Riddles of a Happy Un-anniversary

I don’t know why I invoke the Mad Hatter. There’s the long banquet table set with fine china and silver for the tea-party. There’s the ridiculous little man talking in riddles. There’s the Disney version with the song that wishes a very merry un-birthday to you—but at that teaparty there is the giddy child’s wonder of having 364 fun, regaled un-birthdays and only one dull ordinary day in a year, while my un-anniversary remains a single un-fun day. Still, I think the Mad Hatter belongs at the table with me, especially this day that would be the 30^th anniversary of my failed marriage. I think there should be an empty banquet table presided over by some magus of riddles where the divorced can go to celebrate the anniversaries that are not real, but do not go away even so.

Of the 30 years my un-anniversary does not celebrate, only twelve were spent married, leaving 18—more than half—un-married. The man I un-married has had two subsequent wives, making our un-marriage seem all the more disorienting. And yet I woke up the morning of my un-anniversary and found myself announcing to all my giri buddies what day it was. They loved my star-crossed stories about my groom and how he almost died the night before we married, from cellulitis caught from swimming in a stagnant pond after blistering his heel wearing my father’s golf shoes (symbolic!). They loved the story about how the wrong flowers and wrong wine were delivered mere hours before the big event, and how my often helpless mother mustered rare cunning and charisma to insure the right flowers and right wine were found elsewhere and delivered in the nick of time. They loved the story about me wearing my mother’s satin gown with long train, and how I’d grabbed a glass of red wine at the reception just as someone was rushing up to hug me, and spilled the wine down the front of my dress so that it looked like I’d been stabbed in the heart so that no one dared photograph me. They loved the story of how, because my groom had spent the night before the wedding in the hospital on an IV drip of antibiotics, we had to be rushed from the reception—no dancing allowed—to the resort hotel on that lake in Eufala so he could elevate the foot as soon as possible. We had not eaten all day and my poor sick groom asked me to go out and find him a hamburger. I was night blind and knew nothing about the town of Eufala, but drove around and drove around until I found a convenience store that sold Chili dogs. But of course by the time I got back to the resort hotel, my sick groom was dead asleep. That did not, however, explain why he took off his wedding ring in his sleep and threw it across the room. He told me it had happened utterly unconsciously; his finger just wasn’t used to being bound in rings.

“If I may be discreet,” Zia Paola interrupted me as I was narrating this story of misadventures, “When was this marriage of yours consummated?”

I sort of chuckled and explained to her it hadn’t needed to be consummated because we had lived together for three years before we made it official.

“Ah,” she looked at me knowingly. “No wonder you’re divorced. Your marriage was certainly born under a crazy star.”

I hold no grudges against my ex-husband. Without him, I doubt I would ever have married anyone and I certainly would not have the amazing children that I have or even my grandson, Finn. Without him, I would not of course have anything in my life as I now know it. There really is no such thing as divorce, in the end. The life two people create together keeps creating itself even across great divides and distances.

Margaret, Finn and I were chatting via video chat yesterday afternoon as usual. After Finn had shown off how efficiently he eats a carton of yogurt and pulls up the pieces of his jig-saw play mat, I thought to ask Margaret if she knew what day it was. She did in fact know and claimed that she’d thought to call her father and wish him a happy anniversary but because he’d celebrated his anniversary with his third wife last week and no one had even known it was their anniversary she thought possibly it would be a little rude.

At that moment her iPhone rang and she held it up to the web-cam so I could see who was calling: John Clough. “Do you know what day it is today?” she challenged him on answering.

It seemed absolutely appropriate the way John and I confronted our un-anniversary together yesterday, conversing through layers and layers of technology—Margaret’s iPhone held up to the webcam so that I stared hard at his name while listening to his voice come alive through the infinite regress of speakers. “Thirty years, “ I remarked, still not clear what Time means in any of this. “I’m well aware,” he said with a tenderness I rarely attribute to him.

I did take myself out to dinner last night, wondering had I ever before celebrated my un-Anniversary, not remembering even remembering it before, though believing surely the day never arises when I don’t. It was nice being out alone with the marriage and the riddles and the Mad Hatter whom I swear I could hear singing.

Manifesting Miracles

Yesterday after a Reiki session with Milena, full of my usual Thursday afternoon health resolves but unusually exhausted, I stopped by the COOP for the lemons I use for my relentless tall glasses of stevia-sweetened lemonade. On my way to the check-out, I passed a freezer that someone had moved from a hidden corner of the supermarket to a prominent, far too visible place by the check-out aisles. Instantly a vision of Magnum Bars and a hankering for one rose before me. It was the six-pack of the Mocha Magnum Mini that made me swoon. Six Magnum Mini’s, each of the six the mere size of my thumb, but filled with a distinct variety of coffee gelato, ranging from espresso to cappucino to cafe corretto, I think with rum as well as coffee in the coffee. How readily I could use my incessant bike-riding as excuse to load up on carbs, until I remembered that the forecast for the weekend is rain. How readily I could imagine cancelling dinner at Canasta with Alberto, Pranzo at Tric Trac with Milena for the sake of a wild orgy of Magnum Mini indulgence. I did not kid myself believing I had the power to eat just one. I knew they would become mere bon bons, some of them disappearing before I made it up the hill towards home. It’s here where I acknowledged the perniciousness of my cravings and discovered within myself a merciful forebearance.

I really did not think about Magnum Bars as I went about the rest of my evening errands. I stopped by Boba Wash to pick up the dog treats the puppies like for their obedience training and got lost in gossipy conversation with Anna Lisa. I stopped by the TIM store and faced the desperate frustration of learning that their computers were down and I would not—yet again (this had likewise happened the day before)--be able to pay the fee for my internet service. I ran into Fiorella with her ancient mother who had just had aperitivi with Paolo and Iolida and I had to explain to her what Reiki is and why sometimes going to Reiki fills me up with energy and other times, like right then, it empties me out so that I cannot even make it up the hill and so need to take the bus. Then when I got on the bus, guiltfully, admonishing myself for the money spent and the conditioning foregone, round about the second stop, a man some people call my spassamante —a term that has no real English equivalent but is essentially someone who loves from afar, while “a spasso”—out and about—got on the bus and a took a seat behind me. I made due note of how civil and un-predatory Domenico had become in recent years after a peroid of relentless phonecalls and harrassment. Now he was gentle as a priest with me, patting my cheek, nodding buongiorno or buona sera, then slipping back into whatever thoughts he’d brought onto the bus before he’d seen me and taking a seat some distance away.

There was something for me to learn from him in the control he’d attained over his strange passions, I thought, riding up the hill. He’d worked for years in the San Eufemio Medieval library on ancient texts, a position I found extremely curious because his expertise was so venerated by the Church that he was brought to Spoleto weekly to tend the San Eufemio collection despite the fact that he was some kind of criminal with a life-sentence at Capanna prison. A jolly, moustachioed prison warden would accompany him via train routinely, without handcuffs or shackles, and I would find the two men having a cappucino together mornings as I was headed the other way, to teach in Perugia. Always Domenico would ask could he buy me a coffee and cornetto; always I would refuse but thank him for the gesture. Always I would think back to my own days of prison teaching and how unlikely it would be to find a warden and a prisoner having breakfast together or find a prisoner a spasso or if a spasso without handcuffs or shackles. I was deeply curious about Domenico and his crime and slippery sentence, but no amount of gossip ever clarified things for me, and Domenico himself mentioned only that he was from Sicily, his family was in Sicily. It would be wrong to assume Mafia, especially of a man so delicate, whose chief joy in life is pointing out to others that the chiocciola or @ sign we assume was spawned by email, is ever present in 15th century texts here, here and here. Guarda!

“Be careful with Domenico,” my friend Cally had warned me. She’d been pursued by him and didn’t think it prejudice that made her wary. She’d had coffee with him often back when she lived in Spoleto and would stop by the library from time to time, but there had been true evidence of a kind of imbalance that made her believe he must be in prison for some kind of crime of passion. I couldn’t be quite sure if Cally’s warning had prejudiced me against him the day I took my daughter to the library and suddenly discovered all exit doors locked. He’d given Margaret a lovely a gift: a guide book to Spoleto. He’d given me a gift, too, a narrative in Italian about an Italian man who falls in love with an American tourist who comes to Spoleto for the festival. “I need to go,” I’d insisted to Domenico. “Why are all the doors locked? I need to go.” There seemed a sinister delight in him over seeing me squirm that disturbed me. For a small eternity I feared for my life as he pretended he couldn’t find his keys. Later Cally would nod that Domenico had given her the same book and the same fright. “Be careful,” she’d insisted.

And yet, I really hadn’t needed to be, I was beginning to realize. In recent months he seemed even a free citizen and, in his freedom, self-assured, calm, courteous and endearing, with his tidy gray goatee and kind eyes twinkling behind John Lennon reading glasses, every bit the gentleman and the scholar. I loved that he and I had weathered something odd and alarming, yet had arrived at this place of tender, deferential friendship. Life is good, I kept thinking on the way up the hill. Our worst fears are usually so unnecessary.

No sooner had I thought these thought than Domenico called my name. “Cinzia,” I heard from the back of the bus and turned around. He was sitting there politely, eating an ice-cream, a kind of gym bag across his knees. When I turned, he reached into the bag and produced a Magnum Bar and offered it to me. For a split second, I refused it, arguing that I don’t eat sugar, need to watch my weight. He looked at me impatiently. “Cinzia, take it, it’s melting…I can’t eat it. It’s for you.” I suddenly got chills as I recognized it was precisely the Magnum Bar I’d been drooling over at the supermarket, the coffee mocha kind, but the full-scale variety, not the Mini, offered so graciously. Domenico’s eyes sparkled behind the thick lenses of his glasses as though he knew he were ushering me into the supernatural. The silver wrapper of the Magnum Bar shone iconically. It felt like such a tremendous gift--the universe offering me my heart's desire, assuring me of endless possibility. I’m not sure why. And I'm not sure why if felt so right that Domenico was the one to deliver what I have to call a kind of promise. I can’t explain any of it though it all makes wonderful sense.

New Moon Eclipse

A new moon eclipse carries the punch of I don’t know how many new moons. It is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time to wish upon a star, pull out the spiral note book, hop on the bike and ride out to the Fonti di Clitunno to cast intentions. It’s a time to look around oneself and take stock: What is right here in my new moon moment that is pulsing with promise, incipient with happening, trying to burst into being, destiny lying in wait?

First joy of my new moon is Marisa leaning out the kitchen window, Marisa standing at the window to greet me and the dogs as we leave the house at six, standing there on a brand new hip, just created for her on Monday. Marvel of marvels she is already walking around on it, making the coffee at six, responding to the squeal of eager Evangelina as she races manically to the gate, tugging ZuZu tumbling along with her, given they are yoked together with the coupler hooked to the leash buckled around my waist. “What happened to rehab?” I call out to her and she shrugs, claiming she does better rehab on herself moving among the things she loves, entrusting her body to well-established routines. Staying in good spirits is everything when trying to heal.

Second joy of my new moon is Daniela appearing in Piazza Campello at the same moment I appear, the Grace of a private moment before others arrive, all our dogs facendo la festa (making a party) rather than barking as they once did, evidence that Dog Obedience is still paying off even if we skipped our lesson yesterday because of the heat and Giulia visiting from Naples. How wondrous the dogs no longer tira or snap at each other and seem instead to love keeping step with each other, the walking calibrated so finally Daniela and I can stay shoulder to shoulder if not arm-in-arm without even one of our seven fuzzy darlings underfoot, Sesamo only mildly curious about Desiree’s culo (she’s in heat); Zuzu nipping only Usque once; not one hysterical barking conniption, even when Giulia joins us with her three smooth-haired dachshunds, la piccola only four months old and adored by Irma who hands me back Desiree’s leash so she can give la piccola coccole (little cuddles). Ten dogs doing giri della Rocca with four women, their hearts a-swell. “It is time for a new family portrait,” Daniela reminds me. “Tomorrow after I put Giulia on the train, bring the good camera, ask that man you know who takes such good photos to capture us—let’s fix the moment, make an icon of it, hold onto this as the surest thing we know, her new moon being in the 6th house of relationships, mine being in the 12th house of spirit, intuition, mystery.

After three hours of walking, I return home to find Marisa outside in the garden pruning the geraniums, a chair set up on the front porch with a pillow in it should she need to sit down, but after all that time in a bed in a hospital, who needs to sit, especially with the garden begging for love and her attention. Why go to a rehab facility when she can be in her garden and get someone to come to the house and make sure she’s moving her parts right? Of course she’s moving her parts right, just look at her—moving! Now she’s eager to teach me all she knows about geraniums, which parts to pinch off so the plant won’t lose its limf…and I think how much I love the word limf in Italian, a word I first read and couldn’t translate in the theological writings of the Hermit of Monteluco when speaking of the stuff of spirit that gets passed on from soul to soul, as we love each other, and as we move from being to being throughout our incarnations. How crucial it is, to keep watch over the limf, to make sure it is not squandered or damaged or misdirected. Do Americans even think of limf? I don’t think it’s quite the same as chi or prana, but maybe close. Something tells me limf is thicker, like the shimmering sap I see in the place where Marisa has pinched off a stem, a kind of silver blood that runs through all of us, sustains us—limf. My new moon, my new chapter, is all about limf, I make up my mind as I make my way up the stairs to the house I’m ready to put in order, but only after I have pruned the geraniums and, while pruning them, the tomatoes and anything else whose limf needs my attention.

Taking care of the limf, I realize, has something to do with moving slowly, offering Reiki to the dogs as I groom them, practicing our new Dog Obedience trick: Terra. It takes infinite patience to hold a dog with your eyes for a full half hour of “terra”—“Terra” being “on the ground”, the dog lying on its belly, its head on its paws. My new moon is about the kind of discipline required to hold a dog, and then another dog, and then another dog in my gaze, each for a half-hour so that the discipline is not so much a matter of teaching them how to behave but more the discipline of meditation that slows my own limf down to pure communion with the animal who stops time with me in this way.

How grateful I am that my new moon eclipse issues a beginning like silver limf from this particular moment, this love, this joy. this tender unharriedness. I do entrust myself to all the well-being I am fortunate enough to know on this day and vow to the eclipsing moon that I will help carry the goodness forward.

Remake me!

I have a dress that I spent far too much money on ten years ago that I have not been able to throw away. I wore it once—to Margaret’s high school graduation. Margaret is now 28 and mother of my grandson, Finn. The dress has traveled from Georgia to Italy, from Italy to Georgia, from Georgia to Italy, I don’t know how many times. When I bought it, it almost fit but was tight in certain places. I’d assumed I would lose the weight and wear it all the time to church back when I lived in Georgia and went to a church that required dresses. But instead I had gained weight and moved to Italy where people go to church in jeans. Then a few years ago, I lost weight and remembered the dress, but now it was too big. I thought then to throw out the dress with all the other clothes that were too big as a kind of Feng Shui manuever a friend insisted was crucial: If you hang onto anything too big for you, you are simply inviting your body to get fat again. Only keep clothes around that you want to fit into and wear. Only keep clothes around that define you. I loved this philosophy, and yet I could not throw out the dress.

This might have made some sense if I were the kind of woman who wears dresses, but I rarely wear dresses, and certainly have no use for one that gapes in the bust and hangs down to my ankles. I don’t like sleevelessness either because of my old-lady flabby arms and this dress, what my mother would call a summer “shell”, is lined with silk and therefore too hot, really, for summer wear. Why ever would I need to hang onto it?

Milena, my Reiki coach, told me to trust the dress, to follow the dress. Maybe the colors were calling me. Maybe my soul needed those particular shades of gold and green-- autumn colors. She could feel in my aura a need for autumn colors; I wore green a lot, she had noticed…maybe it was the gold or the particular blend of gold with the specific vibration of green. Or maybe the fantasia of vines and leaves, inviting new growth in me. Or maybe the dress did not truly belong to me, but had entrusted itself to my safe-keeping so I could pass it on to someone else, one of my daughter's perhaps, even Margaret herself, for whom I had in fact bought it, if indirectly, given I had worn it only to her graduation. Or maybe I was destined to put it in a Goodwill bin the year, the month, the day, the moment that some unknown someone was seeking just such a dress and would recognize mine as the one she'd been seeking for who knew what occasion. Puo darsi, I thought, somewhat skeptically, but also somewhat credulously because I did once have a dress I bought on impulse, then lost, then found again, that became a crucial aspect of a romance and a symbol in a novel I wrote: the dress that attracts the right suitor, the dress that changes one’s destiny.

The other day, I was doing Giri della Rocca with Zia Paola and her friend Orieta, the town Sarto, or tailor. Paola remarked that she had gotten Orieta to make her two “tubini”—or tube dresses—for the opera season, one in white, one in tourquoise. She has Orieta make all her clothes because that way Paola can invent precisely the look she wants and also rest-assured that the clothes will be the right color and fit her perfectly. “She can make anything, Orieta. Just come up with a vision and “poof!” it’s like the Fairy Godmother in Cenerontola (Cinderella)—she will turn your rags into elegant garments with the wave of her magic wand! She will turn the pumpkin into a coach and the orphan into a beloved princess."

For some reason I thought of the ten year old dress in my closet. I told the gaggle of women walking with me the story of my having held onto it. I’m sure it was out of style and not worth saving. Plus had they ever seen me in a dress? Would I even wear it if it fit right and were shortened? I am not the kind of woman to wear dresses. “Ah,” Orieta, looked at me, her eyebrows raised, her eyes themselves spalancata as she tried to appraise something in me. “Sounds to me like the dress is begging to be worn! Stop by my place this afternoon. We’ll inquire of the dress what it wants!”

I had never been to Orieta’s before, nor to a sarto before. In the grandiose palazzo, halfway up the marble staircase, a gargantuan bronze statue of Apollo stood, his lamp lifted though it was not lit and did not need to be lit in the middle of the afternoon. He seemed to stare down at me; he seemed to note my passing as though he knew, on my return down, I would be changed somehow, be someone else. I was overcome by a feeling that something marvelous was happening.

When I’d arrived, Orieta ushered me into her glorious tailor’s room…the huge expanse of cutting table covered with patterns and pins; the shelves festooning bolts of fabric; the credenze heaped with notions and ribbons and lace and bottons flashing up their colors from tiers of clear plastic drawers and boxes. On the walls, portraits of brides in wedding gowns she had made, of Opera gowns and costumes. However had I come to land in this mythic place of costumery, creativity, invention?

It was actually quite magical what she did with mere pins. I stood before her three-way mirror, at first naked (well in panties and bra), then in the dress that didn’t seem to belong to me, be right for me, the way the bodice gaped and sagged and the skirt hung around my ankles. But within minutes, using only the pins, the darts of the bodice fit my breasts, the shoulders aligned where they should across my collar bone, the length struck just right, above my knees.

What was odd is that it didn’t quite seem that she had made the dress fit me so much as she had made me fit the dress. I did a double-take--who is that woman? I looked at myself as though meeting myself for the first time. I never knew I looked like this, I think I may have even said to her. Orieta’s eyes met mine in the mirror—wise, pulsing slightly with insight and knowing.

“You’re ready,” she said as though we were embarking on some kind of quest together. “I think this is the first of many magic mantles I will make for you!”

Signs of Arrival

When Daniela and I are ecstatic, we see fiocchi: those quite ordinary ribbons that people tack to a door or mailbox after a baby is born, or use to decorate gift-packages or get-away cars for newlyweds, the kind with as many loops and flourishes and frizzy tassles as possible. We are usually driving along in her car, usually newly reconciled after some minor or major difficulty, and suddenly the ribbons will start concatenating around us like paper fireworks. “Guarda, Cinzia, i fiocchi!” she will call out in utter wonder. It’s not simply a matter of our passing a mailbox and seeing a single pink ribbon-blossom hanging from a post. Our fiocchi announce themselves in excess, in garlands, in impossibile hyperbole. How do we account for an entire clothes-line of fiocchi the size of cabbages? A single “just married” car makes sense, passing us, trailing streams of white fiocchi, but how account for five such cars during a half hour drive from La Bruna to Spoleto? Five weddings, five couples making their honeymoon escape within moments of each other. “Guarda Cinzia, i fiocchi,” Daniela calls out to me, but doesn’t have to call out. I see them, too. I recognize them, too. I feel them blooming inside me, too, as surely as we see them happening beyond us. They somehow belong to our shared emotional life and moments of sudden arrival.

My friend Milena told me her sign was a pumpkin. She wanted some evidence that her sense of the ephemera she thinks are signs comes from a governing and responsive intelligence and are not flukes, simply random. If you are there God or Goddess, send me a pumpkin,” she’d asked and then had let go and gone about her day working at the Centro di Benessere. About half way through the morning, a client came in, and wanted to show her a new product said to be good for the skin. She held the magazine in her hand and already Milena felt that tingle tingle shift in energy, alerting her to the presence of the supernatural. The woman opened the magazine and—BOOM—a full color page of a pumpkin; the product’s chief ingredient was pumpkin. But as if that had not been answer enough, proof enough, she had found herself that very afternoon driving through a field with her husband. Plants she did not recognize filled the landscape. She knew it couldn’t be tobacco. “Honey…what is that world of green?” The plants seemed to go on forever…”Pumpkins,” he told her. Pumpkins.

These mystic flashes happen all the time, everywhere, to everyone, but most of the time we either bat them away like ordinary gnats, fastidious creatures of peripheral vision. Or if we see them and feel the blossoming of light in our hearts that such signs deliver, how soon we talk ourselves out of believing. What can such echoes and signs mean anyway? Am I to base my faith, my love, my work on such ephemera as fiocchi and pumpkins?

Of course I am and I do! Signs are not linguistic tricks or literary conventions, but living pulses from another dimension that fill our souls with light and helium, give us lift. I used to think of such moments as rendings of the veil between this world and the other, and the metaphor does to some extent hold true. But it seems that when one’s heart is full, one’s cup runneth over, so to say, the fullness is so seamless, the wholeness so complete, there’s no room for rending anything, no room for separateness or brokenness of any kind—only joy and only love, only awe. Can I believe in such a place, can I stake out residence here? How believe in anything else?

Ah, Sweet Madness!

Every morning when I walk the dogs home from morning giri della Rocca, I encounter a man miming a formal lecture. His only visible audience is the landscape across the Viale Matteotti, a street also known in Spoleto as “La Passaggiata” or “place of the evening stroll” because of its tree-lined shadiness, and infinite views. One side of the street, the side I live on, invites passersby to sit and rest and look—thanks to a series of confortable green slat benches that face out toward the view across the street. The view is hardly disrupted by the underground parking lot marked by a huge polyhedron that discretely points out where the elevators leading to the under world are situated. Rather than pave paradise for a parking lot, here they have covered up a parking world with a veneer of paradise that gradually fades into the true paradise of lush hills and valleys adorned with peach and yellow-colored villas. Mostly elderly people with their badanti or care-givers stake out places on these benches, sometimes for entire mornings. I often find myself sitting on the bench outside my house waiting for Iolida or Daniela to pick me up for an outing. The man I encounter every morning on the bench not far from mine is neither old nor waiting, nor does he seem the least bit derelict. I am convinced he is full possession of his faculties and speaks to someone the rest of us can’t see.

He’s a handsome man: bright intelligent eyes, fit, well-groomed, hovering around sixty I’d say, already gray, crisp shirt, creased trousers, clean socks, good leather shoes. Looking directly at him without consideration of his context, he does indeed look like a professor, well-trained in elocution, delivering a speech, maintaining proper poise and eye-contact, his gestures neither too exaggerated nor too restrained, certainly grandiloquent in the Italian sense, and lively with ecstactic dips and sweepings, but controlled, artful, clearly orchestrated by the music of his speech, every syllable enunciated with articulate care, though silently. I find this man at his perch, daily, Monday through Saturday, giving his lecture to apparently no one…lost in his lecture, adament, spittal frothing at the corners of his mouth, that is until I somehow make myself known in his peripheral vision. It’s at this juncture I know he must be sane: the fact that he stops when he sees me, cuts the performance short to gather his wits about him so that he can greet me. He is utter politeness and charm: “Buongiorno, Signora…and how are our little dogs today.” Further proof of his sanity: the dogs adore him.

I talk to myself, I know I do, because my children tell me I do, especially Lucy tells me I do…and they tell me further that I look ridiculous, as though I am carrying on a conversation with someone actually there, punctuating sentences with sudden hand-gestures. I am utterly unconscious of being so flagrantly demonstrative when I talk to myself and a little bit embarrassed that people have caught me in the midst of such antics. And to be sure, I never do talk to myself, but talk to sundry people on my path, perhaps the friend I plan to see at lunchtime, perhaps a lost lover or my dead mother…or even the shrink I have not seen in twenty-years or to my Muse who has a human (secret) counterpart. I rehearse how to best tell the day’s stories…or explain a conundrum or justify bizarre behavior or merely name the things I long to have happen in my life, as though in naming them, I create fresh possibilities. Please tell me everyone does this: holds conversations with their inner guides, even half-consciously, not quite aware that the conversation is taking place as one makes one's way from home to the bus stop or waits for a train. I believe in such conversations. I believe that, without them, our souls freeze over and lose sense of how to navigate the world’s often arid terrain.

I love the fact that the interior monologue of the man I encounter on his bench has attained such formal eloquence. I love that the ghosts who listen to him, whoever they may be, fill up such a glorious landscape. I imagine he must see a multitude of faces, a Lincoln Center worth of people dead and alive who sit there day after day, a captive audience, yet somehow also free as only these hills make one feel free, listening to the sagacity he must be uttering, each thought coined with a scholar’s deliberation. I know the difference between a drunk, a bufoon and a wiseman. The man I encounter is undeniably wise.

I met this man this morning, out of context. He was standing by the fountain in the Piazza del Mercato, filling his water bottle as might have been any passing tourist. He recognized me as I slipped past him with the dogs, though I had to do a double-take to recognize him. The look we exchanged ran deeper than mere acquaintainceship. I felt a kind of embarrassment rising in me, as though I’d accidentally caught him naked somewhere, or caught him in a lie—our complicitly declared through unsuppressible blushing.

Acceptance

Visiting hours at the Spoleto hospital make no sense and therefore no one really observes them. Who is going to visit anyone during the single window of the pranzo hour in a country where people eat only during meals and the first meal worth eating happens promptly at 1:30, without deviation? Who in his or her right mind would forgo food to dash out to the hospital and fight the crowds swelling behind the locked ward door that may or may not open promptly at one, given the whims of the nurse in charge? And then there’s the rule of one guest at a time in the room of the infirm who must share a room with someone else and that soul’s guest. Why fight the crowd of bona fide family to visit the friend who has been lying wide eyed all night and all morning waiting for that one hour of random company, the fluke person who makes it through the turnstyle past Nurse Ratchett’s watchful eye?

Irma tells me we will visit Marisa at eleven before I know there’s even such thing as visiting hours that we are violating. In the States such hours are almost obsolete. I have spent enough time in hospitals with aging parents to know Nurse Ratchett doesn’t watch nor does she probably exist given the epidemic wiping out nurses in American Hospitals. We will meet in the shade of the loggia a few minutes before 11 and then go visit Marisa together, Irma assures me, Irma who must know what she’s doing given her medical training (nurse or doctor, I’m not sure) and her having been appointed by the family to be Marisa’s “assistente.” I trust Irma knows what she’s doing and trust that I will have a chance to sit for a good long while with Marisa so we can work out what I can do in her absence for the cats, for the garden, for whatever needs care during the weeks that she will be away in a rehabilitation center in Caccia learning how to walk with her new hip.

Whatever one believes or believes about belief, there’s no doubt that when two people discover that they believe the same thing it’s like the stroke of a tuning fork that aligns disharmonic tones to turn them into music. On the long walk down the loggia, Irma and I bond first in our belief about animals and how we should go about feeding them (we will share responsibility for Marisa’s cats) and then in our belief about Timing and how things work out, even amid tragedy, to bring the right souls together. I tell Irma that, the day before Marisa fell, I had told her about Iolida and the upcoming surgery to remove a mysterious tumor. Deeply saddened by this news, Marisa had shook her head proclaiming: “It’s happening everywhere, an epidemic—out of the blue, people being struck down. You never know when you will be struck down, your life pulled out from under you, everything changed.” Marisa had said this and then, the very next day, it had been Marisa to get struck down. Now oddly, ironically, Marisa and Iolida are both facing surgery in the same hospital, on almost the same day. “Pensa!” Irma says and I feel that kind of ironic wonder for which there is not an equivalent English expression.

The ward doors are indeed locked when we reach the orthopedic wing, and sundry people are lined up on benches in the hallway, waiting. Irma, who believes her status as “assistente” might gain us entrance, pushes the botton on the citafone to announce our presence and desires; a gruff responding voice asks us, Can’t we read, haven’t we seen the notice posted to the door that states plainly that the visiting hour is between one and two? Irma shrugs. I stake out a place to wait and start playing Scrabble on my iPhone with my children across the Atlantic. I don’t know why every word we play in the game seems leaden with meaning. The word my son in California has played is “Dolt.” I’m sure he’s somehow in cahoots with the situation and is talking about the man whose voice I just heard on the citafone telling us to wait. It seems remarkable to me that the word I find to play back at him is: "Agent".

I am sure I am naive to trust Time the way I do—naive, and tired enough of the work of translating to enjoy any compulsory-seeming reprieve. All the anxious waiting faces lined up against the far wall, turning as though synchronized with every creak of the door, meeting my gaze from time to time with a knowing that seems deeper than understanding, seem suspended here with me to do unseen work as private and silent as prayer. “Permesso,” Irma says to me the next time the door creaks open. Somehow she manages to disappear behind it and for some reason I feel a sudden flutter of panic as though I could be stuck here indefinitely, unable to either move forward or retreat and go home, locked in place with these others in some kind existentialist non-drama of doing nothing.

It happens so quickly when Irma returns, telling me to hide the flowering plant in my tote bag, telling me to scurry lest Nurse Ratchet see me. Marisa is beautiful, there in the bed in her silk gown, her face even radiant despite the pain she must surely be in…her eyes beaming the joy of our friendship and instant forgiveness for how I have failed her. I have not, however, arrived undetected. “The nurse says you have to leave, we have to leave,” Irma laments, apologizing as though her efforts in trespassing had been an abject failure. Marisa squeezes my hand, and beams something into me that takes my soul to a new place. It’s okay, she says. The time we’ve had is enough.