#77: California, Italy, California
July – December 2012
Transition

July

Greetings from Pacific Grove, where I’ve just enjoyed a fulfilling July, first with Russell and later on my own. How wonderful to have time with RBS. After two-and-a-half months apart, while he was here and I was in Italy, it was truly magical to be back together again, just running errands, let alone having lots of fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiko#/media/

I think what I most enjoyed doing together was attending the Obon Festival (a day to express gratitude to ancestors) at the local Japanese Buddhist temple. We went mid-morning and stayed til mid-afternoon, not only sampling the delicious delicacies, but also taking in the exhibits of ikebana and bonsai. What patience must be required to create these deceptively simple flower arrangements and to miniaturize trees that want to grow big. Surely a form of meditation and a witness to faith. I was also moved by the traditional Taiko drumming which opened the event, something we had first witnessed at the East-West Center in Hawaii and so the sense of a circle coming closed.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of being here is that I’ve had no headaches! If you can recall the reasoning from months ago when we first visited PG, we decided to move here because I’ve developed an extreme sensitivity to the sun which causes me to have often-debilitating migraines. This foggy, cloudy climate has given me the first respite in long years. How wonderful not to have to overcome what has often been a daily challenge.

Since Russell’s return to Italy, I’ve taken a couple nice road trips — along the Carmel Valley, up and over the coastal range into the Salinas Valley; and down Route 1 to Big Sur, where I stopped for lunch at the state park Lodge, first built by the CCC in the thirties and still doing a fine job. I’ve also been touring local open houses on the weekends in an effort to educate myself about neighborhoods and property values.

Some of the things I like about being back in the States:

• the daily experience of a multi-ethnic society, whether it be food choices or the variety of faces walking down the streets;
• the ease of seeing English-language movies (despite the increased security after the Colorado massacre being exceedingly evident);
• cheap gas (I know it may not seem like that to you, but to one who normally pays around $10 a gallon in Italy, believe me, this is cheap gas!);
• the relative lack of effort in shopping and running errands (America may offer the worst of materialism/consumerism, but the other side of that coin is how easy it is to find what you’re looking for, not always the case in many other — even developed — countries).

Something not to like: I’ve been diagnosed with cataracts in both eyes. This came about in the most humdrum way. I dropped my glasses on concrete, scratching both lenses. So I thought I’d just go to Lenscrafters and get a new pair. But when their optometrist learned that I hadn’t had an exam in two years, she suggested a checkup. She discovered that she could only correct my vision to 20/40 — good enough to legally drive in CA, but indicative of something else wrong. So I came back the next day, had my eyes dilated, submitted to various snazzy new technologies to check for all sorts of things, ending with the good news that I don’t have macular degeneration or a detached retina, but I do have stage-3-on-a-range-of-4 cataracts. I’ll be seeing a specialist on the 14th, after which I’ll know more about when the two surgeries — separate for each eye — will be performed. In the meantime, kindly light a candle.

August

Best friend Bettina has just retired and came to visit so we could celebrate. We certainly did our part: bird/sea lion/seal-watching at Pt. Lobos, driving along the Big Sur coast with lunch at the Lodge, touring Pacific Grove and Carmel, spending hours at the world-class Monterey Bay Aquarium, whale-watching from a boat in Monterey Bay (during which yours truly spent all her time watching her breakfast go over the rear-deck rail). I’ve learned my lesson: the next time friends want to go whale-watching (and it’s a wonderful thing to do here), I’ll drive them to the dock, wave bye-bye and keep my wonky inner ear, low blood pressure and low blood sugar on land — that combo of weaknesses did me in for the rest of the day.

I’ve been trying to educate myself on early California history. As an Easterner, I was woefully ignorant, but after reading some books from the library (including one that was a collection of original sources), retracing part of the 1000-mile journey of Juan Battista de Anza, visiting several missions and adobes, as well as the Monterey site where Father Serra celebrated mass under a giant tree, I feel like I’m starting to get better informed. It’s a fascinating period of history and one which seems to be mainly glossed over in school. Local kids tell me they learned 1) the Spanish were here; 2) Father Serra founded a string of missions from San Diego to San Francisco; 3) then the Americans took Alta California by force and the important era began. 300 years of consequential history ignored, both the good and the bad. One intriguing parallel: the Alta Californians were trying to obtain equivalent freedoms from Spain at the same time the East Coast colonists were rebelling against England.

Lots of local events to attend: Auto Week with antique cars of all stripes for auction and a parade — not my style, but still interesting. Monterey County Fair with exhibitions of all sorts of fowl, sheep, goats, rabbits, cattle and horses, as well as country arts from wool-spinning to quilting, canning and baking — a real taste of the rural life which dominates this county in terms of acreage, if not population.

I also saw the eye specialist, who confirmed that I have cataracts in both eyes and need to have them taken care of, preferably before the end of the year. 

I’m in the home stretch to return to Italy, traveling via Hilton Head to see Barbara, my one remaining (step)sister after too long a separation, especially after we both lost Mary Anne earlier in the year. I’ll arrive in Rome on the 23rd, where RBS will meet me. It’s been a long time apart, but the cool and cloudy weather here has done me no end of good this summer. I can only imagine how I’d have been done in by migraines amid the high heat and bright sun of central Italy.

Now some Italian news from RBS:

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Umbria continued to suffer from an unprecedented heat wave for the duration of August. 99F highs every day without relief. Fall rains traditionally begin about 15 August. This year, not a drop fell. The ground literally cracked open, olives tumbled and grapes shriveled, as local farmers tried to estimate their losses.

Handyman Ascenzo and I used weed-whackers to trim the field grasses around our house, and neighbor Paolo came with tractor to mow the olive grove. We were all concerned about brush-fire danger, given the rash of fires in our immediate neighborhood ever since I returned from the States in mid-July.

On a brighter note, August is also a season of sagas, local festivals and street feasts, with each village featuring a different specialty — wild boar, gnocchi (potato dumplings), hare, beer, wine, etc. Farmers donate the produce, local families cook and serve meals, and the proceeds go to support community activities throughout the year. Often, as in Amelia, these festivals feature medieval pageants, with costumed parades, jousting and other recreation which Nancy and I have written about in past years. With a variety of friends, I drove to a number of these, enjoying the local color, tastes and cooling breezes at day’s end.

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September

Back home again after many adventures. I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but when I flew through Amsterdam en route to the States I almost missed my connection because I couldn’t read the signs. (Due to undetected cataracts, as later discovered). When I got to the gate for my transatlantic flight, it was closed. Luckily, the pilot hadn’t pushed back from the jetway, so they opened the gate, and I got on the plane.

In order to avoid a repetition of this problem, I requested passenger assistance for the return flights, and boy, did I get it! In the Atlanta airport, a hulking college football player met my plane with a wheelchair and pushed me to a) the ladies room, b) the KLM desk to fix a problem with my ticket, c) baggage claim and d) the shuttle bus for my overnight hotel. In Amsterdam, I was whisked through the airport in an electric cart, going through Security in the flight crew lane and down corridors unknown to normal passengers. I couldn’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t just keep the cataracts and have passenger assistance for the rest of my life…

In between all this service, I had three lovely days in Hilton Head with Barb. She thoughtfully invited her two daughters, whom I’d never met, so we had a wonderful family reunion, including Barb’s husband, Neal. It may seem strange to you that I hadn’t met Barb’s daughters, but I never had a sibling until Dad married Barb’s mother late in life. By then Barb’s daughters were grown, spread around the U.S., with families of their own, and we were living overseas. What a lot of talk and laughter we five shared. And good food too, concentrating on the local cuisine of the South Carolina coast.

I should have mentioned attending the Italian Festa in the Presidio Plaza of Monterey before I left California. An enormous “do” with live music all day long, a variety of food booths, plus T-shirts and other memorabilia for sale. When the Italian opera singer finished his rendition of “O Sole Mio,” there wasn’t a dry eye on the plaza, my own included. 

So here I am, back in Italy, with a full slate of things to do. After the record-breaking long, hot summer, the garden was nearly half destroyed, despite Russell’s and Ascenzo’s best efforts to keep everything alive. We three spent a lot of time pruning dead branches and leaves, uprooting dead plants and putting in new ones, filling empty pots with fresh flowers. The place isn’t back to what it was last spring, but it sure looks a lot better now.

The other big activity since I’ve been home is making an effort to see old friends, so in the space of one week, we entertained four families to a variety of meals, including nine members of the extended Gallinella/Gubiotti family at Sunday lunch.

Now we’re busy with ritting up the house, going into cupboards, closets and drawers to seek out things not used but still useful and hauling them off for charity distribution. Along the way, we’re finding lots of stuff that wouldn’t be useful to anyone and wondering why we held onto it, so the trash can is getting lots of donations too. All this is very freeing. Nice to be relieved of the burden of things (at least some of them).

[There’s no newsy October letter, as November’s epistle will explain.]

November

Greetings from Pacific Grove, where we’ve spent the last week taking care of a ton of business during the initial settling-in period.

But first, let’s return to October and our decision to move before our house sold. A lot of issues went into the decision: my worsening photophobia, the need to schedule my two cataract operations as soon as possible (with Medicare not covering costs outside the USA), the Italian government’s resolution to tax foreign residents on their worldwide wealth in addition to income, the lack of any interest in the house for months. All this made us wonder, “What are we waiting for?” So we stopped waiting and started taking action.

The funny thing is that, once we decided to move, we started getting accelerating interest from potential buyers. I’ll let Russell tell those tales, since he mostly took charge of that interaction, while I focused on the actual move.

Moving, they say, is second only to losing a spouse in terms of stress. If so, it must be even more so when the move is international. However, we were quite lucky in that we had a moving company with decades of experience, packing us up and moving us out. That having been said, the experience was not without stress — deciding what to ship and what to sell or give away, running into unexpected obstacles, having to pack our bags before the movers came to make sure everything would fit, organizing and publicizing a moving sale in a country where such a thing is virtually unheard of.

We gave away a lot of our stuff. We sold a lot of our stuff, including all the beds, the living room sofa, the china closet, Russell’s desk, various tables, chairs, kitchen utensils and tableware, lamps of all types. Happily, a number of people were outfitting bed-and-breakfast facilities, and they were pleased to find things they needed.

[A Recollection: I still retain the vision of our colonial wood-and-rattan couch, all eight feet of it, with scrolled armrests, trussed precariously on the roof of a very small car rolling up the driveway, as I watched with the memory of buying it decades before during our honeymoon in Mexico.]

In addition, despite all predictions from Italian friends, scores of locals came and bought bits and pieces and carted them away.  I do think one secret is not to price items to get rich but so people are happy to carry away the things you don’t want. It’s a win-win.

The biggest problem was when the shippers refused to take my Dad’s swords, citing difficulties with Security after 9/11. I had not only his officer’s sword (and how long ago was it that officers were awarded swords?) but also the swords given to him by the Japanese family that “adopted” him when he was responsible, after WWII, for destroying the chemical warfare materials amassed by the Japanese military. We contacted international couriers like DHS, but they also refused to handle the swords. Luckily, the Congressman for the Monterey area is an old friend from our Sacramento days (our first year of marriage for those who weren’t part of our lives then), and he had a staffer contact Homeland Security for assurance that there would be no objection to DHS bringing the swords in. Meanwhile, Russell was able to find out, with the help of his AmEx travel agent, that our carrier, KLM, would take the swords if they were properly packed and checked as accompanied baggage. It took quite a bit of searching to find a bag that would do the trick, but I managed it, packing the swords with heavy-duty foam and our sweatsuits, then having them shrink-wrapped at the airport for extra protection before we boarded the plane.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the move was what to do with our beloved pets. Although Aika wasn’t really our dog, she had entered our hearts after all the months of sharing our lives. Luckily, she could return to the kennel, but it was a hard day when we had to say goodbye. Even harder was putting our cats to sleep. After sixteen-plus years on earth, both were in failing health, with Mama Cat in especially poor condition. The vet said they’d never survive a long flight, nor was it likely they’d adjust to a new family for the few months of life left to them. And what family would take two elderly, dying cats? So putting them to sleep was the only option, but it was dreadful holding each one and saying goodbye as the injections entered their bloodstreams.

All these experiences took a lot of physical and psychic energy. When our departure date of November sixth finally arrived, we left with mixed feelings — relief that all the pre-departure stress was over, concern about what awaited us as we made our way to live in California, and a deep sadness that we were leaving all that Amelia and our house had meant during 15 years of sharing our lives with friends and neighbors who’d become like family.

Now the view from Russell:

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The sudden flurry of potential buyers for our Italian property has come as a welcome surprise. We had discovered an international realty website, and Nancy prepared a program of slides and information which we put online. The European and Italian economies are in much worse shape than America’s, but northern Europeans in particular seem to have decided this is an optimal period for acquiring Mediterranean property at bargain discounts. In any event, we’ve had three sets of serious shoppers in as many weeks. Our favorite was David Suchet, the respected British actor who played Hercule Poirot on TV for 20+ years. We had an exchange of charming phone conversations and emails, but unfortunately, the sale of a U.K. property he was counting on to finance this purchase fell through at the last moment. We would have been delighted to have him “inherit” our beloved Montecampano house. At this writing a family of Swedes based in Rome is visiting our property for the second time, so our fingers are crossed as the website does its thing (some of the photos attached so you can get an idea of how our online pitch looks).