Month: April 2020

Feeling particularly adventurous yesterday during my daylight stroll, I branched off of Via delle Pertiche No. 2 onto Vicolo delle Pertiche B, and went the thirty meters or so towards what I for years have called “the little piazza with the trees,” properly known as Piazza Angelo da Orvieto. There, before entering, I stopped. Everything suspended. The square is primarily a parking lot, but the central portion is a park, and in this park there are a dozen beautiful trees. To the right is a private garden with wisteria in rampant bloom.

While the green leaves and purple blossoms are enough to justify the side jaunt and the pause, there is something more about this piazza. It’s where I meet Roy to be taken to medical appointments in his golden Fiat. I meet Erika there to go down to Ciconia where our hearing aides are serviced. Claudia picks me up in that piazza when we have our joint visits with the remarkable Dottoressa Christel Fritz. Piazza Angelo da Orvieto, is for me, a point of departure, a portal to the world, the way train stations are, the way airports are. For a suspended moment gazing at the little grove of trees, I forget that the majority of meetings associated with it are medically related. The company going and coming is rich and enjoyable and memorable. Like the leaves and the blossoms.

I went to gaze at the piazza again this morning, this time in the rain. The colors were especially vivid, the suspension of time, particularly profound. I noticed how few cars there were. That may have been the case yesterday, too, I didn’t make a point of noticing. The lot is, in normal times, almost always filled with vehicles parked wherever a space can be imagined, legal or not.

Later today, I went shopping. That was somewhat of a cheat, as my last shopping day was the day before yesterday. But this morning, I surveyed my bounty and discovered that I had shopped myself into a week of frulatti (smoothies) and cheese sandwiches without mayonnaise, so some bending of my own rules was called for.

It seems odd these days to say that the rain keeps people in, but the streets were even quieter than usual. Proprietors in the open shops stood serenely at their counters like the paintings of a Flemish Master – luminous glow, gentle shadow, singular, alone. I saw few people at all, and no one I knew. It was as if our collective experience of solitude has caused us to hold our breath, so that grey skies encourage what is now our natural inclination to bunker at home. Life in suspension.

Today, I’ve been thinking about a fellow I met four years ago, a friend of Claudia’s. I’ve seen him infrequently and can never remember his name, so nod, say hello, smile, but make no effort at sociality. In the first and only conversation we had – not far from the little piazza with the trees – I remember enjoying his sly sense of humor. He expounded on the effects of radon. In the intervening years, every now and then I would ask Claudia his name, but as it was usually months before we’d cross paths again, I’d forget. And because I felt I should remember, when we did meet, I was too shy to say more than hello.

The day before lockdown, I ran into him on my way to lunch at Montanucci. He started talking, and we walked together. We began in Italian, then moved a few sentences to English, then he continued in English while I returned to Italian.

“Excuse me for this,” I finally said, “but I don’t remember your name.”

“Emilio.”

“Good, thank you. When I see you by chance, I’m always so embarrassed that I don’t know what to call you that…”

“And yours?”

“David,” and I handed him a card.

“We will now be together and speak English for me and Italian for you, and call one another by name.”

“Great idea.”

“Do you remember when we met?”

“Sure. You were on your bike. Claudia and I were going to her car that was parked in Piazza Angelo da Orvieto, and she introduced us. You talked for several minutes about how radon makes people here crazy.”

“Yes! And I am the living proof! Good! I have to meet my daughters or I’d invite myself for lunch, but soon! Yes?”

There are hundreds of suspended conversations just in Orvieto – billions world wide – journeys to be taken, adventures to depart upon, appointments to be met. For me, many began, and will begin again, in the little piazza with the trees. So, when I find myself on its edge, I have to wait a moment for the conversations to resume. So far, silence. But someday, when all is ready, we the fortunate will breathe deeply, rise out of suspension, and find our ways forward into conversations we cannot as yet imagine.

While I was hanging wash, Patrizia came onto her balcony to take the air, drinking a cloudy solution from a large glass.

“You did laundry on Sunday.”

“Yeah, sun is predicted today, and rain tomorrow. I may be a Monday washer, but even I am not so stupid as to skip a good drying day in deference to habit.” Okay, that’s what I wanted to say. In Italian it was more like, “Today there’s sun, tomorrow rain, so I wash today. Smart?”

“Very smart.”

“How are you?”

“I have a bad headache. That’s why I’m drinking this medicine,” she brandished the glass. “Too much sleep.”

“Really? That’s possible, these days?”

“I’m not accustomed to it, so I wake at a normal time, can’t think of why I have to get up, turn over, and an hour or two later I have a headache that won’t go away.”

“So now even sleep is dangerous!”

“What a long list of dangerous things we have.”

Apropos of that, I confess to touching my face during the night. I wonder if I should, but what have I touched since washing and sanitizing my hands fourteen times in the half hour before I retire? If bedclothes are covered with the virus, we’re all doomed anyway.

Back to the balcony. Renzo joined the conversation.

“You gonna take a real walk today?”

“Like on the street?”

“Stay within two hundred meters from home, you have a note from your doctor, it will make you feel so much better than walking down there in circles.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

And just as if he were a theatre director, he repeated the list of reasons for biding his advice, all over again. 

I turned my attention to laundry. From their balcony, my neighbors started a conversation with the fellow whose yard is sort of behind my house, talking back and forth over my roof. It didn’t seem possible, but they kept it up for quite awhile. Renzo then introduced us, and my newly revealed neighbor made himself visible up a level or two from my garden, and over the narrow fence that spans the gap between my house and Giancarlo and Annalisa’s next door. Renzo said something about Montalcino, but I didn’t catch whether that was the man’s name or where he was from. I waved with a soggy pant leg, he smiled and asked if everything was okay (“Tutto a posto?”), and I returned the same. He seems nice. 

An hour or so later, much in need of a walk, I took Renzo’s direction, donned a mask, put in my aides, pocketed the by now rather limp doctor’s note, and opened the gate to the wider world of Via delle Pertiche Prima. Renzo was at the Corso end of the street watering the flowers he hangs in pots the full length of the lane. Pestilence or not, beauty must be attended.

Via delle Pertiche No. 1 runs for one “block” between Corso Cavour and where Via delle Pertiche No. 2 crosses. If you continue straight, it turns into Vicolo delle Pertiche A, which curves left after about ten meters and goes on to join Via Angelo d’Orvieto. The Vicolo is quite lovely; narrow, passes gardens (one of them with statuettes of the seven dwarves, in living color), very characteristic of the quarter. Close as it is, I’ve not walked there in maybe a year, but today I did. Several times.

My first pass on the Vicolo encountered a masked man carrying a white box. I made room, and as we approached each other I recognized the friendly fellow who owns Enoteca del Duomo. He smiled dazzlingly beneath his mask and waved with his free hand. He was looking for my street. As I looped around I saw him give the white box to a neighbor. I just checked their website hoping for a reminder as to his name, but found instead a delivery menu available seven days a week from ten in the morning to midnight! I just today have become a bit weary of cooking, so that is tempting indeed.

Renzo (and my own good sense) was right. A real walk, in daylight, even if also in circles (they were at least larger) did me a world of good.

The weather cooled. Rain is now forecast by 21:00. I moved the laundry, still damp except for socks, indoors. Weather forecasts, just like pandemic models of probability, are dependent on data, and as the data changes, so does probability. So if it rains early, my laundry is unaffected. If the rain comes late, I’ll get in another real walk. The forecast may not be as neat and certain as we would like, but it is useful in knowing how to time things; like bringing in the clothes off the line. And other much more complex events, too.

Forty days. How biblical. Forty days in the desert. Forty days of rain.

I set out for the Metà on Corso mid-afternoon – sunny and warm. By the time I reached the end of the street, it was obvious that an afternoon walk offers infinitely more pleasure than one in the dark. My late-night skulks are usually accompanied by a puritanical attitude; this is exercise, not pleasure, walk quickly, walk hard, the stones are black, so is my coat, so is the sky (even so, now and then I catch a glimpse of the moon). By contrast, my trip to the store was so inviting I kept going past where I usually turn, right into Piazza Vivaria. It was a daring incursion into foreign territory.

I passed Ubaldini, the housewares store. Their door was open, but the lights were out. Federica was inside. So was Katrin, the marvelous physiotherapist. They were just hanging out.

“You’re open?”

“No. Only in the morning.”

“It’s afternoon.”

“I know, so we’re not open. Only the door is open. Don’t ask me for anything. We are only open mornings. I guess because the virus is a late riser.”

I meandered more, and eventually convinced myself to shop groceries. The blue-eyed checker was the only fellow in the store. I asked him how he was.

“Normal, you know. After six weeks, none of this seems strange anymore.”

“How much longer do you think this will last?”

“Well, they say May 3, but some shops are already opening. Not restaurants and bars…”

And we said more or less simultaneously, “…of course it’s a little difficult eating and drinking while wearing a mask.”

“Eh,” he concluded.

As I was checking out, Gabriele came in.

“You got a haircut!”

“All of it. Right down to the bone.”

“Where?”

“At home, where else, eh?”

After taking my purchases back to the house to run under hot water and soap, I went back out for Metà on Via Signorelli. I crossed paths with Corrado, one of the partners, on the way.

“Free for the day, and tomorrow! I don’t know if I can handle the time off!”

I saw him at the store a few minutes later, shopping for himself. Some of that free time will be spent cooking.

Between getting bread and juice, I passed condiments, and there was a normal size bottle of soy sauce. Kikkoman, no less! I got two.

There were people I know on the street. This morning I had fretted that having spoken so little Italian for a week that I would sputter helplessly all afternoon, but the joy of seeing friends overcame all that. There was the moment at Metà Corso when I was told how much I owe (€20.71) and I could not make sense of “71” despite repeated attempts, so short changed him by fifty centessimi (he took it anyway, I’ll explain next time) but otherwise the only really awkward moment came when I had trouble switching to English when I met a fellow expat. 

On my next pass home, I ran into Renzo.

“Pizza tonight.”

“Pizza! Oh, boy!”

“You don’t like it? Maybe you can give it to someone.”

I normally avoid expressing opinions about pizza, especially to expats who are far more particular about what constitutes good pizza than most Italians I know. But I believe my fixation with pizza as the ultimate indication that we are teasing the edges of normality lies in the fact that my last meal out was at Al Cordone where I had perhaps the most delicious pizza of my life, or at least a serious contender. The crust was thin and crispy, and stayed crispy through to the end. The toppings (for a caprese, that is, mozzarella, fresh tomato, arugula – because basil was not yet in season) were luscious. And they always pre-slice it for me so I don’t spend the whole meal sawing ineptly away only to take so long cutting that the pizza is stone cold halfway through. Upon exiting the pizzeria that evening, I swore to myself I’d be back once a week for their excellent product. That was forty-three days ago.

As I was coming down just now, Patrizia was on the balcony and repeated the promise of pizza.

“What flavors this week?”

“Mozzarella. Zucchini. Maybe a potato pizza. And I think I’ll do a pizza bianca, you know, plain with just rosemary.”

On the forty-first day He came out of the desert. On the forty-first day, there was land. At the end of the fortieth day, there is pizza. Close enough. Works for me. 

Thanks to Erika Bizzarri for the photo; neighbors on Piazza Ranieri.

I listened to a conversation Krista Tippett had with Ellen Davis today that was recorded in 2010. The phrase that stood out was Ms. Davis saying “…and that slows us down, and in our times, anything to slow us down must be viewed as a good thing.” The quote is a little loose because I don’t want to listen to the whole episode again right away, but it is in essence correct.

Were she speaking today, she may have changed a word so as not to imply that the virus is a good thing, but it spoke volumes to me about the lockdown.

I sit in the middle of my circus minimus on a fresh spring evening while typing this. Somewhere there is the persistent pounding of a hammer, this in a town where little besides furniture and doors is made of wood. Any piece of stone hammered like that would be dust by now. This is not the first day I’ve heard this, and I don’t remember when the first day was, but it sparks my curiosity rather furiously. The hammerer just dropped what from this distance sounded like a wood plank. The mystery grows. Now the hammer strokes are short and leaden. Now a little desperate, and as if the hammerer were pounding away at the plank – no nails.

Renzo stepped into the yard on a soup delivery yesterday, or perhaps the day before. He looked at my weedy garden and gave it a thumbs up. I had a quip in English jump to the front of my tongue, but nothing in Italian. Then he touched a particularly hearty weed and suggested it would best be eliminated. I saw then his kindness in wanting to point out the worst of the weeds without insulting my gardener’s skills.

“I just am not up to it, these days. I want to weed, but I can’t.”

“You’re not feeling well?”

“The lack of real walking is taking its toll.”

And we discussed a few options that might solve that.

Today, at times I felt like I could weed, and considered giving the beds a good soak so that weeding later in the day or tomorrow would be more efficacious, but checked the forecast first. Rain Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, then warm weather. Perfect. I’ll wait until Wednesday. Maybe by then I’ll have conquered a few inscrutables and will feel up to the job.

The hammering ceased, a long silence while I discoursed on weeds, then a flurry of pounding something harder than before, another rest and two staccato notes to finish. No pictures jump to mind.

The swifts have returned. I heard reports from the medieval quarter that they were darting through the skies, but just now sighted some for myself. Only a few swoop and glide within my sight; the avant guard I suppose. Just as I wrote that, as if to prove me wrong, dozens of them flew directly overhead. I love watching them, their joyous arcs and dives. They are also cleaners of the air. Any creature that eats mosquitoes is my friend.

Five bangs of the hammer, the last one of a different tone from the rest.

All the blossoms have fallen off the apricot. Now there are only tender leaves. That transformation seemed sudden. I know for a fact that day before yesterday there were still blossoms here and there because Renzo pointed them out, visions of apricots dancing before his eyes. Even with weeds, the garden looks happier with the tree starting to provide shade. And the clematis is showing buds. They will open into lush lavender colored flowers, clumps of them, cascades. 

Suddenly, the delegation of swifts is back and in force. 

The hammer started pounding again and has paused. I imagine someone stepping back from their work, satisfaction rising into their heart for a job well done. 

Dusk is here. I sit wrapped in my cardigan sweater, deep blue, cozy, having walked in circles for hours (me, not the sweater), talked to a friend on the phone, read, and listened to Mancinelli, all the while entertaining thoughts of zucchini stew over brown rice. I’m wishing I had soy sauce. When I asked Gabriele where to find soy sauce last November, he laughed. Two weeks later it appeared on their shelves. I bought one of the tiny bottles and used it up so quickly I forgot to get another.

Tomorrow is Saturday. Shopping day. What fun that will be! People, voices, texture under foot.

The sun sets, the light changes. I remember what a sunset looks like from the cliff. I also have photos. Even if it lacks drama, a sunset is also lovely from my yard.

I’ve been listening to a lot of public radio. I won’t listen to commercial radio because I cannot tolerate the vocal deliveries used for ads. I don’t listen to Italian radio – even though it would probably be a good idea – because… well, I want more content that I can understand on one pass. My threshold for virus-related news is growing thin, so I search for as yet unheard episodes of On Being, This American Life, Selected Shorts. As I walk in circles for at least two hours a day, I’m beginning to dip into archived episodes, when I can find them.

Once in awhile, I walk to music I happen to have on my phone, CD’s ripped to iTunes back when you could do that. Luigi Mancinelli, an Orvieto lad whose name the theatre bears, was a conductor of some fame in his day. He also composed a few things, and I have his Venetian Scenes, a suite that sounded thin and vague to me at first, but one I have come to love.

So anyway, radio. There are many splendid voices on radio, and a great variety. The perfect ironic whine of David Sederis, Marco Werman’s elegant rhythms, the humorous snark of Brooke Gladstone. There’s a traffic reporter for KQED in San Francisco, Joe McConnell, who has such gracefully balanced chest and head tones that I could listen all day to which interchanges are blocked because of a three-car collision. There is the slappy, snappy, midwestern ramble of Ira Glass. I love them all.

However. There is a style of speaking now fashionable on the airwaves that reminds me of a Pilates instructor. It’s pitched and modulated to rise above exercise music, and has a galloping rhythm to it, as if the speaker were tumbling down stairs. Sentences spurt, phrases end sporadically, and I, as a listener, feel as if words are being hurled at me like bean bags in a random game of catch. This has become a standard form of delivery on public radio, as if everyone is from Los Angeles. Possibly they are. I grew up in the Bay Area, so if you seem to detect a bias against Southern California culture, you’re right.

Before I spent weeks at a time in Italy, I assumed that vocal characteristics were like facial features, simply a part of who a person is. As a college-level acting teacher, I was hyper-aware of the tinny qualities American students brought to their voices, something that seemed to disappear after the age of thirty. I thought that was a physical progression, that they grew out of it, but because those tonalities are limiting for an actor (and don’t carry well on stage) I at least suggested to students techniques for relaxing and stabilizing the voice. It was usually an uphill battle.

Still, it seemed to me that Italian voices were different. I’d catch the differences, try to analyze them, but eventually decide they were products of my own romanticization of the culture. Then one evening after I moved here, I was out for a walk (not in circles – think of that!) and two men were a short distance behind me, talking. They had beautiful, resonant voices, full bass tones with lilting descants lending a delightful humanity to the flow. They were moving faster than I, so eventually overtook me – and were, at most, sixteen years old.

So voices are learned.

Listening to Selected Shorts today I kept remembering Isaiah Sheffer, who was until his death in 2012, the host and sometimes a special reader for that show. Hearing him speak was like listening to a Bach cello suite. The woman I just heard as host, today, is certainly intelligent, asked good questions in the author’s interview, and has a solid command of language, but was totally Pilates. And I hear those same vocal characteristics everywhere. I used to accept them as being “real”, refreshingly not-radio standard. Since those two young men passed me on that evening walk, I can’t do that anymore. Maybe a steady diet of perfect modulation is boring after awhile, but at least it sounds professional. Like a choice was made as to how to speak for a medium that is all about speech. The fellow being interviewed lifted the ends of sentences like a question? Many times in a row? And while their conversation was interesting and informative, when I found out they were both at least twenty years out of high school, I was a little surprised.

I am, I admit, being a snob. 

I have heard that Italians are given significant training at school in rhetoric and public address. The results are mixed, to be sure. I’ll go to a concert with uncomfortable chairs, and squirm through a series of speeches that precede the music that seems to last longer than the performance. But I am amazed at how open, confident, and in command of the language most of the speakers are. And the voices are often magnificent.

Excuse me if I have obsessed, but hearing a voice in a natural setting, broadcast only by the speaker’s breath, would be transportive, right now. Even a Pilates instructor from San Fernando Valley would sound glorious – in person. Or maybe I’ll overcome my prejudices in a Mancinelli moment. It, like, totally could happen?

Yes, you’re right, the photo has nothing to do with the subject of this post. But can you find the cat?

In January, 1996, I auditioned a play I was directing for the still quite young Metropolitan Playhouse of New York. When the creative team went into the theatre the weather was chill, skies were clear, and there was some snow in the forecast. When we came out four hours later, there was two feet of fluffy white spread out across the city, and it was still falling. The weekend that followed was among the most memorable I’ve spent.

All but essential traffic was banned. New Yorkers were cross country skiing up and down the avenues and were walking right down the middle of the streets. Central Park was filled with people until the wee hours, building snowmen, sledding on the hills, tramping the meadows in snow shoes. Everyone I came in contact with was smiling, said hello, enthused about the utter transformation the City had so suddenly undergone.

The overriding factor for us all was the stunning absence of cars. Oh, they were still there, but buried under several feet of snow, and even were they to be dug out, they weren’t allowed to go anywhere. The cityscape was for people, first of all and rightly so. New York is one of the great walking cities of the world. That weekend it felt like we’d finally gotten it right.

Sunday came. An idea swept through town like a wind. This is great! Why don’t we just close Manhattan to traffic every Sunday? Or at least Midtown. In the moment, it seemed so possible.

Then the snow melted, traffic congestion returned, and we settled down with our memories of the quiet, happy city we had just relinquished, as if nothing had happened, to the automobile. But no one I know ever stopped talking about that glimpse of city life that reflected the nearly eighty-percent of residents who do not own a motor vehicle. I doubt that the conversation was limited to me and my circle of friends.

Surely it wasn’t, because year by year more parts of the city are closed to traffic and made pleasant for pedestrians. If the city of snow was an inspiration on any level, development of the vision took awhile to gestate, but it has clearly taken hold. And while I doubt there is any way to definitively trace this evolution in city planning to that snowstorm of 1996, I have no doubt that it had an effect.

There are stories now abounding about how heavily polluted air in cities across the world has become clean after only a few weeks suspension of human activity; about how wildlife is showing up in places where it has not been seen in years. I’m eager to hear more about this. I want to remember. And I want these phenomena to be a compelling subject of conversation for the next several decades. The Earth can heal if we stop wounding it. Humanity can organize to meet a threat if we can overcome, or even just suspend, our addictive distractions. We are living through a period that shows our virtues and faults in high relief.

I want to remember.

And I want the conversation that follows to be artistic, academic, and philosophical as well as scientific and political. In fact, on a certain level, I want this conversation about what we experienced to dominate our all our discourse for the next quarter of a century, at least. We need to do it. The problems we face are vast, difficult, and unprecedented, but so is the current crisis. An extended conversation about what we remember of it will fuel insight, connect dots, make the possible concrete.

By “conversation” I don’t mean that those New Yorkers who were part of the magical snowbound weekend did nothing but yammer on for twenty years about skiers on Amsterdam Avenue. But those memories informed how many of us, if not most of us, viewed the City from that weekend on. And sufficient numbers later found ourselves in positions to do something about making that vision real, that the snowy weekend did have its impact.

That’s what I want to have happen to our view of the planet and the crisis it faces; that notions are fundamentally altered by these several months we’re living through. We don’t need to have ready solutions for everything (though we may, in fact, already have them), but we do need to go forth from this spring awakening with a memory of more than the horrifying statistics, ill-informed political posturing, and woeful lack of pizza. This is a major public health emergency, that much is obvious. It is also a major universal health opportunity. Let’s allow that opening to flourish well beyond the emergency, and let’s help assure it does by chronicling our experiences, whatever they are, in whatever way we can.

So we remember.

These pages are my two cents. Got change?

Every two weeks, I change sheets. On weeks off, I wash towels. I have each event entered into my calendar so I don’t forget which is due, when, because often Wednesday comes around and I can’t believe only two weeks have passed since the last iteration of this domestic ceremony. I jumped ahead by a day on the sheets, this week. I’ll launder them overnight because tomorrow promises to be a good day for hanging wash in the yard to dry. (In cold weather, sheets festoon railings and racks indoors.)

I look forward to changing sheets exactly as much as I would wrestling an alligator. Or to put it another way, I’ve never wrestled an alligator, but imagine that I would view it at about the same level of enjoyment as changing sheets. I’ve analyzed it, and believe my attitude derives from the fact that the room is small, everything that has to be tucked at the foot of the bed is either way too long or too short, and those facts together conspire to cause me to trip on disheveled bedding on every circuit. Plus, to get the corners of the bottom sheet to fit snugly requires lifting the corresponding corner of the mattress and hoisting it onto my bent knee, not a terribly difficult maneuver, but annoying enough to bolster the alligator metaphor. 

The reward for all of this comes at midnight when I slide between air-dried sheets. The crispness of the fabric is a delight. Tomorrow’s batch of sun-dried sheets will be even better. The crispness is of a quality all its own when sheets have been set outdoors on the line.

The experience takes me back to childhood in an instant; to before I went off to college, when my mother would enlist my summer mornings to pin up laundry on the rotating clothesline in the extreme back of our back yard. During the school year she would mysteriously shift laundry day to Saturdays, and all credit to her, I never figured it out until I came home after my first year at the University of Arizona to find the clothesline apparatus dismantled and a brand new electric drier on the back porch. I loved hanging laundry. I guess that wasn’t a genetically inherited trait.

Today, while putting the clean bedclothes in place, I could not believe that it had been two weeks since I and the alligator had engaged. It seemed like the day before yesterday. How can a stretch of the sameness-of-days make an event seem more recent than it is? I would think that a day of such distinction would stand alone, remote as a holy mountain on a vast plain. But no, sheet-changing days pile up like books on a shelf during a mild earthquake.

The same temporal distortion may explain why I lose track of my last shopping day. My mind captures the textured bits and squeezes them all together against the blandness of the days between. Is this how factory workers gauge time? My professional schedule was always variable, even random, from month to month. Perhaps my confusion is that of a fortunate few, of one who has never been subjected to years without significant variation of task.

One thing I can usually keep track of is soup. If not the day each was made, I can describe the order of types, and details about the making. Whenever it was I last shopped, I recall standing at the fruttavendola’s door and authoritatively listing product, size, and number as she collected the items with her gloved hand newly sanitized by alcohol gel. What it all added up to was a mystery at the time. I’ve become used to making soup from what I happen to have on hand, I guess, and am quickly set in my ways.

Today, I began a chunky potato soup and ended up with a red bell pepper purée, more elegantly styled as a peperone vellutata in Italian. It’s devilishly good. After a late lunch I texted Renzo an offer of it for supper. He replied that Patrizia was making a vegetable minestrone. He’d be over within the hour for an exchange.

I love to cook, but grow a bit bored cooking for myself. It may be pure ego, or maybe it’s just a natural human need to share in our innate enjoyment of creation, but having someone else to revel in the mysteries of flavor and texture and nourishment makes a dish come alive. This morning’s soup tasted good when I had it for lunch. After I’d provided a container to my neighbors for supper, I snacked at the stove by dipping bread into the pot, and the flavor had bloomed spectacularly. Some of that is the natural ripening of soup, but I have a feeling that anticipating that friends would, in several hours, discover similar flavors at their own table as I was savoring over the pot, had a hand in improving its flavor, too. The wonders of the unseen.

Therefore, for your gustatory delight… Peperone Vellutata

• two large russet potatoes
• two medium large yellow onions
• one large red bell pepper
• six or eight leaves of fresh sage
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 liter vegetable broth
• 1 cube vegetable bouillon
• 100 ml heavy cream
• ¾ cup parmesano regiano, grated 
• fresh ground pepper

1. halve then rough slice the onions
2. place onions in half the oil, heated, stir
3. pour remaining oil over onions, stir, cover and heat 10-15 minutes over a low flame, stirring occasionally
4. wash and cube the potatoes
5. wash and rough slice the pepper
6. once the onions are soft, add potato, pepper, sage, broth, and bouillon – simmer for 20 minutes, covered
7. once potatoes and peppers are easily pierced with a fork, blend thoroughly using a stick blender
8. blend in the grated cheese
9. stir in the cream
10. pepper to taste and stir
11. let sit off flame for at least 10 minutes
12. serve warm (not hot)

Today is Pasquetta. This is traditionally a day, weather permitting, for picnics, or for dining at a friend’s country place under their pergola. At the very least, it is a day for eating out.

Oh, well.

My good friend Maria Gagliano and I say hello via WhatsApp chat almost every morning.

“Happy Pasquetta, Maria!”

“Likewise. The Pasquetta when everyone stayed home.”

Oh, well.

The weather was not perfect – a little overcast by mid-afternoon – but I celebrated by hanging laundry on the clothesline for the first time this year, and by sending a pot of tomato/rice soup over to Renzo and Patrizia. They thanked me like they had done nothing to deserve such kindness. Our bowls of gratitude seem to be overflowing in good form; plenty of noisy joy in this part of town.

Their daughter, Beatrice (who has a double doctorate, one from Melbourne, Australia) translated yesterday’s post for her parents. That made me happy. They went on Facebook and replied, liked, and exchanged niceties with anyone who referenced them personally. Our early balcony chat was about how much fun it was for them to connect with my friends and family half a world away. 

This is great, folks. Thank you for enabling that. It’s stuff like this we can spend our lockdown time and energy fostering. We can do more than simply “get through it.” We can come out the other end with honor for those who served, sadness for those we lost, and with glorious examples of how wonderful people can be to one another to remember in the future.

That will also help us “get through it.”

In the spirit of Pasquetta – to set a different tone – I invite you to share with us your stories of recent kindness, gratitude, and joy. If you read this on Facebook, comment. If not, email me privately, and I’ll post your comments for you. Write JOY in the subject line if you me send an email. (If you don’t have my address, send good thoughts.)

Now go have a virtual picnic, y’all!

A message arrived last night from Renzo.

“I’m making egg tagliatelle with an asparagus sauce for Easter lunch, and there will be some for you. Ok?”

I didn’t read it until this morning, so I wrote back, first thing.

“Okay! That will be a real Easter lunch! Thank you so much.”

My day had a center to it, thanks again to my wonderful neighbors. 

I went about my morning chores, meditated, walked the circus minimus, called my dear friend Joan in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania.

“Time to hang up,” she said. The connection wasn’t great, but I could have kept talking.

Turns out, her timing was perfect. I went upstairs to put my phone under charge (it would surely be regarded as a vintage model, and its battery is slowing down), and as I was doing that I heard my name. Renzo had let himself in through the gate, and was already coming out of the lower door of the house (observant of distancing) by the time I was out on the landing. He carried a tray.

“I brought you lunch,” and he gestured inside towards the table. “Buona Pasqua.”

He retreated towards the gate so I could get a peek. The table was laid with a healthy portion of pasta, what looked like breaded chicken, a sour-cherry crostata, a few cookies of various kinds, and even a shard of a chocolate egg!

“Buona Pasqua!” echoed a voice from above. Patrizia had come out onto the balcony.

“Oh, guys, this is so wonderful! A real Easter dinner. I can’t tell you how special this is!”

They both chuckled.

“I want to take of picture of the two of you together, and the only place we can do that is on your balcony, so… can we?” I didn’t say, your fans are dying to know what you look like, but I could have.

Renzo, while replacing the key, nodded and waved his hand over his shoulder. Patrizia beamed.

“This is all homemade, even the tagliatelle?”

“Renzo’s pasta.” I wasn’t sure if that meant other things were her creation, or if Renzo was responsible for everything, and I didn’t have a chance to find out because he returned upstairs in record time. A photo was taken, and everyone went inside for Easter lunch.

The tagliatelle was the most delicate, elegant, and delicious I’ve ever had. The chicken was likewise good. And what I sampled of the pastry was the same wonderful product I am privileged to expect from my neighbors’ kitchen. I went to text them. A message was waiting.

“I forgot to tell you to put a spritz of lemon juice on the meat.”

I wrote back what I just told you, acknowledging that a bit of lemon would have improved the chicken, but it was nevertheless excellent.”

“Not chicken, lamb! The traditional meat for Pasqua.”

“Of course! It’s been years since I’ve had lamb, and never breaded like this, or so delicate,” and I thanked them again.

After lunch, I walked in circles while listening to a conversation between Krista Tippett and Brother David Steindl-Rast. They talked about gratitude. That gratitude leads to joy, if you let it. Brother David compared it to the bowl of a fountain; it is silent until the bowl begins to overflow, then the water makes a joyful noise as it cascades into the fountain’s next level. And that, in wealthy, consumer societies, the joyful cascade is often not permitted to happen. It gets advertised out of existence. He said that gratitude fills the bowl, but instead of joyfully overflowing, we make the bowl larger – we need a more recent model, the next cool thing, more of that, I want something else. And as long as that’s the case, we never experience the joy that naturally follows gratitude.

When I wrote back to thank Renzo and Patrizia again, at message’s end, I said, “Beyond everything, thank you for your friendship.” 

And the reply – “We are also very happy for the friendship,” and the bowl of gratitude, and my eyes, overflowed in plenty.

What the miracle of Easter teaches me is that resurrections happen every day — I only need be quiet enough to notice. And when I do, a joyful noise will always follow.

Happy Easter, everyone!

It was almost 16:00 when it dawned on me that even the supermarkets would be closed tomorrow and Monday, and that if I needed anything, I’d better get it right away.

It had not been an easy day to that point. I’d kept my schedule, but only after a restless night with what seemed like a lot of gaps in my sleep (though some of those I think I dreamt). Meditation didn’t turn the day around as it did yesterday, and at the end, it turned into a rather long nap. I’ve been uncomfortable in my computer chair all day, so didn’t work on the play. I did walk a fair amount in the courtyard, a kind of therapy that delivered good results while I was in motion, but didn’t sustain. I started a soup, a good one as it turns out, but not particularly inspired.

But when I realized it was now or never for the weekend, that overcame the blahs, and before I knew it I was on the street and headed toward Piazza Cahen for the edicola at the bottom on the hill. I have a CVC digital thermometer that needed a battery, and you never know when a working thermometer might be a good idea – especially these days.

It happens that the edicola is across from Antonny and Romina’s. I knew that because the last time I saw him and his kids it was because I’d stopped to read headlines, but I didn’t put it together today, so when I approached, and Romina was on their balcony with little Linda, hanging a comforter out to air, I was pleasantly surprised.

“Buona sera, Romina!”

“Ciao, David! Buona Pasqua!” Linda smiled and waved three times.

I also knew tomorrow was Easter, of course, but forgot that meant you can wish anyone a good holiday or a good Easter whether or not you know them. The shape of the next two hours was set in that moment. Antonny came out. We talked a bit. Linda smiled and waved another four or five times. I was delighted to return each one.

I pass the woman who owns the edicola often, and we always exchange greetings even though I only make it in to buy something once a year or so. She is a purple person. I’ve noticed for a long time that people who love purple love it to a degree that others with other color preferences don’t share. She always dresses in purple, usually to the exclusion of any other color. Nevertheless, she provided the not-purple battery, wrapped it in its not-purple receipt so I’d be less likely to lose it, and we wished each other a happy holiday – Easter, which always includes a little purple. 

A few more waves with Linda, and I continued up to Metà.

The guys there all call me caro or carissimo, that is, dear or dearest, not at all unusual in Italian. I’ve always loved that, but it took me three years to comfortably return the favor. I asked Gabriele if they would indeed be closed tomorrow and Monday.

“Oh, yes, both days, caro.”

“Good! You guys deserve some time off after this past month.”

“Grazie, carissimo! Tanti auguri per la Pasqua.”

“Altrettanto, caro,” I managed to say without the least embarrassment.

“How is everything going with you,” he asked.

“I’m not complaining, but for instance it is so good to hear another voice!” And that was profoundly true, at that moment hearing him say anything, even stuff on the phone I didn’t understand, was like listening to an angel. Of course he’s been working twelve hours a day for a month and conversing most of the time, so there was a moment of incomprehension before he nodded in agreement. I choked up and chose to leave it at that.

I returned home, unloaded, and went back to the Via Signorelli store for stuff Corso doesn’t stock, then to the bank, the housewares store, and indulged in a couple of unnecessary jogs just because I was out. I wished well to people I don’t know, to people I sort of know, to people I know but not that well. We were all of us with masks concealing our main features, but recognition managed to happen just the same.

I’ve related this sort of thing before, but it continues to surprise and delight me. Today, it was a kind of resurrection – perfectly appropriate.

This morning I received word that a friend and colleague in New York has been taken by the virus. He is the first of people I know, and I hope he is the only. He left a legacy of more than fifty years of unselfish dedication to a school he loved, and gently touched the lives of thousands, always for the better. We shared a first name and a last initial. He would have loved it here.

Buona Pasqua, Zip.