the perfect metaphor for this story – to reveal
Here’s a little story about revelations. Everyone’s lives have them, be they large or small.
On a daily basis, I find myself in wonder at the pervasiveness of posts on my social media featuring snippets of life in my favorite outposts “on the continent”. In the early morning, I’m greeted by chefs and celebrators in Paris, Provence, Florence, Rome, Milan, Sardinia, Sicily, Tremezzo, Positano, Taormina and on. I say to myself, “wow, my favorite places have certainly become extremely popular in today’s travel and cultural media and as travel destinations with lots of other people like me”. Then, I chuckle to myself and shake my head a bit as I realize I’ve set those pages up to feed me in that exact way as, by my own hand, I have expanded my range of likes and follows to directly reflect my own obsessions……..
A lot of kids today have, at their fingertips, the invitation to spend a semester abroad while pursuing their undergrad degrees. Some choose from the more classical and nearby venues of Europe. Some go farther afield, like to Australia or New Zealand, China or Vietnam. My college experience couldn’t have differed more. I spent those years, as a matter of necessity, racing from one job to another and commuting to classes in a nearby outpost. No idyllic campuses, no dorm room gossip sessions, no sorority rushing, homecoming games or storied celebrity on-campus sitings or bottle-tables at downtown clubs. The diligence required to keep track of my own daily schedule enveloped me. As a Finance major in the mid-70s, I kept a journal of stock movements, pencilled-in daily, on the pages of a classic black and white cord-tied composition book and worried about getting to graduation. No lap top, no cell phone, no home printer. I had no sense that I had missed something.
More than a decade later, with very few preconceived notions, I flew over the ocean for the first time. And, again a few years later, with two small children in tow. We strolled to the Tower, the V&A and the major sites of London. Then, we sped under the Channel to Paris, where I spent most of my time in a hotel bed, overlooking the Seine with a bad throat infection while the kids and my husband toured central Paris and went on the ferris wheel. I was fairly intrigued but mostly in need of antibiotics.
Then, a few years later, there was that fateful first visit to Rome. For the first time I could feel the early rumblings and stirrings of a bonafide identity crisis, and an attachment began to form.
As I stood atop the Spanish Steps and gazed below, a feeling of familiarity and homeyness began to blanket me although I could not identify from whence it came. I gazed upon Rome as I had never gazed upon any place before. Unlike my normal pensiveness and wariness for something new and foreign, for the first time, in a more substantive way, the concept of a larger world out there unveiled itself to me, a world more fascinating and enthralling; and, a world beyond my own dot on a map in north central NJ could ever provide began to take its shape. Somehow, the oddity of this didn’t bother me. The only thing I can liken it to is, that moment that a thoroughbred horse who has been held tightly at the gate by the reigns, when assaulted by the buzzer and the intense rush of adrenaline is suddenly free to GO!
At this time, a fissure began to occur, perhaps in my psyche and my sense of belonging, but most certainly and blatantly in my visual world. I turned my head askance, not in a pejorative way, and looked over my shoulder, back across the ocean, not unlovingly certainly, but more in a comparative way. Somehow, as I gazed upon the old, I began to realize how new and perhaps slightly more diluted America perhaps felt, if only by virtue of its own age and time-lined persona, in ways I didn’t want to admit to myself but needed to examine. The tiniest sense of conflict began to emerge in my thoughts and emotions and yearnings. Could it be that I felt more at home and invigorated here? Could I stop this if indeed I wanted to? Did I want to? One of those existential moments occurred, forming the question, was I one of those people one hears about who is born on the wrong spot on a timeline? Or, more seemingly, was I just awakening to an orientation, a fascination, with another time and place which needed to be nurtured, fed and quenched? I felt more than slightly unhinged as, at the same time that I needed to attach to these new feelings, I suddenly felt slightly out of time and place with the vibrations of my own home turf. Was it possible to become a European? Ooooh……….
Suddenly, as if a light bulb had gone off, all of the events, places and stories I’d tried to cram into my head, uninvited and as a chore rather than a rapture in my school years, began to form a resonation of place and time. They popped up off the pages like a set of stand-up paper dolls and began to come alive. Who exactly was Michelangelo, Da Vinci, who designed and built the Duomo in Milan and, more critically, how? The wonder ignited slowly, but, once it began it couldn’t be stopped.
Rome felt to me like home, even in that short week. Walking down the Spanish Steps alone, while my daughter and husband napped in the hot afternoons, I sought out the vendor at the end of the Via Condotti who sold fresh peaches and almonds in a tiny brown paper bag. I eyed the chestnut vendor at night with envy as he ignited a glee in me I could not deny. Somehow, I felt a kinship with him as if he had become my neighbor. There emerged a warmth and a soulful tugging at the back of my throat like no other place I’d ever visited. “Go home” became a phrase wrought with confusion.
Milan, Venice and Florence with the kids followed after Christin’s college graduation. Memories and images too long to ramble on with here (but you can read them in my other posts). Time to go home? Um, confusion and tugging. It felt entirely wrong to leave every single one of these places. Hot? Yes. Sticky? Yes. Tired? No. Homesick? Definitely, no. Only a hunger for more of this serene feeling and curiosity. Questions began to emerge in my mind, and happily so, as if someone had just turned on the light in a dark room that had been so for decades. Wait, who built those Duomos, carved those statues, painted those murals, pieced those mosaics and how? I longed to reside in the hollows of Venice and dine on fish for the rest of my days and nights. My eyes bobbed up and down, along with the rhythm of a resting gondola.
The rest of this story is an unanticipated wonder and serendipitously so. As Ryan progressed through his own college experience he began plans for a semester abroad in London. I was the likely candidate to deliver him. Initially thought of as yet another “chore” of sorts to check off the list, we flew over. Walk, walk, walk. Late January, biting cold, early dusk, but undeniably charming and warm at that.
Hmmm, I must have muttered to myself, still tangentially unaware of a subtle agenda building up on the periphery. Here’s a time and a convenient excuse to become “more familiar” with the continent. Totally unwittingly and perhaps with a tinge of regret now, my husband was the one who suggested we spend a long Easter weekend with Ryan in Paris. I didn’t disagree. Pack it up, go. Cold, biting, grey Paris. Like a warm cashmere blanket, Paris scooped me up and held me in a haze of coddle-dom. I was hooked on the beauty and the glory of it all. I was hooked by the wizardry of Baron Haussman and by the quaintness as I walked behind people stopping on their way home to select a baguette in one shop, a piece of cheese in another and a bottle for the evening aperitif in another. What was routine in Paris was more engaging and intimate than what was mundane at home. I immediately coveted this little routine for myself. I could feel my normal, nagging aversion for noxious weather slip down from my shoulders onto the cobble as if I were stepping out of a wet coat – anxious to say goodbye to something I couldn’t control in the elements and all at once, I freely accepted of them as part of the picture. This was something I could never envision feeling at home. Ohhhhh, I let myself become aware, so, THIS is the place where happiness overtakes the elements…….
The streets clung to me in their immense enchantment as the light faded early and we strode hour after hour in the freezing temps, eyeing fountains and statues. Feelings I had never felt before came up and I let them. My eye scanned for evidence of the profusion of plantings I found so alluringly welcome in the London of January – window boxes and small gardens – the cyclamen and others that surprisingly thrived and called the long-from-close Springtime. The Paris grounds remained barren and hard in their own comforting residence of the dead season. Disappointed though I was, I recognized it for what it was, no forcing of the season in Paris; an acceptance of time and season. Parisians wait for the plantings, but sit, cloaked in woolens, in all the chairs and benches whose sole purpose is for soaking in the rarefied sunshine that came and went on its own terms. Grey? Yes. Cold? Yes. Hauntingly beautiful and addictive as an opioid. Yes. I could feel the earth shifting under my feet but was powerless to stop it. Knowingly, I was irretrievably falling in love with another continent. I felt a tinge of betrayal and let that slip away too.
That week may have been as short as it was crammed with emotive glimpses of something all too powerful and uncappable. And, then came May.
I met Ryan at the Baglioni in Rome. Trepidation did not exist as I stepped aboard the plane alone. George flew over two days later. It was already too late. I’d never be the same. No one could ever save me again from the depth of love and attachment that was forming. When I stepped into the lobby of that hotel and saw my son waiting there, it all felt like magic.
I now began to form an early familiarity with Rome. I knew the basic direction of some major sites. I knew where to cross the Tiber. I knew where to buy shoes.
Just a few short days and we were off to Positano. Our driver, Christiano, picked us up and swirled us around the curves and up and up. He poignantly stopped for us to enjoy a view and get a glimpse from the edge of a pull-over with a tiny fruit stand. It was all part of the plan to trick you into the undeniable and no-turning-back formation of an addiction like no other. Dizzy from the sights and elevation perhaps, I felt myself succumbing. Mine was a secret forming that I couldn’t share with anyone else who I suspected didn’t get it. Others could return home, in person and in heart and soul, and look back and say, “wasn’t that fun?”. I could never. I think it was the man I watched lovingly gardening on his terrace across from our hotel room on a plot of earth that couldn’t have been more than 4′ x 4′. And the garden below at Hotel Palazzo Murat was where I lost it. Here was a place tended with extreme love and a wickedly gifted eye.
these photos don’t do this garden justice
Taormina was next. Sicily as I had never imagined. I just plain never knew. The colors. The sparkle. The words charm and comfortable in cascades of new iterations. It was this year, 2013, with it’s rapid-fire succession of trips in a row, in a short 5 month period, that sealed the deal. Life-um-changing.
Then, return again to Milan, Venice and Florence, with a new stop in Tremezzo. Euphoric.
Odd thoughts began to emerge in me that had not done so previously. Was the Renaissance speaking to me or was it just my own relative ignorance of its scope and depth? Was it my absence of any previous attachment to that time and breadth of artistic and intellectual awakening? That renaissance transformed and became my own.
My own salve when I did return to the states, was to have an entire new appreciation for the city of New York and my luck at living so close to it. I began to explore there like I had never before. The energy there was undeniable if not with the same level of extreme beauty, ripe for visual feasting.
Paris again, alone for a few days while I waited for Christin to arrive from Budapest. I felt like a kid alone in the candy store. I’d never had the luxury of having Paris all to myself, void of anyone else’s influence, comment or agenda. It was a priceless gift. This time it was early July and the temperatures were in the nineties. It took only a few hours for blisters to appear on my feet and yet all I did was return to my room to change my shoes. Where would I begin? End? There is no end.
Last Fall we went to Paris again, then onto Provence and then back to Paris. We were met by both glistening skies and raging thunderstorms. All were met undeterred. While I would surely stay in at home when these storms threatened, that possibility did not enter the picture. Time and yearning to see were of the essence. We went and loved Tourtour and its smaller surrounds, Avignon, Isle sur la Sorgue, Chateauneuf de Pape, Arles, in lightening the likes of which we’d never seen nor felt before as it crashed to the ground, and Aix.
the doors are open
These days, when I awaken, my mind clears around the photo above, taken as we walked from Avenue Bugeaud to Victor Hugo in Paris. This photo for me represents the invitation, the luring, “come live with me”. It is a place for my myriad of possibilities. And so, I must accept that the venues of my dreams and earliest am inklings have shifted off-shore. I am torn with my own homesickness for that window in Paris, and also for the humorous yet skillful folly of the horses in front of the Duomo in Florence, tossing their feedbags up to better serve themselves, and the gazing upon the Colosseum and imagining the chariots. These will feed me like no other. My eye, hand and camera may be drawn to a thousand other pictures in America, but these are not the images that lie within my soul. Soppy? Mais, non. Mais, superbe. Ravissement.
Days now come and go. Like a dry parchment, I will tread until the edges soak up their needed moisture. I hope to finish with this someday and be quenched, but perhaps really, I don’t. How long will it take? I don’t know. But, I am heartened knowing it was meant to be for me, otherwise I would never had been led there by the stars. And so yes, I never had a semester abroad during my own tenure in college. But someone else’s delivered its own gifts to me. And so, I confirm how God works in the most mysterious and glorious of ways and delivers unto you a fateful invitation to cease upon.
this sky is the perfect metaphor for what happened long ago.
Note: for travelogs and photos of individual cities, input city name into the search box; London, Paris, Milan, Florence, Rome, Tremezzo, Positano, Taormina, Tourtour, Arles, Avignon, Chateauneuf de Pape, Isle sur la Sorgue, Aix-en-Provence