabile—in perfect shape, like new. You don’t find them like this anymore. They are dinosaurs now that Mountain bikes have come on the scene. This belongs in a museum. However did you come to own it?”

I can’t quite sort out the bizarre mix of pride, disappointment, embarrassment, betrayal, irony and delight I felt at that moment. My bike not a mountain bike and yet I am stupid enough to have believed it one?. My bike 25 years old, a dinosaur! . And yet it was the Ferrari of bicycles, a Cinelli, top of the line, one of a kind, impeccable, a collector's item. Can I sell it for a lot of money and then buy a real bike, I even asked them. They looked at me as though I were slightly demented.

I’ve lived two days with the knowledge that I will never quite be the serious biker my bike portended on the day destiny offered it to me. But knowledge of its limitations and of my own have not sapped the joy from my daily ride. The bike suits me—as though my unintended intention had drawn into its mysterious light-filled halo the one and only bike that would truly fit. It is indeed a faithful Rocinante to my ever-romantic Don Quixote. It does indeed get me up the Spoleto hills with gears that rarely clunk, does indeed get me places I’d never before been able to reach. I can visit Iolida on a whim at the Fonti di Clinunno. I can ride out past La Bruna to Terraia, where her mother, Nanda, is spending a brief time in a kind of nursing home. It takes me along the pista ciclabile from Spoleto to Assisi through some of the most beautiful valley landscapes in all of Italy, if not in all the world. I suppose I will never be able to do wheelies or other stunts on riding expeditions through the Alps, but my bike gets me where I need to go and even where I want to go, and we travel together as though we were one beast, both of us grandmothers after all, both of us a little lame, a little doddery, a little deluded, a little too caught in windmills of our own making, but hell—the wind still sings in our ears and my, my, my we’re going strong!

Interesting info on the history of the bike:

http://italiancyclingjournal.blogspot.com/2008/09/cinelli.html