Sicily XI - All Us Rats and Pigs

Our group’s time in Taormina was the end of our trip. We soon had to take heartfelt leave of each other and head off at 3:00 AM to catch our plane from Catania. This time though, I was sincerely sorry to part from everyone. It had been a remarkably interesting, enlightened, and friendly group. I had been able to circulate around and chat with everyone a little – and I was amazed by the breadth of all these people’s interests and accomplishments. We had quite a few published authors in the group – quite a few active home renovators – quite a few seasoned travelers who had interesting things to say about the places they’d been.

As is customary on these trips, a hotel breakfast buffet was included every day, and those were often the best times to socialize. The topics touched on at these get-togethers truly “covered the waterfront.” One man was a life-long yachtsman and had published several books on boat maintenance, how to navigate in storms, etc. I have never been sailing, but he made his subject really absorbing.

Then there was Gabriella, a woman campaigning to become the first female ordained Catholic Priest. She was finding it an uphill battle and thought it unlikely that there would be any woman ordained in her lifetime. But she said she had a “calling” and would persist.

Then I got into a jovial, almost giddy giggling conversation with two Taiwanese women who were on the tour. They happened to mention the Chinese Horoscope, just as a set of fun-facts, not as one of their implicit beliefs. As most people probably know from Chinese restaurant placemats - the Chinese astrology involves repeated 12-year cycles. Each year is correlated with an animal or beast. There’s the year of the horse, the dragon, the rabbit, etc. When the subject came up, I chimed in that I was a pig. I laughed how I was pointedly confronted with that fact every time I sat down to a meal at a Chinese restaurant and was getting ready to order “the works.” We all laughed.

One of the Taiwanese women said, “My mother is a rat. Actually my father is a rat too. Both my parents are rats.”

Another member of our tour group was a psychologist and happened to be passing our table just in time to hear the tail-end of this conversation. She heard me declare myself a pig, and she heard the other woman declare both her parents rats. I could see the psychologist’s eyes light up. She no doubt perceived a whole smorgasbord of family dysfunction among us – perhaps something she could “help” us with later.

All-in-all, we were such a convivial group, I was sincerely sorry when the tour was over and we seemed destined to go our separate ways. I felt as if I had a lot more to learn from all the group members. I hope we get to travel together again someday.

Well, that was more about my Sicilian adventure than you wanted to know, I’m sure. You only asked, “How was your trip?” LOL.

Sicily X - Cruising the Mediterranean

I would have liked our tour to spend a much greater proportion of its time in Palermo. But scheduling oddities breezed us out of there and put us in Taormina for days on end. I had hoped to hook up with “mutual acquaintances” in Taormina, but that never materialized. So it was up the hill in the funicular to shop there every day. However one member of our tour group was especially resourceful and negotiated an unplanned boat ride for all of us. She struck up a conversation with an independent boatman who hawked his services along the beautiful beaches of Taormina. And for a very reasonable price, we all got to get aboard one or the other of his boats (like a very enlarged, partially motorized gondola), and glided off into the Bay of Taormina.

The waters of the Mediterranean were startlingly clear. I saw no signs of pollution or litter anywhere in the water or along the bright beaches. As I stared over the side of the boat, down about nine feet, I could see to the bottom as clearly as if I was looking through glass. I could see the multi-colored rocks and coral and the sea urchins clinging to them. I saw none of the red algae that I’d read was choking the Mediterranean.

We cruised around the Bay and into several of the caves that puncture the cliffs there. One cave was a mini Blue Grotto. Peaceful blue water was gently splashing in there – nature’s own Valium. We didn’t see any dolphins out in the water that day, but our boatman said that wealthy people often booked him to take them out dolphin-watching. He said he had conducted Bill Gates’ party out there recently, and that Bill Gates had acted like just a nice average guy, not like a “big-shot.”

Other than those picturesquely weathered men you see around Sicily, there seemed to be only handsome men. But there were two kinds of handsome. There were the well-chiseled men who looked like Marcello Mastroianni. Our tour bus driver, Giero, had that kind of face. Then there were those men who were handsome in a stockier, more rugged way. Our boatman was this latter type. He spoke enough broken English to narrate our trip for us, and he generally seemed an amiable, down-to-earth fellow. But he said two strange things, both of which struck me as being gratuitous lies.

One member of our group was very worried about getting caught in a “high tide.” She had been eager to get off the beach earlier, “before it hit.” I didn’t want to come off as sounding pedantic, but I had tried to ease her worries on this score. I briefly quoted the exchange I’d had with my German cousin when I’d thought there must be significant tides on the Great Lakes. He had written back to me, countering my assumption with two pages of calculations proving that the tides in the Great Lakes are less than a quarter of an inch. So quickly extrapolating from that, I guessed that the tides in the Mediterranean couldn’t be any more than a foot – except maybe in places where the water got funneled through some straits. (My subsequent research online proved me to be right on target. A number of sites on tides all said that water levels in the Mediterranean fluctuate less than a foot, except at the Straits of Gibraltar.)

However my reassurances didn’t register on this woman at all. When we got out on the water, she nervously looked around and said, “Wow, I’ll bet the tides are really high here! How high are they?”

I trusted the boatman would set her straight and vindicate me. Instead, he confirmed her worse fears. Without hesitation, he said “Yes, three meters!”

I gasped to myself. Three meters! That’s about nine feet! It couldn’t be! The man said that he had been fishing and conducting tours on these waters for over fifty years. How could he be so wrong!

Then, a little later, apropos of nothing (well, he was giving us a thumbnail autobiography), he said that he had been married for thirty-five years, and had never once cheated on his wife – or even thought of it. I don’t know if he threw that tidbit of information about himself in, hoping to get a bigger tip from us for being such a good husband, but I hardly think that could be the reason. None of us tipped him – there was no tipping in these situations in Sicily.

At any rate, we all applauded him – literally. It would have been nice if his declaration were true. But after that whopper of a misstatement he came up with about the tides, I began to think he was just picking remarks out of the air.

Come to think of it, maybe there was no Bill Gates either.

Sicily IX - Dual Dueling Governments

As I say, I hadn’t really planned my trip. At the last minute on the plane to Sicily though, I decided I should perhaps scope out at least one aspect of Palermo that wasn’t on our cut-and-dried itinerary – at least one sight that wasn’t a cathedral or an ancient ruin. And I saw on a map of Palermo that had been sent to us in advance that our hotel was just two blocks away from a large prison. Ah, that looked like just the thing.

As soon as we linked up with our tour guide at the Hotel, I asked about the possibility of taking a tour of the Ucciardone Prison. (Well, it could happen. I’ve been on tours of Chicago/Illinois prisons.) That request took our guide aback. I think she immediately pegged me as something of a loose cannon in the group. She said no one had ever inquired about touring the Prison before. It was the largest, most notoriously brutal prison in Sicily. She said that was where convicted Mafiosi were incarcerated. (I would have thought that would make it the most luxurious, most benign of prisons, since I’d expect Mafia members to get special privileges behind bars – but maybe that’s not how things work in Sicily.) At any rate, our guide said she’d look into the possibility of a tour, but she very much doubted that any were given.

I don’t think she ever followed through on my request. I never heard back from her about it. But I thought since the place was so close, I’d walk over there myself. Only a few pictures of the place had been available on-line, where it had shown up as a concrete fortress. But as close as it was, I never got there. I was so exhausted after having walked in the other direction during my one free day in Palermo (going to the Marionette Museum and through the vast outdoor Conservatory), I just couldn’t make it the two blocks to the Prison in the late afternoon. So I’ll never know.

Our guide naturally did make reference to Mafia activities in the course of our touring. Sicily, and Palermo in particular, is the epicenter of Mafia operations. Our guide said that nothing got built in Sicily, no business opened, no government project went forward – without the proper Mafia figures being paid off. As our innocent little bus went jouncing through the countryside – on our way to a luncheon at a Duchess’ farm estate – on our way from one town to another – our tour guide pointed out some of the consequences of this conflicting, multi-layer power structure in Sicily. She pointed out numerous stalled building projects, projects that might remain stalled forever. Unlike the Greek and Roman theaters, they wouldn’t become ruins; they were starting life as ruins.

There was a half-finished hospital on a mountain overlook. Construction on it had perhaps been started with a Mafia OK, which had then been overruled by the legitimate government - or else it was the other way around - the government had started the project, but insufficient numbers of Mafiosi had been paid off to allow completion of the building. We passed any number of apartment complexes in the same state of indefinite suspension. Technically, there are large scenic parts of the countryside where new construction is not allowed. But someone gets a Mafia go-ahead and starts. Then the government rallies the strength to step in and assert itself and stop the building. And so all these shells of buildings can be seen, testament to some failed negotiation between Mafia and government and public.

Trials of Mafia figures are on-going in Sicily. But for every high-level figure convicted, another springs up to take his place. It’s life immemorial on the Island.

Sicily VIII - Idols and Effigies

For every time I was either ignored or shouted out angrily in Sicily though – there were more times when I was honored.

Often in Palermo when people heard my name – they lit up. You see my given name is “Rosalie” and “St. Rosalia” is the patron saint of Palermo. She became a hermit and a mystic. Her body rests in a gold casket high on a mountain ledge overlooking Palermo. Unfortunately, our tour didn’t include a trip up there. But some of the respect granted to her asceticism rubbed off on me. If it’s Rosalia – it must be good!

Actually, our tour hadn’t scheduled nearly enough time in Palermo at all. I really had only one free day to walk around there, and I used most of that up going to the Marionette’s Museum. Puppetry is Sicily’s quintessential art form.

The Museum was hard to find. As in much of Europe, there are few free-standing street signs in Sicily. The Street names are usually eccentrically inscribed, like graffiti, on the stones of buildings at the various intersections. You have to look among the crevices and crumblings to make out where you are. And numbers are similarly hit-or-miss daubs of paint on doors or ledges. Add to that the fact that the Marionette Museum was off the beaten track, set in an especially bewildering labyrinth of cobblestone lanes. But I finally found it.

I first stumbled into one eerie room in the Museum that I don’t think was supposed to be open to the public. About fifty almost life-size puppets were dangling in there, hanging from two parallel ropes, like meat carcasses in a meat locker. There was almost no light on in that room, but I could make out the puppets’ dead wooden eyes, staring at me, one peering over the shoulder of the next one. Like the next victim in a horror movie, I nervously scanned the rows, searching for the psychotic killer who might be hiding, hanging there among the dead figures. I waited for that telltale blink of the eye or the ever-so-slight turn of the head to give away the living menace among the dead forms. But if there was a homicidal maniac lurking there, he didn’t give himself away. I took a few pictures (I later learned flash photos were prohibited) – and hurried on to the more obviously intended museum rooms, replete with tableaus of puppets.

One of these tableaus showed Abraham Lincoln sitting at the Ford Theater – with a dark puppet approaching from behind the curtain. Well, come to think of it, maybe I didn’t escape from the eeriest of the rooms after all.

Sicily VII - Veni! Mange!

The food in Sicily started out being a joy. However, every night we were faced with the same limited range of choices. Each dish would be soaked in its own distinctively flavored olive oil - but they were the same basic dishes nonetheless. Usually it was either pasta, pizza, or swordfish. A Chicago acquaintance of mine once stopped talking to me when I ordered swordfish at a restaurant. He was a vegetarian and worried about the plight of swordfish in particular. I thought of him every time I guiltily scarfed down yet another serving of swordfish – but usually that was the only solid “meat” offered. Other than that, there would have been just calamari or clams or squid to wrestle with.

The pasta dishes were always more than plentiful and left me full. But after a while, we began to notice that we rarely were offered any fresh vegetables or fruit. How odd in this land known for its earthy abundance! But we rarely got any crunchy broccoli or cauliflower or – anything. Oh, tiny bits of broccoli would appear sometimes in the pasta dishes. More often, it was bits of eggplant. Eggplant was ubiquitous. Even the salads we got tended to be limp leafs of head lettuce with a few shavings of this and that mixed in – just the typical sort of salads you find as a side dish in greasy spoon restaurants here.

So where had all the fresh vegetables gone? I remembered that in the Durrell book about Sicily I’d read in preparation for this trip – that author had similarly written about the repetitious meals. He had reported just pasta and rice – pasta and rice – over and over every night. When I read this, I thought it couldn’t be true. Italian cuisine is world-famous! But while each dish we were served was individually delicious – it really tended to be just pasta – and more pasta. How did all the Italians remain so svelte when their main course is always - just another heaping dish of pasta?

The only enforcement I came across in Sicily though involved eating. Usually anything goes there in the arenas of love, traffic, or law. But I had glanced through one of Rick Steve’s travel books on Italy before launching off, and I’d read how many Italian cafes have a strict dual price list. One price is for counter service; the other price allows you to sit at a table. But I forgot about this little duplicity one day when I ventured into a café myself. I unthinkingly ordered a cheaper-looking offering and headed towards the outdoor café with it in hand. A waiter screamed, “No! Is no permitted!” - and rushed over and blocked my way. Then I remembered! My cheaper price had just bought me the right to stand inside at the café’s counter and munch there.

Some members of my tour group drifted into the café a few minutes later, bought some brioches and sat down. Then they espied me and called out for me to join them. But I was in the embarrassing position of having to decline. I called out to them, “I can’t. I just paid for counter service. I have to stay standing up here.” I felt like a naughty child relegated to the dunce’s corner in third grade.

Sicily VI - A Walk on the Wild Side - Traffic in Sicily

Moving along to some quick random impressions of Sicily – I think the most startling sight I came across was in Palermo. I was walking along one of the main streets, on my way to the big plant conservatory there, when I saw two men changing a light hanging high over the middle of the thoroughfare. The men were doing things the old-fashioned way. They didn’t have a cherry-picker crane, as our road maintenance crews would have here. Instead they just had a rickety tall, tall, tall, two-sided wooden ladder. I have never seen such a tall ladder anywhere else. It might even have been homemade, and it was 25-feet high if it was an inch. One man stayed below, supporting it – while his partner clambered up. What made the scene a really white-knuckle spectacle though was the traffic. Cars and motorbikes were whizzing by, within a hair’s breath of the ladder on either side. If just one of those notoriously harum-scarum drivers had deviated by the smallest fraction – the topside man would surely have been plummeted to his death.

You’ve no doubt heard about Italian traffic. I’d heard about it too, but I still wasn’t prepared for the free-for-all in Palermo’s streets. The Italians apparently have even more of a love affair with cars than Americans do. Our guide said there were about three cars to every adult Sicilian. And that isn’t the half of it. There seem to be more motorbikes around than cars. The cars dart here and there and the Vespas dart in and out between the cars. Most of the streets are choked with vehicles. Our Palermo Hotel was on the fringes of the downtown area and the intersection outside of it was often jammed. I saw one typically Italian exchange of gestures. A man double-parked near the intersection, causing traffic to come to a complete standstill for almost a block in all directions. The stymied motorists first started honking and shouting. Then some of the men among them got out of their cars.

I thought the gathering mob might start to pummel the offending driver into the ground. He didn’t flinch though, maintaining his right to park wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Finally, after several minutes of this operatic exchange, the fellow got back in his van and moved it – about fifteen feet. And so the shouting and gesticulation started all over again.

But that’s traffic in Sicily. Other members of my tour group who had traveled more extensively said that traffic was actually a hundred times worse in Rome. A hundred times worse! How could that be?

But it was the sheer numbers of vehicles, jockeying and jostling, that made street life such a spectacle. From 9-to-9 every day, the streets were like one big, clotted PacMan game. There were very few traffic lights to regulate traffic flow. And there was a general every-man-for-himself nature to navigating in the cities. Cars drove up on sidewalks and parked there with impunity. (Where else was there left to park?) My toes were constantly in danger of being flattened by some vehicle riding up the curb.

Then traffic was further stymied by the almost daily demonstrations that took place throughout Sicily. I saw the main street of Palermo being cordoned off almost every time I walked along it – to accommodate one group or another demonstrating against some government policy. One time it was a group demonstrating against housing restrictions; another time it was a demonstration against immigration policy. Each time a group announced its intentions to bring their protests to the streets, the local carbonieri would have to come out in force, complete with gas masks and truncheons. But I gather that generally these demonstrations don’t escalate above the grand operatic gesture. Rarely do the carbonieri have to use force.

Actually, there was a sort of friendliness, a comfort in all this unregulated activity. Our guide said that in Sicily, most laws are regarded as being merely “suggestions.” That was obviously true of traffic laws, if they existed at all. But other facets of life in Sicily also seemed to be appealingly unfettered. I know hardly anyone will agree with me on this point, but I appreciated coming across the occasional pile of dog dung on the sidewalks. A lot of people could be seen walking their dogs, and some dogs roamed free. And laundry waved merrily from balconies everywhere. And I saw only one garden in all of Sicily that had what could be called a “lawn.” All the other yards and gardens were free-range, with all the varieties of palm trees and cacti that had been imported to Sicily ages ago and all the native vegetation growing according to their own inclinations. My “Wild Ones” group here in Chicago (the group that advocates using only native plants in gardens) would have approved. Everywhere there was the sort of do-as-you-please atmosphere that would have been immediately quashed by any condo association or homeowners association in the U.S.

And as I say, I rather liked the free-for-all spirit – dog dung and all. It’s when the trains start to run strictly on time that I get worried.

Sicily V - Souvenir Hunting

Many of the narrow lanes of the towns in Sicily were lined with individual little shops that opened and closed with pull-down shutters. Oh, I wished I had my digital camera with me to capture a scene in one of those little cubbyholes in particular. I saw a very old and picturesque man in his storage space shop, working over a shoe last. He was the kind of shoe repairman you don’t see in the U.S. anymore – the kind who has toiled life-long, without any great ambition for other things, amid his clutter of antique tools and waiting pairs of scuffed shoes. I thought of trying to photograph him with my disposable camera, but I felt embarrassed about approaching him. I thought I might be able to work up my courage later, when I came back that way. But I’d missed my chance. When I walked back down that lane in the afternoon, the little shop had its shutter down, closed for the riposa time (siesta hours).
Our guide said the afternoon riposa close-down had been decreed by an early Roman ruler. And now it was such an entrenched tradition in much of Italy, it was still almost law. Shopkeepers feel virtually required to close for several hours every afternoon, even on cooler days, even when there are lots of eager-to-buy tourists around. This down-time often irritates and inconveniences shopkeepers who have to idle away those hours in their closed shops - betwixt and between – with not enough time to go home for lunch, but too much time to consider it anything but a big waste.
This riposa also made it difficult for shoppers. Get there quick before 1:00 when it closes! Generally, this didn’t affect me much because I’m not a shopper. But I did want to bring back a souvenir for one acquaintance. Oh, the difficulty of finding something typically Italian that you can’t find in the U.S! Well, there were a lot of puppets of various sizes. Sicily is a major center of the puppeteer’s art. All the souvenir shops had puppet versions of the Patron Knights of Sicily for sale. I considered these. Not something available in Chicago. But what about the difficulties of getting a bulky puppet with all its dangling cords on a plane? And did my friend really want a puppet?
No, I kept searching. There were all sorts of souvenir knick-knacks featuring the mermaid/naiad symbol of Sicily, the three-armed floating figure that presumably resembles the contours of the Island. There were ashtrays and plates with this figure. But no, all that seemed uninspired.
Then at last – just the thing! I saw shimmering in the window of an art glass shop – a little clown figure playing a violin – just about four inches high. It was the perennial buffo character of Italian operas in hand-blown Murano glass. I went in and bought three of these joyous figurines. They were so delicate, and caught the light from all angles. I thought there would be no problem packing these small men for the trip home. How clever of me to have by-passed all the gangly marionettes. But then the shop owner started to wrap the glass figurines. And he wrapped and he wrapped and he wrapped. He put each figurine carefully in its own form-fitted block of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam block was wrapped in crushed tissue paper. That mummification went into a box. That box went into a larger box. That outer box was wrapped in paper. By the time the man was through, I was sent trundling out of his shop with a billowing that would have rivaled the largest of Macy’s Parade balloons. I spent the whole rest of my trip worrying how I was ever going to get this bulk onto the plane. The boxes were too big to pack in any remaining space in the one suitcase I’d brought. I would have to carry them on the plane by hand. Would I be allowed aboard with this much baggage? I tossed and turned.
As it turned out, I made it aboard without being challenged or searched, and I made it home. The figurines were of course in tact when I unwrapped them in my kitchen. Well, the way they were padded, an atomic bomb could have been detonated under them without their sustaining the slightest damage. Oh, the perils of souvenir hunting!

Sicily IV - A Man and A Woman - And No Chemistry

As for my general impressions of Sicily – I was astounded by how much Italy as a whole must have changed its personality in just the last few decades. NONE of the stereotypes that probably in fact applied in the 1960’s or 1970’s were applicable today.

Most notable was men’s reaction to women – or I should say, their total failure to react at all. Before I left on this trip, I felt a little anxious about what I might encounter in the way of derriere-pinching. Italian men had been famous for committing that sort of public sexual harassment. I didn’t want to be the target of any such painful attentions. On the other hand, I had heard that French men and Italian men alike simply love women – that they are animated by the feminine principle in all its forms. I’d heard that Italian men don’t care if a woman is elderly or fat or thin or frazzled. They would spark to her regardless. And in a way, as long as that sort of liveliness didn’t become lechery, I was looking forward to being in such an atmosphere. I thought it would be a welcome change from the total indifference men manifest here - to almost all women except the most completely Barbie doll types.

But people are too much the same all over the world now. I found nothing but indifference among Sicilian men. There was no derriere-pinching. That was good. But neither did the men brighten the least bit to light a woman’s way a little better. I walked alone through the streets of Palermo, and only once did a man address me. I heard someone mildly call out behind me, asking a question. When I turned to apologize “No parlo Italiano,” he backed away, withdrawing even that much of an advance. I don’t know if that was because he saw I was older than I had looked from behind, and therefore of no interest to him - or if he legitimately realized he didn’t need any information.

In either case, I wasn’t the only one who failed to capture the attention of the local men. They were indifferent to everyone, including the youngest, loveliest women. The primary guide our tour Company had hired to usher us around Sicily was a model-beautiful, stunning woman in her late 20’s. In the rather vulgar parlance of the day, she was tall with “legs that just didn’t quite.” She had long, blonde, straight hair (she was a refugee from the Bosnian War who had been living in Sicily for ten years) – perfect features – a Sports Illustrated figure. And amazing – as I watched her stride down the street leading us, her clucking little brood of chickens – she turned not one head. Not one car honk, not one catcall, not one doff of the hat, not one smile. She was as completely invisible as I was.

Well, there were two exceptions to this indifference. There was one moment there when a waiter seemed to be catering a little specially to our guide. He encouraged her to go back a second time to the antipasto buffet, something that would ordinarily be out of the question in Sicily. They don’t generally entertain the concept of the “All-You-Can-Eat” buffet there. You get one pass at the groaning board – and that’s all.

Then there was our evening in Noto. We went on a side-trip to that small town one afternoon to view the three architecturally significant cathedrals that flank the one main street there. I think the whole town has a population of less than 800 – yet here were these three massive cathedrals serving the town’s spiritual needs. I wondered how the townspeople decided which of the cathedrals to attend each Sunday. I was told it was a matter of family tradition. I wondered how the town could afford the upkeep of these vast, echoing enormities, when there might be only a handful in each one’s regular congregation (since our guide said it’s generally only the old people who now attend regular church services). I was told the Vatican sends the bulk of the necessary support.

Incidentally, it was here in Noto that we encountered one of the only two beggars we met on our trip. This one was a rather frightening hag of a woman in a tattered dirndl skirt who came angrily panhandling to each of us in turn. I think our guide dismissed her with some scorn as a ”gypsy.” When none of us contributed to her coffers, she retreated halfway up the vast, Byzantine, Capitol-Building-like steps of one of the cathedrals and sat there, staring angrily at us, definitely hexing us with the “malocchio,” the evil-eye.

The other time we were accosted by beggars was in a crowd around one of the Greek ruins attractions. An appealing little boy came up to each of us, holding out his hand, beseeching with his limpid brown eyes. Again, our guide wised us up. She whispered that he was merely a distraction. His mother had been slyly circulating in partnership with him, ready on one side to pick the pocket of any person who briefly considered the little boy’s pleas on the other side. A clever gambit. But none of us got robbed, since we all had fanny packs buried under layers of buttoned clothing. Those were the only two times we were challenged by any begging/stealing activity on those Sicilian streets that until recently had been notorious for highway thievery. So perhaps that aspect of Italy has also changed.

But back to Noto. Night fell after our tour of the cathedrals and our guide told us to shop and sip espresso in the town square to fill the time until our bus picked us up. After I’d walked around a little, I returned to the bench by the archway entrance to the town. Our guide was sitting there with an older member of our tour group. And I saw that three slightly tipsy boulevardiers were buzzing like bees around her. Two of them were chatting up our guide, while the third, not quite able to elbow his way to her, was contenting himself with chatting up her older companion. The older tour group member didn’t speak Italian, so a jovial charade was going on there. “Where from? Iowa? I-o-ah? No, I no know. Where I-o-ah?” However since our guide spoke fluent Italian, a more fluid exchange was going on between her and her two admirers. They were asking where she was from, what her job was, and most important of all – if she was free that evening. She was answering with polite, but vague banter that didn’t give away too much of herself.

When our bus showed up and we mercifully saw our means of escape from this importunate band of eager men – one of them saw his last chance. “Un besso? Une? Bessame, por favore,” he pleaded our beautiful guide for a kiss. He sprang forward, ready to plant one on her – but she good-naturedly deflected him, “No, no, no.” And there were no hard feelings. I think he had expected to fail with this miraculous, luscious angel landed like a UFO in the middle of his stone-old little town. All three men waved us off into the night, their eyes shining amorously. “Well, you made their day – their year,” the older tour member whispered to our guide.

But that was the only time I saw Italian men living up to their reputation as lovers of women – any woman, all women – the fabulous feminine principle of life itself. I don’t know if things might be different on the Italian mainland – if men there might still be the same old derriere-pinching, on-the-prowl characters traditionally associated with Italian manhood. Many people said that Sicily is a place apart, that it in some ways hardly considers itself Italian. I heard that the dialect and history and mores of Sicily harken more to Turkey, to Greece, to Tunisia than to Rome.

I didn’t take the tour extension to Rome. But somehow I think that in this regard, things are probably now the same on the mainland – that men aren’t animated by any romantic hopefulness there either – that they don’t thrill to any woman passing by.

Maybe part of the problem is that everyone in Italy is so attractive. Our tour guide was still exceptional-looking, but I hardly saw any really dowdy women. During our whole time in Sicily, I saw only one dumpling-like older woman who even remotely conformed to the “Mama Mia” stereotype of a buxom, copiously-clad woman obviously used to spending most of her time in the kitchen over a steaming pot of pasta. Then there was that malevolent, tattered beggar woman in Noto. But outside of those two, all the women I saw, of all ages, were trim and smartly dressed – sporting about in tailored suits and designer sunglasses. I remembered having heard how hard the Italian women were trying to shake the old Mama image – and it seemed they had succeeded beyond all rightful expectation.

Our guide said that, although she hated to admit it, modern Italy was rather superficial. It was all about looks, about appearances. The new shops that lined the main downtown streets of cities like Catania seemed to be 90% clothing stores. I didn’t see the variety you find in downtown America. Here it was all Gucci and Pucci and similar up-scale apparel or accessory stores – one after the other – bright lights and high fashion. No more comfortable, clumpy-shoed women to come home to. It was all the cutting edge of stiletto heels now.

Most of the men of Italy were very handsome and fashionable too. But you could still find the picturesque, weathered faces among them that make such good photo opportunities. But then men all over the world are allowed to have “character” in their faces. The more character, the better. Women, on the other hand, have to be perennially smooth, and baby doll, and indistinguishable.

Sicily III - I Become an Invalid Abroad

All in all, there was quite a bit of climbing involved in this trip to Sicily. The one who handled all this exertion the best was a man in his middle 80’s. Hardly anyone offered to give him a boost, because he was obviously doing so well on his own.

I at first didn’t give a second thought to how I was managing. I was normally healthy –sometimes even able to imagine myself gazelle-like. Until one member of our group took me under her wing. She started to make a habit of rushing forward and assisting me whenever I stepped off a curb or got off the bus. She took my elbow and, cooing encouragements, “helped” walk me down the steps of the forum. “You’re doing great,” she all but patted me on the head.

This woman wasn’t a great deal younger than I am, and not obviously less fit. I had no disabilities that I was aware of – at least I had none when I started the trip. But her incessant ministrations and concern soon began to make me feel positively decrepit. She was a truly kindly woman – so it didn’t seem likely that this was some elaborate game of one-upsmanship she was playing, calculated to make me wilt on the spot. Therefore, I soon began to suspect she saw some infirmity in me that I hadn’t realized. Her caution that I be assisted over every cobblestone (while the 86-year-old was assumed to be perfectly capable) might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It got so that I paused on the bottom step of the bus every time we stopped somewhere – waiting for a wheelchair to be pushed forward to scoop me up, poor invalid I.

Actually, I was one of the few to stay in good health throughout the trip. Almost everyone else, including my nursemaid, eventually came down with a bad cold or flu. I think those long, grueling airplane flights might have been partly to blame. I don’t know how I avoided catching anything. Maybe it was because I kept popping Vitamin C pills, although I’d never really had much faith in that preventative before. But two members of our group got so bad, they had to be confined to their rooms for several days – and they had to call a Doctor. One reported that this was a cultural experience in and of itself. An avuncular man came to her bedside, looked at her tongue, prescribed antibiotics – and charged a hefty sum.

(An aside on health care – an ordinary Italian wouldn’t have been charged for a Doctor’s visit. The Country has long had socialized medicine. However, our tour guide said that the average citizen pays about 43% of his/her income in taxes to cover all the services received. But most of the people don’t grumble about that – they think they are getting a good deal. Also, there are no overt sales taxes levied in Italy. At least, no sales tax is ever added on separately. When a restaurant menu says an entrée is 10 Euros, 10 Euros is all you pay. Your bill doesn’t end up being an irritating and unwieldy 10.90. So generally, I found food and shopping to be a bargain around Sicily. It seemed I was spending less than I would have spent for comparable items here at home.)

At any rate, if I ever do truly become an invalid, I might consider moving to Sicily and applying for citizenship. All my expenses will be covered!

Sicily II - Sicily Runs Hot and Cold

Next, my advance reading about Sicily had prepared me to see some of the most complete Greek ruins still in existence – right there, not in Athens, but in Sicily. The Island had been a Greek possession during much of the classical Greek period. Plato had walked the streets of Syracuse where we toured, teaching in the forum there, possibly trudging across the very stones I was walking on. Dionysus I, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse, had prevailed upon Plato to come to Syracuse. Dionysus hoped Plato could teach his nephew and brother-in-law to be “philosopher-kings,” like the ones Plato had written about in The Republic. Plato was very doubtful that these young men could be taught wisdom. But he came to Syracuse and tried nonetheless. However, he soon had a falling out with Dionysus, was imprisoned, and was almost sold into slavery. Only his followers’ incessant pleadings on his behalf eventually won his release. He came back to Syracuse a second time to teach for Dionysus II – but fell out with this ruler in turn, over freedom-of-speech issues. This time he was only put under house arrest for a while. But all-in-all, Plato did spend a fair amount of time in what is now Italy, something that surprises even people who are familiar with Plato’s works.

The Greek amphitheaters were mostly carved right out of the Island’s substrate of rock. Sicily is one big, rocky, volcanic island. So it wasn’t necessary to haul big slaps into place to make the circular tiers of seating and the stage. The raw material was already there.

Some of the most notable Greek ruins are in Syracuse itself. But it was hard for members of our group to focus on the ancient ruins. The big draw in Syracuse is the wild pussycats. They are everywhere, poised on every vendor’s canopy, sunning on the forum steps, prowling where their larger relatives, the lions, were once led out to attack and do battle. The population’s willingness to communally feed and care for the wild cats may go back to the time of Plato himself. As I looked at the cats and their kittens reclining everywhere, it seemed as if they might have had more wisdom passed down to them than those numbskull human relatives of the Dionysus dynasty.

Then the Romans ousted the Greeks on Sicily and the “glory that was Greece” was replaced by the “grandeur that was Rome.” Our guide pointed out how, in Syracuse for example, a Roman arena would be built less than half a block away from a Greek amphitheater. The two kinds of structures looked essentially the same to me. Both were circular tiers of seating surrounding a performance ring. But our guide said if you looked more closely, you could see that the two structures reflected two entirely different worldviews and cultures.

The Greek amphitheater was built for the intellect and for enrichment. It was the site of plays and choruses and lectures. However the adjacent Roman arena was built “just for cruelty.” Our guide pointed to the runways that winged the Roman theater – where the lions would be prodded out from their pens in the excavated basement under the arena. It seems the lions had even less of a chance of survival than the gladiators or Christians. The lions were brought over from Africa and starved in wretched conditions until the moment they were released for the crowd’s entertainment. Hardly any survived more than one very short bout in the arena.

But the Romans were great builders. Their plumbing achievements are especially famous. Many of their water ducts remain in use to this day, although since the pipes were made of lead, it’s doubtful that one would want to drink too much of the water that passes through these pipes.

But one of our tours took us through the “Frigidarium” – the old Roman bath in Catania. A cathedral has been built on top of it, but the essential plumbing remains in the sub-basements of the church. The pipes down there were designed to carry cool water from local aquifers and feed a reservoir, which now serves to keep the cathedral cool through the hot summer months. It was a little eerie, going down the dim fire escape stairways to this old spa, inching along the catwalks overlooking the pool. I could almost see the Roman wealthy, languoring there, 2,000 years ago.

The city of Catania was itself an interesting contrast with the rest of Sicily. A lot of Sicily’s towns are similar mazes of ancient, stone-paved alleyways. But a lot of Catania is much more modern. That’s because Catania is right underneath Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in Europe. Our guide said the residents of Catania are kept busy sweeping ashes off of every surface, the spumings from Mt. Etna. However, I didn’t notice any particular residues about the place the day I was there. But several times in the 20th century, a large part of Catania was buried under ash and lava. And the residents had to rebuild their city. In Sicily, when you want to call someone “pigheaded, stubborn,” you call him “Catanian.” That’s because through the ages, the place has been destroyed so often – and yet the survivors always rebuild on the same spot.

Now big swathes of the city are glitteringly new. The main street is a broad boulevard lined with gleaming plate glass. But always looming behind is the outline of ancient Mt. Etna.

It’s not just one fumarole. Etna is actually a chain of several hundred craters. The volcano was especially active while we were there, more active than it has been in decades. A new crater was opening up, spilling lava down one of its steep sides. The molten lava pouring from this crater was added to the lava pouring from three adjacent craters. We would all angle to get good views of the Mountain at night. These four orange-glowing rivers would shift and re-channel, looking as if they were trying to form different letters of the alphabet there on the mountainside. For a minute, the lava streams looked as if they were forming a big letter “M.” Then the next moment, they converged to look like an enormous “R.” It was as if the mountain were trying to spell out a message for us. Everyone took photos of the spectacle, but I don’t think any of these night shots came out.

(By the way, when the tour was over, our group departed from the Catania airport. When I got home, I read that the very next day after our departure, that airport had been temporarily closed due to the heavy amounts of smoke and ash coming from Mt. Etna. It would have been too dangerous for the planes to attempt any take-off in the ceiling-zero conditions.)

But as I say, while I was there, I didn’t notice anything particularly noxious about Etna. (The only respiratory distress I suffered was when we were touring the ruin of a Greek temple in Agrigento. A man was cleaning the stones of the temple that day, using a scrub brush and buckets of benzene! Maybe he needed to scrub away spray paint graffiti?)

Our group was bused out to Etna one day, and invited to climb a little way up the mountain - on a facet away from where the molten lava was spilling. We were also told we could collect as many granite rocks as we wanted as souvenirs. The mountain just keeps tossing out more and more. Some of the ones we found were still warm, a sign of their recent escape from the nether regions. These were all spongy-looking, nondescript rocks though. It seems Mt. Etna doesn’t form any obsidian – the lovely black-glass rocks I was hoping to see.

“Obsidian my midnight gleams…”

Sicily I - Our Trip Starts

As for my big adventure of the year – my trip to Sicily – there were a lot of surprises there. I learned a lot. I didn’t prepare much for the trip. I decided to just make it a spontaneous junket without boning up a lot on Sicily in advance. I don’t know if that was wise. I sort of wish I had learned more before going, so I would have known what to look at, what questions to ask. And I certainly wish I had boned up on the language more. Every shred of Italian I ever knew totally escaped me when I was there on the ground. The one time I tried to communicate with a native in full Italian sentences was at the Post Office, and I ended up getting ten postcard stamps for twenty Euros – over twice what I should have paid. So something went wrong there. They saw me coming!

I did read a few books before launching off though, including one written by Lawrence Durrell (who also wrote the Alexandria Quartet and other become-PBS-Masterpiece-Theater-productions). In the 60’s-70’s he wrote this journal account of a bus tour he took around Sicily called Sicilian Circus. He made almost exactly the same circuit I was scheduled to make.

Durrell’s observations were generally out of my league, and well, to be frank, a little precious. He was very versed in classic mythology and found frequent likenesses between phenomena such as a lowering cloud formation and “the brow of Zeus as he was chastising Hera for her inconstancy.” Like that. Also, much of his book wasn’t about Sicily at all. It was a reminiscence of his bygone and again slightly too refined-for-my-tastes friendship/love affair with a beautiful, highly cultured woman – recently deceased when he wrote the book. She had lived in Sicily and frequently urged him to visit her there. But he never had, instead buying palazzos in Greece, and particularly on the Island of Corfu. Now, too late, he was heeding her call and visiting her beloved Sicily. As his little tour bus with its motley set of passengers made its way around the Island, Durrell recalled conversations he’d had with his friend.

He recalled how they had sipped wine under the stars of Corfu and exchanged anecdotes about Aristophanes. It all made me wonder – are there really people who converse like that? Could there really have been a man and woman, lovers, whose pillow talk consisted of reveries about what the ancient Gods meant to the Greeks? “Where the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.” That sort of relationship seems to exist on another planet, no - in another universe altogether from the one I’m inhabiting.

But getting back to Durrell’s Sicily – he did alert me to the long, multinational history of Sicily. The ancient Egyptians were there, although they didn’t leave any pyramids, as far as I know. But I did get to see some of their steles of hieroglyphics in the Palermo History Museum. And even at that, the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to leave an imprint of their culture around Sicily. That Museum also had representations of some of the Paleolithic cave paintings to be found around the island – some almost as spectacular as the famous Lascaux paintings.

I hadn’t realized – Sicily is only 100 miles across the Mediterranean from Africa. I never really bothered to understand before why Patton and our other Generals were fighting in Tunisia during WWII. But Africa is only a rowboat away from Italy. So no wonder. This was brought home to me during what was perhaps my most memorable day in Sicily. Our group was touring Ortygia, an Island off an Island. It’s a southern projection off the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Some of us stopped there for lunch at an off-the-beaten-path restaurant. It was a hole-in-the-wall place with barely room for our party and the one other party there in an alcove. We glanced over at this other group, a panel of three distinguished-looking men who had little flags placed on their table. We didn’t think much of it at the time. We ordered, and gazed around the place, at the wine barrels and red-checkered tablecloths.

It was very homey. But there was near disaster waiting in the coziness. Two men on our tour were celebrating their 5th anniversary by making a present of this trip to themselves and to an accompanying pastor friend. One of this interesting couple was rather tall, and when he came back from the bathroom – he bashed his head into a low stone archway. He fell, briefly unconscious, bleeding. It was quite dramatic. Cold compresses were rushed to him and he was quickly revived. He was soon back in his seat, eating spaghetti. But he continued to seep blood onto his compress, and in his gusto over his food, he continued to drool a little rivulet of spaghetti sauce from his mouth. He was twin rivers run red.

The meal was delicious – prepared to order for each of us by the daughters of the restaurant’s Tunisian owner. After we finished, the daughter who had waited on us came up and shook hands and embraced each of us in turn. She had a mist of tears in her eyes as, in her halting English, she wished us all a good trip. We looked at each other sadly, realizing we’d probably never see each other again. This was the one moment when I experienced a really different way of being in the world from anything I typically find in the U.S. Here was someone putting human contact ahead of business. It was a truly touching moment.

When we got outside, our tour leader asked if we had recognized that other party behind us had been. What? No. She said the man in the middle of the group, the one who had nodded over at us and graciously said “B’giorno” – was none other than the Prime Minister of Tunisia – Mohammed Ghannouchi. It seems the restaurant owner was head of the Tunisian ethnic minority in Sicily, and so Tunisian potentates dined there often. But we’d really hit the jackpot of VIP’s that day.

We all shopped some more until night fell on Ortygia. It got a little chilly, at least chilly by the standards of long-time Sicilian residents. It was slightly comical, the way the tour leader would rush up to me worriedly and say, “Oh Rosalie, button your sweater. You’ll catch cold!” whenever the temperature dipped even a notch below 65 degrees.

Especially on such cool evenings, chestnut vendors came out in force along the lanes and in the town squares. Their metal cylinders sighed gusts of aromatic smoke up towards the starry skies. Our tour leader bought a big bag of chestnuts, and we all stood around munching, our sweaters buttoned, while we waited for our tour bus to pick us up and bring us back to our hotel in Syracuse.

While that may have been my favorite day in Sicily, there were many good days.
(To be continued...)

Stop Or I'll Shoot!

Packing for a trip is always a delicate balancing act between too much and too little. But even prior to all those weighty decisions for me – is the decision about whether or not to take a camera.

For most people, a camera is a foregone conclusion when they travel. But I come to that crossroads with the extra poundage of my parents’ prejudices in my backpack. My mother especially was given to issuing carefree, Auntie Mame waivers – about living in the moment. “Don’t record life. Live it! Don’t take pictures to look back on. Look at what’s around you now!” For her, taking pictures was like taking copious notes in class. You miss so much while you’re scribbling. You miss the fleeting grimace on the teacher’s face. You miss his joy in making a point. You miss the nuance in favor of the facts.

That all sounded so Bohemian and right. And other people’s pictures generally supported her argument. If anyone ever had the time to look back through them at all, they would generally find posed shots of “Say cheese” groups standing in front of – the Taj Mahal - the Eiffel Tower - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there were so many indiscriminate shots of these clumps of conscripted smilers.

Now technology has made it possible to be even more indiscriminate. Weddings aren’t usually about creating close, personal family ties anymore. They aren’t about the intimate hopefulness in the vows made between two people in love. Weddings are now usually mass staged events, like coronation ceremonies. The point is in the spectacle of the thing. The point is all in how the thing is visually arranged for the ubiquitous cameras. And a bride feels her life is ruined if the photographer somehow fails to get a shot of her throwing the bouquet.

In earlier decades, people usually only captured one or two choice pictures of themselves around the time of their weddings. My mother had one formal picture made in 1928. It is a sepia close-up of her husband-to-be smiling down wistfully, indulgently at her - and her looking up at him, a little tentatively, perhaps just a shade unconvinced that she wanted to launch on this adventure. She might have been prescient because that marriage did end in divorce about six years later. It ended amiably enough, amid, what was for the times, a relatively mild scuffle of Depression-era troubles. Yet at the moment the photographer snapped the picture, they were a strikingly handsome jazz-age couple - an early, untroubled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - except for just that slight shadow of doubt that might have revealed itself to someone pondering the picture closely enough. The photographer kept them on display in his window for years – a close-up example of his skill.

That picture is all my mother had or cared to have of the rites surrounding her first marriage. Then she didn’t even think to have any pictures at all taken when she married my father twenty years later in a civil ceremony. She was content to let all the unphotographed moments shed their skin and assume newer, livelier forms in the minds of the people who were there. Presumably she lived in the moment, and that was enough.

Now it seems necessary that everything about a wedding be captured on film. Now we must record every one of Uncle Johnny’s jarring elbow thrusts as he attempts to do the Macarena at the wedding reception. Now we must record Cousin Otis precariously threading his way across the dance floor, holding a sloppy, sliding piece of wedding cake on his little paper plate. These details can be of telling interest. But somehow, they usually end up being neither telling nor interesting. They just trap Cousin Otis in a podgy limbo somewhere between the self-conscious and the candid, whereas before he could have flown free into history. In the same way, our traveling companions of a previous era could have remained more truly themselves, rather than being cut to the constant Procrustean Bed of a picture frame.

Yes, my mother was right about all that. But then I got a digital camera. And I started taking pictures.

I still choose my shots carefully, although when I have the camera along, I feel pressure to take the obligatory shot of the landmark. But in general, I try to limit myself to things that have a personal, unpredictable interest.

And lo and behold! I see things on these pictures I would never have seen if I had just “lived in the moment.” For example, I recently took a series of photographs of the large Cooper’s Hawks that have miraculously been visiting my garden in a populous Chicago neighborhood. Looking over the pictures, I was amazed to find one that captured the instant when the hawk’s second eyelids, its nictitating membranes, were pulled down - eerie, iridescent shades over its eyes. Although the bird was indeed a hawk and not a raven, that captured slice reminded me of Poe’s final-stanza description of his harbinger bird – “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”

That and a thousand other details are revealed in a photograph – details that would have been forever lost in the rush of impressions that constitute life in the moment. I suppose this value in taking pictures should have been obvious to me all along, if the enterprise hadn’t been clouded by my mother’s injunctions – and even more, by the generally rather dull and trivializing output of most shutterbugs.

But then, also perhaps obviously, I have discovered value not only in the picture, but in the process of taking pictures. Having a camera in my hand wakens me to my surroundings. I go forth with an artist’s eye, in the footsteps of Steichen and Stieglitz, more keenly aware - scouring the landscape for unique features, for odd juxtapositions that might be a commentary on the human condition, without necessarily involving any actual humans.

I still feel a reluctance to take pictures of people. That might in part be due to an instinct operating in me similar to the instinct operating among tribal peoples and people in closer-knit communities like the Amish. It’s a feeling that to take a picture of a person is to literally “capture” and encase the essence of that person in too-earthly a mold. And again going back to all the sorry and depreciatingly specific remembrances we have of the Uncle Johnnies of the world – that instinct has wisdom in it.

Then too, I feel that taking a picture of a person is just generally too intrusive an act. It seems it should certainly entail my approaching the person and asking their permission first. But if I do that, I will almost always destroy the spontaneity that made me want to take the picture in the first place. So how is that whole exchange supposed to be negotiated? I’m never sure. The classes I’ve taken in photography haven’t covered that topic. Any tips that teachers could give in this regard would probably have to boil down to legality and sensitivity – and after that, how to take pictures covertly.

I know I would certainly be made to feel ill at ease if I spotted someone photographing me, even if I was sure it wasn’t part of a lawyer’s investigation, but only because I was “picturesque.” Perhaps I’d be even more put-off by implications of picturesqueness, because that usually means being somehow typical of a place and time, being somehow representative. And above all, it usually means being old. And I assume other people feel the same aversion I do to being typecast that way.

But again, I might be wrong in many cases. On my recent trip to Sicily, I was rather taken aback to see a member of our tour group ask permission, then stand directly in front of a weathered native (an old-man-and-the-sea archetype) – ready to snap him head-on from only a foot away. I cringed at the audacity. But then something amazing! As our tour member lined up her shot, a huge grin radiated across the man’s face. Pride at being found picture-worthy boosted him, suddenly reversing the years’ inevitable sapping of youth and vigor. In the gaze of this media attention, he flowered into his prime, a second wind filling his sails. It was apparent our tour member had brought immense joy to someone by soliciting such bold exposure. And I felt a little ashamed of my global reticence. Because of it, I might have missed many opportunities to similarly bring joy to people.

Going back to the original dilemma that prompted all this reflection - I decided not to bring my camera along on the Sicily trip at all. It was practical reasons rather than philosophy that made the decision for me in the end. I had heard so much about drive-by camera-snatchings all over the world. And my camera had a big zoom lens. It couldn’t be tucked in a pocket. It would be an albatross around my neck, something that would brand me as a tourist from a mile away. Or more affectionately, it would be like traveling with an infant. I would have to be constantly conscious of it, protective of it – swaddling it away from harm.

I wasn’t even sure how to get such a thing on board an airplane in the first place. Not being much of a traveler, I didn’t know the post 9/11 protocol regarding cameras. You don’t really pack such an expensive, delicate item in your checked luggage, do you? But on the other hand, isn’t a camera a suspicious thing to carry dangling as you go through inspection? Wouldn’t the security guards want to disassemble it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Then even if I got it intact onto the plane, I’d be left with a big wattle weighing me for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

I am always so flummoxed by these little questions in life. While other people are grappling with wars and famine and family crises – I am left in the dust, immobilized by whether or not to tote a camera.

In the end I left the camera behind. In the end, I regretted it. Everyone else on the tour through Sicily routinely brought cameras along, seemingly without have spent a moment agonizing over what – how – who. So I will have to depend on the kindness of these strangers to share their pictures with me if I want to look back at where I’ve been.

But I probably won’t make a big point of asking to look back through their portfolios of pictures. I now see how my mother was partially wrong. But I still appreciate how she was partially right about the shallowness of taking pictures. A lot of things are better left to the imagination. Although I have developed a sort of keenness for taking the occasional photo, my primary medium always was, and probably will continue to be – the printed word. So I will still likely keep most of my memories of trips through life in the form of letters I write or in just random jottings like this.

Taking pictures is more like watching TV. Writing is more like listening to the radio. When I take pictures, I’m pretty much limited to capturing a scene as it is. Yes, I have choices – a choice of subject matter, of angle, of lighting, etc. But these are all choices among off-the-rack options already out there. Writing seems to leave me more room to insert myself into the scene. When I write up an experience, I can weave myself into the very fabric of the narrative.
So I will write my trip to Sicily. In some follow-up postings, I will tell what I saw in Sicily – or, more accurately, I will tell what a picture Sicily and I made together.

Attack of the Clones!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

My Children are Clones! It’s a headline you’d expect to see only in a newspaper like The National Enquirer. But actually, most people speak as if cloning were taking place in their families on a routine basis. Listen to the average married couple.

I first became aware of what I was hearing years ago while a friend and I were watching a couple exchanging anecdotes about their children on The Tonight Show. This couple was famous not only for being a singing duo, but for their long-standing, presumably close and successful marriage. As they bantered that night though, they didn’t seem close. They seemed to be occupying opposite ends of a tennis court in a singles match. The wife started the story with, “My son…” The husband kept the tale in play by elaborating, “And then my son…”

The two went through the entire anecdote that way – volleying the child back and forth. “My son” – slam. “My son” – slam. My friend pointed out the oddity. The anecdote was finished, and not once had either partner used the pronoun “our.”

Yes! Something struck me as being not quite as idyllic about this couple’s marriage as the world would like to believe. And my friend zeroed in on the source of the taint. He pointed out how it was the persistent use of that singular possessive “my” – applied to a child who by rights should have been the height of the couple’s mutuality.

But then, once I’d been alerted to this usage – I found it everywhere. I found that Tonight Show couple wasn’t the exception. They were the rule. I hear most people employing that same exclusive “my” when talking about their children, as if every woman’s child had arrived by Immaculate Conception, a case of parthenogenesis – and every man’s child had been cloned from one of his cells.

The usage would be understandable, if somewhat ungenerous, in cases of blended marriages, or when one partner is dead or out of the picture. People have taken me to task for objecting to someone referring to “my” child when, for example, they are on air being interviewed by Larry King. A celebrity wouldn’t want to mention “our” child then, because this might imply the celebrity had had the child with Larry King.

That sounds like a good excuse. But in reality, it doesn’t wash. People who have biologically engendered a child together use “my” as often as couples with blended families. And like that Tonight Show couple, husbands and wives who are right there together, sometimes even holding hands, are still all respectively “My,” “My,” My.” When Oprah interviewed Jerry Seinfeld, she asked his wife, sitting front row center in the audience, what it was that she really liked about Jerry. Jessica Seinfeld thought for a moment, then said, “He makes my children laugh.”

Furthermore, the same celebrity who says “my child” will go on in the next breath to tell an amusing story about the sufferings endured in the course of remodeling “our house.” The house is no more shared with Larry King or Oprah than the child. But people seem more willing to acknowledge their spouses’ mutual investment in a house, while the children remain exclusive, each to each.

The switch in pronouns was dramatically illustrated recently in a statement issued by the mother of an abducted child. She stood before the cameras, issuing a plea to police to make a more concerted effort to find the perpetrator. “Someone took my child out of our house,” she anguished, with her husband standing in the background.

This may seem unconscionable of me – criticizing someone’s grammar when they are in the throes of one of the worst imaginable tragedies. But I’m not criticizing grammar. I’m regretting a more diffuse tragedy, one that seems to be afflicting most families. Each partner in the typical marriage is viewing the children of that marriage as the end – with the spouse as just the means. The man is acting like a sultan of old, before it was acknowledged, or even known, that women made any genetic contribution to children. The sovereign would look out over the numerous progeny his harem had produced, and he would see there HIS children, HIS heirs and successors.

For her part, the woman would allow the male his conceit. Meanwhile, she quietly maintained her sense of being the de facto power, the power behind the throne. The male was as incidental to her marriage ceremony, to her having achieved the status of wife, and to her subsequent nest-building - as the female was incidental to the man’s goal of perpetuating himself in a bloodline. The woman always knew the children were really HERS. And so it continues down to this day.

The perpetuation of this mindset seems more dangerous, more sinister to me than the actual techniques of cloning everyone is worrying over. That couple on the Tonight Show who started this whole rant are still around, still married, probably still as happy or as privately unhappy as they were those years ago. But in general, I think the use of “my” in connection with children spells trouble for a marriage. It dooms it to early dissolve, dullness, or dysfunction. This is the root that the Dr. Phils of the world so often fail to dig down to. Until people can truly, convivially think in terms of more inclusive pronouns – in marriage, and in the world at large – it will be OUR loss.

Gotcha!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

_______________________________________________________________

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was such a good buy. I bought a wrapping tape dispenser at the Dollar Store. It was a big, elaborate tape dispenser. I got so much plastic for my money.

And I needed a tape dispenser. I mail a lot of boxes. In addition to being sealed, these boxes have to have all traces of their previous adventures taped over, concealed. So I was happy with my new acquisition. I even pictured myself starting a mailing service with this formidable piece of equipment.

But when I got it home and tried to load a roll of tape into it, I saw I had a problem. It hadn’t come with any instructions. How should the tape be threaded through the complexity of rollers and serrated edges? I tried one way and another and only ended up in an improbable Three Stooges dilemma for my trouble. I ended up with wads of tape affixed to my sweater, my jeans. I even had wads of tape plastered in my hair.

I brought in some consultants. But no one else could thread the tape through the dispenser either. So after several more accursed and cursing attempts, I put the dispenser aside. It languished on a shelf for months. Summer passed into autumn.

Then - a miracle. I saw an exact replica of my dispenser in a neat package in Walgreen’s. It cost ten times what I had paid at the Dollar Store – but I saw it had one vital thing my model lacked. It came with an instruction sheet.

I tried to read the instructions through the package cellophane. But it was useless. The sheet was folded and exhaustive. I didn’t want to buy yet a second dispenser just to get the instructions. That would have completely nullified my original bargain. So I regretfully walked on and shopped down other aisles. But I was drawn back to that dispenser. After unsuccessfully pretzeling myself around the package once more, trying to make out enough of its directions - I decided my only recourse was to steal that instruction pamphlet from the package.

I had never once before in my life shoplifted anything. Even as a child, a teenager, I had never taken so much as a candy bar from the shelves. It seemed an unlikely time of life for me to be launching on a criminal career. But I felt I had no alternative. (Don’t all criminals justify their deeds with some presumed necessity?)

I furtively scanned the walls for security cameras. I didn’t see anything pointed at me. But I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a camera concealed in some unlikely object around the store. So I doubled over in nefariousness. I slipped a penknife out of my purse. Then, cloaking myself over my victim like Jack the Ripper, I sliced through the package cellophane with surgical skill and deftly drew its vital little packet of instructions out. I slithered it into my pocket, tucked back my knife, and continue to walk down the aisle, for all the world a nonchalant shopper browsing down the rows.

But I was hardly nonchalant inside. My heart was pounding. I felt almost dizzy with fear. What if camera surveillance had spotted me? They might assume I was trying to make off with something really valuable – something like one of those watches that had been stocked on a nearby rack. How could I convince them I had just lifted a sheet of instructions from a tape dispenser? Would I be hauled off to a police station?

Although I had brought the chill autumn air into the store with me, I realized I was now sweating - sweating bullets. And my heart was pounding harder, harder, harder…

Hoping my high anxiety wasn’t showing, I proceeded down the aisle as if walking the last mile. I was almost to the end. The checkout counter was in sight. And then – out of nowhere - a voice directly in my ear intoned in mocking malignant singsong – “I see you-u. GOTCHA!”

I dropped the cans of almonds I was legitimately going to buy. They clattered to the floor, in what seemed like slow-motion, endless reverberation.

I turned to face my accuser. I saw a skeletal face leaning into mine with an evil, triumphant grin. No, it wasn’t a skeletal face – it was an actual skull!

When my eyes finally focused and I started breathing again, I realized it was one of those motion-activated figures that stores display around Holidays. This was a sample of a Halloween haunting you could buy for your window. It would spook anyone who crossed its path. And yet – how eerily apt its “Gotcha!” Perhaps it really was inhabited by a stalking Halloween spirit, some all-perceiving vengeance from beyond the grave.

I scooped up my almond cans, and went to the cashier. I tried to keep my hands from trembling as I paid. But I don’t think I succeeded. The cashier was mercifully oblivious to the customers though, and just processed me mechanically. Still, I thought she might be feigning indifference. When I went outside, I took a few steps away from the building, then stopped and waited – for the long arm of the law to claim me. But no human enforcer came after me. So I walked a little farther, and then farther. And finally I was home.

After I had calmed myself a little with a hot cup of tea, I tackled those hard-won instructions. A few more hours of tape contortions demonstrated that, with or without instructions, the threading of the dispenser was hopeless. I ended up donating the dispenser to charity, actually compounding my felony I suppose by visiting this intractability on someone else.

So once again, the lesson had been conveyed – Crime Doesn’t Pay. But more than that, I’d learned to be wary of those animated Halloween displays. Perhaps they know more than we realize.

Lean Over and Look At My Stick Shift

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

________________________________________

I walked briskly out into the big, almost empty parking lot, but slowed a little as I approached my car. I saw there was a man loitering near it. It was too late. He’d seen me. I sighed. I was headed for a nuisance – or something worse.

“Is this your car?” the man beamed and waved me forward. It didn’t seem possible that he could be too dangerous. He was old and wizened. Yes “wizened” - not a word you hear much anymore. It recalls root cellars and your mother reading Hansel and Gretel to you.

He introduced himself cheerfully. “I’m Norm. Beautiful day, isn’t it? What’s your name? You live around here?”

It had been quite a while since anyone had hit on me. I didn’t know if I should be flattered or frightened. Even though he was small and “up there” in age, he was wiry. He could still do some damage. And it was always possible he had a knife or a gun. He might be counting on his harmless appearance to launch a surprise attack. Oh, all the TV shows have put serial killers on our brains. But I was polite and answered his small talk questions, as vaguely and evasively as possible without being rude. At the same time, I was conscious of the fact that that’s exactly how women get snared – through their compulsion to be polite, accommodating.

“That’s a beautiful Toyota you have,” he switched from strictly personal solicitations. “I love Toyotas. Always bought ‘em. They’re the best thing going. I have one myself – right now. See? It’s parked down there at the other end of the lot. Come and have a look.”

I’d already unlocked my car door, which made me doubly reluctant to follow the man. But again, that persistent female impulsion to be nice won out. And then there was also that ingrained reluctance to stanch the flow of any masculine attention, however unlikely the man. So I provisionally followed him, at a distance.

He continued extolling the virtues of Toyotas all along our course. Finally the fellow stopped short and pointed. “There’s my baby. She’s a ’94. Got 170,000 miles on her and she runs like a charm. I tell you, I’d never buy anything but a Toyota. They’re the best.”

The vehicle in front of me was an odd amalgam. I’m not familiar with makes and models, so I don’t know how to characterize the strange runt I had presented to me. It was a mini-mini-camper – a triple cross between a truncated camper, a scaled-down 2x4 flatbed truck, and a jeep. I didn’t know that Toyota had ever made such an odd fusion vehicle. I wondered if the man might have added that metallic shell on the back of his chassis as storage space himself. It was big enough to hold camping gear – or a couple of dead bodies.

The man continued his patter of praise. He opened his own driver’s door and waved his hand with a flourish, as if he were a model at a car show. “Lookee there. Clean as a whistle. And it’s a stick shift! I always did prefer the manuals myself. This one’s on the steering wheel. That’s how I like ‘em. Leaves your seat free clear across. Here, lean over and look at my stick shift!”

I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh. Whether that was a racy pick-up line or an inept killer’s attempt to get me to bend down so he could bop me on the head and push me the rest of the way into his car – whatever it was, it was priceless.

The man seemed to take my merriment as sheer shared enthusiasm for his Toyota. He rattled off some more facts and figures about the car (camper, truck, whatever it was). He waxed nostalgic over trips he’d made in it. He got so caught up in his expostulations that he seemed to forget I’d never complied with his urging to stretch into his car.

Finally though I felt I really had to get back to my own Toyota, left vulnerably ajar back there. Like a TV talk show host running out of time, I mumbled some segue wrap-up phrases and started back. The man trotted along behind me, yapping more praise of Toyotas. When we arrived at my car, he insisted on jotting his name and phone number on a paper. He thrust it at me as I was getting in behind my wheel, ready to make my escape.

“Here, call me sometime. I live right back there. Call me. I mean it. Give me a call. I live alone. I get lonely. It’d be nice to have somebody to talk to. Never been married. Had a fiancé once. But she left me while I was away in the War. One of those ‘Dear John’ things, I guess. Soured me on marriage for good. But I sure would like to see you sometime. Give me a call. Promise?”

I briefly pondered what war he could possibly have been in. He looked too young for WWII or Korea – too old for Vietnam. What else was there? But I didn’t want to delay my departure with any more calculation than was absolutely necessary. I was just relieved this hadn’t turned out to be a deadly encounter after all. And indeed, I felt a little bolstered by this prospect of a date, even though I knew I would never call the man. Well, I probably wouldn’t. I politely took the scrap of paper he’d written his name and phone number on. But the triumph of romantic conquest has always been fleeting for me at best.

“Give me a call,” he repeated his urging. “I’ll take you out to lunch – my treat. Bring your Toyota. We can use your car to go to the restaurant. I’d like to ride in another Toyota. So be sure to bring it. Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in selling that car, would you? I wouldn’t mind having another one – as back-up. You can never have too many Toyotas.”

Well, this day had started out sort of flat. But it had ended up being more productive than I could ever have hoped. I had acquired not one, but two catch-phrases to chuckle over, to evoke as off-beat counsel when I didn’t know what to do. Now I could remember to “Lean over and look at my stick shift,” and I could remind myself that, “You can never have too many Toyotas.”

Not a Sparrow Falls

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
____________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________

I went to Chicago’s North Park Nature Center the other day – to learn about sparrows.

Just going to the Nature Center itself always provokes flights of fancy in me. The Center’s conservators are currently devoted to turning the acreage back into native prairie and wetlands conditions. Walking along the trails lined with goldenrod and bluestem grass is interesting. But I remember when this land was devoted to another, equally interesting use. I remember when it was one of the last tuberculosis sanitaria in the U.S.

Right here, in the middle of Chicago’s busy urban north-side, there was this asylum for victims of “consumption” (the old word for tuberculosis). The last residents of the sanitarium were relocated (where were they sent?) in the 1960’s. After that, the land was hotly contested for several years, with competing interests vying for ownership. The conservationists eventually largely won out over the condo developers. A few senior citizen apartment complexes were nestled back in the parklands. But for the most part, the land has been handed over to the Park District as a place where citizens can come to study and commune with nature.

I often walked the ground when it was in transition though. It had a haunted, fading quality. The extended arbors on which the tuberculosis patients once grew grape vines as part of their fresh-air regimen were collapsing. The glass panels of the greenhouses were shattered and sharded. It was like a page out of a Southern gothic novel – beautifully bygone, but dangerous with bitter loss. The huge red brick building that used to be the “natatorium” where the patients could swim is still there. It was rehabbed and is a more generalized gymnasium now. However, there are nooks and crannies about the place that are still as they were in the days of the insidious TB bacterium, old hiding places where I would hate to poke a stick.

But the other day I went to my sparrow lecture in full sunshine. Most of the nature classes are held in a smaller, cozier red brick building. There is a fireplace in the main room where we gather. And the rafters of the room are usually decorated according to the season – twinkling white lights in the winter – papier mâché butterflies made by children in the summer.

A panel of expert birders was there to walk us through the fine points of sparrow identification. They handed out charts that labeled the different external anatomical parts of the bird, emphasizing the parts we could use as points of distinction. There is the superciliary (the eyebrow), the malar (the mustache area), the crown and whatever median line runs through it.

One of the best tips we got though was to observe the overall form of the bird. Look at its silhouette. If it is relatively small and has a long, narrow tail, it is likely to be a member of the Spizella genus. Around Chicago, that means there’s a good chance it is either a Field Sparrow or a Chipping Sparrow. If the bird has a stubbier tail, it may be of the Ammodramus genus. Maybe it’s a Grasshopper Sparrow, or if it has more lines on its face, it might be a Henslow’s Sparrow.

Another valuable tip to identifying sparrows – watch where they feed and watch where they flush to when they are frightened. Some species almost always forage in groups on the ground and flush further away into the grass when they are frightened. Some don’t like a background of trees at all. Other species may feed singly and flush into a shrub or a tree when they sense danger. I wouldn’t have thought to look at such behavior as a key to identification.

One instructor said that learning to distinguish the different kinds of local sparrows was like becoming a fine wine connoisseur – without the elitist connotations of that term “connoisseur.” But the point is – everyone can specify a preference for either “red” or “white” wine. Almost everyone can distinguish a cardinal from a bluejay. But if one would truly like to think of oneself as a nature lover – if one would truly like to travel down the path to becoming a naturalist – that means learning how to make finer distinctions. It means being willing to abide in nature long enough, lovingly enough to become aware of subtler distinctions.

I liked that analogy. And then another analogy involving sparrows came to mind. I remembered one noted feminist saying that women in this society could never be truly free and equal until people learn to love the sparrow.

She didn’t elaborate on this rather enigmatic remark. But I think I know what she meant. Unless a woman engages in time-consuming, straining measures – she won’t be noticed. In order to stand out, she must paint on a lot of flash. She must regularly prune herself into a strikingly artificial topiary form. Otherwise, she will be relegated to the status of sparrow – common, unremarkable. She won’t have the command of a typical man who is taller, more muscular. A man, with his bushier eyebrows and bolder, more prominent features, just naturally tends to be more vivid. And certainly a man, at least in many age categories, is a much rarer bird.

Older women are the sparrows of our society by virtue of numbers alone. Convalescent homes and senior citizen living facilities are notoriously female preserves. Almost everyone resident there is female. Women live longer. Surviving men perhaps are likelier to have younger, still healthy mates to take care of them in their own homes. So it’s women, women, women, you see out and about on tours and on retirement cruises, doing volunteer work, in gardening clubs.

It is easy to view them as an undifferentiated mass. It is easy to become dismissive and to look over their shoulders in the direction of that blaze of red cardinal. Even the nicest media stars take a dismissive tone when they refer to their matinee audiences. They say that they will be performing that afternoon for the usual “flock of little old blue-haired ladies.” They do their best to disassociate themselves from this demographic. They sigh and shrug, as if to underscore the fact that they play to these individuals not by choice, but simply as a matter of contractual obligation.

Well, perhaps it is true that they will be statistically less likely to find someone in those matinee audiences who will appreciate the edgy, avant-garde nature of a performance. Still, there “might be giants” out there. There might be genius that can appreciate the script better than even the performer himself does. And there almost certainly will be beauty. But the beauty will be the beauty of a sparrow, requiring more commitment and concentration before revealing itself.

Until people can learn to be interested in their fellow human beings selflessly – without the urgencies of sex or profit prodding them – then women are indeed doomed to being second-class citizens in society, to being the sparrows. When they are younger, they will be tied to the labor of bringing out their best features with mascara and lipstick and diet in order to be visible to the casual observer. When they are older, they will fall irremediably under the heading of “flock.”

Everyone’s attention will be turned to the soar of the masculine eagle, to the bright self-assertion of the woodpecker. And all those sparrows underneath, with their drabber, more difficult tones, will be invisible – except to the most discerning eye.

Spelling Bee - Part II

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

_________________________________________________________

And finally the dread day of the Spelling Bee arrived.

My mother took me on the bus to Francis Parker High School, the old red brick building that hosted the annual District Bee. My classmates had been given the day off so they could attend the event. They’d been provided with directions on how to get here. Since they were all older, it was assumed they could manage the trip on public transportation on their own, without the need of any accompanying adult. Except for the boy I thought was going to be my partner up on stage - he had been brought by his housemother.

This boy lived a precarious, prejudiced life because of having been placed in the Uhlich Foster Home. The Uhlich Home wasn’t for orphans. It was for children whose parents were “temporarily” unable to care for them. But often that temporary status in fact stretched to official adulthood, when the youngsters were simply “aged out” of the system. Meanwhile, these children existed in limbo. They weren’t eligible for adoption since their parents were ostensibly waiting in the wings, just needing a breather before they would resume their parental obligations. But in fact, most of the parents never did recover their ability to care for their children – and so the children languished in their eternal waiting room.

Our grade school accepted all the kindergarten-eighth graders from that facility. And their presence brought out the Dickensian meanness in many of the teachers. “Those damned Uhlich kids” became the perennial scapegoats. They bore the brunt of the teachers’ pent-up hostilities and sadisms. Some of the teachers automatically started picking on any Uhlich student they had in their class from the moment the starting bell knelled the beginning of each school day. It was like watching the inexplicable pecking to death of one chicken by a gang of other chickens. It’s not always clear what causes one chick to be singled out this way. Sometimes it’s an obvious vulnerability; but sometimes the trigger is obscure, lying deep in some medullar instinct somewhere.

So a Uhlich student became the teacher’s automatic target. He would be sent to the dunce’s corner first thing in the morning, before he’d even had a chance to commit any transgression. There the teacher would fling humiliations at him throughout the day. The student’s only release was the day’s end. And I doubted that was any kind of release at all. I imagined he just shuffled from one locus of ritualistic abuse to another as he walked from the school back to his foster home for the evening. I didn’t know for sure what went on beyond the locked grillwork gate of that Home, behind those stone walls – but again, I pictured the most heartrending series of block print illustrations from a Dickens’ novel.

I had once almost gotten lumped in with these Uhlich students by a fourth-grade teacher, a woman with an especially sharp ax to grind. Along with the one actual Uhlich student in our class, I had also been taken as a handy coat hanger for this woman’s billowing frustration and rage. Whenever I mispronounced a word during reading period, the woman took the mistake as an occasion for a searing, humiliating condemnation of every aspect of my being. When I forgot to bring lunch money, the teacher declaimed the failure before the whole class as a clear indication of the total failure I was to become in life.

But then things changed suddenly. My mother wrote a particularly literate, slightly humorous, slightly flattering excuse note to the teacher explaining one of my many absences. And shortly after that, the teacher met my mother in person at a PTA meeting. During their conversation, my teacher learned that my mother was a graduate from an Ivy League University, and that my father owned a thriving neighborhood business. And from that day forward, the teacher’s persecution of me turned to fawning.

All the abuse that would have been heaped on me, now was heaped two-fold on the one actual Uhlich student in our class. That student had no parents in the picture to write literate notes to the teacher. That student had no college graduate mother, no businessman father standing prestigiously behind her. That student walked to school alone, without anyone to hold her hand – without anyone to object to whatever cruel treatment the world decided to mete out to her.

I felt wretched about this undeserved reprieve I’d been granted from the teacher’s abuse. But I did nothing to correct the injustice. I was just glad it wasn’t me under the teacher’s thumb any more. And that made me feel all the more wretched and cowardly. I realized I was one more person who had abandoned the Uhlich girl to her fate. But I guessed the Uhlich students were used to it.

I guessed that had been pretty much the same dismal grade-school experience my spelling bee partner had suffered through, although I had only landed here in the same class with him in eighth-grade. But I could see how he’d become inured. He walked down the school corridors mutely, as if in shell shock. However after he’d been chosen for this spelling bee, that had started to change. He began to blossom. He smiled; he talked occasionally. He became more and more eager and expansive as the day of the spelling bee drew close – just the opposite of me. Fred told me how his housemother was going to bring him to the event, and how he had even invited his real mother. She was going to take the day off of work to come see him.

He didn’t go into a lot of details, but I got the impression that this was to be the start of a whole new chapter between him and his mother. The fact that he was selected to represent the school in the bee was proof that he was a good student, a good boy, a worthy son. Maybe it would draw his mother back from her estrangement and they could be a family again. I saw in Fred’s eyes a reflection of the gleaming prospect that he wouldn’t be “one of those damn Uhlich kids” much longer.

And there he was sitting, near the front of the Francis Parker School Auditorium when my mother and I arrived. I hardly recognized him. His hair was brushed and Brilliantined back into daguerreotype formality. We made our way down the row toward him and sat. He was really happy. He whispered proudly to me, “There’s my mother – back there.” He waved his hand in a general over-the-shoulder direction. I couldn’t make out which of the many heads bobbing with pride he might be referring to. So I broadcast a general smile of acknowledgment.

Then everything happened so fast. My home room teacher leaned over to me and ordered, “Time to get up on stage. Get your placard!”

Fred and I both rose. But the teacher stopped him. “Not you, not you,” he said impatiently. “You’re just the alternate.”

Fred looked bewildered. I didn’t know what was going on either. But there was no time. The teacher was shooing me onstage. I jostled around with the other contestants for a bit, then found my seat up there, facing out the other way this time, into the dim maw of the Auditorium.

I didn’t have a chance to dwell on this mix-up. The spelling bee was starting. The moderator announced that there would be a warm-up round. She told us this first round would count, but she beamed that she was confident most of us would get through it without any trouble. And we started to tick off.

The contestant ahead of me got the word “laundry.” Not too bad. I would have known that – although it seemed a little tricky for a “warm-up round.” Then my turn. I lurched into the spotlight and looked out at the assemblage. I saw Fred in one of the front rows. His face had turned ashen. I still didn’t understand. Wasn’t he going to be up on the stage with me at all? And where was the rest of our class? I couldn’t see all the way to the back of the Auditorium or up into the balconies. Maybe they were out there, somewhere.

I couldn’t distract myself with these questions any longer though. My time had come. I had to stand and deliver. The spelling bee judge hurled the fateful word – “Myrrh.”

Myrrh? Myrrh? I was stunned. I had never heard so much as a whisper of this word. Myrrh!! I knew a million words – or so everyone said. But I’d never heard of myrrh!

I don’t remember if I had the presence of mind to ask for a definition and for the word origin. Since I’d had virtually no coaching for this event, I don’t think I’d been told that was my right, although somewhere along the way, I probably had gathered some sense I could ask for that information.

But whether I asked for definitions or not, I knew it was useless. To think – I had practiced, practiced – boning up on onomatopoeia and numismatist – only to meet my Waterloo on a one-syllable word. Myrrh. A practice word!

I took a stab at it. Against all reason, by some impossible intuition, I know I put an “h” in there somewhere. How I sensed that much, I’ll never know. I think I sputtered out a spelling like, “M-U-I-R-H.” With that, I’d shot my wad. I heard the dismissal bell. I was pronounced “wrong,” and made my way off the stage. Well, at least the pressure was off. I could enjoy the rest of the day as a spectator.

As I picked my way through the rows of contestants-still-in-the-running, I heard a girl sneer sotto voce to the student next to her, “She missed the easiest one. Everyone knows ‘myrrh.’” Well, I hadn’t known it. As I later learned, it is part of the famous Biblical pair of “frankincense and myrrh.” But I had never read the Bible. I had never been exposed to the slightest fragment of religious mythology. I guess the devout would say God came and punished me as an infidel that day. But really, myrrh! Could there be an odder word anywhere in the English language?

As I sheepishly took my place back next to my mother and homeroom teacher in the audience, I feared the teacher’s rebuke. He could be a harsh, sarcastic person. But surprisingly, he made light of my failure. “That’s OK,” he comforted. “That was a tough word.” I looked down the row at Fred. He was staring straight ahead, like a deer caught in headlights. I wondered if he would have known “myrrh.” Regretfully, I guessed he would have.

At that moment, the proceedings on stage were interrupted. There was a commotion in the balcony. We all turned and looked up. It was the rest of my class, boisterously traipsing in, displaying varying degrees of macho dishevelment. Marhsall’s face was streaked with mud in a war paint pattern. Leonard had one sleeve of his jacket rakishly torn away. Our home teacher grimaced and made swatting gestures at them. But they didn’t see us way down by the orchestra pit. They jovially stumbled over each other finding seating up there in the crow’s nest, and finally the spelling bee was able to resume.

I felt relieved that they hadn’t been there to witness my disgrace – me, the one they called “the brain,” the one whose homework they all copied. Maybe they’d never hear that I’d been eliminated on the warm-up round. Maybe they’d forget to ask why I wasn’t on stage when they got here. As the rounds of spelling wore on, I did hear a hoarse query from the balcony, “Where’s she at? I don’t see ‘er.” But it didn’t seem to be a pressing concern with them. And the spelling bee carried on to an uneventful conclusion without me.

Then we all scattered our separate ways home. Those late arriving members of my class roistered out as they had roistered in. My mother and I walked back to the bus stop. As we were walking, I caught a glimpse of Fred being ushered by his housemother toward a car. He looked as if he didn’t know or didn’t care where he was. I felt a knot in my stomach tighten.

The next day at school a few of those Fonz-like boys who’d clamored into the balcony did make reference to my early elimination from the bee. They’d heard. But they shrugged my failure off with good humor. You might even say they were mildly “supportive,” if that term had been in use then, and if you could ever characterize the demeanor of a gang of delinquent boys as “supportive.” At any rate, my spelling bee fiasco didn’t seem to have lowered me in their esteem. I assumed I would be as sought-after as dispenser of homework and quiz answers as ever.

However there was something wrong. There was a buzz in the air as we all flopped into our seats that morning and waited for the homeroom teacher, who was unusually late. I sat there, trying to piece together the snatches of excited conversation I heard bandied in back of me. As I was craning my neck around to be better included in this rush of rumor, I was brought back face-front by a terrifying crash.

Our teacher had arrived. He’d slammed a room-shaking load of books down on his desk. His usual cool remove was replaced with raw rage. “That’s the last time – the last time – you animals ever get out of your cages!” he screamed. “I’m going to see to it you never go across the street again, much less across town! Do you know – we’ve been getting calls all night, all morning – people reporting vandalism! You were always the worst class, but this does it! This is it!”

He stormed on, becoming more and more incoherent. But I gathered that our class had taken the occasion of their release from a day of classes to become pillaging Huns. They had cut a wide swathe of destruction across the city on their way to the spelling bee – ransacking, burning, looting. They toppled telephone poles and stop signs. They smashed windows. They spray-painted everything in their path. They started fires in apartment lobbies. They buffeted old ladies against garbage pails. They terrorized the driver of every bus they boarded.

It was true, our class had been branded as the worst in the School’s history even before this episode. The Uhlich students aside, we had that unusual concentration of older, demoted boys in the class and they had been chronically delinquent. They had made our class the original “Blackboard Jungle.” When people deplore the current epidemic of violence in classrooms and look back wistfully to “the good old days” – I can’t help but cast a dubious look their way. Their recollection of those days seems very selective. It’s true that students didn’t generally carry guns some decades ago – and weren’t generally high on crack or cocaine. But they had switchblades. Has everyone forgotten about switchblades?

Most of the students in my class carried a switchblade. One girl cut off the tip of her finger while we were only oh-so-mildly rehearsing three-part harmony during music period. She said she’d just been playing with her knife. One of the most unpopular teachers in the school was permanently blinded in one eye when a switchblade came hurtling at her down the corridor. The thrower of that switchblade (now one of the ringleaders of the mayhem en route to the spelling bee) had claimed he’d just been fooling around – trying to throw the blade to a friend of his down at the other end of the hall. The teacher had just haplessly stepped in the way of the projectile. So, another accident?

After all these accidents, plus vicious weekly switchblade fights on the school grounds, the school principle had been careful to assign only the toughest males available to teach our class. It didn’t help much though. Every day for these teachers was pretty much like Glenn Ford’s first day in The Blackboard Jungle. That’s why I smile knowingly to myself whenever I hear anyone lamenting “Today’s kids – all the shooting – drugs – violence - all because we took God out of the schools.”

Although it’s true - that particular group of students I found myself among in eighth-grade wasn’t exactly typical. We had the worst offenders among us, not because of Uhlich’s contribution to our population, but mostly because of that unusual concentration of demoted, older boys in the class. They were chaffing to get out from behind those pinching little desks and out into the wider world. And now they had thrown that proverbial straw on the camel’s back. After all the detentions they had racked up earlier that year – now this culminating vandalism. As our homeroom teacher continued his tirade, Fred and I could sit there, the only indisputably innocent bystanders. Nevertheless, our class as a whole was going to be punished.

Our teacher was reeling off the consequences of this flagrant cross-country pillage. Some of the boys would be sent to St. Charles, the distant reform school. Some would be held back again in the process. I imagined none of them would stick around to turn eighteen in grade-school. So that would probably be the end of their academic careers.

But there was more. As our homeroom teacher picked up a large book and slammed it gratuitously back down on the desk a second time for parting-shot emphasis – he yelled out at us that it had been decided our class trip would be canceled. No bus ride to the State Capital. “We don’t want you animals out in the streets any more – ever again!” The School would go ahead with the graduation ceremony (minus those youths who would be sitting it out in the reformatory, of course). The ballroom event at which the usual presentation of graduating class presents was made – would instead take place in private. We would each receive a paperback dictionary down in a basement storage room. All of us would be kept away from decent folk. “You are the worst class I’ve ever had or ever will have! You’re incorrigible - an embarrassment – a disgrace!!” the teacher spat out. And that was that.

I never saw those ringleaders of the spelling bee spree of vandalism again. I did see Fred every day for the remaining weeks until graduation. He had drawn back into pale numbness. He didn’t reproach me for not knowing “myrrh.” He never spoke to me at all after that. I never saw him speak to anyone unless he was spoken to. He just came and went, in a zombie trance. He stayed at Uhlich. No other home was opened to him.

The teachers, the counselors had decided to enter the School in the spelling bee just as a last-minute, off-hand sort of thing. No one had bothered to tell Fred or me what it was all about, which of us would be the real contestant. We were just sent. The teachers took a shot. No big deal.

It struck me that there had in fact been a crime committed that day – a crime worse than the crime of spray-painting walls or toppling street signs. And as usual, that really devastating crime had been the crime of casualness.

____________________________________________________________________

I would like to hear from any of you who were ever contestants in a spelling bee and who have adventures to tell. Write a paragraph or two. What word did you win or lose on? I will try to post as many of your comments as I can.