BEEF MUSIC:A SLOVENE FAVORITE WHICH IS ALSO A HIT WITH ME

Last night when we visited our daughter-in-law's super-nice family for a most delicious dinner, I asked her very cute adolescent brother about the accordion on his bed. He had just started taking lessons four years ago when we were here for the wedding, and he already sounded good then. Ditto for our daughter-in-law, who never had a lesson, but is very talented at most everything, including music.

An accordion is an essential element of a popular style of this country's music that's referred to as "beef music." I realized I had goofed when I asked Jan if he liked "cow music," and got a perplexed look. Once I corrected myself, we both agreed that we liked it. It is invariably cheerful and smile producing. Kind of like the tap dancing I still do.

Many Slovenes seem to make fun of it, but there is even a tv station that I'm watching right now that plays it 24/7. The singers wear what look like liederhosen, and every once in a while there's an actual "moo" or yodel.

Now compare that to those 145 church bongs at quarter to any early morning hour. Just try turning THEM on and off.

Oops! I must have missed the 9:45 set of bongs because I had my beef music volume turned way up. But something tells me that I will get another chance.

Here's the budding young accordionist resting after a long hard day of playing beef music. 

And here he is a year later, more grown up, but not too grown up to still play with dogs in strange Santa outfits or to make music.

IT'S 145 O'CLOCK IN BEAUTIFUL SLOVENIA!

We are getting to know our son's adoptive country, and as helicopter parents with a first grandchild on the way, we expect to be spending increasing amounts of time here. Even though it's a seven-hour drive from our Italian home, this will not be such a sacrifice. This is a beautiful place that feels exotic to us, and about which we still have plenty to learn.

For example, just outside our charming B&B, the church bells go bonkers with something like regularity. They seem to go into overdrive at quarter of the hour, and they like to get an early start.

A few minutes ago, at 8:45AM, I counted 145 bongs. That must mean that it's 145 o'clock, and all is well. Or could it mean that once the bonging stops, we have only 10 minutes to get to 9AM mass?

We are a family of theorists who likes to think there's a method even to things that look like madness. We  have a family saying for when we have no idea what might be behind any given phenomenon:"that would be due to ....something." It was invented by J, who is very smart and understands a lot of things. But even when he doesn't, that doesn't stop him. Who doesn't like to think that there could be an explanation for why things happen ?

He couldn't believe that I was actually in bed counting all 145 of those bell bongs. Of course I could have been wrong about that number, since some were more elaborate than others, making it hard to decide what constituted a single bong.

As for what it all means (besides no more sleep for YOU), that remains to be pondered.

Maybe at 9:45 I will get another clue?

Perhaps the playwright Eugene Ionesco visited here, too. His "La Cantatrice Chauve" ("The Bald Soprano") opens with a very cuckoo English clock that bongs 3 English times, at which Mrs. Smith declaims, "Goodness, it's 9 o'clock!" A bit later, the very English clock bongs 7 times, then 3, then 5. 

 If the time is out of joint, what next? It's all a bit unsettling, but that would certainly be due to something. 

Slovenia is always beautiful, but especially so in winter.

A playful surrealistic touch in downtown Ljubljana

 When I first saw this stuff hanging in the distance, I thought they were using oddly-shaped sausages as holiday decor. (Food obsessed? Moi?)

A closer look shows that the designer went to the Imelda Marcos School of Street Decor Design.

J would like to see my saddle shoes from fifth grade--the most comfortable ones I own (and also the best ventilated due to the strategically placed holes)--strung up here, but I can't give them up. Ionesco would have LOVED it here!

Here's a shoeless winter view of downtown.

WELCOME TO SLOVENIA--A KNOCK-OUT COUNTRY!

 We just arrived in Slovenia, a knockout country whose pitched roofs, while practical for snow, seem designed to give the unsuspecting person who is not a dwarf a loch in kop (that’s Yiddish for “a hole in the head”—something no one needs). On arrival at our cozy B&B, the same one as last year, it took J about five minutes to repeat his feat of bonking himself on the bean. He bent over the bedside table to pick something up, and WHAP!—just like last year. 

Our kids have rented an adorable apt that has many similar hazards. It's on the top floor, which means that each of the three rooms has parts that can do serious damage to those who commit the folly of entering the place without a helmet. Somebody put my coat on the bed in the little extra room designed for those under three feet tall. Of course after I bent down to pick it up, the inevitable happened:I womped myself a bit. 

Those previous two words are key. To survive here it is important not to make any sudden, violent moves. The Italian mantra of "piano, piano" will win the race.  A small womp can knock some sense into one's head. A big one can land you in the hospital, or leave a permanent scar. 

I took a few photos of our room to illustrate the situation.

The room comes equipped with a very efficient closet-sized kitchen.

It works fine if you don't bend down or lean in too far.

This poor, unsuspecting, tall man is in for a surprise.

He bent down to get something from the fridge, which is conveniently located under the sink. OOPS! If he looks a little stunned, it's because he forgot to duck when coming up. Oh, and by the way, it could be risky to get up too fast from the bed. 

The room comes with an adorably compact bathroom. But to get in and out of the shower can be an adventure. 

TOUCHING HOME BASE FOR THE 5TH AND 66th TIME:DECEMBER 25, 1946-2012

Huh? Even though you probably knew I was bad at math, you may be saying what's she talking about? For a start, I am recognizing that although I turned 66 on December 25, this is my 5th birthday year in Orvieto. Here's the sequence of events that culminated in the rough night that produced these musings.

Getting ready to leave home

I was not entirely recognizing myself in the old woman who actually had it together to go to her tap dance class the very morning of her flight, but when her son heard about it, HE did: "Mom, why should you be surprised? After all, by going to Italy, you are going to your second home." He was the smart one who had figured out that his transition-averse mother might be able to travel without freaking out, if it meant going from one nest to another.    

Lessons from baseball

The poetry of baseball is as old as the game, and literary evidence of the desire to return to home base goes back to the Greeks and beyond. So what's new? For me, a gorgeous tooth and a mouth guard to wear at night to protect me from myself. Thanks to modern dentistry, after many months, I finally have a beautifully implanted canine tooth to fill a space formerly the size of New Jersey. And then there's my new mouth guard that's supposed to keep me sliding--not grinding--into home plate.

Ah, to be able to read a map! (When you come to a fork in the road, take it?)

This search for home makes me think of my dad, an appreciator of maps who always worried about being lost, and who died at 63. Although I did not inherit the map-reading gene, I had always thought I resembled him in other ways--that the apple does not fall far from the tree (more about that in a minute)--and I never thought I would make it to 66.

Which way to the bathroom?

The question of the difficulty I have orienting myself came up during our first night back in Italy. When I woke up to go to the bathroom, I felt disoriented about which way to turn. Sensing that something was not right, I waited before taking a step. I recalled a remark Jim had made in our American home about waking up at night and not knowing which way to turn for the bathroom. Something finally made me realize that I was no longer in New Haven, and I found my way. When I had made it safely back to bed, I had a flashback to the time when my young self nearly walked off the edge of a high staircase, thinking I was elsewhere. We had had a houseful of guests, and I had been elected to sleep in our playroom with my visiting grandma, who woke up just in time to prevent me from walking off the edge into nowhere.

What happened to terra (sort of) firma?

Next, I flashed to the time in Maui after a storm had swallowed up the beach. I relived my shock as I peered down at what used to be the stairway to Kamaoli Beach Number Two, which now led right into an abyss filled with ocean, where soft sand used to be. 

More liminal zones

I was on a threshold then, too, but did not know it, since while living in Maui, I was writing the dissertation that was like birthing a first “baby.” A few years later came a less metaphorical birth—that of my son--about which I was just reading in my scrapbook from those days. It was the Metropolitan Art Museum's "Baby's Journal" adorned with old French block prints, the latest version of which we'll be giving our now adult son, and that will mark a new phase of life. I'm remembering learning in my freshman Intro to Psychology class about Erik Erikson's stages of life, as I now get ready for my grandparent stage. It was there that I also learned for the first time about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of dying. My dad was especially good at the denial stage. Am I denying anything? Not so much. 

After the flood

We arrived this week in Italy a month after the worst flood in recent memory. We could see the trees that had been uprooted, swept away, and that were now lying on their side--the new lay of the land. The flood had not done our own already impossibly bad roads any good, either. Of the two ways to access our house, the one that appears to date back to the Etruscans always reminds me of the opening to Longfellow's "Evangeline":

THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

The opening to Dante's "Inferno," however, contains the essence of the entire mishmash of what I have been babbling about--journeys, life stages, transitions, thresholds, floods, dental wizardry, baseball, birth and rebirth, the thirst for home, losses and feeling lost: 

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself

In dark woods, the right road lost. 

--all of the above was scribbled in the mental fog of a bumpy first night in middle-of-nowhere Italia, and subsequently unscrambled (?) on 12/26/12 by the post-birthday girl, D  

CODA

Since this post opened with a mention of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” maybe it’s fitting that it close with a coda. I said above that I would be getting back to the expression, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Well, as you can see, here at our house in Umbria, even in December, not so many apples have fallen from the tree at all. And they still taste good, too.

ON THE REBIRTHING PROCESS:DECEMBER 25, 1946-2012

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading.

Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself.

I’m rethinking quite a number of things as I turn 66, among them my reluctance to give up my alter-ego, Donatella de Poitiers, and to send Andre Aciman my letter from January 2012.

As we get to know more of the ex-pats who have relocated themselves here in Orvieto, and hear their stories of the often painful situations they chose to leave behind, I see them as having re-birthed themselves. Maybe me, too?

‘Tis the season!

"BETWIXT AND BETWEEN":THE EXPAT'S "HOME AWAY FROM HOME" ?

The Dean of my residential college is a man of many parts--adviser, psychologist, teacher, wordsmith, disciplinarian, but mostly philosopher. During any given year, four hundred students look to him for whatever they are missing from home. Every Sunday night, he sends something he modestly calls "Notes and News," whose ostensible purpose is to forecast events and opportunities. But the highlight is always a thoughtful essay about how to live.

On the cusp of returning to my academic home, I am thinking about an idea he brought up in last week's message:the concept of the liminal zone--the place where both expats and college students dwell, perhaps without even realizing it.

"Liminal zone" is a fancy term for being poised on a threshold--neither here, nor there. As someone who has given her heart to more than one country, I like to think I know something about that.

France started off as the love of my life. I teach her language and literature, and when I first lived there during my junior year abroad, I felt sure I had found my spiritual home.

Flash foreword some forty years. Approaching retirement and having brought back to life a ruin, I have found a new home in Italy.

When I started this blog, the blurb after the title started out like this :"I feel like a traitor to France." Although that felt like a true statement, my husband suggested I not use it, so it has just remained in the back of my mind.

Since unexpectedly finding expat friends in the local community, (who knew they were here?), I see that these are brave people who seized the chance for a fresh start. I am trying to do the same.

How many times have I said some version of "if I only knew then what I know now..."?

What would the end of that sentence be?

To be an expat in Italy is giving me a chance to find out.
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MORE ABOUT LIMINAL ZONES

At the risk of being confusing by including someone else’s words in this posting, I am going to quote an excerpt from the Dean’s Notes that inspired what I wrote above.

NOTES FROM THE DEAN

At this time of year, I note several kinds of light.  It seems to me the slant of the midday light gets harder as the days shorten. The early morning light seems a thin diaphanous light that barely disguises the coming of cooler days.  The sunsets we can see as we descend science hill are fall's translucent clouds that reveal an indirect light.  Less apparent is that slant of light occasionally reflected onto our upper courtyard from the golden skyscraper behind our residential college -- a light both in and out of place.  Such varieties of natural light limn our daily selves and our comings and our goings.

Yesterday I felt the sun on my face and the slightly cooler air, too.  I felt a hint, alas, of the approaching cool of fall in the air.  This time is a transitional time, a between-time of the remembered and the anticipated.  The coming and the going are simultaneous.  Maybe all times are between-times, transitional.  We may have that sense as we pass from task to task, from day to night and back again. We need our marks of beginnings and endings, no doubt, but I like to think we also sense our place in nature's time passing, this season marked by the cool air and the warm sun on our faces.  Things are not quite what they used to be and yet not quite what they will become.  Now well into our term, almost half way, some of us, perhaps, may also feel we have begun before we feel we are quite ready. 

October can be a wonderful month once we accept its mix of the past and the future.  That mix can be as comfortable and uncomfortable as the rise and fall of our own lives can be sometimes.  As a reminder, you may look up to see the October sunsets of bright yellows and smooth washy blues….  And soon there will be the frost's beauty, all the more so because it is ephemeral.  It comes and it goes, but it is pleasing while it lasts.  It is pleasing like that ephemeral pleasure of the warm sun and cool air on our faces.  Transitions are all about the ephemeral.

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OF COURSE I HAD TO WRITE BACK…

Dear Best Dean,

I recognize that I often have occasion to say this to you, but this one REALLY "speaks" to me, poised as I am between two cultures, and about to set one aside for another. Liminal zones: my son once talked about what a great topic that would be for study. I think he was thinking art historically, perhaps about spaces like porches and thresholds that are neither here nor there. 

I grew up in a place like that, the fittingly named, "Middletown," of which there are so many listings in the Atlas. And now I continue to grow up in middle-of-nowhere Italy, which I like a whole lot better.

You are making me think about how our academic calendar and college life are full of opportunities to reflect on liminality. Yet with its predictable deadlines and reassuring regularity, college life (regardless of which side of the desk one is on) gives a good name to the liminal zone. That may not be readily apparent to our anxious students who jump from one crisis to another, rarely taking the long view. But your weekly Notes give us all a way to see the patterns--a thread that is there for the taking as we wind our way through the labyrinth.

See you around the courtyard, beginning November 1.--best, d

PS: Poet Emily Dickinson, who knew a thing or two about liminal zones would surely have liked the way you made that "certain slant of light" your own.


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AND NOW, HERE COMES A LITTLE CODA TO WHAT HAS PRECEDED. ALTHOUGH  ACTUALLY WRITTEN BEFORE ANY OF THE REST OF THIS POST, IT HAS BEEN LOOKING FOR A HOME:

Umbria is about to change her clothes, and for the first time, I am being allowed to watch. It is only fitting, since we are now on intimate terms.

I THOUGHT THOSE LINES WOULD HAVE BEEN THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING, RATHER THAN AN ADDENDUM, BUT SINCE WE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT FEELING BETWIXT AND BETWEEN, MAYBE THE ORDER DOESN’T MATTER. THE DEAN WROTE BACK TO SAY HE LIKED MY EXTENDED CONCEPT OF “MIDDLETOWN—WHERE EACH OF US IS FROM, PERHAPS.”
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SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE EXPAT?

A DIFFERENT TYPE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE?

 I am celebrating the new year by changing the sheets—something I confess that I probably do not do often enough. Here in Italy, laundry is always something of a production. Umbria is not just the home of s-l-o-w cooking. Although Italian washing machines do seem to get things cleaner and with less of an impact on the environment and the clothes, they require an investment of time and forethought. Electricity is expensive and not to be taken for granted. Some frugal people only do laundry on the weekend when the rates are lower. I like to do it on a sunny day so I can hang the clothes out to dry, the way I imagine the local contadine do.

As I consider things new and fresh, I am reminded of a message I just sent to a new friend who already feels like an old one:

Ciao, G

Thanks for your delightful message, which is a reminder that it can be nice to grow old here with new friends. Whoever tells you that you are a good writer is right!

I'm impressed with your energy to tackle a top-to-bottom kitchen clean-up while simmering cinnamon-scented peaches and plums in honey just a few days before your departure. And I sense a kindred spirit in your description of your attention to your 90-year-young mom. I could totally relate to your watching for the reassurance of a breath or a snore. I see that you, C, and I have moms about the same age, which has its own joys and worries.

Jim's mom, to whom we owe our having been able to do this renovation, lived to be 91, still sharp and beautiful. As we were coming out of a Gregorian chant concert at a church in Perugia yesterday, Jim realized that that was the anniversary of the day she died. He thought about lighting a candle, but then realized that she would definitely have preferred that he eat a nice gelato in her honor:she never lost her appetite for the good things in life.

 Bang, bang, bang! Today is a splendid fall day, at last--unless you are a bird getting shot at. It's high season for bird hunters and the also the eve of the Jewish New Year.

And although it’s a Sunday, instead of being in church, since 6AM the hunters have been having a field day. Despite the sunny skies, it is NOT a good time for a peaceful walk in the woods. Especially not without bright-orange bulletproof duds.

Never having been here in Italy at this time of year, we did not realize that September 1 is the start of the bird hunting season, and that the big moment for wild boars comes on November 1. I keep thinking of the boar families we have seen crossing the road on several occasions. Hope they have some good hideouts. There's also a confused young deer that likes to run along the road--not a good habit these days for those wanting to be inscribed in the Book of Life. 

Even though it was only for a concert, it did feel strange to be sitting in a public Mass in Perugia’s cathedral, and that was after a visit to one of my favorite museums that was full of religious art. In trying to put it all together, I like to think that there is something universally religious about the spirit that makes sublime art and music.

I'm wishing you and your family an easy transition and tante belle cose as we all re-connect with our fall selves.--xxx, d

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It can be tricky to figure out how to formally acknowledge a religious holiday from afar. Usually I go to services with my mom. But here I am thousands of miles away from her and any formal services. I am going to have to improvise:time to strip the bed. A clean slate is in order.

For writers, the metaphor “to be inscribed in the Book of Life” for the coming year is especially powerful. I am hoping that there can be many ways of demonstrating that one is worthy of being included.

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CODA:

This post has had a very troubled genesis, and I recognize that I am taking a risk by including it. As I often do, I sent it to a few friends for comment before trying to post it. Usually, they reply, which gives me some reassurance that the piece might be ready for Prime Time. But this time, no one responded, which gave me pause. 

When I asked my husband, another non-responder, about it, he said that because it operates on several levels and contains a letter within it, it might be too complicated. It reminded him of those nested Russian dolls that I cannot resist. And then, as often happens in our remote corner of Umbria, we lost our internet connection for almost two weeks, after which we were eagerly awaiting the arrival of dear friends. Their visit had already been postponed once, due to a health problem. We all thought the time was ripe.

And then we received the kind of message that no one wants to hear:on the eve of their departure, their vigorous, young son-in-law was felled out of the blue by a massive stroke. He would not be inscribed in the Book of Life. And of course our visit will be once again deferred. Maybe next year?