Several months in the Mediterranean sounds great, but what’s the first stop?  The beginning of a journey sets its tone, shapes your expectations.  Since this is to be a time of both renewal and reflection, it should mix together new places and ones already visited – to check for changes in them, and me. 
          To start, though, someplace new -  Barcelona, because in late September it is about to begin its magnificent annual festival, La Merce’, in honor of its patron saint.  Over time, religion has given way to music & the region's Catalan folk culture as the spiritual core of the celebration.  I instinctively like the people who shaped that transition even though I have not yet met one of them. I hope the local musical culture will be vibrant, & that it will present opportunities to play my fiddle with musicians there.  I also am intrigued by pictures of some of Barcelona’s architecture, buildings that I want to see close up.

             I play with much better results in other parts of the park with a Catalan guitarist & his Mexican girlfriend whose striking appearance probably attracts listeners as much as the music we make.  She plays tabla, the Indian drums; and the guitar he bought in India is actually an interesting blend of sitar & guitar.  Once I figure out the drone note it has, it‘s pretty easy to play nice counter-melodies in that key with him.  When the chords are simple and the tempo slow, I'm fine.  After we finish, they offer me part of the money in the case.  I thank them but tell them that I’m only in it for the music.  They confirm what a Flamenco guitarist from Argentina told me earlier that day – the money in the case is usually meager. Most of their earnings come from selling their self-produced CD’s, and it takes many hours of playing (on what would be considered a “good day”) to bring in the euro equivalent of $100 in CD sales & case money.   All three of them had left office jobs, willing to accept less economic security for more freedom.

             On another day there, I hear some great blues coming from up above where I’m walking.  The sound leads me to a weathered looking American expatriate from Tennesee playing his dobro,  He’s been living in Barcelona for the past 13 years and looks to be fiftyish.  He tells me he has a few students, occasionally plays in the local clubs and only recently returned to busking.  We jam nicely on several of his tunes.  I wonder afterwards - could this have been me if I had continued the expatriate musician’s life?

             The most intriguing opportunity presents itself in the form of a young Chinese woman who is plucking a traditional instrument of her country, producing lovely, folk-like melodies.  I approach to compliment her.  She speaks no English & only a few words of Spanish, not enough to ask her about trying to play something together.  I sit on a rock nearby & noodle around quietly on my fiddle.  The drone note of her instrument gives me a base to work with, but the melodies she plays have more in them than the 5 note pentatonic scale that my limited knowledge of Chinese music leads me to expect.  I expand a bit my palette of notes to play around with, but stay rooted in the 5 notes of the drone key.  She looks in my direction and says what sounds like the Spanish word for “louder,” although her pronunciation & my Spanish comprehension are so poor….. could it instead be  “Too loud!”    Which interpretation to choose??  
            I press down on my bow & jump in.  We trade some phrases that sound musical, each of us occasionally picking up from the other a small grouping of notes to copy or vary somewhat.  We thereby bring some structure to our sonic ramblings, and instinctively alternate taking the lead.  When she takes the lead, I resort to the safety of rhythmic drone notes on my fiddle.  When you can’t talk, ending the music becomes problematic; I think I just let my drone notes die away, the sound dissolving into mutual semi-smiles on our faces.  We do something similar two more times, after which I’m not sure if she would like to continue or concentrate again on playing her music to sell her CD’s.  The music we made was pleasant, but not compelling, so I give the benefit of the doubt to the economics of her situation and decide to leave.  We smile one last time, I pack up & depart. 

             Later, several thoughts come to mind.  Thirty-five years before, when (unamplified) busking financed my summer travels throughout Europe & two extra years at the music conservatory in Florence, I was at times annoyed when other musicians insinuated themselves into my goal-oriented music-making.  A mediocre German guitarist who expected me to accompany his out-of-tune, heavily-accented rendition of “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” comes immediately to mind.  That’s not how things were supposed to be. 

             Back then, I found myself early that first summer in a beautiful pedestrian zone in the historic center of Munich.  It had been rebuilt after the war with people rather than cars in mind, and was newly flourishing now with musician buskers, dancers, mimes & sidewalk artists, surrounded by appreciative groups of Germans.  When I looked at the money piled up in the cases of some of the buskers, I decided to give it a try.  If I didn’t find some way of making money, I might have to return to the States by the end of the year.  For an hour or so, I played some Bach pieces I was studying at the conservatory mixed in with Appalachian fiddle tunes, and then counted out over $50 in German money (worth two or three times that today? why was it so much easier then?)   I celebrated with a hearty meal in a nearby beer hall, washed down with lots of Augustiner beer.  A second hour of fiddling later on resulted in a similar purse, and the course of that summer (& the next one, too) was thereby decided.  I found that many European cities had wisely converted their historic centers into pedestrian zones, freshly abloom with the free artistic spirit of the times.  I played once in the Paris metro (subway) but with everyone rushing about, I felt more like a beggar than a musician and vowed never to repeat that kind of experience.  The charming pedestrian zones where audiences spontaneously gathered were the ideal location.  As I traveled around making music, there would also often be invitations from Europeans to join them for dinner, or to stay over at their place.  That’s the way things were supposed to be.

             There were also times when, instead of Mr. Tambourine Man, other musicians got their instruments out and wonderful things happened.  That’s how it was with Barry & Roger, two gifted British blues guitarists I met that way.  But we were able to talk about what to do. That wasn’t possible with the Chinese woman in Barcelona.  Playing with her was more challenging, more ambiguous.  I remind myself that the musical conversation is an important part of what this trip is about.  I must will myself though initial hesitations, past easy thoughts of “that’s something I can do later” when these opportunities present themselves.  I was able to do that to at least get us started; but I was the one who gave up. I decide that next time, when the situation remains uncertain after a few attempts, I will hold my fiddle at my side and wait for some signal from my colleague. 

             Barcelona’s musical life offers many spectator opportunities, too.  The opera house is just around the corner from my hotel, but the new season opens with “L'arbore di Diana” by Vicent Martí­n i Soler, a Spanish composer I have never heard of.  When I learn online that his now infrequently performed operas were more popular than those of Mozart when they were rivals in the late eighteenth century, my level of interest shoots up and I buy a good ticket.  Both composers used the same gifted librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, which makes it especially hard to believe that audiences of that time preferred this pleasant work to great masterpieces such as “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro”.  Is there a better teacher than time?  The opera’s highlight is a brilliant coloratura soprano aria that sounds too much like the Queen of the Night’s famous arias in the Magic Flute, composed by Mozart a few years later.  The talented normally steal from the genius, but theft can go in the other direction, too. 

             The strongest non-musical impression I take away from this night at the opera involves food.  I have seen pro football fans put away huge amounts of (mainly junk) food, but I have never seen any audience eat the quantity or quality of the food that the Barcelonans consume during the opera intermission.  These elegantly-dressed fans make a bee-line for an enormous eating area as soon as the curtain drops, a curtain that will stay down for more than a half hour before rising again as digestion begins.   Perhaps the 8 PM starting time in a society that normally dines later provides the explanation, but the artistic looking multi-layered meats & fresh or grilled vegetables placed between beautifully-crusted bread must have something to do with it, too, especially when compared to the fries covered with cheese & chili so evident at my last NFL game.

           I will gladly go to see Barcelona’s superb soccer team again, however.  The best soccer in the world is played in the professional leagues of Spain, Italy and England, and the reigning champions of both the Spanish League and the Champions League (a season long tournament contested by the best teams throughout Europe) is Barcelona.    The five most highly paid players in the planet’s most popular sport earn between $20,000,000 & $50,000,000 per year, and two of them play for Barcelona.  During my first meal in the city, I had a superficial conversation in my limited Spanish with a matronly Catalan woman seated next to me.  She was feeding her wheelchair-bound mother, and when they turned the conversation from food to Barcelona’s soccer team and its Argentine superstar, Lionel Messi, I suspected this squad had a very broad fan base.  Huge billboards link the team’s tradition of excellence to the image of Barcelona (and to affiliated businesses as well).  As human society becomes increasingly complex, our interests more specialized & our loyalties divided, it is illuminating to see which organizations are still able to draw enthusiastic support across all social classes in a given area.  What does the breadth of our attraction to groupings of elite physical competitors tell us about ourselves?  And why does “the beautiful game,” as it is generally called, get such little attention in the USA (beyond watching our kids play it) while totally dominating the rest of the sports world?

               I am not able, though, to maintain a grip on my wallet as I approach my hotel on the way back from the game.  The Rambla, Barcelona’s central promenade, is reputed to be the arena where some of the world’s most highly-skilled pickpockets perform daily.  I had been forewarned and took what I thought was the virtually fool-proof step of moving my wallet from my back to my front pocket.  Anyone attacking it would have to get past my protective perimeters of sight (full front view) and touch (that pocket is next to a particularly sensitive area).  It’s after midnight but the Rambla is still busy when two guys stop me about a block from the hotel with a question in Spanish & English about directions. They are anxiously pointing to a map.  My brain’s profiler kicks into gear: they appear to be a pair of scruffy-looking Arabs or Turks, but they also seem to be close to my age and have a pleasant manner, perhaps too old and nice to be pickpockets.  I decide to slyly avoid them by responding in Italian and saying that I don’t speak any other language.  When they answer in broken Italian, I am disarmed and wind up caught in a gesture filled conversation that quickly turns from pointing at their map (probably the attention-distracter that enabled them to learn my wallet was not in my back pocket) to the quality of Italian belts.  When one of them goes beyond commenting on my belt to grabbing it, my instinctive reaction is to yell at them to leave me alone as I put my hand into the pocket containing my wallet.  When I realize that it is still there, I at first feel relief and a little smug at having out-foxed them; but when they politely leave, my relief mixes with feelings of doubt.   Has a racism that I normally only see in others caused me to misjudge them? 
               Shortly thereafter, I look in my wallet and notice that the 50 or so euros & a small amount of dollars are all missing from the billfold section; everything else is still there, though – credit cards, debit card, license, & slips of paper with important information.  My feelings now undergo a dramatic transformation.  Why did I drop my guard when they got past my initial avoidance strategy? Was it my fear of feeling/seeming racist?  Were they just too clever for me? The only answer I’m sure of is to the last question, and it’s a resounding “Yes.”
            My feelings get sorted pretty quickly, though.  Since I didn’t have much cash in the wallet, it’s no big loss. They were both pleasant and appeared to need money.  Most of all, I’m impressed and grateful.  Impressed that they so quickly & expertly located & removed my wallet, extracted the money inside, and returned it to its starting place in my front pocket, all unbeknownst to me.  And grateful that they only took the money and not the other things that would have created much inconvenience and cost me many hours sending formal notifications, getting replacements, etc.  I decide to view them not only as masters of their craft but gentlemen thieves as well – they took only what had more value to them than me, and left what had more value to me than them.  In my work as a mediator, I always try to help the parties to a negotiation accomplish this same result in their bargaining with each other.  Although I had no say in the outcome of this Rambla encounter, I’m thankful that my adversaries respected this basic principle of a successful transaction.

             They also got me thinking back to the trip in 1970 that hooked the 25-year-old me on serious traveling.  I spent half a year wandering around South America (including one month in the Amazon jungle on the way to Carnival in Rio), and matched wits one day with a much younger colleague of theirs in Columbia’s black market.  In that era before plastic cards, essentially the only way to change money was to go into a bank and exchange your travelers checks or dollars for the local currency at “the official rate of exchange.”  That rate in Columbia was a joke, and you could get a multiple of the official rate if you were willing to take a chance on the black market.  That involved dealing with shady characters and very stiff fines if you were caught.  Necessity made me more of a risk-taker back then, so I found out where one of those markets was located and dressed like a tourist to increase my chances of being solicited.  A kid quickly approached and asked if I wanted to change dollars for pesos.  He seemed no more than 16, probably too young to be one of the cops that I kept looking out for.  When I negotiated a favorable rate of exchange, I figured my few extra years of life experience were putting me in control of this situation, even though it was my first time.  He was supposed to give me 890 pesos according to our agreement, and I of course carefully counted the pile of bills he handed me – seven 100 peso bills and the rest in 10’s on top of the bottom 700, but he only gave me a total of 880 pesos.  I complained; he counted them quickly and insisted there were 890.  I counted them again with the same 10 peso deficit as before; he did likewise and again claimed there were 890 pesos in the pile.  I was getting impatient and the 10 peso difference didn’t amount to much, but I didn’t want to be cheated as a matter of principle, especially by a teenager.  I insisted he give me the missing 10 pesos, so we wound up doing yet another round of counting, after which he apologized and said I was right.  I felt vindicated and triumphant as I watched him place a new 10 peso note on top of the pile.  In a gloating tone, I told him that I was one gringo he wouldn’t be able to take advantage of, to which he replied “Si, Señor.”  What I didn’t realize until later was that he had deftly palmed five of the 100 peso notes off the bottom in that last round while adding the extra 10 peso note on top.  Since I had already counted the big pile of bills three times, I didn’t think of doing it a fourth time.  I can still see the fresh, unlined face and bright white teeth in the smile that accompanied his “Si, Señor.”  It took me a much longer time to get over that con job.

             I went on that trip because I had so much enjoyed living in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1969-70 that I wanted to visit the sources of that lively latino culture.  The conversational Spanish I worked hard at learning while traveling around Latin America got decent enough after a few months to impress upon me the importance of having some language skills when traveling – the better your communication level, the more you can participate in the local culture rather than watch it go by.  My intentions were good – just before returning to the USA, I bought a copy in Spanish of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book that had come out a few years before (it would later win its author the Nobel Prize) and which people all over the continent raved about.  My plan was to read it at home, dictionary in hand, and master the language while working my way through its several hundred pages.  By the bottom of the first page, I better appreciated the enormous gap between the basic traveler’s Spanish that I had picked up and what it would take to get through this book.  A few pages and many hours later, I developed Plan B: buy the English translation and read them together.  That plan didn’t last much longer than the first.  There were of course many simpler ways to maintain my Spanish than tackling a complex epic novel that was hard enough to understand in English.  Instead, I allowed it to decompose through neglect.  How easily back then I let go of something so difficult to acquire!  Little resistance, minimal effort, too many other things to do NOW.

             However, some Spanish remnants remained, which I reinforced with grammar and vocabulary review during the months before flying to Barcelona.  The language I wound up speaking most often there was Spanitalian - I’d pack as many Spanish words & constructions as I could into a sentence and fill it out with Italian.  The languages are similar enough that it worked surprisingly well.  A multi-lingual hotel clerk there told me his teachers advised him that he could study several languages simultaneously, but not Spanish and Italian because the resulting confusion would keep him from learning either.  In situations where Spanitalian didn’t work, I at first asked "Do you speak English or Italian?", but after a few days switched the language order to "Italian or English" and asked the question in Italian.  I suspect that many Europeans still resent Americans to some degree; but virtually everyone seems to like Italians & Italy, especially people who have been there.  I have lived more than five years of my life in Italy; all of the blood & genes swimming inside me, my wife and children come from that land.  I feel bi-cultural enough to view this as a very minor subterfuge, if that.  After the switch, I have a long & lively conversation in Italian with a young Catalan businessman whose work often takes him to Italy.  When the person speaks another language, though, it is usually English.  If we get into a conversation, some of them comment on how good my English is for an Italian; I always clarify that I am an Italian-American, born in the USA.  I don’t know if changing the language order in my "Do you speak ..." questions made anything different than it would otherwise have been.  I wonder to what extent the increasingly subtle distinctions we make as we age are real or imagined. 

           Whatever the language we used, the Catalans I met were friendly and justifiably proud of their history & culture; some were ardent separatists.  They view themselves as the hard-working economic center of Spain and have a strong business presence throughout Europe.  This faster pace, especially by Mediterranean standards, and the ambitious people it attracts may help explain the high incidence of smoking, along with the lack of noticeable efforts to restrict it in restaurants and other public places.  The quality of the tapas and the fish I eat daily while there, though, enable me to focus less on the smoke and more on the nice things happening to my taste buds.  Solo traveling has its advantages, but not at mealtime.  I often initiate conversations with people sitting next to me in restaurants, but at other times am content with merely observing.  The Catalans strike me as bright & industrious, but also as connoisseurs of life’s pleasures.  They are simpatico -  almost all make time to respond to my questions, smiling & offering information about things to eat or do, even the guy otherwise occupied with hustling the pretty young woman standing next to us at the counter of a packed blue-collar café, where the fish come fresh from the sea a few blocks away.

             Barcelona has opened its doors wide to people from all over the world, visiting, working and walking about.  It has the look and feel of an international city.  As a solo foreign visitor, I normally am the one who has to start a conversation when I feel like switching from the loner to the social me.  But I am pleasantly surprised by two Argentine women shortly after midnight during the festival at a crowded rock concert in the Cathedral plaza.  My walk back to my hotel from a wild Turkish folk-rocker in another plaza gets interrupted here because of the interesting harmonies I hear coming from Barcelona’s most popular rock group.  I’m listening & moving in time to the strong rhythms they’re producing when the two Argentines leave their partying group and approach me to ask some questions.  After a few preliminaries (“what do you think of the music?” “where are you from?”...), they get increasingly personal – “what are you doing here?” “how old are you?” do you have a family?” etc.  As they pull out my story, their eyes widen in reaction to the traveling fiddler in two eras part.  Then I get them to respond to some of my questions.  They came to Barcelona from Argentina a few years before when they were in their early 30’s and have jobs as English teachers.  They were intrigued to see a grey-haired man enjoying a rock concert after midnight and wanted to learn more.  I look around and notice that I appear to have at least twenty years on most of the other people there.  Both of them want to see more of the world, and we exchange some life philosophy thoughts before they rejoin their group.
             “I knew I would have you as soon as I saw you” Rachel later said in her delightfully accented English.  Our eyes had first momentarily locked at a late night jam session in 1976 during the Fleadh Cheoil, Ireland’s annual celebration of its rich traditional music heritage.  She was a university student from Paris, the voluptuous, exotic-looking creation of a French mother & Moroccan father.  I thought I was pursuing her during the mating ritual that unfolded the next day when I saw her at the Irish fiddle competition.  But she took the lead at several critical moments, and I happily went along.  Back then, the combination of music settings and attractive young women often led to romantic adventure (or humbling rejection).  No longer an object of desire, I have now become an object of curiosity in such a setting.  But I have not been in the hunt for a long time.  The woman I love awaits me in Florence.  And I am glad that the curiosity of the two Argentine women leads to an interesting conversation.

           I hope to return again in the future to Barcelona.  But my mind is now turning to Italy.  My original plan was to look for a gig as a strolling violinist on a cruise ship headed from Barcelona in the general direction of Italy.  I’ve never taken a cruise, mainly because most of the ships seem to be enormous floating hotels, teeming with big eaters and serious shoppers.  The more I thought about it, the less attractive that seemed, especially since I’d already had an enjoyable time as a strolling violinist during an earlier journey, trading music for room & board in the high-end hotels of Africa & Asia.  Back then I was short on money and long on time, but now I have the means to be selective about which experiences to seek out; and as a general rule, I place a premium on how I use the shortening period of time when good health allows us to do what we want.   

             I have long been intrigued by the idea of going to sea as a ship’s fiddler.  A centuries-old tradition, the ship’s fiddler originally played rhythmic tunes so repetitive work like hoisting the anchor could be done in unison.  He also performed at the captain's command for festive occasions. He was the ship’s primary source of music and entertainment before technology made him obsolete.  Would it be possible to resurrect this quaint tradition in a contemporary setting?  What about decadent European aristocrats about to take yet another island-hopping trip on their yachts with easily-bored friends – wouldn’t it be a refreshing change to have a fiddler on board playing tunes and telling stories?  Or perhaps the small private Mediterranean cruises like those often sponsored by American universities?  As I fantasized how to make it happen, I imagined myself at the end of my stay in Barcelona going down to its docks and spending a day or two doing what I always enjoy doing in beautiful weather by the water – playing my fiddle.  I’d need a multi-lingual sign (just like the one for the “musical conversation”) and a simple way to enable my prospective hosts to confirm that I would be an interesting addition rather than a loose-screwed threat to their voyage.  That was the impetus to creating the FiddlingAround.net website – I put its web address, which contains my background information, on the sign so they could quietly check me out before welcoming me aboard.  I also bought a very small portable chair well suited to dockside music-making. 

             That fantasy, however, has not yet materialized.  I scout the docks shortly after arriving in Barcelona and see several yachts, but they look uninhabited and inaccessible.  I contact the city’s two yacht clubs with information for posting on their bulletin boards, but get no response.  I explain my plan to a Catalan working on his boat, and he says it will be difficult since the peak sailing season is behind us.  The only cruise ships in port are the big factory ones.  I think about taking the ferry to the island of Majorca and trying my luck there, but some quick research on the web shows me that many of its hotels are closing up in October, and also that all of the island’s boat lines go back to Spain but not on to Italy.  There is, however, a convenient overnight ferry from Barcelona to the Italian island of Sardinia, so I book a cabin and look forward to the next leg of this trip. 

               Alghero, the northwestern Sardinian port, provides a gentle transition because centuries ago it was part of Barcelona’s Mediterranean empire.  Along with Italian and the Sardinian dialect, Catalan is still spoken here.  Though overrun with tourists in the summer, things are pretty quiet now and the days pass pleasantly.   But during a walk along the beach, I am visually assaulted by three grossly obese tourists.   Two are women in their fifties whose two-piece bathing suits look like colored stripes at the top and bottom of the enormous flabby spheres that are their bellies.  They are seated next to an even fatter man,  all three voraciously consuming the pile of food and large pitcher of beer on the table between them, occasionally pausing to grunt something at each other in German or use their towels to wipe the sweat dripping from the many folds in their bodies. 
           Then Cagliari, a city that bathes the eyes with her beauty.  This capital has seen so many civilizations come and go over thousands of years that it is now an extraordinary distillation of Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Arab, Byzantine, Spanish and Italian influences blended together with its own ancient culture.  I spend days walking around its streets and beaches, absorbing the mist from its sea and its history.

            I enjoy the same kind of pleasant stay as in Alghero; but I am feeling the attraction of nearby Florence.  My wife, Giovanna, is directing a college junior year abroad program this school year, and I miss her warmth and exuberance.  And dear Florence is an even older friend, generous to me with her bounty and brilliant in her example.  Food and friendship have evolved into art forms, to be enjoyed here as nowhere else.  And then there’s the real art!  Florence is so captivating that I long ago fell in love with her.   However, we started very badly.  I insulted her intelligence and she responded with gross irrationality.
            I asked Florence to allow me to study violin at her music conservatory with its fine maestri.  This was a dumb request, proof of the detachment from reason of which a young male is capable.  I knew that good conservatories are supposed to put the finishing touches on already highly accomplished classical musicians in their teens.   I was a 29 year-old who had only taken lessons for a few years as a kid.  In my mid-twenties, I fell under the spell of folk fiddle tunes; and its much simpler technique enabled me to become a decent folk fiddler. 
            But my classical technique had enormous holes – I couldn’t even draw the bow smoothly from one end to the other, which is the very foundation of playing the instrument.  Every down stroke had a scratchy, slightly out of control middle section.  What made me think that a classical European conservatory would accept an overage folk fiddler whose every second stroke produced defective sound?
            It is true that I had an excellent excuse for my deficits.   All the violin students in my school were girls except me.  My boy friends teased me for playing a sissy instrument .    I was making good progress and liked music, but it just wasn’t cool.  Too bad.  Not then appreciating the enormous power our younger forms thoughtlessly cede to group mentality, I quit.  

            I was not so naïve as to think that a good excuse would help me get in to the conservatory.  In fact, I wasn’t thinking much at all, at least not rationally.  Instead, I was reacting to two powerful impulses rooted in emotion and intuition.   I wanted a good enough classical technique to play great chamber music well, and I wanted to spend some time living in Italy.  
            Chamber music is considered an ideal form of musical expression because a small group of individuals converse with each other using a musical dialogue written by the greatest composers, often at the peak of their inspiration.  The musical ideas and their development must both be of the highest quality because they are so exposed, and cannot be covered up with big orchestral sound or color.  The unsurpassed quality of the string quartet as a vehicle for great music is evident from how quickly it reached perfection in the hands of its early practitioners, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and how consistently it has elicited masterpieces from the best composers of each generation since then. 
            I occasionally played chamber music but not well and normally the second violin part.  When you hear a beautiful melody soaring up into the sky it almost always springs from the bow of the first violinist.  For me, that was out of reach.  Chamber music was too much a sequence of technical hurdles, and that kept me from bringing it to life.  But the glimpses I had of what that might be like provided the strongest impulse to forming this plan.  I knew how exhilarating it felt to play folk fiddle with good musicians.  My comfort with that easier technique allowed me to focus on shaping the musical sound, giving it line and pulse.  I could only imagine what it would be like to do that playing a Beethoven quartet. 
            The second impulse came from my grandmother.  One summer during college I had a construction job near her home in Pennsylvania, so I lived with her.  She was a strong peasant woman, who was in her twenties when she arrived in this country from Italy with a second grade education, her husband, and the baby daughter who would one day become my mother.  They had four more girls, but he was impossible to live with so she threw him out and raised the girls herself.   I was the first male to enter this feminine (but definitely not feminist) enclave, and my early life came wrapped in a warm blanket of love and attention from all these women.  Since we lived only a few blocks away, I saw my grandmother almost daily, and every Sunday afternoon my aunts & uncles & cousins would gather at her home for good food & company (to be repeated every Sunday evening with my father’s family).  By second grade, though, we lived a few hours drive away, so it was good to reestablish daily contact the summer that I worked there. 
            Culturally, she remained very Italian; the rest of us were Italian-Americans, a different breed.  She and I had good talks during dinner and then played briscola, her favorite card game, afterwards.  Often, her Italian friends would stop by for animated conversation on the front porch.  I couldn’t understand the words, but I definitely felt the warmth and good humor of people very much at ease with each other.  Over that summer, the respect and love I had for my grandmother deepened; and I resolved to spend some time living in the country that produced these engaging people.  Why not do that and study music at the same time?

            So that’s how this Italian music conservatory scheme got concocted.  Not because I was well-prepared to do it but rather because I very much wanted to do it.  For someone trained in the rational world of law, my request of Florence was a presumptuous and irrational act.  For someone with her proud history and high cultural standards, opening her conservatory doors to someone as unqualified as me would be an even more irrational act. 
         But that’s what happened.  Hers was a well-intentioned act, made possible by the egalitarian reforms that ended the widespread social unrest of the late 60’s and offered virtually universal access for a while to educational opportunities previously reserved primarily for the elite.  This elite was playing defense throughout Europe, accused of having privileges for itself and its children that were unfairly denied to others.  Access was determined by money.  Some asked if that was any different from controlling access through party connections in the authoritarian communist world.   Though I did not know it when I knocked on the conservatory door, the rational rules of meritocracy had been temporarily pushed aside in Italy by the ideals of equality and open access.

            The road to that door, though, contained potholes of disorganization and anxiety.  When I asked the Italian Consulate in San Francisco what the application process was, I learned that it was very informal - I filled out a few forms but would have to go to Italy and play a successful audition at the beginning of the school year, probably in October but the date wouldn’t be determined until a month or two before it occurred.  This is not the organizational model that a tooth grinding American lawyer wants to deal with.  What if I closed out my life in San Francisco, went to Florence and then didn’t get in?
            From the outset, the omens were mixed.  I got a cheap flight to Luxembourg and realized after a busride from the airport to the city that I no longer had my passport and travelers checks, my primary source of money other than the small amount I had changed for local currency at the airport.  I retraced my steps and luckily found my passport and travelers checks on the same airport counter top where I had carelessly left them more than an hour earlier.  An internal Freudian voice wondered if my subconscious was telling me that my plan was so foolhardy that I might as well let someone else put the money I had saved to better use.  The only thing I hadn’t provided was the pen.   
            Music is what pushed me onto that plane, so I decided to put my romanticized notions about its power to an immediate test.   I went to a nice park near the center of town and started to play fiddle tunes. 
            Two students asked if they could sit down and listen; and would I like to have a glass of wine with them?  After a few more tunes, some more Luxembougers joined us; one jammed along with his harmonica while others danced, which in turn attracted a tourist from Alabama who kept saying “Golleee!”  Our spirited group conversed mainly with gestures, played and danced some more and then parted ways with much smiling and hand-shaking.  It was encouraging to see the fiddle exert such a magnetic attraction in my first effort at playing abroad.  My earlier anxiety was replaced by a renewed optimism.  But that again gave way to anxiety the next day when I was told by bureaucrats at the Italian Consulate that my Italian student visa could only be granted in Italy after the conservatory officially accepted me.  That was easy for them to say and they sounded encouraging, but it got me worrying about my audition; the Appalachian fiddle tunes that drew together my group in the park wouldn’t do anything for me with the maestri who would determine my fate in Florence.

            I spent several weeks making my way through France and northern Italy.  If I wasn’t accepted, the fallback scenario was for me at least to do some quality traveling, and this was to see what that might be like.  I learned about the music festival in Besancon, France and bought a ticket for an all-Vivaldi program by one of Italy’s best baroque orchestras.  In the large church of a small town, I sat down next to a striking French woman, late 30’s but dressed younger, black hair, dark eyes and black clothes.  We started a simple conversation, but she saw that French was a real struggle for me.  She didn’t speak English but had picked up elementary Italian from her travels there.  Though I had studied that language for the prior two years, that was pretty much still my level, too, so we switched to Italian and carried on nicely - it’s easy to converse when you both speak slowly and use simple words & constructions .  When we went to a café for a glass of wine, I began to fantasize about where this might wind up.  She was an attractive free spirit; but she looked forlorn, and was reluctant to talk about herself.  There was a deep melancholy in her voice and eyes, an air of tragedy about her.  It all felt very mysterious and romantic, but she only briefly considered my proposal for passing the night before rejecting it.  I had been excited, hopeful - why wasn’t she feeling the same way about this?  We parted ways with a short hug at the main road going through the town; she to hitch a truck ride to her home in southern France, and I to take a late night train.

            I missed the train, but saw the concert’s mandolin soloist waiting on an almost deserted platform.  I complimented him on his performance, he told me he’s really a lawyer from Milan, and we then launched into a lively discussion on our efforts to combine the two professions.  He loves music and therefore doesn’t mind that his colleagues think him a bit odd.  I liked his smile and easy manner, but after he got on his 2 AM train and I waved good-bye, the mystery woman returned to my mind.  Too exhausted to walk into town and look for a hotel, I made my way to a nearby field, crawled into my sleeping bag and looked up at the sky.  It was gently illuminated by a bright moon more than half full.  I thought of her, what might have been, and gazed at the stars.  Although it had been more than a decade since I left the Catholic Church, the heavens consoled me that night, though in a different way.

            Wine tasting in the Burgundy region and several days on the French Riviera provided a pleasant distraction from what was often somewhere in the back of my mind, the looming audition.  On the plane ride over, a nice conversation with a French schoolteacher named Rose turned into an invitation to visit the Riviera home where she lived with her husband and young son.  A German friend of theirs named Irmgart was also visiting. While the others went to work, Irmgart and I took off in her car for a beautiful, isolated nude beach behind St. Tropez where I made my au naturale debut in the midst of sand, crystal clear water and charming coves, relieved that a newly exposed body appendage remained naturally at rest and unburned by the sun.

            A few days later I was in Italy, happy to finally be in a place where language presented less of a barrier and fascinated by the hand gestures which accompany spoken Italian.  One evening in a café, I needed both careful observation and confirmation from one of the locals to distinguish a table where a group of deaf mutes met regularly to converse in sign language; hand and arm movements at the other tables were at only a slightly lesser level of intensity.  I went to a festival of avant-guard music in Como, still not knowing when the school year would begin, and met some conservatory students there who told me it would start the following week. 
            And so, eager and anxious, I arrived in Florence.  As I walked around looking for a place to stay, a pigeon shit on my head.  I later learned that Italians consider that a sign of good luck, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.  Literally shity hair doesn’t make a good first impression when you’re looking for lodgings, so I went to the public rent-a-shower at the train station and washed it out.  All the places I looked at were either full or too expensive until I found a pensione that was nice but packed with English-speaking tourists.  I wanted a place that would force me to learn more Italian, but checked in and planned to continue my search the next day after going to the conservatory.
            I was pleased that the forms I prepared in San Francisco had been received and was told to return the next day for an audition.  The next day I learned that a new director had recently been appointed, things were “a little disorganized” and that my audition was being postponed until the following week.  A few days later, I was waiting for the bus when an elderly woman noticed the violin slung over my shoulder and enthusiastically exclaimed “Ah, la musica – e’ la piu bella cosa che ci sia!  (Ah, Music – the most beautiful thing there is!)”  Her poetic outburst encouraged me that I had chosen well, but this dream still had to get past one major hurdle. 
            I was feeling more confident since in the meantime I had been allowed to begin classes in solfeggio (some theory mixed in with ear training & sight singing) and supplementary piano (required for those whose instrument is other than piano).   My piano maestro was a refined gentleman in his 70’s who spent as much time discussing Italian cultural history and passing along interesting anecdotes as he did teaching me piano.  A close colleague of his had occasionally accompanied Mussolini, whom he described as a good amateur violinist.  I tried to get in an hour or two of practice a day, but that could be difficult because I had to use the pianos at the conservatory and sometimes none were available.  One day after an extended search, I came upon a well-appointed room with a beautiful piano in a remote corner of the building.  After about an hour’s practice, one of the custodians happened by and politely but firmly informed me that this was the conservatory director’s private room and was off limits.

            Roberto Michelucci, the violin maestro I had been assigned to was off concertizing in other parts of Europe, so it was two weeks before I finally had my audition.  I began in carefully rehearsed but still hesitant Italian explaining to him a little about my background and that I had developed some bad habits in my bowing hand.  It turned out that there was no need to lower expectations or even to be anxious.  He said I had a very good ear and that almost all my problems involved the bow, but that these were correctable if I was willing to work very hard.  That’s all there was to it – I was now officially a violin student at the Florence Conservatory because of a temporarily reformed admissions policy that I still was not aware of.  I felt relieved and happy.  It was only much later that I appreciated the paradox in this fantasy plan of mine.  If it had been the narrower one of studying music in an American conservatory, that would have been impossible.  But naively expanding the fantasy to have it take place in Italy is what enabled it to happen.
            Each violin maestro had six or so students; at least one of them was a young beginner who went to a regular elementary school and also came to the conservatory for music lessons.  Enough of them quit to raise the question – is this a good use of such high quality teaching talent? But then the truly gifted are shaped from the very beginning by an accomplished maestro.  Inefficient, however …..
            Another example of inefficiency but without any such supporting rational was that no effort was made to match up the best students with the best teachers.  I provided strong proof of that, something I realized even before my first meeting with Michelucci.  I heard a recording of his on the radio and then listened to the announcer describe it as a prior year winner of the Grand Prix du Disque, the classical music world’s highest award.  When I asked a conservatory employee if that was the same person I had been assigned to study with, I also learned that he had been the soloist with “I Musici” when the revered conductor, Arturo Toscanini, called it the best chamber orchestra in Europe.  He was in fact the star of the violin faculty.  In his early 50’s, he was in his prime; and though he lacked the international fame of violinists like Jasha Heifitz and Isaac Stern, he commanded the stage with great musicality and complete technical fluency.  Some mathematicians find beauty in randomness; I found a magnificent maestro that way.

            Despite my limited skills in both the language and the instrument, we got along very well from the outset.  He had an artistic temperament but learned patience as a teacher from being required by conservatory policy to occasionally work with the young beginners.  He thus didn’t seem to mind having to start me from scratch with the bow, showing me a better way to hold it and explaining what’s involved in a good stroke.  I knew my older, habit-stiffened muscles wouldn’t learn these fluid mechanics in the naturally assimilative way a youngster does, so I tried to compensate by using what I did have, the analytic mental tools of the lawyer.  I was constantly asking questions, trying to better understand the reasons for doing things this way rather than that.  Michelucci loved that approach.  He frequently told all his students that a violinist plays with his brain, not with his hands and arms, so his philosophy of the instrument and my analytic method were well suited to each other.  His younger students learned by watching his demonstrations and doing what he told them.  I added the “why” and other questions that he welcomed and thoughtfully responded to.  He also seemed to enjoy the conversations on non-musical subjects that we occasionally had after the other students had left.
            It’s nice when you have a great teacher that you also get along with well, but I still had a major bowing problem to fix.  The sound produced by a bow on a string tells the world the internal state of the player as nothing else can.  That’s because you have two highly elastic materials, the string and the bow hairs (from a horse’s tail), in contact with each other. This extraordinary suppleness between the string and bow hair means that even the slightest changes in bow pressure, position or movement will all be heard in the sound produced.  This gives the player of a bowed instrument a unique ability to create the subtlest of nuances and an expressive power that has fascinated music-lovers all over the world for centuries.  But it also means that any imbalance or tension will also be heard in the sound.  There was no way for me to cover up the slight loss of control in the middle of each downbow - a smooth stoke was absolutely essential to good sound production.   Was this just from a bad habit I had formed as a kid?  Or was this a sign that I was out of balance internally, too tightly wound to be capable of the relaxed fluidity that beautifully bowed sound requires? 
            There was no denying that the compulsive world of law school and lawyers that I was leaving behind had attracted and helped shape the competitive/tooth-grinding person who now wanted more than anything a smooth musical stroke.  I believed that would be possible, but Michelucci advised me not to expect too much at first; correcting a problem as long ingrained as this would take a great deal of effort and patience. 


             When they see that I don’t understand their question to me in Turkish, they ask me in accented but good English about a place they are trying to find.  They are two well-dressed business types, late thirties, engineers in FIAT’s international division, one from another part of Turkey, the other from northeast Greece.  They also tell me they are staying at the luxury Intercontinental Hotel and are at the end of a week-long conference, out to enjoy their last night in Istanbul.  I tell them I, too, am looking for a place here in the Tashim district, a traditional music club that I haven’t found despite walking the entire length of the district’s lively pedestrian street.  I am on my way back to the tram and have a nice chat with them about their jobs and my Mediterranean journey in its senior edition.  When we see the place I am looking for, they say they have heard of it and suggest we get a beer there.  It’s basically an upper-end restaurant with a strolling music group and a sort of beer garden where we sit down and order 3 drafts of Turkish beer. 
            They refer to their wives and kids, but also sound like they might be on the make.  Our conversation is animated, much of it about European soccer, international business practices, and Turkish food & customs.  They are both very simpatico, with the Turk striking me as especially smooth and charming.  I try to pay for the beer but they don’t let me.  They joke that I can pay when they come to Italy, but this is their home territory.  They want to take me to a bar near their hotel which they say has good music, and where we can close out the evening with a traditional drink of Turkish rakki. 
            They hail & pay for a cab which takes us to a place on the area’s main boulevard.  It looks classy on the outside and is dark enough on the inside to take a few moments of eye adjustment.  There are rotating lights splashing color around, illuminating a few women dancing on a low platform to some recorded European pop music.  I am disappointed that this isn’t the kind of music I was expecting, but they already have a corner booth for us and I don’t want to offend my generous hosts by complaining.  They put me between them and order our rakki along with several trays of snacks & fresh fruit, because “in Turkey you never drink rakki without also eating.”  We drink the rakki and continue our conversation.  The Turk gets up to go to the bathroom and comes back with three women, all in their 30’s but already showing mileage beneath their heavy make-up.  One of them sits next to me and asks if she can have a drink.  That’s when I understand what is really going on, though I don’t want to believe this scam is happening to me and being perpetrated by such thoroughly likeable guys.
        
            I had read about this just a few days before in a Turkish guide book at my hotel.  The prey is always a guy on his own, usually older; the predators always have a clean-cut business look.  After ingratiating themselves, they take the prey to a club where he is wined and dined in the company of younger women, then told he has to pay thousands of dollars.  If he refuses, strong arm tactics normally follow, including being taken into the back “office” for hands-on persuasion.  
            Here I am, armed with this advance knowledge yet now in the middle of a booth, surrounded by two of these con artists and their three female accomplices.  My anxiety level quickly shoots up, my initial thought – how stupid of me not to have put the pieces together sooner.  But recriminations can come later; right now I have to get myself out of this jam, hopefully without giving up too much money or bodily integrity. 
            I launch a high road initiative, telling them how happily married I am, how uncomfortable I now feel, and that I am leaving.  Why I ever thought this appeal to conventional morality would work with this group remains a mystery to me.  Instead, they close in around me and insist we continue to enjoy the evening.  I try to match their insistence level and decide there’s no harm in some reality based discussion – I know what’s going on because I read about it, the food & drink orders were not placed by me, and their efforts will be better spent with guys more easily duped because I’m leaving.  As I say these words, I look around.  It’s dark but I notice one other prey; he seems to be going along with things, though it’s not clear if that’s out of naivete’, resignation, or something else.  One thing is certain – there are no alliances to be formed in this room; I’m on my own.  My insistence produces one positive effect, though; the Greek says OK, we’ll get the bill and each pay our share.  I am slightly hopeful that the special rapport I believe I have developed with the Turk will result in some mercy, but my alleged share of a few drinks and some snack food comes to almost $500.  Should I be grateful that it is not a multiple of that, as the guide book indicated it might be?  Should I try to get the number as low as possible and then internally declare victory?

            The bill is presented to me by the burly club manager, who stands at the open end of the booth.  Flickering candles draw my attention to the facial scar and pock marks which give character to the area between his very short black hair and very square chin.   The way the others look at him tells me that this is the man I must negotiate with; my engaging “friends” from the enjoyable earlier part of the evening are obviously mere employees, or perhaps agents on commission.
            As I move toward him, I try mixing the tough and rational (“the price is ridiculous and these guys told me I would be their guest”) with a conciliatory gesture (“I could pay $10 or $20, a fair amount for what I personally consumed”); but when I stand opposite him, he tells me without hesitation that if I know what’s good for me, I’ll pay the full amount.  Two points from the guide book now enter my mind: 1) the back office might very well be my next stop; 2) the “Tourist Police” is the agency that deals with these kinds of scams.  I tell him if he doesn’t let me go, I will call the Tourist Police.  He grabs my arm in a crushing grip and gives me a menacing look.  I surprise myself by breaking free of his grip (an adrenalin rush can do a lot, even at 64); I pull out my cellphone and, in the most earnest voice I can muster, again threaten a report to the Tourist Police as I walk briskly to the door.  “Take him to the back office, boys.”  Those are the next words I expect to hear, but instead, he hesitates.  Over the sound of my pounding heart, I hear him mutter something, accompanied by a waving-off hand gesture.  I run out the door, not looking back until I jump into a cab half a block away.  No one is in hot pursuit, and I am awash in feelings of relief and self-congratulations.   

            Why did he let me go?  I was outnumbered by younger, stronger men.  If this had been a film noir scene, my threat to call the police should have produced guffaws and comments about the local cops also being on their payroll.  But tourism is an important part of Turkey’s economy, and the Tourist Police were given jurisdiction in this sector to protect against the negative effects of these kinds of scams.  Did I fortuitously invoke an authority that is both feared and incorruptible in a part of the world where that combination may be hard to find?  Was that bar already on some kind of watch list?  Since it was only 11 PM, perhaps it was just too early in that night’s harvest to fuss with a cranky sucker who hadn’t run up much of a tab yet.
            Of course, the next day I thought of several other things I could have said that would have left me with no doubt that my successful escape resulted from ingenious quick-thinking on my part.  “Here’s your bill back, and I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m going to tell you.  I’m a stubborn, savvy lawyer, and I always get even with people who cross me.  I’m visiting a good friend here with an important position in the American Consulate, and we will have the authorities shut down your so-called business tomorrow unless …”    I developed numerous variations on this theme (the only accurate part of which was that I did have a law degree), occasionally asking myself two things: Why am I spending hours on this now useless exercise? And why are we so much more clever about how to deal with situations when it’s too late to do anything about them.  The value of learning from mistakes might provide some comfort and even be an adaptive mechanism with its own evolutionary justification, but I’d rather get it right the first time. 
            I did wind up being less hard on myself about falling for a scam I had read about just a few days earlier.  In addition to being thoroughly engaging, these guys were absolute masters of their deceitful craft - their appearance, the low-key entry, the naturalness of the mid-game conversation which was tailored to my interests and subtly handled to avoid raising suspicions about ulterior motives, the fluidity of the transitions from one stage of the hustle to the next.  Now that I’m thinking about it, their entry ploy – asking about directions in the local language before using English – was the same one the Barcelona pick-pockets profitably used on me several months before.  As my mother often says, maybe I need another four years of school.   And why didn’t their willingness to  pass a few hours with someone almost twice their age, not to mention their generosity with the early drinks and cab, get me wondering about motivations? 
            Personal vanity provides one explanation – when you think you’re likeable and interesting, no red flags get raised when others (seem to) want to spend time with you and also pick up the check.  But I think the main reason is that I’ve had so many wonderful experiences with strangers during my earlier travels that my guard is down, perhaps permanently.  There is an interesting symmetry in my running into rip-off artists at opposite ends of this Mediterranean trip  - Spain and Turkey - and opposite ends of the con man social spectrum – scruffy street pickpockets in Barcelona & smooth business hustlers in Istanbul.   I hope they don’t make me too hesitant about interactions with strangers during future travels; we do tend toward caution as we age and add to our experience base.  But earlier experiences are often stronger than later ones, because they have shaped parts of our character that become anchors in our sense of who we are.  It takes decades to get those, and they will not be easily dislodged.  
            So I don’t expect to be raising my guard much.   But then, it’s not hard to be philosophical about getting conned when the total cost for being exposed to memorable performances by two teams of consummate international artists playing on different fields in different leagues is so low - the 50 euros lifted from my wallet in Barcelona, with nary a bruise in either place.   I’ve paid more for many a boring baseball game, and once got hit by a ball. 



 To be continued...



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