Margotlog: Neapolitan Cousin

Margotlog: Neapolitan Cousin

The taxi from the airport was surrounded by boys with rags. Leaning out, the driver shouted imprecations as they swiped the windshield. "Cholera," warned one friend; "pickpockets" warned another: "sling your purse across your body and clutch it like a life preserver." Finally safe, high above the streets, in Naples' only sky-scraper--"grattacielo"--I stared down at the old castle, squatting like an enormous egg on the harbor. What had I done, coming solo to Naples, with only a few years of Italian on my tongue?

Several years before, my soon-to-be-ex and I had met my father at this very hotel, then driven into the mountains. In Pescopagano, where mountains crouched close on their haunches we found an ancient cemetery, but no family graves, only bins of femurs, digits, skulls in the Ossarium, Who could tell which belonged to the great-grandfather Michael, reputed to be a horse thief, who'd died when my grandfather was seventeen? There was no hope of identifying dates and names, but, miracolo, real-life relatives put us up, the portion of the family who'd stayed in this mountain town while others crossed the ocean for the grey-green mountains of Pittsburgh--Gonellas, in particular, one of whom, Maria, married to a well-to-do lawyer, had reclaimed an old tower for modernity.

I had to have more; I had to prove that my life wasn't fractured irrevocably by divorce. Writing to Maria, I learned that her sister Giovanna lived with their mother outside Naples. Giovanna taught middle-school. Would she come into the city to meet me? In Naples everybody lived life in the open. Glancing into a butcher's shop, I saw a lovely woman in deep conversation across the cold case with the butcher. He reached across and gave her cheek a pizzichille, just as my father used to do with me--little pinch kiss. Women walked arm and arm, men hugged and kissed each other on both cheeks. Motorscooters sped by as I hugged the walls.

Giovanna was adorable: small and light, with golden curls above her school-teacher rimless glasses. Where did I want to go, as a tourist? she asked in clearly enunciated, standard Italian. I pointed up up to the rim of the city where the palace/museum of Capodimonte stood. Trip-trip-trip went her little heels as she inquired of bus after bus if they stopped at the museum. Eventually, as the motor strained up the steep hills, the panorama of turquoise bay, and distant islands spread before us. We looked down into apartments where households were making beds, preparing pasta--our vision almost as close as a window-washer's.

The huge red-facade of the Museo di Capodimonte (head of the mountain) fronted a lovely park where we sat to catch our breath. Built by the Spanish-Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, Charles VII as a dwelling for his Farnese mother and her huge art collection, the museum did indeed rival the Vatican's collection with room after room of Titians, Caravaggios, Raphaels and many minor followers. But it was the porcelain collection which sent Giovanna clicking around the gallery, repeating "Beh, Beh, I did not know such excellence existed." I too was intrigued by story-telling scenes of monkey tormenting parrot, or lifelike birds swaying on branches as they pecked at fruit.

By now, Giovanna and I had eased into tentative friendship. I could speak well enough to answer her questions about gli Stati Uniti, and to understand her family stories of Italy. Her father had immigrated to Pittsburgh where he'd been forced to stay by the war, leaving Giovanna, her older sister Maria and their mother Elisa in starving Pescopagano. Eventually they packed the little they had in a neighbor's cart as he traveled down the mountains into Naples to sell the town's two cheeses: Burro, a soft mozzarella with a buttery center, and Cacciacavallo or was it Caciocavallo? This cheese, like two little provolones connected by a cord was thrown over the horse's neck to go out and "bing, bing" shoot, Maria had emphasized. The cavallo clearly meant horse, but was the first part of the word cacio for cheese or caccia for shoot? Maria said shoot.

Naples at the end of the war was swarming with British and American soldiers. For a while Elisa worked in a military hospital, cleaning and making beds, but leaving the two girls locked in a room all day long. This dangerous city was no place for two bambine to wander alone. Soon, she acquired a commission from the hospital to stitch sheets. Her prized possession, a sewing machine, thus allowed the three to take lodging with two other families in a large room; each family group separated by sheets hung on wires.

"Even wars end," said Giovanna. By now we had left the museum, and were walking the Old Quarter of Naples where she showed me the Policlinica where my great-uncle had studied. Its facade lined with beautifully blue accacia trees. "Finally my papa reunites with us," Giovanna said, as we walked a narrow, cobble-stoned street in the old quarter, so narrow it wasn't designated Vico for street, but Vicolo, diminuitive street. Suddenly a roar. A motorscooter shot by. Giovanna let out a cry and clutched her throat. The scooter passenger had torn a gold cross from her neck.

Weeping as we sat for relief in the ancient church of Santa Chiara, Giovanna said over and over, "It was from my father. It was all that remained from him." When her father returned after the war, he could not find work, though he'd been trained as an engineer. Within a few years, he immigrated again, this time to Ethiopia, which had been an Italian colony for a short time. He send money back to Naples, but later died in Ethiopia, never having returned.

As I held her hand and murmured my few words of condolence, "peccato, peccato," too bad, too bad, I felt keenly the irony of this loss, falling on the daughter of Italy rather than on the distant American cousin. With my tourist caution, I'd worn no jewelry; Giovanna, no doubt wanting to dress up for her visitor, had put on a cross which she perhaps always wore. I felt deeply the sadness of separation and war, which had barely touched my immediate family--my father being too near-sighted and flat-footed to be drafted for World War II. And wished intensely I could comfort her for all she and her family had lost.

Margotlog: Traveling Companions

Margotlog: Traveling Companions

Usually I like to arrive solo. Fran, my husband, and I are terrible auto-companions--I clench as he sashays, speeds ahead, breaks for sudden red lights. No wonder I make him nervous. For air travel, we do ok, but usually only once a year do we want to go in the same direction: someplace warm, away from Minnesota's socked-in snow. Otherwise, he hightails it west to the wilds of Las Vegas or California; I fly east, to Italy or maybe Paris, Brussels, Munich.

In my mind's eye spins a distant version of our solar system: the sun blazing against interplanetary dark, and eight (or nine) planets rolling in their orbits around it--product of fifth-grade science when Mrs. Weston, music and science teacher, presented us a replica on wires with an orange for the sun. What these planets couldn't show was their individual tilt. Now, in early morning dark as I write this, I imagine our part of the earth tilted away from the sun in winter gloom, while Buenos Aires offers its southern flank to long summer days. Lucky we spin, I inform myself; otherwise, half the earth would be constantly scorched; the other, perpetually starlit. A shivering proposition.

Rhythmic fluctuation, light-dark, light-dark: implanted in us in the womb. Our cats come alive at night, hunters of small timid creatures of the dark, prey to the cats' superior vision and rampant claws. We are committed to motion from inception. Not gigantic leaps, kangaroo-style; not sudden scurries and bounds like rabbits. But steady pacing back and forth, up and down furrows, following herds and ripening fruit; delivering mail to neighborhoods; stuck in traffic five days a week, still miles from home.

The fluctuation I like best is revisiting critters and places, day in and day out, season upon season, or, with luck, once or twice a year. Tilly the cat curls behind me in the desk chair as I write, her body warm against me, adding a slight purr to the comfort; the backyard bird-feeding extravaganza viewed ten times a day from the big picture window upstairs: there's a flash of red--cardinal in the woeful pine; I count ten squirrels at various seed dumps in the criss-cross of paths we've managed to carve from this exhorbitant snow. More chickadees flit to the one feeder not prey to squirrels--how I love their jaunty speed. Two days ago I returned from an outing to find feathers and dots of blood strewn under the tips of the pine, and the carcass of a pigeon with wings spread, its core torn to bits. Cooper's Hawk: the third pigeon done in this winter. Fran suggests I'm luring the pigeons to their deaths. Possibly. But hawks have to live too and how could they possibly dive for voles through these feet of snow.

When I'm lured back to Italy or Charleston, time after time, it's because I look forward to finding friends there, and the friends are as much places as people. A play of light, heft of air--I'm turning a corner to step into the piazza before Santa Croce in FLorence. Tourists criss-cross, the statue of Dante, head half lowered, holds down the left edge of the church steps. The looming facade lowers to the tiny pinnacle of the Pazzi chapel to the right, this top of its tiny dome the only portion visible beyond the wall--another marvel of the great Florentine architect Brunelleschi.

Standing before Santa Croce I recall a display of photographs taken of the horrific acqua alta, high water of 1966, when the Arno, heaved high by unusual rain, overflowed its banks to the height of many many feet, toppling a Cimabue crucifix and ruining it forever, while the FLorentines heroically rescued countless other object of artistic and religious veneration.
In the middle 60s, I was working at Doubleday as a secretarial assistant to one of the early editors of Anchor Books, Anne Freedgood. She had friends and authors who knew FLorence first hand. I had yet to visit Italy, but the images of this city of art and letters roiled in mud and muck amid international rescue efforts--Jackie Kennedy lent her name, as I remember--became part of my growing library of images that would eventually put me in motion--companions of the mind and heart, urging me forward and back to many returns.

Margotlog: Christmas after Hugo

Margotlog: Christmas after Hugo

Flying into Charleston's airport the December after Hurricane Hugo struck in late September 1989, I stared down at miles of the Francis Marion Forest snapped like matchsticks. My mother had kept up running reports since she drove my father the day before it hit to the motel slightly inland where he had been receiving "adult daycare." Pioneer grit: she thought they could weather the storm at home in Wappoo Heights. Thank heaven, some kindly angel intruded: "Maxine, a category 4 hurricane isn't like a North Dakota blizzard. Your house won't protect you."

Conventional wisdom has it that the best place to weather a huge wind, other than a cyclone cellar, is an interior room, preferably a bathroom. There are no cellars in Charleston: the city is only six feet above sea level. By instinct, my parents' dog Cindy knew to creep into a huge downstairs coat closet as Hugo delivered winds of over 100 miles an hour. Forever after, with the first sound of thunder and lightning, Cindy clicked her way into the back of the closet. Once almost fifteen years later when I was home, the poor pooch trembled and whined in my arms as a rainstorm passed over. By that time, Hugo was, for my mother, a distant memory.

She reveled in disaster: it roused her rather phlegmatic soul to sparkling reports. "We took turns bringing water back from the Piggly Wiggly," she told me, the "we" meaning Diane up the street, and neighbors on either side whom sometimes she muttered against. Not after Hugo: they were united in sustaining each other. Hoards of builders and hurricane "experts" drove up from Florida: she hired some to repair the holes and crushed porches, front and back. My father's favorite backyard tree, a pecan, was split in two; one half crushed the tiny backdoor stoop. A huge live oak toppled over the front porch and damaged a corner. Within days after the storm, the huge tree was being sawed up and carted away.

The other half of the pecan poked a hole in the back bedroom ceiling and water poured over the mattress of my parents' antique sleigh bed. Some of the Florida angels helped her drag it outside into the sun where it eventually dried: it had been specially made for this bed, which had come with the Breckinridge family from Virginia via Minnesota after the Civil War to North Dakota where my grandfather acquired it on one of the depleted farms he bought up "for back taxes" during the Depression.

Often, late December weather in Charleston, is glorious: warmish, clear, crisp and full of slanting sun. Some years when my daughter was little and we came every year for Christmas with G. & G., my father would lift her up to pluck kumquats off his little tree and pop right in her mouth. About the size of an adult thumb, these thin-skinned citrus have a combo taste/texture of grapefruit/orange, plus the sensation of biting into a sweet/sour ladies kid glove. How do I know? Pure fantasy since I've never bitten into a ladies kid glove.

December of 1989, I arrived solo. All utilities had been restored to the neighborhood, the house repaired--well, almost. The mattress put back on my parents' bed. My father's decline was obvious: he was hard to rouse. Getting him out of his chair, which Cindy protected when we weren't nearby, required a combination of urging, tugging, and pushing. Eventually my mother and I loaded him into the back seat and we drove to Folly Island Regional Park for a winter picnic. It was truly beautiful weather: not at all hard to sit outside and eat our sandwiches. Good tonic, I hoped, for all of us. Yet, my father, in his pseudo hunting hat with the flaps over the ears, was hard to disembark from the back seat. My mother's foot flashed: she was kicking him. I was shocked. It happened again after the picnic when we tried to get him to his feet to walk toward the car.

What I saw incensed me, but what did I really know? I slapped on a label I'd heard in the media: "elder abuse." For several years, I'd been urging her to place him in a "home." She knew all too well that once he was gone, he wouldn't last long, and she would have a hole in her life that no Florida builder could repair. We settled for calling the South Carolina Wildlife experts and having them trap several raccoons who were taking up housekeeping in her second floor ceiling. After all, their previous home, a huge sweet gum tree across the driveway, had snapped off during Hugo. The Wildlife guys promised with big grins that they'd release the two huge coons in the forest. Even I had enough sense to suspect the beasts would end up in a stew pot.

Maybe it was my last night at home that we decided to sing Christmas carols. For years, my sister or I had played the piano and my father his violin. This Christmas tradition was one of the family's musical offerings to my father's Italian side, especially to his mother, Grandma Rose whose little hands used to "fly up and down the keys," in his memory. With my sister well launched in an operatic career, it was clear that the musical talent in the family had been passed on. I may have even suggested the entertainment, an attempt to honor the past in the midst of such radical changes. Sitting at the spinet with several Christmas carol books open for selection, I began with "Adestes Fideles" and "O Tannenbaum," in honor of my mother's German/Swedish North Dakota. We probably sang "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," and "Good King Wenceslas," then I turned to the most beloved carol of all, because most reminiscent of the winter scenes she had left behind: "Silent Night." Over the arms of a wing chair, she had opened my father's violin case and flipped back the paisley scarf to reveal the rich red-brown violin. My father, sitting on the sofa, was apparently asleep beside her. As I began "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright," he got to his feet and tottered to the case. My mother was beside him, helping to position the violin under his chin, and place the bow in his right hand. I began again. Creaking and squeaking, his thin melody rose above the piano's chords. He was playing along with me.

That he hadn't known exactly who I was, could not speak except a few erratic words, yet, could stand and play with scarcely any missed notes this beloved tune in honor of his family's most ancient holiday, told me that music lay at the core of who he was. He was honoring my presence, our joint continuing, and welcoming a season of joy and reunion as he said good-bye as best he could. We played the carol through twice. By then he was worn out; my mother relieved him of the violin and helped him back to his place beside her. Four months later when he developed a sore on his heel, she gave up and let him be placed in a nursing home. Every afternoon until he died at the end of July 1990, she visited, wheeling him around the flowers and little trees, planted to replace hurricane-damaged oaks.

He roused himself for me one last time. One early morning in July as I lay on the floor of a Minnesota prairie college dorm doing my exercises, preparing for a day of teaching, he appeared behind my closed lids, a figure in a wheelchair, placed against an aura of brilliant light. The light lit up his white, upstanding, cockscomb of hair. I sensed that he was asking permission to leave. Whether he spoke actual words or I only intuited sounds, I cannot say. But the message was unmistakable: he wanted me to know that he loved me, yet it was time to depart. In those seconds of connection, I accepted his affection and his need to say good-bye. It was no surprise to me that ten days later came a phone call from my mother telling us that he had suffered a massive stroke.

The damage from Hugo has healed: this December from the air, the Francis Marion National Forest looks green and tall. The huge long-leaf pines whose tops were snapped off by Hugo, now tower in my parents' neighborhood as they once did. Some benefactor replaced the ruined oaks in Battery Park with huge implants. It is hard to tell that the city and surrounding islands and towns were ever inundated and ruined. In this quiescent period, shivering in unusual chill, I return to render the only form of account I know how: offering my presence and affection to my parents and to the city who took them as outsiders to its heart and often repaid their homage with unusual kindness.

Margotlog: Accents

Margotlog: Accents

In my interior memory I hear the drawl of leisurely Southern voices. Best spoken by women, black or white, who come to call, but also possible to appreciate from the lips of a gentleman. Where did this languid, inviting speech originate? Recently in Charleston, my mother's neighbors Diane and Clare led me into rendition of our shared past--a tiny portion where their coming to Wappoo Heights overlapped with my parents' living there. "Ed rounded the corner off Folly Road and there, a few houses from the corner, he slowed the car. On a deep wrap-around porch, sat a couple eating their dinner by candle-light. 'Diane,' he told me, 'that is the place for us. They seemed to be enjoying the cool breeze, the candle-light, and whatever they fixed for dinner. Not worried at all about traffic or anyone bothering them.'" My Midwestern mother, with a casualness rare in true-blue Charlestonians, loved "porch picnics," where candlelight soothed, enhanced, offered the possibility of romance. Queen of romantic voyaging, yet with scarcely an ear for foreign languages or accents: all her intelligence in her eyes and orderly brain. She settled my father's estate all by herself when she was 80, and filed her taxes solo, with no help from H & R Block well into her last decade.

Of our family, my sister was the only one who picked up a truly Charlestonian drawl: she had the ear. I remember someone from out of town phoning us up and getting my sister. Later the caller told my mother, "I didn't except to hear a little Southerner on your Yankee telephone." If I'd answered, such a comment wouldn't have arisen.

I'm no expert on accents, but I can detect the New Yorkese from cultivated Brooklyn Heights of a graduate school friend. Add to that Boston or eastern New England speech: friends here in St. Paul retain their muted Rhode Island and New Hampshire twang. Though I can't tell the two state origins apart, I hear the region speaking through them: friendly but with a Robert Frost's well-made wall. Not that Charleston drawls can't also "draw a line." They simply do it with a veil of enchantment which leaves the hearer so appealed to, so cosseted that all differences or hidden agenda are forgotten.

The founder in 1676 of Magnolia Plantation on the Ashley River northwest of Charleston came from Barbados. So did many other early Charleston plantation settlers, both white owners and enslaved black people who were brought with them. Originally from England, the Drayton family speech like so many others must have been affected by the African languages and accents of their servants and field hands, and of course, vice versa. Deep in the large sea islands between Charleston and Savannah, huge plantations often housed an entirely black population. Years ago I tried to study the Gullah dialect which survived there, and listened to recordings of services held in tiny off-the-road churches. Gullah itself to my ear was almost indecipherable. Yet hearing it helped teach me that the rich sounds which emanate from African-American throats are rarely duplicated by whites. I know: any recognition of racial distinction can sound goofy, if not dangerously racist. Yet, what is wrong with considering how eons of living in warmth, sending the voice across acres toward a resounding answer, might shape the way a people create a speech? My sister sends me a digital holiday greeting which includes a lovely rendition of "Silent Night, Holy Night," quintessentially German melody of snow-stilled fields. "Does anyone else associate "Silent Night" with British boy sopranos?" she writes at the end. There's that extraordinarily acute ear of hers: I heard only soprano, neither boy nor British.

When Toni Morrison reads Beloved on books on tape, her story of the black woman who steals herself and her children from Kentucky slavery and crosses the Missouri river into Cincinnati enriches my ear with a deep unmistakable voice. Her story includes a decent slave-holding family who sacrifice to avoid selling these humans they have enslaved. This fiction reminds me of the history I learn when Diane and I tour Magnolia Plantation's house. Owned before the Civil War by a fourth-generation Drayton who served God as an Episcopal minister and as a fellow gardener working with the black people on the plantation, the Magnolia Plantation house was burned just before the war ended. The white family had left for North Carolina. It is possible, suggests the most recent young Drayton in charge, that the black people living there throughout the war set the house ablaze. I think about this while I stand in front of photographs showing a Christmas gathering of blacks and white on the steps of the current plantation house. Yes, a kind of family, but divided by their shared history. Such a division can happen anywhere; but the particular form it has taken in the American South brings that schism intensely alive and public. Accents and voices will always carry different burdens. Yet, Magnolia Plantation today stands as a remarkable effort on the part of its family-run board to make the racially complex history of plantation Carolina available to visitors. The day Diane and I visited, it was too cold to walk through the row of slave cabins and hear the stories their curators could relate. Think how cold it must have been to live there in such weather two centuries ago, I say to myself, not wanting really to feel that hardship.

Margotlog: At the Edge of the Continent

Margotlog: At the Edge of the Continent

At the Holiday Inn Riverview, I look down twelve stories onto a sweep of Ashley River and marsh. Charleston, South Carolina, where I grew up, is chilly this December. My parents, from Pittsburgh (father) and Hankinson, North Dakota (mother), used to complain that damp Southern cold penetrates far worse than dry, Northern cold. As a kid, I pooh-poohed this. Yet, now that I'm edging far beyond that designation, I understand what they mean. Still I love these winter-brown marshes where suddenly, swooping past my view, a small flock of something with curved beaks descends over the river toward the parade grounds of The Citadel. Ibis, the Egyptian dream-god Thoth, arbiter of good and evil.

Millions of ibis were mummified, so says Wikipedia, to honor the god Thoth in ancient Khnum. I remember no ibis in Charleston when I was a girl. But there were pelicans and gulls galore. Now I anxiously scan the marshes for pelicans, the poster bird of the Gulf Spill: a pelican, coated in heavy oil, raising its dripping wings, beak squawking in alarm. Even as I write this, my heart cramps. Then I spy a pelican, flying low as they do, over the water, huge head humped into its body, large bread-basket beak outstretched. And another. I breathe a sigh.

The edges of the continent, of any water-meets-land connection, teams with life. Amphibians, deep-water mammals--in the Ashley River, often dolphins crest above the waves--wading, diving, skimming birds; crustaceans--I identify a small boat loaded with crab crates and followed by an erratic medley of gulls. I am so happy to be home, beside this landscape, wide at the tidal rivers, then dotted with pine and cedar islands and finally fringed with the rich loops of magnolia, live oak, and the tall long-leaf pine that stretch above the rest.

My parents' last home in Wappoo Heights wasn't far from the Holiday Inn Riverview, which is why I choose to stay here. We were outsiders, but that was a human designation. I pride myself on absorbing close to my heart the smell of pluff mud, the sea-scented breeze, the watery light of coastal Carolina. This business about who belongs has agitated our country since its inception; maybe I should say agitated humankind. During the Continental Congress of 1775-6, so I'm reading in David McCullough's masterful story-telling biography of John Adams (2001), long debates agitated the delegates: should the thirteen colonies break with dastardly England and George III who was burning their cities, creating havoc with their shipping, etc. etc.

Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence included a rant against the English king, blaming him for the slave trade which, by 1776, was responsible for a population of 500,000 Africans enslaved in the thirteen colonies, one-fifth of the entire population. This language of Jefferson's was removed by Congress; after all, argued Adams, pre-eminent tactician and goad for independence, New England ships had carried the slaves and made huge profits; Southern plantations owned their very existence to slave labor. One English king could hardly be blamed for such an extensive enterprise.

Perhaps it's easier for outsiders to see what is wrong, though harder to plump the depths of what it means. As a girl, walking to Ashley Hall through a broken-down neighborhood, where a trail of blood dotted the sidewalk, I knew instinctively as an outsider that the black children peering at me from their third-floor porch were poor. I felt a tug of guilt. Their obvious need frightened me. Later, as a teen, I argued mightily against my father's racism. "No black boy is going to knock at our door and want to date me!" I cried. "I don't know any black boys!" I refused to let my father, stewing in his cauldron of hatred and fear, use me as fodder. In fact, Southern white women often led the call for abolishing racism, especially lynching.

But I was not really a Southern white woman. Still, the core of who I am resonates with the Carolina low-country. As racism used to pain me as a girl, what pains me now is the desecration of the beach with enormous MacBeach Houses. Thirty years ago, we could walk the beach at Edisto or Folly Islands and pick up a wealth of shells. Moon snails laid their collars of wet-sand, filled with tiny off-spring, on the December beach. Now with huge houses on stilts just beyond the dunes, sometimes right at the edge of high-tide, not only is the view from across the marsh toward the waves blighted, but shells and moon-snail collars are rare. No doubt pollution for which we're all to blame, is a huge reason for this decline.

Thoth's flocks of ibis know where to congregate: at Magnolia Cemetery where my parents are buried. Pre-Civil War, this lagoon land of grey obolisks, Egyptian temples circa 1890, cunning cradles of marble to lament child deaths--hosts birds galore. It's almost too cold to walk far, but I drive to the tip of Green Isle, locate my parents' gravestone and the magnolia my mother planted to honor my father in 1990 when he died. The tree is now two stories high, I'll be able to tell my sister. Someone has left a stone on the top of their gravestone; I'll add one, in this wonderfully perennial Jewish tradition. And I will catalogue the birds: a black-crowned night heron, a yellow-crowned night heron, a great blue heron, a snowy egret, its fluffy plumage all bedraggled. They crouch at the tidal edge in a bit of sun. As I drive past on my way to the airport, suddenly on the opposite bank of the lagoon, a flurry of white--ibis. They settle near the car. I snap a photo of their awkward orange beaks, a bit like heavy chopsticks. Suddenly a huge winged nemesis flares across our path: the great white egret. It's time to go. We travelers owe each other some space to be calm for a while.

Margotlog: Christmas in the Old Country.

The Old Country

When Geraldine Page creates "Souk" in Truman Capote's most wonderful work, "A Christmas Memory," she rises into film legend. Forget Capote's nonfiction novel from the late 1960s about a family's murder in Kansas, or even his "Breakfast at Tiffany's," with Audrey Hepburn. These are the trifles of a soul uprooted from his "old country," from Alabama. What New York and booze did to Capote has been well chronicled. I choose to hear his voice, that reedy, lisping man-boy voice narrating a piece of magazine fluff that, for me, is nearly immortal.

My "old country" is Charleston, South Carolina, in early winter, the "fruitcake weather" that sends Souk and the boy she calls Buddy across dried-up fields to gather pecans. Souk shakes her head at a sign prohibiting entrance to the grove: "I do not admire a man who puts up a sign," she says. Then with Queenie, the black-eyed terrier, running ahead, she bends under the leafless trees and calls, "Buddy, Buddy, look here; there're lots of big ones."

Some years Christmas slides almost unnoticed under the door; I take its coat and offer it a beverage or two, but I am distracted, unable to give it a true welcome. This year, I've insisted early, "Let's put up the tree." At the St. Paul's Farmer's Market, where trees lie in their casings like bound bodies, I buy a wreath from the plain-clothes farmer who tries to sell me a larger one, but I take the smaller, for there are many other purchases to make. With the tree up-- fake, I confess, decked beyond its capacity with the gems of many Christmases, four households combined before this one--I insist we have to watch our video copy of "A Christmas Memory."

Now in Geraldine Page and Capote's voices, portraying Souk and Buddy, I send my own version of forty fruitcakes--theirs went to President Roosevelt and a young couple whose car broke down and who spent several hours "with us in pleasant conversation." Their voices reverberate while I travel to my Old Country and the few remaining loved ones and scenes who bring me deep into the heart's core.

I don't want a perfect tree, done up in lace, color-coded and sprayed with glitter. I want my tree, with the balls whose surface is worn to glass; the clothespin doll with tuft of red hair, gift from some extravagant friend; the Chinese pagoda which opens into hexagonal silk scenes, gift from Fran's semi-Chinese parents (his father born of Iowa missionaries in China). This amalgam of lives, touched with the memories of other years when there were still kids full-time, when aged parents still waited in South Carolina and Tennessee, this is the tree I cherish. A tree for just us two, which Julia, the black and white, can climb as soon as it is up and peer down at us from the topmost branches.

Spare me perfection which turns my impulses toward glossy-magazine anonymity. I want the echo of Southern voices, lights to blaze in real darkness, the inevitable losses, the memories of kindness beyond measure--my mother's last tree, bought by her caregiver, a generous-hearted black woman who "gave the most glorious baths." When you're over 90, and afraid of the tub, caring hands make the body grateful. To all those I've loved, who are now wisps in the darkness, and to those still living, I send greetings.

Margotlog: The Old Country.

Lucretia and Rembrandt at The MInneapolis Institute of Art

Dream Space at the MIA. Entering into the gleaming glass entry, I stand under the fiery sunburst hanging from the ceiling. Fire and water--the air swims with possibilities. This dark season I will rise into the painting galleries and head toward the MIA's greatest work in oil: Rembrandt's "Lucretia." Painted in 1666, near the end of his life when he was bankrupt and mourning the death of his companion Hendrikja Stoffels, Lucretia draws us into the essence of life at its penultimate moment. I have stood before her, time after time, marveling at the roughness of the painting, the gleaming gold strands of her hair, the pursed upper lip with its splash of paint--so pitiful yet real yet artful. It is that combination of paint, and my awareness of it, with the absolute integrity and dramatic flesh of the image that almost makes my heart stop.

Lucretia was the quintessential Roman matron, dishonored by a friend of her husband's because earlier she had proved herself the industrious, chaste exemplar of a wife, while all the other wives, spied on by their husbands, were discovered carousing. Lucretia gathered into herself almost the only integrity allowed a woman in Rome, 500 B.C.

Later, after the contingent of men had confirmed her honor, when she was alone again, her husband at camp miles away, Sextus Tarquinius stole into her bedroom and threatened her at the point of his sword: if she resisted, he would dishonor her anyway and kill her, leaving her beside the body of a nude male servant.

What followed was her outrage, her father and husband's fury and their determination to rid Rome of these Tarquinians or Etruscans, this king and his infamous son Sextus. The revolt, which followed Lucretia's death by her own hand, led to the founding of the Roman republic. Thus, you could say, Lucretia's absolute integrity supported a people's demand for self-government. It is a stirring story in these dark days of almost-winter, when our own republic's survival seems to hang in the balance.

In the painting, Lucretia has already stabbed herself. The tissue of her chemise is stained with blood. Her eyes are flickering out. Her lip with its splash of color quivers while, with one hand, she steadies herself. "But why should she be the one to die?" The voice of my daughter echoes. It is an earlier winter; she is perhaps fifteen. We have toured the Institute, stopping at our favorite works. Hers is Ganymede and the Eagle, in white marble: the boy bends to offer the imposing bird a drink of water. She and I both love birds. I think she identifies with Ganymede in his fearless offering, and with the quiet readiness of the eagle who, according to the myth, will soon snatch the boy up to Olympus where he'll serve forever as the cupbearer to the gods.

But it is Lucretia who compels us both. Why, indeed, should her only choice be suicide when, as her husband and father both argue, her soul has remained pure. But the painting and her history focus on the body. Ideas are nothing next to what happens to the body. Rembrandt has created a masterwork because he has made her valor physical--she has stabbed herself. What remains is the weak, pathetic instant, solitary and pleading, just before her lights go out.

The marvel is that we get to witness this instant again and again, until it becomes a motif in our own lives, a beacon to light whatever is troubling us this year, this season. An image to admire, ponder, revere for what art can make of sadness and loss.

Margotlog: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

In the Norman Rockwell version, a huge bronzed turkey lies on its side under carving knife and fork wielded by the family patriarch, while up and down a long table wait the solemn yet rosy faces of three generations. Way too sedate and poised. Let's imagine wild arrivals, shaking off snow or rain, snack table plundered by two boys under five, household pots and pans reassigned as head gear, discussion of whether The Wizard of Oz is too scary for this fledgling generation, the pork roast in milk (Italian-style) refusing to boil off sufficiently, two cooks jockeying for place at the stove, a milk spill, a first 2-year-old attempt at the potty, more arrivals, coats piled on banisters and newel posts, etc. etc. By the time we all sit down--all ten of us (some arranged on a card table nearly in the living room), what with a little spat between oldest and middle generations about whether to light the ceiling fixture--oldest insists on low romantic light-- finally finally the dishes are handed round--and what I taste is indecipherable.

That is, until the pecan pie. Not until that crunchy, silky sweet enters my mouth am I sure I have eaten.

My parents rarely entertained large family groups. We were removed, all the way south in Carolina, while their relatives stayed up north, the closest in Washington, D.C. So, they invited in stray Citadel cadets or friends without their own local ties. Now that I'm edging into their age, when I can appreciate their situation other than a backdrop for my own struggles and triumphs, I see that acquiring a suitable crowd around the Thanksgiving table created anxiety and hope. They were very glad when one of their daughters came home for the holiday.

We're such a huge country. Going west or north, east or southwest sends relatives far away. I remember leafing through an old magazine called Ideals, which had found its way into Papa Max's home in Hankinson, North Dakota. In an autumnal scene of falling leaves, with cornucopia spilling fruits and nuts, corn stalks studding fields like a pliant army, and cattle lowing before a barn, yes a turkey too with its tail feathers spread in colorful fan and its wattles jiggling like loose skin on an old lady's neck--in this image, a wagon carried a family toward the farmstead house. The company, aunt and uncle with cousins, had spent hours on the road, but they arrived just in time for a late afternoon dinner, the patriarch poised over the turkey bronzed and eatable, with shining faces turned toward him.

That's the ideal we strive for. Abundance of kin as much as weight of foodstuffs on the table. Under the hail-fellow-well-met of the American character, under the recent revival of cantankerous political argument, under our celebration of abundance lies the hope of surviving in a foreign land. The first Thanksgiving gave thanks for learning how to plant and harvest corn and possibly other Native American foodstuffs like squash, for a successful hunt of deer and turkey, for friendship among strangers. I raise a glass in recognition of those who were not with us this Thanksgiving, the sister, brother, and cousins on various coasts, the many friends spread over the continent. Those who draw up to the table a solitary companion whose warmth and concern lights candles in their hearts. I hope they know that I, far away in the northland, hold them dear.

Margotlog: Bird Capture

Bird Capture

Yesterday morning, around 9 a.m., a hawk swooped through the backyard and sent the pigeons, sparrows, bluejays, chickadees, four cardinals, and assorted juncos and nuthatch--all making a beeline for trees or sky. This has happened before, usually in winter, when the accipiters, harrier, falcons or buteos are hungry and their more normal hunting grounds are covered with snow. Never before have I stopped to watch the whole hunt unfold. It takes patience unless I come in during the middle of the episode when the hawk's watching and waiting have already taken place.

This time, three jays hounded the hawk into a mess of trees two houses away. With binoculars I could spy the tall, pale-chested, dark- backed hunter almost cameoflaged among the thin branches of the trees. Its yellow legs and feet lifted it fairly tall. Checking the bird book, David Allen Sibley's Guide to Birds published by the National Audubon Society, I decided it was probably a Cooper's Hawk that stands 16.5 inches, with a long tail striped with dark and lighter bands. It swiveled its rather flat head with the hook of beak back and forth, but otherwise, except for shaking off flakes of snow now and then, it didn't move.

The jays, quite brave I thought, kept heralding "Hawk Hawk Hawk" from the very tree where the critter stood. I went upstairs to the bathroom with its huge picture window looking out to the back yard. I could spy the hawk from there as well, even better cameoflaged from this higher angle than from the kitchen window closer to the ground. Time passed. The jays kept at their warning, like tornado sirens gone wild. Oh, the hawk will give up, I thought. The jays make it too conspicuous; no birds will return to our daily feast. But I was wrong. The hawk simply waited and watched. Eventually after I'd been upstairs and down a number of times, a few pigeons and sparrows returned to peck at the ground.

Shaking its shoulders, the hawk dislodged itself and flew a short distance to balance on a wire. None of the birds in our yard seemed to notice. All of a sudden, so fast I couldn't track it, the hawk swooped around to the other side of our yard and in an instant had captured a dark-feathered pigeon, one of the few who'd seemed fearless (or dumb or old or careless). The yard went absolutely quiet. Light snow fell. I steeled myself, binoculars to my eyes.

Huge yellow claws dug into the squirming pigeon's back. The hawk was beautiful, stern, absolutely alert, looking in every direction except directly behind it, its large yellow eyes like small headlamps boring into underbrush, between fences, behind the garage. I was fairly sure nothing threatened it, but the hawk clearly didn't want to spend more time than necessary pinned to the ground, pressing its captive to death. This close--I was now in the kitchen no more than six yards away--I got a good long look at the hawk's features. Its breast was heavily striped with orange; a strip of white went under its chin and almost around the whole of its head. The feet and legs were startlingly yellow.

The poor pigeon took a long time to die. Perhaps it's in shock, I thought. I'd be in shock if something pinned me to the ground and began piercing my innards with sharp pokers. After perhaps four or five minutes (but I really couldn't judge the time. My heart was pounding with amazed horror), the hawk began tearing at the breast/stomach of the pigeon. Feathers flew, one stuck to the hawk's sharp, downward curved beak. Flesh, red and wet, was exposed. Maybe the hawk is trying to get at the heart and put a quicker end to this agony, I thought.

The pigeon opened its beak and was either crying out or trying to breathe. I almost couldn't watch. Flashes of a news article from the morning's paper about turkey raisers in Willmar, Minnesota, who toss newly hatched but damaged turkeys into a grinder reminded me of another kind of cruelty. But of course, I told myself, the hawk has to live. It is in essence a hunter and killer. It eats only if it kills other living things. Gradually, the pigeon went limp. In another minute, the hawk lifted off, carrying the body of the pigeon in its claws. And I was left to pour over the two volumes of David Allen Sibley's bird books, discovering that among accipiters, the female is larger than the male since it must feed its young in cold weather. Surely, there was no nest nearby with newly hatched chicks or fledglings, not in Turkey Weather.

Margotlog: Margotlog: The Face of Florence - II

Margotlog: The Face of Florence - II

Borgo Pinti, the street where the Women's B&B is located, runs into the center of Florence in one direction, and in the other, toward the northern edge, toward Fiesole. Heading in that direction, you can look down narrow Borgo Pinto and in clear weather spy the clock tower of Fiesole rising up from the hills. From many sources, some casual, some intentional like the Museo di Firenze Com'Era (the Museum of FLorence As It Used To Be), I've gathered that Borgo Pinti originally designated a zone outside the city walls. Old maps describe Florence like a spiky star, with city walls zig-zagging out toward bastions and in toward streets and houses. Between the bastions stood huge wooden gates which could be closed at night or in case of siege.

Antique Florence was a city dominated by families with wealth and power who built huge palazzi or palaces with enormous portals crowned by their coat of arms. But the Catholic Church also amassed earthly might: many sons of wealthy families became bishops and eventually popes--as was true throughout the upper half of Italy. If the Church said NO to building residences/hospitals for "penitente" or unwed mothers within the city walls--sacred space, after all--then such ospedale were constructed outside the walls. Borgo Pinti, beyond the walls, became such a site, with many homes and hospitals for unwed mothers. Pinti is a contraction of "penitente" or the penitent.

I think about this as I roam the neighborhood, now dotted with antique palazzi turned to modern use: one houses the faculty of architecture for the University of Florence, another a military establishment devoted to the wounded. Some of the more enormous gardens and palazzi have been acquired by hotels. One of the more subdued, called the Mona Lisa, shares the enormous inner garden with the palazzo which houses the Women's B&B.

In the middle 1990s, I was lucky enough to be invited by friends to hold a travel memoir class in their fabulous apartment not far from Borgo Pinti. Were there perhaps eight or ten of us who pulled chairs and a sofa into a circle and wrote about breaking high heels on cobblestones or falling ill after eating Mexican oysters? I can't recall our exact number, but we ranged in age from relatively young to older. One of the youngest flew over with me from the Twin Cities. With incredible luck because there was a railroad strike, we hitched a ride from Rome with Helen, an Iowan who'd acquired, then shed an Italian husband, kept their place in the Tuscan hills, and had business beyond Florence. We stopped midway, thank heavens, because Helen drove like a maniac. Panting, drained of color, Margaret and I were almost sick with fear and speed. We admired Helen's collection of American quilts, sampled olive oil made from "her" olives, and hit the Autostrada for the final zip into Florence.

Margaret stayed at the Mona Lisa. As we gathered for our first morning of writing, she arrived with a sparkle in her eyes. She had met Livio who worked the desk at the Mona Lisa. "What, you are unhappy?" he intuited as she approached the desk after viewing the room she'd been assigned. Fingers raised in an encouraging gesture, "Give me twenty-four hours. I will make it right." In fact it didn't take that long: not only did he direct her to La Pergola theater, just behind the hotel, where James Galway was giving a concert, but after she returned, he signed off from the desk and they walked the mystery of Florence under full moon. Her sparkling eyes suggested just what had happened under that magical luna.

Staring up into the Mona Lisa's coffered ceiling, which must have been the entry courtyard where carriages pulled up, I decipher tiny little frescoes illustrating Latin sayings: each square of the coffer contains such things as "Fideli tuo silentio" with a finger pressing lips together. Or a pair of bellows to fan the fire with the saying Accipit Reddit Que. Silence with Heat was the essence of Peg's message. She told us almost nothing of that moonlit walk but her swagger and sparkle suggested warmth, much warmth. Of course, my rude translations of the sayings may be off kilter. Who knows what precisely they suggest--not unlike the whole history of Borgo Pinti.

Margotlog: The Face of Florence - I

Margotlog: The Face of Florence - I

In the dark of 5:30 a.m., the city of Florence rises in memory, as if I'm hovering over her, not very high up, and viewing her features and moods, wiles and compensations. Yes, her face. What does it take to become enamored of a city? To know her almost better than if she were human, because, of course, she is human, but also shaped by landscape and weather and the occasional cry of birds.

I return every year, needing to inhabit her like a song. She centers me. I exit the train, walk to the busy concourse with the huge clock and low, shed-like ceiling, and turn left toward the door that leads to the buses. Once I am outside, the umbrella pines lining the bus and taxi lanes are conclusive: I am back. No other city I've ever known has such a beautiful line of green in the midst of traffic. I cross under them, miraculously, vehicles stop for the light, and I board the number 6 bus (though this year that's changed, but let's imagine all is as I've known it), which will wend its way past the Duomo, mobbed this early afternoon with tourists, down the street of rich shops, then a jog to the right and the piazza of San Marco greets me with its ring of elms. This year, the elms like the pines look healthier. There's been enough rain.
The new trees, replacing those that died of Dutch elm disease, are flourishing in the early October sunshine.

To be truly home, I descend the bus by a secondary school beyond Piazza Annunciata. The school is a block long with a beautiful series of sightless ovals along its facade. I orient myself to the narrow street called Borgo Pinti, and begin pulling my suitcase along the irregular, narrow sidewalk, sometimes veering off to avoid other pedestrians. It's two long blocks before I arrive at number 31. Cristina and Liana are expecting me. I ring their bell and the huge door within its Egyptian frame swings open. I take the blessedly new and functional "lift" to the top of the palazzo, and one of them greets me. The long shadowed hallway is exactly as I remember it. They've prepared the little single room in white and pink, across from the bath. I step up, leave the suitcase, and cross to the window. There is the huge walled garden, studded with linden, chestnut, ginko, and, close to the window, another umbrella pine whose soft fluttering needles and rough reddish arms pose against the red and tan dome of the Duomo. Sunday morning and evening, bells will ring through unnatural stillness, but now I'm in the presence of weekday paradise--the walled garden at the heart of this city I love.

Later I will begin the passages to reconnoiter favorite views. I'll learn more about the origin of Borgo Pinti from a new garden recently donated to the city, where a custode and placards inform about this neighborhood's history. But first I will rest, drink some coffee, close my eyes on the comfortable bed, recall the play of light on the walls, and settle into grateful arrival.

Margotlog: Water Quality and Showers

Margotlog: Water Quality and Showers

Over the weekend, after shoveling wet snow in Saint Paul, I drove off into the wilds of Minneapolis for a shower. Funny usage, that "shower" for a women's gathering to shower a new bride with presents. I suspect commercial connivage as far back as the '50s. Speaking of commercial conniving, I discovered in conversation with a younger member of the bride's set that new suburban developments are no longer seeding their lawns with five inches of topsoil, but using only two inches. Hereafter, that pride of the city's outer ring will be greened by implanted shower heads and chemicals.

Heaven forfend, say I, and this young woman, who works for the Minneapolis Park Board, agrees. Despite being surrounded by wet snow, despite our yearly water accumulation being at least an inch above normal here in the Twin Cities, we both understand that, in the future, water use by businesses and households will have to decrease. There will be more of "us," potentially laggard and wasteful humans scarfing up scarce water. Yes, even in the land of 10,000 lakes. The MInnesota DNR has just inaugurated a decade-long study of our water table, including those acquifers way below the surface from which many communities draw water. Not to mention, the rivers and streams, lakes and marshes which provide other water sources.

Oh, help: I can feel a preachy tone sneaking into my voice. Soon I may declaim. At our house in Saint Paul, with five resident mammals, the three cats find water where they can, not particularly given to excessive showers, caring nothing at all for lawns and gardens. One biped limits herself to what in Europe would be a bidet-full of water for washing most days of the week. The other biped only recently stopped showering for five minutes at a time. Told by his doctor that dry itchy skin may, indeed, be the result of too long an application of hot water.

What I don't use on my person, I occasionally lavish on our postage-stamp lawn, though lawn hardly applies here, since all the "turf" put down before we bought this place 25 years ago, I've let revert to whatever would come up on its own. Which means creeping Charlie, Virginia waterleaf, woodland violets, dandelions, bellflowers, and in later summer, with a little nudge from me, goldenrod, tansy. and golden glow. OK, I admit I transplanted these prairie natives from a few blocks away where our swatch of native grassland is oddly preserved because train tracks run alongside it. This declivity was once a stream which fed a mill, thus the name of the road on the other side of the tracks: Ayd Mill Road.

Our prairie swatch runs for several miles, and if various nameless mowers don't do too much damage, blooms with truly wonderful prairie flowers, including plum, prairie rose, campions, and the late-summer golden glows--huge sunflower derivatives which I've also filched for several sunny spots in my garden.

Come to find out that these native plants are much hardier than almost anything I have imported. They need less water; die back and return on cue, and given half a chance, will take over from the imported hostas and peonies--well maybe not from hostas and peonies which, once established, are pretty hard to nudge aside. But from lilies and even dragon's head. But now I'm getting too arcane for most readers. Moral of this tale: we need a mental make-over in the lawn department. We need to shed the ridiculous idea that a swatch of perfectly even, green grass is the ideal, and replace it with a varied panoply of natives. Even creeping Charlie, the bane of grass growers, labeled a hated "broad leaf" and subjected to herbicide application, grows pretty purple flowers, rarely needs to be mowed, and when crushed, gives off a minty smell.

Our lawns are English imports from way back in the 18th century, when Italian ideals about close-cut boxwood, and parterres of paved terraces adorned with limonaia (lemon trees in pots) gave way to huge expanses of lawns, copses of trees in the distance, a water course of some kind--think butterfly lakes, or sparkling waterfalls--and finally woods. These gardens expressed what was called the "sublime." They were supposed to lift the eye and the fancy away from what we'd call the "built environment" into wild nature, but only by degrees. The main impetus being a large sweep of lawn down which the fancy strolled to contemplate the cataract of wild nature.

Phooey! In my conversation with the water quality expert, I learned that geese are one of the Twin Cities' greatest polluters of beaches and lakes. "It's their poop," she whispers. One solution resides with the geese themselves: They don't like high grass. Light-bulb moment: the Minneapolis Park Board's renovation of Lake of the Isles includes tall stands of aquatic plants along the edges of the lake. These filter fertilizer and other pollutants which run off from the fancy lawns across the road. Viola! The lake becomes cleaner and the geese stay away from the lake shore. No one swims in Lake of the Isles, but the short-term and long-term message is clear: get rid of lawns for all kinds of reasons. Native plants and grasses, especially tall grasses and flowering plants like goldenrod and golden glow, need no fertilizer or herbicides and far less water to thrive. Plus they keep the geese away.

Now I hear the flip-side of the preacher in my voice: the barker for a new product whose enthusiasm gets out of hand.

If only we could transplant this idea to the suburbs and beyond, say to those lake shore communities across Minnesota where McCabin owners insist on green grass running down to the lake. Think fertilizer, herbicide running off into the water, feeding algae bloom, killing fish. Let's challenge some fine designers to present us a modern version of the sublime, subsituting creeping charlie for grass.

Margotlog: Study Abroad

Margotlog: Study Abroad

A dear friend, retired from teaching Art History at the University of Minnesota, leads "study abroad" courses to Florence or Rome for undergraduates. Usually his students are native Minnesotans, attending the "land grant" university where their own parents may have gone. "Study abroad" for them means entering another country whose language is largely a mystery. They depend on Michael like bambini (little children).

For my mother, second born twin, the runt of her family who had rickets as a child, "study abroad" meant leaving her small town in eastern North Dakota, Hankinson, and traveling by train to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. By my calculations she entered as a freshman in 1925 and graduated just after the stock market crash in 1929. That latter date I have firmly in mind because she often emphasized, "But by 1929 we already had had an agricultural depression in North Dakota," which allowed her father, the big fish in Hankinson's small pond, to gobble up smaller fry. That he would emerge wealthier than before, we girls had no reason to doubt, for when we began spending summers there in the mid 1950s, Papa Max's house was one of the grandest in town. Around nearby Lake Elsie he had bought up farms for "back taxes." Did banks foreclose these farms because the owners were so strapped for cash they could not pay the mortgages or even the taxes? Or had farmers owned the land for decades but because of the drought earned nothing; when their taxes mounted, the state sold the debts to banks who then put them in something like foreclosure? I have to do more research.

In any case, my grandfather prospered when those around him did not. Even as a child, I felt a prickle of discomfort and resentment when my mother bragged about this Far away in Charleston, we lived on my father's very modest teaching salary; rats slithered around our apartment garbage cans or died in the Old Citadel's foot-thick walls. My mother made over my father's worn-out trousers into slacks for us girls. We certainly weren't rich. Her brother who worked with their father also did very well. His wife sent my sister and me "hand-me-overs" from his daughters, almost our age. Did we love or squirm uncomfortably in their twin blue coats with the gold buttons, or their flounced gingham dresses with white petticoats? Perhaps I sensed a conflict in my mother's choice to leave Hankinson after college and "go east" to Pittsburgh where her job as a college librarian satisfied her quiet love of books, but never made her rich. Yet it put her directly in line to meet my father, a graduate student at Carnegie, who bent over her library desk with his warm brown Italian eyes. He was smitten from the get-go; it took her a little longer.

Her enthusiasm for what she gleaned at the University of Minnesota remained throughout the years entirely unalloyed. She loved the campus, she told us, so close to downtown Minneapolis with its glamorous department stores like Young Quinlan where her mother used to treat her and her older sisters to party dresses and lunch in the sky-high restaurant. Though she was sick the first quarter, intensely shy and suffering from stomach trouble, she gradually adjusted. She thrilled to history courses taught by Guy Stanton Ford. Attended concerts at Northrup Auditorium where she heard Rachmaninoff perform. Rachmaninoff, my mother? Was he still alive in the late 1920s and would he have visited the Upper Midwest?

Why Mousy decided to become a librarian, she never explained, though her love of books shone through my childhood as she read to us every evening: The "Little House" books, poems and stories from the twelve volumes of The Book House; the orange-bound biographies for youngsters of such luminaries as Mozart, my favorite, or Madame Curie. Every week we took a bus from The Old Citadel to the Charleston Library, then housed in a four-story mansion shaded by towering magnolias. Truly a "book house," this library with its intricate curving staircase, its Palladian windows, and the sense that human eyes had awakened under its ceilings garlanded with rosettes and nymphs captured real life within its pages. If I lost myself there, I would wake up in charmed splendor, listening to my mother telling a story of going home to Hankinson for Christmas. "We were stranded just beyond Glenwood," she related. "Huge drifts of snow blew across the tracks. But we college students didn't care: we stoked the pot-bellied stove with torn-up wooden seats; broke out tins of sardines and crackers, and danced to a fiddle up and down the aisles." I capture her there, sashaying across a line of little windows, her cheeks flushed, a smile on her lips.

Margotlog: Moments in Viterbo

Margotlog: Moments in Viterbo

Odd what moments stand out. When I look back on our excursion from Umbria south into Lazio (the Italian province which contains Rome), I find myself outside a church in Viterbo, gazing over the main piazza of the city. Just to my left, high against a stone wall, hangs the stone lion, guardian of the city. As we entered the square, I looked up at the lion (perhaps with a palm tree behind him) and commented, "Mi piace moltissimo il leone." One of the group whom I scarcely knew, a tall man with soft Italian body, someone with a weight of sorrow on his back, spoke to me for the second time that afternoon: "Si, si, e molto gentile." It was the surprise of his response, when I'd been rather diffident in his presence (he was, after all, reported to be a count), plus the charm of the grinning lion that cemented the moment in memory.

As tourists, it's impossible not to be rather vague about where exactly, and how, and what's to come next. We're carried along by those who know--friends, in my case, or tour guides who treat us like friends. Landscape whizzes past. We stop to meander around ruins, examining the fiori di campo (literally field flowers), noting that they're the same malva found among the Roman ruins in Umbria, stooping to pick up a piece of stone, numbered then discarded by archaeologists excavating this site of Roman/medieval baths, theater, etc. Being told by a restorer among us that every piece unearthed must be numbered, but since not all can be fit into a meaningful whole, ,many are left for curious scavengers to lift, finger, and once again discard.

Italy, with its rocky, hilly terrain, its centuries of wealth (often from outside the region) lording it over peasants, far more familiar with the land and seasons, crops and produce than those nominally in charge, is full of opportunities for such charming encounters. Little fragments numbered according to some other system than our own tumble suddenly into view. An American friend, entering Venice with her sister and a tour group, steps into a gondola and is wafted away by a gondolier singing an aria from Italian opera. Suddenly running toward them along the canal comes a woman with a cerise scarf floating behind her. She's in full voice, offering to the world and the throaty gondolier, the female accompaniment to his role. Her husband, their friends, run after her and tug at her clothing. "Stop, stop," they insist, but she breaks free and runs beside the gondola, as together, she and the gondolier complete the love duet. I can't forget this, and it didn't even happen to me.

Following association and memory through the labyrinth of Italian story, I find myself in a rocky field, on the huge island of Sardinia, off the western coast of Italy. Edging her way toward the stone hut of a goatherd is the youngest daughter of a wealthy, landlord family. The daughter, lonesome, cooped up by late 19th-century etiquette, by boredom and isolation, has found a friend. Perhaps she reads to the old man; or he tells her about his goats, his memories of her family years ago, his own children and wife lost to the years.

She grows up. There is a war. She moves to the mainland and sets aside afternoons to write while her own children sleep. This is Grazia Deledda and the novel containing this story is published as Cosima n 1937, the year after she has died. Though DeLedda won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926, very few of her works have been translated into English. We can thank Italica Press for bringing us a fine English translation of Cosima by Martha King.

Margotlog:The Step-mother of the Bride

The Step-Mother of the Bride

Thanks to the suavity and generosity of the upcoming bride and groom, the parents involved in this soon-to-be wedding have sat down to a meal together. It was a heady affair, at least for the older generation. We discovered paths where our lives crossed: groom's mother and bride's father both attended the March on Washington. Bride's stepmother and stepfather discovered a fine yoga teacher in common who used to babysit the bride. And so on.

The wedding itself will be rather secretive--only one parent of the six involved will stand up with the couple. But not so the wedding dinner. We of the older generation will congregate again. Not that we'll outnumber the kids, far from it. In fact, I expect the cousins and various offspring of the 0-5 generation to people the front of the stage. Lots of hands grabbing toddlers and restraining the wild "5's." We of the older generation may be pushed to the wings.

So why do I keep returning to the question of poetry? Why do I want to make a spectacle of myself by reciting some verse when the call comes to toast the happy couple? Though I don't remember this, rumor has it that my husband, the current bride's father, embarrassed the younger generation at our one other family wedding a few years ago by reciting something the couple considered way too sexy. It was probably e e cummings. (Try "i like my body when it is with your/ body...") I've been warned by my own daughter not to bring "The Owl and the Pussycat"into this upcoming affair. "Oh, Pussy, my love," you understand, has salacious undertones.

Think back, I tell myself. Remember how you felt about your own parents at each of your weddings! The first was very solemn: held at Riverside Church on Morningside Drive in New York City, a gothic gem near the Columbia University campus. I wore constraining white and trembled with the chill. The dinner afterwards passed in a haze. If anyone toasted us, I was either too blinkered or too cold to notice. The second wedding, thankfully, took place in May at the Presbyterian Homes in Roseville, Minnesota, where I taught a writing class for old ladies. They with their remembrance and enjoyment cut heavy peonies to decorate the chapel, sweet heavy swoon. Yes, poetry would have been welcome at that wedding. (e e cummings: "i like my body when it is with your/body") Maybe it's that wedding I want to commemorate with Keats' "Bright Star."

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Which is more objectionable, eh? The "ripening breast" or "swoon to death?" Since Keats died a few years after writing this poem in 1819, the death may be literal, yet we don't believe he meant literal death, but that swoon of satisfaction, the swoon of earthly bliss.

No, I probably won't read "Bright Star," though its lines keep sparkling through these last warm days like the late chrysanthemums blazing along the sidewalk. Or the absolutely clear evening star in the half-dark sky.

If I read anything poetic, it will probably be Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," etc. Yet, yet, it is a cold poem with its argument thoroughly under control and its daring to bring time's sickle into a poem of love and marriage. Or, maybe this sort of marriage is all of the mind, and very little of the body. That's what chills me. Not to mention its ending with "doom." I don't count that tidy regular coda. Keats and Shakespeare both end their supposed love poems with mention of the grave's chill. We are to be reminded to "gather ye rosebuds while we may." I'm afraid we older generation bring too much of that reminder into the hallway of love. Though we may still propel ourselves forward, even skip once in a while, we do not bloom so naturally, nor sing in a clear, sweet voice.

Plus, our children truly abhor the idea of our bodies. Especially in any but the most chaste of love's acts. "Ewww, Mother," I can hear the daughter cry when she was a teen. Too ishy for words. Aversion personified. Hints of incest.

There, I've done it--grossed out myself. Nope, I won't mention a word about love or coupling or, heaven forfend, breasts. I'll just give you Shakespeare as a mental exercise, to admire the balanced lines, the measured rhyme, the various sedate metaphors.



Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me proved,
  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Margotlog: Danish Gymnasts, African Students & American Political Hype

In Minnesota Scandinavia, the Danes figure, along with their more populous cousins the Swedes and the Norwegians, as contributors of delectable (and hard to make) holiday treats; civic accountability; spare, appealing furniture design; and the Danish Gymnasts. Friends took me to view this smiling, blond, thoroughly fit and friendly troupe last night. In between ohhhs and ahhhs at double, triple twists, lovely swirls of girls in turquoise leotards, etc., we talked about Copenhagen as a place to visit--expensive food, I learned. Beautiful porcelain called Royal Copenhagen.

We, in fact, dined off a lovely set before the program: each plate hand-painted with a soft blue flower. And the eatables presented by our Danish friend from Tyler, Minnesota: first course of herring, pickles, and buttered brown (homemade) bread; second course of vegetable-beef soup with tiny dumplings made of the same stuff as cream puffs--no surprise that they melted in the mouth; and finally dessert of the most amazing combination: butter cookies made with Hartshorn, which must be obtained from a pharmacy; blue cheese, more brown bread, and succulent pears.

The Italian in me, who not so secretly believes that the best food in the world comes from Italy, had to sit back and leave the field to the Danes: that dessert could not be beat by any other ethnic combination. Or at least that's what my tongue told me. Lest you think this Tyler-bred cuisine is off-the-beaten path, let me point out that the Danish Gymnasts, who are touring the world in ten months, will stop at Tyler, Minnesota. Where, I have taught several writers-in-the-schools residencies over the years and remember a culture hall, dedicated to Danish culture and conviviality.

One of the best things about being American is savoring our ethnic and racial differences. That's one reason I enjoy teaching at Metro State where an upper-level writing class for nurses is likely to include recent immigrants from Africa. This year my class contains students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Uganda. Not to mention other immigrants from Southeast Asia, Greece, and all over Europe (but those with European roots come from families in the U.S. for many generations). The African students working for their nursing degrees are acute observers of the U.S. and their own countries. For the second paper, the class wrote on the huge topic of global warming, based on Lester Brown's important book, Plan B. 4.0. (A friend who works for a Minnesota legislator says that Brown's book informs many environmental debates at the legislative level.)

Two papers from African students caught my attention for their startling revelations about population. One, about AIDS in Uganda, pointed out that when a middle-aged man with HIV is treated with anti-retrovirus drugs (the "cocktail" that keeps many HIV patients alive for years), he may then live long enough to marry three more wives and father perhaps a score of children--all of whom will be infected with AIDS. Another paper began with a surprisingly humorous announcement of a death in Kenya: relatives of the 94-year-old deceased contributed three-quarters of the mourners at his funeral: he had been married 130 times, fathered almost 300 children and untold numbers of grandchildren (V. Duham, Oct. 2010, "Kenya's Akuku....polygamy hall of fame"). My student followed this with a compelling description of Kenya's deforestation, largely caused by clearing land for farming to feed the country's rapidly expanding population.

There is little danger that the U.S. Danish-population will expand so much as to cause an environmental crisis in western Minnesota. In fact, my years of teaching as a writer-in-the-schools in farming Minnesota suggests that, if anything, these communities suffer from the reverse: dwindling population due to the consolidation of smaller family farms. What strikes me as I mull the experiences of the last few days, personal and public, writerly and political, is how complex are the policy decisions facing us, worldwide. Our recent election hoop-di-do raises angry voices, confrontative politics, and an awareness on my part that the U.S. swings wildly between apparently irreconcilable poles. Yes, within a decade we as a nation can experience wrenching contests and demanding alterations. Our excesses of hope, greed, and manipulation can wreck certain kinds of stability. The housing crisis, for instance, seems wrought in part by banks and mortgage companies who enticed families of very modest means and no experience in home-owning into accepting variable-rate mortgages. When the rates rose sky-high, what had been affordable became impossible. Who is most at fault: the ignorant home-buyer or the companies that lured them into this trap?

Maybe a portion of the American dream needs revision: instead of every family housed separately with a green swatch around us, we need to look back to the cities of Europe, with their apartment buildings, lovely green thoroughfares (sometimes), and, best of all possible worlds, no cars in the city center. I'm thinking of Munich, or Ferrara where I recently visited. We've eaten up all the wilderness we should; the forests and grasslands that remain need to stay as they are, protecting us from the damages of global warming, as we draw closer together, not so prickly of our neighbors, careful of our own expenses, and teaching each other about the future.

Margotlog: The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon

The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon

The Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree," moves sedately and with scarcely any dialogue, but once it ends, the message is unmistakable: a huge concrete wall has slid into place, separating the Israeli Defense Minister's fancy modern house from a West Bank lemon grove which has been cut down to stumps. Fear of terrorism cannot coexist beside a dense, much-loved grove.

What the Defense Minister has perpetrated, of course, is also a form of terrorism on the widow (quite beautiful, stately and determined to save her grove) who with an ancient helper tends the trees and picks the lemons. First the Defense Minister has the grove fenced, padlocked and the widow's care of it prohibited. Then he has a huge tower erected where a stupidly amusing guard tries to learn some sort of logic from a tape-player which drones on while he sleeps. When the minister and his increasingly disturbed wife throw a party and forget the lemons, he sends soldiers into the grove to steal some fruit. The widow, outraged, comes after them with a stick (she's easily climbed the fence). They start mauling her, until the Defense Minister's wife cries out in horror for them to stop.

All this time the widow and a charming young West Bank lawyer have been pursuing the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. During this effort, they start a sweet, subdued love-affair, which never really goes anywhere, just as, in the end, the Supreme Court composed of three women judges (so as not to make the gender-divide too stark) rules that, though the grove should not be uprooted, it must be pruned to allow any terrorist to be immediately visible.

If the film contained nothing else, we would be thoroughly outraged against Israel, but the Defense Minister's wife, whom he neglects and rather obviously cheats on, gradually comes to hate this attack on the lone woman and her beautiful grove. Though at first the wife mouths agreement with her husband, toward the end of the film she gives a friend, a newspaper journalist, an interview. There she quietly objects to the treatment of the lemon grower, to the huge fence which both women can now scale, to the ridiculous notion that cutting down a grove will prevent terrorism, which of course rains down from the sky.

When the wife leaves the Defense Minister, we understand that she represents the heart of the film. She is appalled by Israel's bellicose attitude toward its neighbors because it duplicates the way her husband treats her and because she can see that the widow who grows lemons is herself a good neighbor. Conversation, sympathy, accord are far better protection against hatred and attack than building a wall and cutting off a beautiful grove at its knees.

Seeing this film set me to thinking about what damage modernism in all its vices has perpetrated against land, water, trees, animals, sky. Outsiders, who haven't lived for centuries and centuries on a particular stretch of land, find it easier to wreck what we call "natural resources" than do very ancient states. Outsiders, especially if they come to settle from distant areas and must uproot peoples long-suited to working the land and gathering its bounty, are quite vulnerable. They're ignorant, to begin with; they don't know the seasons, climate, soils; they also have to battle the current inhabitants for supremacy.

This warlike, defensive behavior continues even after the battle is won--I'm thinking of the United States. We still extract our "natural resources," as if we lived somewhere else and weren't hurting our very own air and water, etc. The conservation movement, which began with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," has educated us that such behavior harms ultimately ourselves. Not only does pollution and degrading of forests, grasslands, rivers, air kill off wild creatures, but such damage ultimately deprives us of rich soil and timber as well as clean air and water, leading to respiratory illness and cancer, etc.

We reap what we sow, or in the case of fisheries, if we reap and reap and reap, eventually nothing remains. There's an excellent case study of recovery from such excess in the Environment Defense Fund's work with Atlantic fishermen on a "catch share" program. Here "fishermen are given secure shares of a total catch limit, set by science, to which they are held strictly accountable"(Turning the Tide: Fishermen Embrace a New Approach to End Overfishing" special report 2010).

Why am I reminded of the recent construction craze in the United States when I read about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries? Because during the craze, hundreds of thousands of houses were built on unsecured loans, gobbling up farmland, and spreading suburbanism even further from city centers. Columnist Bonnie Blodgett wrote recently in the StarTribune, that so many houses were built, each American family would have to acquire four to make use of them all. Of course this was nuts, and once the unsecured loans collapsed, first homeowners who saw their "adjustable rate" mortgages go up so high they couldn't make the monthly payments, then developers themselves went belly up, leaving in their wake, what is surely a blight: empty boxes dotting acres of farmland, where nothing lives, but wind blows. A scene that deserves to be set beside Dust Bowl fields billowing away.

Let's argue that ancient civilizations guard the land and its amazing plenty with the most passion and knowledge. Italian fields today look like those in the background of Renaissance princely cavalcades. Italians, even those who live in cities, love to get dirt under the fingernails. Two Florentine friends come immediately to mind as examples: Grazia has run a "collectibles" shop in the heart of FLorence for years, yet every Saturday she tends land in the country, with apple and plum trees, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as roses and perennials. She also is a mushroom hound, heading off to collect with her friend Antonio, and returning to cook me five dishes with "funghi" which she names over and over until I can repeat them.

Antonio, though working as a tailor or "sarto" in FLorence all his life, was born in Puglia in the boot. One evening he and Grazia drove me through the Cascine, the huge park on the western edge of FLorence, under a beautiful three-quarter moon. They began reciting a saying they both learned as kids from their parents who were farmers. I listened from the backseat, not quite understanding:

Gobba a levante, luna calante
Gobba a ponente, luna crescente.

Gobba means hunchback. I study the moon: yes, its hunch changes as it waxes and wanes. In English the saying goes
Hunchback to the east, moon is waning,
Hunchback to the west, moon is growing.

Of course, to decipher this, you must be able to know east from west. Finally I learned to do this in Florence. The Arno flows west, toward Pisa and the sea, away from the mountains which you can see through the arch of the Ponte Vecchio.

Telling east from west here in Saint Paul isn't all that difficult either because I can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west from my upstairs windows. Still, I have a much harder time telling the waxing and waning moon here in the US than I do in Florence. It must be that the moon responds to local dialects and we don't have an English saying to help us.

Postscript: lest someone accuse me of excessive fondness, Italians have a horrible environmental history vis-a-vis tuna which Italian fishermen are rapidly depleting. Not to mention the practice of snaring songbirds in huge nets, a practice which continues to decimate songbird populations along the Mediterranean. It makes me very sad.

Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss

Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss

Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering cactus just outside the doorway, and read about depredations on sanity, Swedenesque. Last evening, one of the few Sunday Halloweens I remember, the neighborhood graves opened and out poured a werewolf who peered in my window like a mask out of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Princesettes in pink tulle pirouetted; one face-painted pumpkin bobbed her real pumpkin handle attached to reddish hair, and some plump teens gave shame-faced grins because they hadn't bothered to doll-up.

The last and favorite was a tiny girl wearing the Snow Queen's Kiss--all in white, with spangled slippers, bunny fur wrap, and a wand with sparkly silver star. A premonition of the season to come? Or a character from Crime and Punishment which I've been listening to with my late night exercises? The waifs and discards of society find their makers in mid-to-late 19th-century European fiction--Dickens., Mrs. Gaskell, and Dostoevsky are the best. American writers don't take up the theme of the earth's outcasts until later, and then wrap them in outrage--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Our myth of human perfectibility and the New Eden doesn't easily admit extreme human need.

My limited knowledge suggests that Europeans don't do Halloween the way we do in the U.S. For intensely Catholic countries, the day after, All Saints Day, is what's celebrated. Similar to the Mexican practice of visiting family graves with marigolds and skeletons made of sugar. "It's a liminal time," a Catholic friend tells me. Over the years, as my list of dead grows, I've come to understand what she means. Liminal, or of the doorway. In these days of dwindling light, the dead press closer to us, they rap quietly at our awareness; they hover just out of sight. Tears spring into my eyes and I'm mourning my mother, the most recent, profound loss. I picture her sleeping as I last saw her, when I came early into her room in assisted living and sat, watching her in her long afternoon nap. The pallor of her face struck me with the intuition that she would not live much longer.

In the last few months, two Italian-American poets and translators have given us versions of the early 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi. W.S. Di Piero's translations and selections of Leopardi's notebooks contains these sentences: "The ancients assumed that the dead thought only about the things of this life...that they grieved or felt contented depending on what had hurt or pleased them here in life, and so as they saw it--and as Christians do not--this world is mankind's home, that other world is exile." (In Poetry magazine, Nov. 2010, p. 130)

I like to think that this liminal period reminds us that living is precious; the earth that supports us ultimately demands our respect and nurturing in kind. We are kin/kind with those who have gone before and those who come after.

I remember loving Halloween: my Swedish-German mother, not given to effusive displays of affection, yet knew how to decorate and conduct a party. She made us elaborate costumes--Pucinellas in ruffed motley or Japanese ladies with wallpaper kimonos. Then she and other Old Citadel mothers gathered us in the three-story, echoing courtyard of the "center building" where we bobbed for apples, touched slimy disgusting things, pinned some kind of tail on a pumpkin, and shared our "trick or treat" loot. "One hundred and fifty children in one block," she would marvel. She who grew up in tiny Hankinson, North Dakota, whose population at its highest couldn't have been more than 1000.

In this night of misrule, we can blame our pranks on the dead, laugh and stuff ourselves with easy sweetness, and put aside any notion that life hereafter trounces such pleasures. I'm all for believing in benign heavenly guidance and malign distrust. But, so far, I'm more convinced that the dead remain with us, nurturing and terrifying.

Margotlog: Nonsense/Cat Sense

Nonsense/Cat Sense

Often this time of year when the light fades and mornings are very dark, my mind wakes up with songs or ideas already formed. This morning it was Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat."Years ago, when I first awoke to books, my mother was sitting between my sister and me on the loveseat in her bedroom, reading to us.

These were the years we lived in The Old Citadel, a block-long fortress spread across Marion Square, which provided us with echoing courtyards, deep tall windows, and incredibly high ceilings. Built to house and train cadets for almost a century before the new campus was built further up the Charleston neck, its architecture helped cool against intense summer heat, at the same time that it announced the school's profound defiance of any attack on Southern values. But, of course, for a while, I was too young for such a sophisticated perspective. To me and my sister, the Old Citadel was simply an entire village in and of itself, with friends at either end of the block, slate slidewalks already set for hopscotch, bums loitering in the park at our King Street end, the bells of St. Matthew's church ringing "Big Ben" style at the hours and quarter hours, and my mother's voice reading us to bed.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced to the light of the moon
The moon,
The moon,
They danced to the light of the moon.

I've rarely studied owls close up, but there've been cats galore in my life. How we acquired the first, I can't remember, but it was a tiger cat who would jump into the kitchen window well beside my turtle's bowl. In the evenings, when I watched for my father's car to turn into the cobblestone parking lot, I would pat the cat who purred. Then one day it disappeared. A thousand things could have happened to it. Maybe like a much later Minnesota cat named Archie, this tiger simply belonged to someone else and either went home or was lifted. But that's another story.

I was distraught at losing this first cat, my solace in the window well when my parents argued. Walking to school, I began calling for it, day after day, with no results. Finally, after a week or two of disconsolate searching, a tiger kitten, much smaller than the one I'd lost, hurried up to me a block from school. I scooped it up and carried it to Ashley Hall. Let's say I was in second grade, taught by the lovely Citadel wife with the white pageboy and blue eyes. Her speech could not have been more gentle. She took me and the kitten to the principal's house across the playing field, nestled in a stand of trees. After that I remember only that my mother who did not drive, but walked from the Old Citadel to Ashley Hall, stood in the doorway, talking to the principal. When I came home that afternoon, the kitten was waiting for me.

Living with cats fulfills life's promise that there is warmth and kindness and affection in the world. I know, this sounds terribly sentimental. But there it is, My mother who usually scorned sentiment, especially when expressed by my father (instance of that barbed but seductive resistance I recognize now as an adult), my mother in the case of this lost kitten acted the storybook Good Mother. The only element lacking is the mean wizard who would terrorize our lives until the cat came to save us. The wizard was there, hanging like a noxious cloud in the wings. He was compounded of my parents' alienation from what they'd known in the north, and of the poverty and discrimination in the south. Soon he would flap his terrible wings and drench us with sickening hate. But until that happened, the orange kitten kept me company. And though our bedtime stories from early volumes of the Book House might make us sweat or shiver, they always ended by promising that we would find what we was lost.

Margotlog: Close Connections

Margotlog: Close Connections

Italy's regions hold fiercely to their cooking. Polenta made of corn in the Po Valley, region of immense corn fields. The Veneto influenced by French, wine-based meat sauces. Olives and bread in Sicily. Cheeses throughout, especially cheeses made from goat's and sheep's milk, some of which reach back so far into antiquity that their origins probably aren't traceable with any scientific exactitude. Languages too, or what in the United States we'd call dialects, remain locked in histories so vastly different that in a country our size, it's hard to believe their narrow specificity. That is, unless you scroll back maybe fifty years to the time before national television dominated our senses. Since I grew up in South Carolina speaking my mother's Midwestern American English, I was keenly aware of how different my classmates sounded from my mother, my sister and myself.

Not to mention my father who on Saturday, roaming around our apartment in The Old Citadel, uttered Italian diminutives like "porcheluzza"--big fat ugly pig, or porcellina--sweet little pig, or the worst, porcaccia--gross, disgusting sow! He delivered each, depending on our behavior and his mood. He also occasionally lapsed into a kind of ditty,
Uno, due, tre cancella
Suona, suona, suona bella
Ecco si, ecco no, then came
Bum bum bum and some
sense that the opponent
was leveled to the pavement.

The most I ever deciphered suggested that this rhyme had to do with a fight, bells ringing to announce the funeral, and then some sort of victory dance. But this is almost pure fabrication. I have no idea what the ditty implied.

My father, the lone Italian-American in Charleston, surrounded by his Waspish family of three women, Waspish colleagues and communicants in school and church, and then many African-Americans whom I, for one, could barely understand--my father could have propounded any number of strange Italian dialects on us and we wouldn't have known the difference.

Had I been older and wiser, more given to rumination about origins and tongues, I might have paused in my scorn of his silliness (scorn mixed with affection and even curiosity). I might have written his account of this ditty. But I was speeding out of immigrant identity toward one that could "pass" among Charleston's two ethnic/racial groups: English/Scotch-Irish (with a sprinkling of French Huguenots) and African-Americans. In my grade school classes at Ashley Hall, the private girls school paid for with my North Dakota grandfather's money, there was one other dark-haired girl. She was Jewish, which I knew nothing about, and thus in my headlong, unquestioned sprint toward uniformity, never investigated.

Over the years, as I return again and again to Italy, I relish the localism of its food, but can't really penetrate its dialects, though I can hear the broadening of "sc" sounds in the Tuscan. My friend Grazia, born in FLorence but with a Genovese mother, speaks standard Italian with that slight aspirated element. I hear the hint of the Veneto in Giangi, my friend Pat Smith's husband. These tiny intimations of the vast dialectical riches in Italy remind me of a saying that describes the best Italian: "lingua Toscana in bocca Romana" or the Tuscan dialect spoken by a Roman--literally, the language of Tuscany in a Roman mouth.

The one and only time I met my father in Italy, he slumped on the bed in a Neapolitan grattacielo, or literally sky-scraper, depressed because an airport taxi driver had tried to swindle him. But what truly troubled him was the fact that the man spoke the Neapolitan dialect and my father couldn't entirely penetrate it. "What happened to la lingua d'oro?" he moaned. The golden language of Dante, he went on. Well, Dante's Italian was Tuscan, on its way to becoming standard but not there yet. Probably my father knew this, except in the shock of arrival (I'm guessing a decade had passed since he'd last been in Italy), he cried out for the uniformity of language that allows strangers to enter an unfamiliar town and, especially if they're compatriots, communicate easily with each other. We're getting there in the United States, at least in airports and train stations. But visiting the byways by car, one can still hear localisms and pronunciations that sound odd. Vive la difference, I say. Why would we ever want Kentucky to sound like Montana?