Time Out

by Sheila Connolly

Sharon's post earlier this week put my recent adventures abroad in a new perspective for me.

View from Capitignano in Tuscany

The backstory:  I just returned from a two-week trip to Italy, planned by two of my college classmates and announced at our reunion last June.  Space was limited to forty (no spouses or partners), and since there were more people who wanted to go than spaces, the organizers held a lottery, and I was one of the lucky winners.  I put my name in the day it was originally announced, without even thinking about it.  I'd been to Italy once before, decades ago, and had never planned to go back, but when the gods drop a gift in your lap, you don't quibble about the wrapping paper.

It was fabulous, and I'm sure I'll be telling you more in coming days, but I was struck by how well the trip fulfilled many of Sharon's suggestions.

--we spent ten days without seeing a television set or a newspaper.  I assume someone would have told us if something major had blown up (especially if it interfered with air travel), but otherwise we were cut off from current events.  Ah, peace.

--there was no time to read.  Of course we all brought books (both print and digital), and we had access to plenty more, but somehow reading never fit into the schedule.  We were busy from dawn to after the late dinners, and then we fell into bed and slept. No need to lull ourselves to sleep with words—by ten most nights we had to fight to keep our eyes open.

--no marketing.  Ah, bliss. (Well, I might have to admit that the group I was with was the perfect demographic target for my kind of book, but I didn't run around flogging the books to anyone who would listen.) I had a book published on June 4th, Monument to the Dead, and the extent of my promotion for that was a newsletter to my fewer than 1,000 subscribers.  Period.  No social networks, no guest blogs.  I could get email on my phone, but no way was I going to try to respond to blogs and posts on a two-inch screen.  It was a clean break.

--Exercise.  Sound of hysterical laughter.  In northern Italy, it seems that everything is on a hill.  Uphill.  We walked, and walked, and walked.  Through towns clinging to mountainsides, through fields with Roman ruins, into the center of a mountain of marble in Carrara.  In Florence we saw at least three museums (all in different parts of the city, of course), and then took off on our own to shop or, in my case, to hunt down the perfect gelato.  We did not sit in a café and admire the passing crowd; we were the passing crowd.

--Eating?  Amazing.  And healthy.  Lots of very fresh tomatoes, and olive oil from trees only feet from where we ate.  Incredible seafood, from the sea we could see as we sat at our tables.  Wine from grapes right down the hill. The aforesaid gelato—I tried nine flavors, sometimes two in a day.  But in small, intense portions.

--No planning.  One of the most appealing things about this whole idea was that I didn't have to organize it, past getting myself to Italy on time.  I didn't have to hunt down places to stay, rent a car, make decisions about which museums or towns to see, or where and when to eat.  It was a great relief to let someone else worry about all that stuff.

--One thing Sharon didn't mention:  Talking.  We writers are often solitary

Monterosso in Liguria--the view
from my patio

people, and there are days when my main companions are my cats (yes, I talk to them).  On this trip I was thrown into a group of forty interesting, accomplished women, some of whom I knew to some degree, others I recalled only by name.  Many I hadn't seen for forty years, so there was a lot of catching up to do.  And we did, at meals, in vans as we sped (as much as you can speed on Italian mountain roads with scary hairpin turns) from one incredible site to the next. Smaller subgroups shifted and mingled.  We sang, we toasted our tireless coordinators, both of whom deserve a medal for putting all this together.

--And one more thing:  the views.  We humans seem to define certain views as beautiful, and I'll agree—misty mountains receding into the distance, terra-cotta colored towns scattered in lush greenery, peeks of the sea.  All lovely.  Does it change your perspective to be surrounded by beauty like this? 

Did I write anything?  Nope, nothing beyond a brief email to family.  Did I miss it?  Not really, because it was important to be in the moment. Will I be using the experience in a book?  Of course.

I think it fits Sharon's definition of a break.  Is my brain detoxified?  I think so, if I can get past the jetlag.  What day is this?

In my Grandmother's Footsteps

by Sheila Connolly

When you read this, I will be in Italy, if all goes as planned.  And for once, I didn't have to do the planning—this is a trip for a group of us who were in the same college class, proposed a year ago at one of those milestone reunions.  Two classmates who have access to villas and vineyards and good things like that are doing all the organizing; all I have to do is show up.  No spouses or significant others allowed.  I feel like I'm walking into a Lifetime network movie.

I always knew I wanted to go to Europe, thanks mainly to my grandmother.  As I've mentioned before, she was orphaned young, and anything she achieved in life she did through her own efforts.  She ended up in upper management at Lipton Tea Company in New York in the 1950s, which was a pretty significant achievement in those days.

She was "encouraged" to retire in 1958, when she wasn't even sixty.  Her long-time mentor was retiring, and a new administration was coming in, so she had little choice.  But the company gave her a nice parting gift:  a luxury trip to Europe.  This was defined as a working trip:  she had been instrumental in assembling a collection of tea-related antique silver items for the Lipton Collection, and she was asked to take it on the road to the capitals of Europe that summer. 

And they put her up in style!  She took the Queen Elizabeth (the first) one way, the Queen Mary the other.  She had a driver in each country.  All her rooms were booked for her, all meetings scheduled, all appointments made. All she had to do was be there and be charming, which she did well.

And of course she sent postcards to my mother, my sister and me.  We dutifully kept them and put them all in an album, which I still have, so I can reconstruct the trip.  If we assembled it right, she started in London (not surprising, since most of the silver pieces were English in origin), and the first postcards are of the guards at Buckingham Palace, in late June of 1958.  Then Holland (yes, colored postcards of cute little Dutch girls wearing wooden clogs), Lake Lucerne, and on into Italy—Florence, Rome, Venice (lots of postcards from Venice—she must have liked it!), and finally Paris, by way of the chateaux of the Loire Valley.  The trip took a month.

Then she joined us at our rented house on the Jersey shore, laden with souvenirs—I still have some of the little soaps and tiny perfume bottles she brought me, tucked in a trunk in the attic.

Her trip had a tremendous impact on me.  I knew early that I wanted to follow in her footsteps (only more than just once!), and ended up majoring in art history so I'd have a professional excuse to do it.  It was fun traveling as a starving student back in those days, when you could get a prix-fixe three-course meal for less than five dollars, and a hotel room in the country might cost you ten.  Renting a car (a Deux Chevaux which sounded like a lawn mower and had about as much power) was the big splurge, but it enabled me to see out-of-the-way places and small towns, and actually talk to people.  So I visited all the sites (except for Holland) that matched the long-ago postcards from my grandmother, and much more.  And later I took my mother and my daughter (together) on the same trip through France.

For a while life got in the way, so there was a decade or more without any grand trips, but now I'm making up for lost time.  And forty years after my first (and only) visit to Florence, I'm going back, to visit the Duomo and the Uffizi and Michelangelo's David—and the extraordinary gelato! My first visit was with a college classmate, so it's fitting that the next one should be as well, except that this time there will be thirty of us, and drivers.  And the better part of a lifetime of accumulated wisdom so I can appreciate what I only glanced at before.

Languages

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I realized that could say "I don't know" in five languages. English obviously, but also French (je ne sais pas), German (Ich weiß nicht), Spanish (no sé), and Irish (níl a fhios agam). It's good to know that I can be ignorant in sooo many different countries!

I started thinking about languages because I'm going to Italy in June, with a group of college classmates.  I have been to Italy before—exactly once, in 1972.  I didn't speak Italian then, and I don't speak it now.

In 1972 I was traveling with a friend, who had a peculiar independent streak and decided to take off on her own, leaving me sitting in the middle of the Roman Forum.  I could have panicked, stranded in a place where I didn't know the language.  I didn't. I looked around:  it was a beautiful day, I was in an incredible place, I had the map (she didn't!) and money in my pocket.  What did I have to complain about?  So I had no way of communicating with most of the people around me—what did it matter?  In the end, it didn't. It was surprisingly liberating to find out that I could cope just fine.

I know probably as much Italian as anyone who goes to Italian restaurants and watches Italian movies, or movies set in Italy.  I'm good at obscure food terms.  I can say useful things like "where is the church?" or "how much does that cost?" but that's about the end of it.

I've always been good at languages (thanks, I think, to a Swiss nanny I can't even remember, who spoke only French to me), and I can understand languages better than I can speak them, which means I nod a lot during a conversation and say "yes" in whichever language is appropriate (oui/ja/si/tá).  But I have also acquired some handy phrase books, which I plan to read…sometime.  Maybe on the plane on the way over.

My husband has been to Italy since I have, maybe ten years ago (it was a business conference in Florence).  He passed on to me a handy Berlitz phrase book, which I've been reading on and off lately.  Its original publication date was 1970, and our copy was its 19th printing, in 1995.  I have a feeling that not much was altered from the original 1970 version, and I'd guess that one drew heavily on earlier ones.  It's a weird snapshop into a different world of travel.

For example, early on it tells you how to call for a porter for your luggage when you land.  Facchino!  Wait, are there still porters in airports? Will they come if you call? Not long after there is a handy phrase if you want to ask, "could you drive more slowly?"  (Think any self-respecting Italian taxi-driver is going to agree to that?) On page 27, we are instructed how to ask for a babysitter/secretary/typewriter. There is an entire section on Difficulties, in case any number of things in your hotel room don't work. Okay, that could be useful.

If you can find your way to a restaurant, the book tells you how to say, "I'd like some more," followed by "may I have some more, please?" and not much further down the page, "where are the toilets?" (A phrase that remains useful and appears every few pages in the book!)

I find the section called Relaxing particularly charming.  "Is there a sound and light show on somewhere?" If you're seeking a nightclub, you can ask "is there a floor show?" and "is evening dress necessary?" (Who are these people??)

And then there's the Dating section, which I present to you in the order given:

Do you mind if I smoke?

Would you like a cigarette?

Do you have a light, please?

Why are you laughing?

Is my Italian that bad?

Of course, there is no information on what to say if you've made it past smoking and introductions and laughing and would like to negotiate more amorous pursuits, although there is a line for "I'm on the pill" in the medical section.  Still, one might want to bookmark the page with "call the police!" or maybe just "Stop!"

This is all pure entertainment for me, because the trip is being organized by someone else, starting with picking us all up at the airport, through where we're staying (one villa, one vineyard), driving us around, feeding us, obtaining tickets for museums and so on.  I don't think I've ever been on a trip where someone else did all the planning, but I intend to wallow in it, while taking pretty pictures of Florence and the Ligurian coast.  And eating a lot—at least know what to order.

Ma io non parlo italiano.