the duomo, firenze ksully
I can sympathize with Franz Schubert and his Unfinished Symphony. We get busy, too overwhelmed to go back and make sense of previous unfinished masterpieces. I’m sure Franz had a lot going on. You can’t finish everything.
I wrote Travels With Mary almost thirty years ago, after a trip to Italy with my friend. I sent the manuscript out a few times, even got some interest, along with some suggestions. I wasn’t in the mood for suggestions, so I moved along to other, more pressing projects, like THE OAK AND THE REED, my mini opera based on Aesop’s fable, or UNASSISTED LIVING, a screenplay about an old lady whose kids are trying to put the old bird in a home so they can have her house. Someday, I’ll share a bit of those, but for today, we’ll stick with Mary.
excerpts from TRAVELS WITH MARY
For their thirtieth wedding anniversary, Mary’s husband gave her a trip for two to Italy. For her and a girlfriend. This may seem strange. It was.
There were several more faithful friends in line for this trip, but my name eventually rose to the top of her list. I was free as a bird, spending the bulk of my days writing chamber music in my attic. My operetta about the lonely MAN WITH THE POLKADOT TIE could wait.
I met Mary in New Haven, over forty years ago, on the first day of freshman year at a small Catholic liberal arts college for girls. We bonded immediately, both being from large self-deprecating Irish families. After a year and a half of study, pizza parties and numerous practical jokes, usually involving the institutional washroom (a fixture in every Catholic school building), I decided to throw my life into high gear, complete my degree early, and be the first of my classmates to get a wedding ring.
Mary and the rest of the gang stayed behind and did the late sixties the way it should have been done: communal living, SDS rallies, back-packing through Europe. I skipped all that and raced along to suburbia and babies. While I was becoming a pillar of my little Republican seaside community, Mary and the others were throwing away their lives, sharing apartments and outfits, vacationing in sleepy Martha’s Vineyard cottages, drinking Margueritas, smoking dope, and generally figuring out the meaning of life. Oh, there was the occasional gathering of our old gang, but they would reminisce and laugh about the good times I had missed and they didn’t seem all that interested about the time my husband and I accidentally flushed a cloth diaper down the toilet.
That's always so depressing whenever I hear that everybody did something back then, because I missed out. Like I told you, I was too busy doing things that had nothing to do with the 60's. I skipped all that and did something more out of the 40's or 50's. It's depressing but I guess it isn't really my fault. I was surrounded by white gloves and linen suits, Sunday roasts and Memorial Day cookouts. I learned what makes life happy--what men were supposed to be like, what women were supposed to do. The 60's just slid by me.
Eventually Mary and the others married, had children, belonged to professional organizations and paid their bills on time. By then I was on to bigger and better things. Let me say here that you can’t be a dabbler in high-rolling real estate investment. You’re either in or out. We were definitely in. Until we were out. We didn’t actually decide that. The banks decided that for us.
When you lose all your money, you become dangerous. In 1968 I had no interest in Janice Joplin, but in 1991, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose had a ring of truth, and I launched a freedom campaign that included leaving my husband, becoming a singer-songwriter and living on lentils.
getting to know the statue in front of the Uffizi
I moved to the city and spent the next ten years singing, acting, painting, smoking dope a few times, going out on occasional weird dates and generally trying to live a missed adolescence under the watchful eyes of my four children.
A few years ago, I ended up in a town not far from Mary. I invited her over for a cup of tea and we compared notes on where our Irish self-deprecation had gotten us. Mary had married up, become a well-dressed, well-respected, not to mention incredibly wealthy grown-up, her dreams of living in a cottage by the sea, with a comfy sweater and a pot-bellied stove, dashed forever. I had moved through a brief period of wealth right along to the cottage part.
Mary was brought up in a very modest home. Wealth had not been her birthright. It was a surprise gift and she had somehow survived the last thirty years intact. She was kind and generous, with a lovely Irish twinkle in her eye; flickering, but it was still there! And she was very happy to get a break from her noblesse oblige existence. I decided to show her a bit of the paupers’ life she had missed.
We caught up, reminisced, and eventually signed up for the same adult ed Italian class. There, we learned helpful phrases like My, this pottery is lovely! Is there a discount on the cheese? and are these bananas ripe? We participated in various lively class exercises, including Italian re-enactments of LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD. I say ‘we’, but in reality, Mary was not big on participating in class. She had majored in history and her true love was cooking, so she preferred just to breathe the Italian air and listen while I practiced. I looked forward to a day when I would travel to Italy and say, I am the big bad wolf in a teeming marketplace in the center of Florence, or What big eyes you have! to the monks at Sant’Antimo. Mary couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into the tagliatelle covered with parmeggiano reggiano, drizzled with the first pressings of the local olive oil.
We also learned how to say, ‘I like’. Mi piace. The Italian language is the most musical, lyrical language of them all. I love the sound of it, but I especially love the frequent sound of ci, pronounced ch. I melt. I feel so Italian. Mi piace. (me piA-cheh) My eyes widen. My lips protrude. I gesture with my hands. The trick with ‘I like’ in Italian (and many romance languages) is that the construction has to be thought of in reverse. If you want to say I like wine, you have to think ‘wine is pleasing to me.’ Mi piace il vino. If you like the flowers? Plural noun, plural verb. Mi piaciono i fiori. No problem.
When Mary asked if I’d like to go to Italy with her I exclaimed in my best Italian, Are these bananas ripe?
Our trip began in Milan at the crack of dawn; ten days to experience our chosen slice of Italy. We pack our sneakers.
Mary always flies first class. First class isn’t really like flying. It’s more like recovering from childbirth in the old days; when you got to stay in the hospital for days with nurses and attendants constantly checking to see if you were comfortable, if you needed anything. First class is just the same, except for the baby part…. and the food. It was exquisite – linen, silverware, choice of entrées, choice of wines, cappucino, chocolate, cognac. We ate, we drank, we reclined our seats almost horizontal. I flipped up my sleeping mask, turned to Mary and ventured, Maybe we should just fly the whole time?
Sunday, October 28
We arrive in Florence at about noon.
Buon Giorno! I say to our cabbie, just waiting for my chance to interject ‘this pasta is delicious!’ So, you can imagine how thrilled I was at my good fortune when he says, Mi piace molto la letteratura Americana. I poke Mary in the ribs. He likes American Lit! Two entry points here – Red Riding Hood and my expertise with mi piace. The cabbie continues: Mi piaciono Ernest Hemingway e John Steinbeck. There it is, Mary! The plural! But Hemingway and Steinbeck? I had been assigned THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA in the seventh grade, but the only thing I read was James Thurber’s short story THE NIGHT THE BED FELL. I loved it, especially the part about the guy who was so petrified about the possibility of suffocating during the night, he slept with his room full of camphor fumes. Camphor, camphor, how would you say camphor? Screw it, I thought, go with Steinbeck.
the streets of Florence ksully.
Mi piace molto Steinbeck, I say, using my best Italian hands. Scrive bene. He writes well. What an idiotic thing to say. I look at Mary for approval. She smiles patiently. The car is squirting through the streets in fits and starts, slowing down to squeeze past a truck, darting ahead at a break in the steady flow of pedestrians and scooters brushing past on either side. I am thankful I’m not driving because I’m so busy thinking up my next sentence. Where did you study? Nope, don’t know the past tense. Why are you...? but should I use the familiar tu? no, of course not...what is the formal you? same as the third person? Look out for that Vespa!!! Look out! Imperative! All I can remember is the old vocative from Latin class. Et tu, Brute!
We cross the Arno. Mary points out the Ponte Vecchio, its arches and happy jumble of tiled-roofs reflecting so vividly in the sun-drenched river, it’s hard to know where stone ends and water begins. The Ponte Vecchio is, in fact, the oldest of Florence’s six bridges, built in Roman times. It was swept away by a great flood in 1333 and rebuilt twelve years later with porticos that housed various shops and enterprises. These were rented out and eventually sold to individual owners in the 15th century. In 1565 Cosimo de Medici had architect Giorgio Vasari build an enclosed corridor above the shops so he could get from his house (Palazzo Pitti) to work (Palazzo Vecchio) without getting wet. While de Medici strolled above, individual shop owners remodeled, upgrading their little chunk of real estate with additions, balconies, terraces -- whatever they could engineer that wouldn’t tumble into the river. The Ponte Vecchio retains that hodge-podge feel to this day, with the original butcher and baker tenants replaced by jewelers and souvenir hawkers.
the duomo in the rain ksully
We take a left along the river, then right on the Via de Guicciardini. The cabbie pulls up to the curb a few doors short of the grand Pitti Palace and says, This is it. Hotel La Scaletta. At least I think that’s what he says. I don’t know, maybe he left us here because he doesn’t really like John Steinbeck.
We walk through the archway, into a private alley, looking for some indication of a hotel. I’m about to tell Mary that I’m sorry, I know I should have read The Old Man and The Sea, when she calls out from deep in the alley, Hotel La Scaletta! Here!
out the window of the hotel Azzi, ksully
I enter the cave. My eyes haven’t adjusted, so I feel my way along the granite walls to the small archway in the back. Mary leads the way, pulling her suitcase behind her. I feel like Theseus and just as I am wondering if I should leave a trail of string to find our way back, the narrow passageway opens up into a five-story stairwell with a wrought iron cage in the middle. The Minotaur, Mary! We found it!
Mary ignores me and reads the sign. Acensore. This elevator is out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Stop, Mary, don’t go in there! You’ll be decapitated! is what I want to say, but I’m afraid she will begin to think I was a bad choice for a travel partner, so instead I utter a controlled cry. An elevator!
Tirare reads the little sign on the outside set of double doors. We try pushing. Must be pull. The outer doors reveal another set of doors labeled Spingere. OK, I say to myself, remember this. Tirare, spingere. Next semester I can embellish my Little Red Riding Hood essay. Capuchetto Rosso pulls the blankets off and pushes the wolf out of the bed.
We wedge ourselves into the elevator box. It is just big enough to hold the two of us, hands by our sides, and our suitcases stacked one on top of the other. Mary, spingere over closer to me, I say. I can’t shut the door. We’re in. Now what? We’re going to be decapitated! We turn as a unit, in small shuffling steps, like Pantelone, the rich and greedy Venetian merchant of Commedia dell’arte, whose stock character always walks with very small, infantile steps. We crane around, looking for the elevator button, wondering if this really is an elevator. Our eyes wander past the 240 kg sign to a bank of black buttons. Aha! I say, Here it is, Maria! Ecco, Maria!
I push what looks like the start button and the mechanism lets out a heart-stopping BANG!!!! The elevator lurches upwards. Mary and I look at each other with eyes more whites than irises, both wondering how to convert kilograms to pounds. They’ll have to search through the pockets on our mangled bodies to find our passports. The elevator cage is open wrought iron all the way up. We chug slowly up through the stairwell. The sign at the bottom of the stairs warned there were 95 steps to the top. That wouldn’t have been so bad. We could have made it.
We stop with a gentle plom at the top. The doors are not flush with the landing. We’re trapped between floors! We’ll never get out!! I shuffle around, looking desperately for solutions, emergency buttons, crowbars. Mary points towards the door behind me. Yes, of course, Mary, I was just testing you.
Stooped and haggard, we make our way down an ornate hallway to the front desk, where we are greeted by Silvia, the Italian Goddess stationed there.
She is beautiful, charming, and most important, she speaks slowly. She hands us the keys and points in the direction of the hallway. We clatter down a little set of stairs, (lots of stairs in La Scaletta. Makes sense, scaletta means little staircase) along a worn out parochial school kind of hallway, with hearts sinking and feet dragging, then open the door to Room Number 20.
Our little room has French (Italian) doors and a wrought iron balcony that overlooks the hillside of the spectacular Boboli Gardens. The towering umbrella pines show off for us in the late afternoon sun, in just the same way they must have in 1550 to convince Eleanora di Toledo and her husband Cosimo I de Medici to buy the place and fix it up. Mary and I look at each other, protrude our lips, gesture with our hands, and say Mi piace molto!
Refraining from complaining about the elevator so Mary doesn’t regret you as a travel partner is HILARIOUS! The whole thing is wonderful!
Great story. Pairing a calm person and a panicky one makes for comedy gold. But why can’t I imagine you as a 1950s-style housewife?