Wherever your life ends, it is all there.  The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use;
some have lived long, and lived little.  Attend to it while you are in it.   Michel de Montaigne – Essays


1.   A different kind of artist

            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 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 city’s Tashim district, a traditional music club that I haven’t found despite walking the entire length of the lively pedestrian street at the district’s center.  I am on my way back to the tram and have a nice chat with them about their jobs and my extended Mediterranean journey, now well underway in its senior edition, traveling alone with my fiddle as I did more than thirty years before.  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 a restaurant with a strolling music group and a beer garden where we sit down and order three drafts of Turkish beer. 
            They refer to their wives and kids, but also sound like they are 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. 
            “You’ve been here almost a week and still haven’t had rakki?”
            “No, but I’ve noticed how popular it is.”
            “You must have some.  There’s a good place near our hotel; I pay for the cab.”
            They hail a cab that 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 folk music I was hoping to hear, 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 a few minutes later with three women, all in their 30’s but already showing excess mileage beneath their heavy make-up.  One of them sits next to me.
            “You’re from America?  You have a nice time here?”
            I’m not interested in extending the evening by conversing with new people, especially given what I suspect is now underway, but don’t want to be rude in case my suspicions turn out to be unfounded.
            “I like Istanbul very much.”
            “When did you arrive?”
            “Last week”
            “Can I have a drink?”
             “Ask him,” I say, pointing to my new Turkish friend.  “He brought me here for a rakki; he’s our host tonight.”
            She continues looking at me as she again asks “Can I have a drink?”
            It’s clear now what is going on, though at first I look for reasons to believe it’s not really happening to me. These guys are so likeable, our earlier conversation seemed so pleasant and authentic.  I’m too smart, too experienced to fall for a scam that I had read about just days before in a Turkish guide book at my hotel. 
            “Can I have a drink?”
            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 suffering any physical pain.
            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 that an 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.
            “Listen - I know what’s going on because I read about it.  You guys invited me here, and you placed the food & drink orders.  You’ll be better off spending your time on others 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.
            “OK. OK” says the Greek.  “We’ll get the bill and each pay our share.  Divide it by three.”
            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 his square, steely chin.   From the way the others look at him, I know that this is the man I must negotiate with.  My engaging “friends” from the enjoyable earlier part of the evening are apparently mere employees, or perhaps agents on commission.
            As I move toward him, I first try a tough, rational approach.
            “I’m not paying; the price is ridiculous and these guys told me I would be their guest.”
            That produces a sneer from him as the other two tell me we all have to pay our share.  I decide to try a conciliatory gesture.
            “Look, I don’t want trouble.  Maybe I could pay $10 or $20; that’s a fair amount for what I drank and ate.”
            He and I are now face-to-face.  His words are heavy, his tone threatening.
            “You pay your part.  If you don’t want trouble, you pay me now.”
            Two points from the guide book now enter my mind: the back office might very well be my next stop; and 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 as he more deliberately repeats his last words “You pay me now!”
            I surprise myself by breaking free of his grip (an adrenalin rush can do a lot, even at age 64). I pull out my cellphone and, in the most earnest voice that I can muster, again threaten a report to the Tourist Police as I move with false confidence toward 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 might 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 has 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 that Barcelona pick-pockets profitably used on me at the beginning of this trip several months before.  It disarms you by making you think that they believe you to be a local instead of a tourist.  As my degreeless but savvy mother often says, maybe I need another four years of school.  And why didn’t their eagerness to pass a few hours with someone almost twice their age get me wondering about motivations? 
            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 youthful travels as a wandering fiddle-player that my guard is down, perhaps permanently.  There is an interesting symmetry in my running into talented 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 briefly wonder whether this double dose might make me hesitant about interacting with strangers during future travels.  We do tend toward caution as we age and add to our experience base.  But earlier experiences can be much 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 are not 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. 
 

2.  Kenyan soundings

             A Noteworthy Dispute

             At one point during those youthful journeys I was in Kenya, able to appreciate the interesting sound of the tribal languages, but incapable of understanding a single word.  I had a friend who knew some of the chiefs from her business running motorcycle safaris out of Nairobi into the tribal lands to view wildlife.  She acted as an interpreter after introducing me to a Samburu chief, who then brought me to meet the village elders.  We all sat on the ground around a blazing firepit, drinking fresh milk from a gourd that was making its way round the circle, and talked about how they resolved problems within the tribe.   While working as a novice trial lawyer a few years before, I had volunteered for an experimental mediation program and was intrigued by this approach to dispute resolution that was so different from the adversarial legal tradition in which I had been trained.  In Africa, I was hoping to gain some insight into the origins of mediation, perhaps even pick up a new technique or two from some old masters.
            Their lives seemed much less complicated than ours, at least on the technological plane.  The tribe’s spearmaker did his work in a way that probably had changed very little in the last few thousand years.  But a simpler way of life did not mean there was any shortage of disputes.  Tension within the village had to be addressed because their society was based on collaboration and everyone lived so close together.  Arguments between a husband and wife or among siblings were especially disruptive, but any dispute could tear the social fabric of the village if it dragged on unresolved. 
            Sometimes the chief or a respected elder would talk with each disputant separately, shuttling back and forth like a mediator until an agreement was reached.  Sometimes the chief acted more like a judge, hearing both sides and then deciding who was right.  The end result was usually a village feast, a celebration of re-established harmony, with anyone determined by the chief to be a wrong-doer required to slaughter one of his cattle and prepare the food.
            Afterwards, my friend and I headed off to a wild animal reserve on another portion of their tribal land.  It was hot and dusty, the many holes in the road making the ride slow and bumpy.  We picked up an African hitch-hiker, a young man in some type of uniform.  He explained in choppy English that he was a policeman and that his unit’s car had been broken for awhile.  He was going to a village down the road to make an arrest for murder, news which made me glad we were picking him up on the way there and not back. 
            A few hours later, we stopped to take a break in a small town about halfway to our destination.  My friend went off to get a cup of tea, but I had decided to drink some canteen water, walk around a bit and take a music break with my fiddle.  As I stepped out of the Jeep, my attention was immediately drawn to a nearby commotion – a loud, animated argument between two Samburu women, tension on the faces of several onlookers, a screaming baby.  Here there was need for some mediation, but I felt blocked by cultural limitations.  I certainly had no words to offer.  I watched the escalating discord for awhile, then thought about my original plan for this break, and I wondered….  
            I sat on a rock some distance away and began to play, somewhat timidly, an American folk tune.  Heads turned.  There was a momentary pause in what had been non-stop shouting, then another.  Encouraged, I started to play louder; and the shouting began a steady decrescendo.  By the time I was halfway into the tune, some of the onlookers were drifting over in my direction.  Before I slid into the last note, the arguing had ended and the baby was no longer crying.  I launched into another tune without stopping to catch my breath.  The rest of the group moved toward me, eyeing me with curiosity. 
            I smiled.  Several of the Samburus smiled back, then some began to clap along with the vigorous tune I began fiddling.  We grew into an increasingly festive crowd, joined now by the combatants of earlier on.  I noticed a tentative grin from one of them, and when I saw the other join in the dancing which was underway, I felt like I had done something good.
            Soon after my friend returned, somewhat startled by the scene before her.  I kept fiddling, and she threw herself into the dancing.  When we climbed back into the Jeep a little while later, there were waves, smiles and laughter all around us.  It remains the most enjoyable mediation I’ve ever done, and I didn’t have to say a single word.

 
            Lady of the Lake

            Not long after my arrival in Kenya, I took the overnight train from Nairobi to Mombassa, the colorful city on the Indian Ocean.  I had been on the coast for a few days the week before and heard about a luxury beach front resort whose manager was a folk music enthusiast.  I had stopped by, fiddled him a few tunes and arranged to perform there a week later in exchange for a free stay at the resort.  He said he’d set things up and do some publicity in the interim. 
            Stepping up into that quaint English train at the Nairobi station was like stepping back into the colonial past, with well-preserved railway cars proudly dressed in burnished wood, and an immaculate linened dining car noted for serving excellent food.  I reserved a place for the last dinner sitting and enjoyed the striking scenery that began soon after leaving the city.  Later, I found myself assigned to a dining car table opposite a young African woman.  It was my custom to carry my violin with me as I moved about, both as a theft precaution and conversation starter, and I placed it under the table against the wall.
            “What instrument do you have in your case?”
            “A violin.”
            “Are you a musician?”
            “Yes; and I really enjoy hearing local musicians as I travel around. Any advice on where to go?”
            “I like music, too.  My tribe is the most musical in all of Kenya, and our most important instrument is the orutu – it’s a kind of folk fiddle. Have you ever seen it played?”
            “No, but I’d like to.  I think I’ve heard it on the radio here.  I’m always interested in seeing how the fiddle and its relatives are used in different musical cultures.”
            She was from the Luo tribe, based in the Lake Victoria region on the opposite side of the country, but had gone to college in England and then found a job there.  Her tribal name was something like Atiena, her Christian name Joyce, and she was back in Kenya for a month of visiting family and friends.  She was twenty-four, bright, attractive and curious, with a radiant smile and an honest laugh.  Our dinner conversation flowed along with the wine, accompanied by the rhythmic reverberations from the rails.    
            “I’ll be visiting some friends in Mombassa for a few days, then relatives in Nairobi.  After that, I’ll spend the rest of my time at home with my mother in Kisumu.  She has a small hotel there.  If you go to Lake Victoria during your visit to Kenya, come stay with us.”
            My concert the following night went well, with an enthusiastic mixed crowd dancing to the up-tempo fiddle tunes and country waltzes I played.   Afterwards, a few guys pulled out guitars and African drums, resulting in an impromptu jam session.  They played in some pop styles whose chord progressions were simple and predictable enough for me to join in the music-making. 
            The food, drinks, facilities and services were all at a level far beyond what I was accustomed to when I would be paying the bill.  I was therefore not shy about ordering the best meals, enjoying a steady stream of fresh-squeezed tropical drinks, taking wind-surf lessons from a master African surfer, or using the boats and other equipment that interested me.  This was my first musical performance of the trip, and I hoped I would be able to negotiate similar arrangements later on.  I had already learned that work permit restrictions would prevent me from being paid, so bartering was the way to go.
            Joyce had given me the phone number of the relatives she’d be staying with in Nairobi, and we met at a coffeehouse in the city center several days later for an afternoon of pleasant conversation.  About a week after that, I stepped down in the Kisumu bus station following the long ride from Nairobi, eager to explore the Lake Victoria corner of Kenya and hoping to hear some live orutu music.  I also wondered what might happen if Joyce and I spent some more time together.
            I went to her mother’s tiny hotel, met Joyce’s cousin, the front desk clerk, who told me that Joyce had been delayed in Nairobi and would return late that night.  Her mother and some other cousins joined us, and I asked where I could go that evening to hear live music.  As her relatives described a show at a nearby upscale hotel, it became apparent that it was created solely for tourists.  I asked for a place where the local Africans went to hear Luo music.  They told me about a club on the outskirts of the city and where to catch the bus that would bring me there.
            The club’s main room had a restaurant and bar, but I heard music nearby and followed my ears to an adjoining room filled with people listening, at times dancing, to the music of a Luo nyatiti player.  The nyatiti is a type of folk lyre, with strings on a frame attached to a gourd that serves as the resonating chamber; the player plucks a melody line from the strings and uses his toes, some of which are ringed by thick steel discs, to tap out a rhythmic accompaniment on the base of the gourd.  This musician often sang verses, all in the tribal language, which the audience reacted to with a mix of applause, comments and occasionally laughter.  Sometimes people came up to him, put some money in the basket by his side and talked to him.  They then stood by as he sang verses that seemed directed at them.  Though I couldn’t understand the words, the interactive vigor of this music was immediately appealing.
            “I see you, too, are a musician,” said a middle-aged African man sitting across the table from me.  “I can tell by the way you are moving your head and feet.”
            I had also walked into the room with my fiddle case slung over my shoulder before resting it under the table, but had no reason to doubt his motivation in starting a conversation.  I was the only white person in the place, and in fact had seen only a handful of whites so far in Kisumu.  Aside from Africans working in tourism and services, most of my personal encounters since arriving in Kenya a few weeks before had been with other whites or in settings where the races were mixed; I was eager to have some experiences more African in hue.
            “Yes, I play the violin.  Can you tell me what he’s singing?”
            “This is our traditional music.  It was originally about singing the praises of the chief.  Now, the musicians more commonly improvise verses about our political leaders, especially during this election campaign that is underway.”
            “I’ve noticed all the political activity and have been to some festive rallies.”
            “Did you notice how people sometimes put money in his basket?  They then get to hear him sing their praises, or perhaps those of their favorite politician.  Sometimes they just give him a topic, and he then makes up verses on the topic while improvising an accompaniment on his instrument.”
            I was grateful for the cultural insights he provided as our conversation continued, and curious about whether the musicians dared to be critical of those in power, but backed off when he seemed uncomfortable with the subject.  I had noticed that a photograph of the autocratic Kenyan president, Daniel Arap Moi, hung in many restaurants, hotels and other such places, including this one.  Earlier travels in the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe had taught me that is more likely an indicator to be careful about what you say in public places than a sign of respect for a benevolent leader. 
            One of the waiters pointed to my violin case and asked what it was.  When I took it out, I realized that no one seemed to recognize it; some asked if it was a small guitar, others looked like they wanted to hear it, so I played a few hard-driving American fiddle tunes and was happy to see them clapping and dancing to the music.  The nyatiti player spoke only Luo, so I told him through my new friend how much I enjoyed his music and then sat back and enjoyed the rest of his performance. 

            The next morning, I met Joyce.  She told me one of her cousins was being married later that day and would I please bring my violin to play during the traditional African ceremony in his village?  Would I?  I mentally kissed my fiddle while saying “Of course!”
            The village was about a twenty minute drive outside Kisumu.  Just before arriving there, we stopped in the tiny village where Joyce had been born and where her father, now in his seventies, still lived with several of his wives and children.  His original home was the thatched mud hut in the middle of a semi-circle of five homes.  As he added new wives, her father would build a new home for each wife and the children he would have by her.  The most recent of the homes had amenities such as tin roofs and white plaster on the exterior walls, the most recent wife a woman not yet thirty, with several small children running around.  Joyce was one of six children (all now adults) by his second wife, who by some unexplained circumstances left the village for the small guest-house that she now owned in the city.  They were separated, but still on good terms.  The father would move among the simple homes in his compound, overseeing family and business matters, while his wives did the farm chores and tended the crops and cattle that sustained the entire family.  It struck me as not a good place to be a woman, but polygamy was quite common in this part of the country, formed the foundation for their social support network and somehow co-existed with the Catholicism they also practiced. 
            In fact, the wedding party would soon arrive from the morning matrimonial service in Kisumu’s Catholic Church, so we left for the nearby village of Joyce’s uncle, who had a similar compound.  He was the father of the groom and, as the oldest of several brothers, the leader of their clan.  One effect of these striking variations on the concept of family is that the sharp distinction we make between siblings and cousins is much more relaxed among the Luo.  
            The traditional marriage celebration began just after we got there with the ritual welcoming of the bride to her new home.  The wedding party entered the village and slowly walked toward the house of the groom’s mother to receive her greeting, but occasionally took some backward steps - marriage was not something to be hastily undertaken, nor would its course necessarily be a smooth forward progression.  The group sang the whole way, alternating between rhythmic Christian spirituals, heavily syncopated traditional songs honoring the newlyweds, and call & response chants led by a strong female voice.  Several times people broke out into raucous, joyous yelps that seemed derived from bird or monkey calls. 
            We wound our way around the village to a large open-air tent where the exotic feasting moved from the ears to the taste buds.  While we filled up on freshly prepared Luo dishes and beverages, various rituals were enacted under the leadership of a master of ceremonies.  Many involved the giving of gifts or placing of money in a basket on the bridal table.  From time to time, a family elder would make a celebratory toast or speech.  The ceremony leader would direct the group in a type of ritual applause after each of these - sets of three loud claps, with the number of sets determined by the leader’s opinion of the quality of the immediately preceding speech.  There were humorous moments, too, as when some of the women showed the bride the correct way of carrying baskets on her head.  The nyatiti player I had seen the night before was there, improvising verses about the newlyweds and married life which evoked more laughter. 
            As the only white person among the more than one hundred guests, I was an object of some curiosity.  Joyce asked me to play something when the African musician had finished his performance, and I fiddled some rhythmic American folk tunes.  In addition to some dancing, each of these elicited spontaneous applause rather than the tripled claps I had heard before.  I was glad when Joyce told me that meant the guests enjoyed it enough to respond immediately rather than wait to be led in the ritual claps.   The celebration continued through the afternoon with festive mingling, though at a more relaxed pace; and I had good conversations in elementary English with some recently graduated students about growing up in the village, their thoughts on polygamy, and their hopes (probably unrealistic) of finding jobs in the city. 

 
            In a Jam

            Dusk settled as things wound down.  I asked Joyce if there was any place we could go to hear some live music on the orutu, the African folk fiddle she had told me about during our train ride to Mombassa.  She checked around and the two of us, along with her girlfriend Alala, headed off in her mother’s car for some villages on another side of Kisumu.  As the night turned black, we drove for almost an hour through increasingly remote countryside, with some stops for further inquiries by Joyce and Alala.  Apparently, there was an orutu player who lived in the area, but no one seemed sure if or where he might be playing.  After a few dead ends, we pulled into a village without electricity that had at its center a well-constructed mud and wood building.  The single room inside served as a general store & restaurant, its contents and few tables illuminated by the gentle glow of candles and lanterns.  But my ears pulled me quickly through the room towards the large courtyard to its side, lit not only by lanterns but torches as well, pulsating to a vibrant music.
            The beat was insistent, infectious and multi-faceted, an amalgam of cross rhythms produced by a half dozen Africans, some slapping home-made drums, others banging together blocks of wood or pieces of steel.  In their midst was a young guy vigorously drawing a bow back and forth across a single-stringed instrument.  The string was attached at one end to a stick inserted into a gourd, which anchored the string’s other end and allowed its sound to resonate.  This was the orutu, the only melody instrument of the group but also an equal partner in the creation of this music’s torrential rhythmic waves, visibly expressed in the body movements of all the musicians.  The audience surrounding them moved and shouted in time with the music.  Some of them danced – alone, with partners, and in larger groups, too.
            The raw vitality of it all immediately swept me inside.  I eagerly listened and moved along with them.  Again, I was an object of some curiosity, both as the only white and because of the (to them) strange-looking instrument case by my side.  When the musicians stopped for a break, some of them pointed to my case.  I showed them my violin, started playing and was excited to see first one and eventually all the percussionists join in, laying heavily syncopated African rhythms under my straight-forward Appalachian fiddle tune.  We smiled amidst the applause and comments from the audience, none of which I understood since they were all in Luo.
            The musicians began playing again and beckoned for me to join them. I fumbled around quietly for awhile, unsuccessfully attempting to somehow blend into this music that was new to me and unlike any styles I had ever played before.  Earlier that year, I had worked hard on improving my limited skills as an improviser, but now felt frustrated at not being able to better engage this extraordinary opportunity. 
            I stopped and listened more carefully, trying to analyze what I was hearing and seeing.  The heart of this intoxicating music was its rhythm.  The orutu player was making low-pitched sounds that at times seemed to have simple melodic contours but which were always highly rhythmic.  When I began some rhythmic noodling with a few random pitches on my bottom string, things got better, but with a grafted-on quality.  How could I make what I was playing sound more organic? 
            I turned my eyes into laser beams and focused all my attention on his bow wrist.   When I made motions with my wrist that were similar to his, we fell into the same rhythmic grove and then really took off.  It was as if the melody notes from our two fiddles didn’t matter much; there was no chord progression to figure out and follow, indeed no harmony at all, just two contrapuntal lines, creating both consonance and dissonance, blending together over the most hard-driving cross-rhythms I had ever heard.  When I got in the rhythm, I got in the music.  We all smiled, our bodies swaying to these joyous sounds. As my confidence grew, I relaxed more and let my ears shape the melodies and rhythms now flowing freely from my fiddle. 
            My spirits soared.  At one point, the orutu player and I exchanged instruments and each briefly played the other’s fiddle.  What fun we were having!  My portable tape recorder was being repaired in Nairobi – shit! what a time for it to be broken – but that made it even more important to savor this experience as it unfolded.  Did we play for an hour? Two? More?  I don’t know because I had moved outside of time.  At least, that’s the way it felt.  Until Joyce abruptly pulled me back in.
            “We have to leave.”
            “But making music with these guys is great; Can’t we stay? I’m ready to play all night.”
            “Yes, it sounds grand, but we have to go right away.” 
            She pulled me aside and lowered her voice.  “See that group of rough-looking men in the corner of the courtyard over there.  Alala and I overheard them talking about luring you outside and beating you up.” 
            Alala added, “They are going to steal your money and your violin, too.  We must go.”
            I was stunned.  Instantly persuaded, too.  It was clearly time to not only come back down to earth but also get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. This would be a much different trip without my fiddle, my money supply was already limited, and I had a strong dislike for violence, especially when the victim would be me.  The three of us slipped out of the courtyard and moved briskly through the inner room.  Were those guys that got up in the corner following us?  We quickened our pace, then ran to the car, never looking back.  We threw open the car doors, jumped in and sped off into the night.

            During the ride home, I remained on an emotional high but the feeling of musical ecstasy from earlier on had been transformed into a burning anger.   There I was having one of the peak experiences of my life, and it came to an abrupt end because some guys had decided to rob me.  Why couldn’t they just enjoy the music like everyone else that was there? 
            It took me a while to gain some perspective on that evening.  All the people in that isolated village were poor, desperately so by our standards.  What was for me an incredible musical opportunity was apparently for some of them an extraordinary economic opportunity.  Money is usually trump, especially where it’s very scarce, especially if you’re not playing the music but just there, watching some outsider passing through having the time of his life, a white westerner’s life that makes money much easier to come by, much easier to replace if taken.  It also helped to think about the bittersweet quality of much that happens to us, life’s way of balancing things out.  Yeah, I can rationalize what happened.  But I was still pissed.
           It took longer still to move beyond that way of thinking, to arrive back at a feeling that now expresses what that evening truly means for me.  On one magical night, I stepped into a world radically different from mine, amid people I could not even say “Hello” to, yet made sounds that enabled me to speak with them in a joyful wondrous way, thanks to music.  That is what really happened that night.  The rest is just background noise that’s often there in one form or another, but that we shouldn’t ever allow to define our experience.  The memory of that evening always brings a feeling of exhilaration and satisfaction like no other.  

             It was well past midnight when we got back to the city.  Alala and Joyce shared a room down the hall from mine at her mother’s guest-house.  The three of us sat on the two beds in their room and talked for a long time; the playfulness in their conversation and easy way of laughing had restored me to a positive mood again.  I got up to use the bathroom in the corridor and said good night to them.  Sitting on the flushable throne got me thinking.  There had been an inviting quality in Joyce’s eyes when she looked into mine, an openness to the smiles shaped by her thick lips.  I decided to go back to their room rather than continue on to mine.
            They had turned off the light but were still talking to each other in the dark, now in Luo.  I sat on the edge of Joyce’s bed, holding her hand. 
            “Yes, I’d like that, too, Peter, but not tonight.  I’m too tired.  Alala will probably have you in her bed.”
            “Peter, come here,” said Alala. I was both motionless and speechless.  By the moonlight coming through the window, I saw Alala approach me and felt her stroke my hair.  “You are a lion.  Come to my bed.” 
            I’m not a lion – too short of stature and conflict-averse, among other dissimilarities.  Alala just wanted to get laid, but I wasn’t interested – I liked her joviality, but not the roles of fat on her body.  Anyway, I was attracted to Joyce, wanted to be with her, and gently said so. 
            Joyce began to tenderly rub my hand.  I leaned over and kissed her – her lips seemed to swallow mine.  We were soon wrapped around each other.   I tried not to think about Alala being there.   Joyce had meaty legs, compounding her earthy sensuality.  When I found myself between them, I got very excited and turned out to be much more a gazelle than a lion.  Things would go a lot better in the following days, but hoping it would turn out that way didn’t make me feel any better on that first night.  You can never be totally sure about what your mind might do to your body.  A very eventful 24 hours, though, from start to finish.

 
            A Wedding in White

            Black and white.  They provide a dramatic color contrast, and the same was true of the two weddings I attended during my stay in Kenya.  When I returned to Nairobi from Kisumu, I stopped by a cooperative gallery run by several women as an outlet for their artwork.  One of my best friends from the States had been a member of this cooperative for awhile, gave me the address and suggested I look them up.  I had already done that right after arriving in Kenya, had some pleasant visits with them, and popped in now to just say hello.
            “How was your trip to Kisumu?” asked Vicki, a chirpy divorcee’ who was firmly rooted in upper-class colonial society.
            “Great, but I’ll have to tell you about it some other time.  I didn’t sleep well on the overnight train back, and I’m headed to my hotel for a long nap."
            “Well, we’re headed to a fancy wedding at the Stilton estate.  It’s out near Mount Kenya and there’s just enough room in the car for you and your fiddle.”
            “Sounds like fun, but I’m too tired for anything other than a nap.”
            “This will be more than fun – it’s THE society wedding of the season.  Interesting people, great food.  Come on, you’ll have a grand time.  The bride is a good friend and I know she’ll enjoy your music.”
            Six of us, including one African, piled into Vicki’s car, then stopped at her house for a quick lunch and to change clothes.  I pulled out my last clean shirt, brushed the dust off my shoes, and used a wet cloth to transform a food stain on my chinos into a ghost-like ambiguity, hopefully below the threshold of perceptibility.  Scandalous society gossip provided the entertainment during the two hour ride to the Stilton estate.  It had a magnificent setting on a gentle slope, with a stunning view of Mount Kenya glistening in the bright sun.  The road leading up to the stone and iron entry gate left me with the impression of being in an earlier era, entering a plantation, with the black workers lining the roadside, smiling and waving at us. 
            On the other side of the gate, a large gathering of wealthy colonial descendants engaged in civilized conversation, though occasional bursts of laughter provided evidence that this was in fact a festive event.  A string quartet played in the background, tastefully restrained in both the selection and execution of their music.  Like many of the guests, the table linens were a bit stiff, perhaps from the starch that completed their whiteness.  Black servants moved discretely among us, carrying trays of hor d’oeuvres imported from Europe.  A handful of African guests, obviously well-to-do, seemed at ease in this crystalline ensemble but somehow simultaneously out of place.  They were surrounded by mazungas, a word used by Africans to refer to whites but that doesn’t actually describe a color.  Among the definitions I heard for this elusive word, the one that made the most sense is “the hurried ones.”  When whites draw racial distinctions, we use words of color, black and white, a superficial difference that tells us nothing about character or quality.  The Africans instead focus on differences in the use of time – rather than “whites,” we are mazungas, the ones in a hurry.  Rather perceptive, I thought.
            The bride was from one of Kenya’s most prominent settler families, the groom a German engineer who had come there on an elaborate work project and liked what he found.  The numerous toasts, invariably witty and literary, provided an excuse to drink still more of the expensive French champagne our hosts had specially shipped in for the wedding.  Gift-giving was hidden from view.  After a satisfying meal of international cuisine, a band began playing dance music, but there was more discussing than dancing to be had from this sated group.  As Vicky promised, there were many interesting people to talk with, but also much silent scanning of surrounding territory by bored faces.  When she asked me to fiddle a few tunes, the bride (who was very down-to-earth despite her blood line) danced with some of her friends, but by this point, not even music could turn around the steadily decreasing pulse of our weary celebrants.  All in all, though, quite nice - Quite. 

            It was late when we got back to Vicky’s spacious house, which by night more resembled a fortress.  She had a private security force of several Africans, all armed with guns, some with automatic weapons. As we approached, one of them opened the large steel gate to her property, which was surrounded by a high solid fence topped off with barbed wire.  Had I not noticed this heavy security earlier in the day?  Vicky said there was always an armed guard on duty, but more of them at night, when the incidence of break-ins was high, along with the danger level.  This was an affluent white suburb outside Nairobi, and virtually all the property owners hired their own black mini-armies to protect them and their possessions.  Vicky’s guards made the rounds of her house in a business-like fashion, but I found the open display of weaponry unnerving, and wondered how reliable this security system would be in times of turbulence. 
            Our sextet formed a circle on comfortable cushions in the middle of her living room floor and passed a joint around.  The conversation made its way back to the scandalous behavior of their upper class colleagues.
            “Did you see that cute little snit that Nigel is running around with now.  I can’t believe he brought her to the wedding; she must be at least twenty years younger.  I wonder how Maggie felt.”
            “Well you know that Maggie started it by fucking one of her security guards, so don’t feel bad for her.  But the guy she brought with her was obviously just there for show - I think he’s the lawyer who does her divorces.”
            “That guy is a cocaine addict…”
            I had little to contribute, but in my now more relaxed state, listened with interest to their tales of colonial decadence, all of which seemed natural expressions of who and what they were.  Just as I was beginning to feel bloated by dissipation, my attention drifting, Vicky turned the conversation toward something strange and mystical. 
            “Did you hear that Charles is back at it again?  I can’t believe he even survived.”
            Charles was a middle-aged Brit who had moved to Kenya many years before.  A sensitive vegetarian and contemplative soul, he chose to live off the land out in the bush country.  Gradually, he developed deep spiritual feelings about his place in nature and the unity of all life forms.  He put these beliefs into practice by taking long hikes in the bush, unarmed, among the wild animals, predators and prey alike, walking and talking with them.  As his story spread by word of mouth, he became a charismatic, cult-like figure, the man who walked in peace with lions.  People sought him out, eager to have his aura of serenity envelop them and cleanse their spirit. 
            But then a lion attacked him, biting deeply into his flank, leaving a grossly unnatural curvature in the side of his body and a definite demystification of his persona.  Had he been spiritual and brave for so many years, or merely stupid but lucky?  People viewed him differently afterwards, though he apparently did not feel that way about himself.  After a long, painful convalescence, he returned to walking with the animals.  But only he knows if it is now with a fear that was not there before.

           
3.   Autumn journey
 
            My early travels as a vagabond musician did more than lower my guard with strangers such as the Turkish con men and the would-be robbers in Kenya.  Music opened doors to life-changing experiences for a young man in search of adventure & self-definition.  Decades later now, with kids grown and an understanding wife, what started as simple curiosity about what it would be like to be a white-haired wandering fiddler has matured into a decision to try it.  Not to re-capture the adventures and emotions of before (though some of that would be nice, too) - more rather to observe and reflect, free from the youthful pressure to be the protagonist.  Free also to focus more on something beyond the sensual pleasure seeking that so easily dominates young adulthood.  There is wisdom in the emphasis of some traditional cultures on going off in search of deeper spiritual understanding after completing one’s primary householder responsibilities.  I learned much from the world and its peoples before undertaking those responsibilities, and I wondered what they might teach me later in life. 
            Risks, too, must be factored in.  But the risks of improvising a musical journey abroad that concern me at this stage of life do not involve con men, nor (as before) wondering how I will pay my way or put a career together afterwards.  Instead, I wonder if the crustiness of age and habit will keep me from trying for what might be;  if comparisons with the freshness and intensity of my earlier travels, especially in their peak moments, will result in disappointment and boredom.  Important decisions about time and place must be made, too. The Mediterranean feels like the right setting because the more I have come to know its people and cultures, the more fascinated I have become.  As is often the case with big plans, the main question is now or later; but later often means never, and the problems recently diagnosed in my right hand threaten my long-term ability to play the violin, so the time must be now.

            But where to start?  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 during 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 make enough money that summer, I would have to return to the States before long.  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 almost $40 in German money (worth a multiple of that today).  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 applauding audiences spontaneously gathered were the ideal location.  As I traveled around making music, there would also often be invitations from European listeners 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 and left. 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 new colleague. 


4.  Barcelona post-reflection

             In addition to playing opportunities, 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.


5.  The Italian Siren

           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 Smith College's 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.  But the beginning of our relationship was quite strange - 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 1960’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.  I was quitting a well-compensated position in the litigation department of a large corporate law firm (and glad to be leaving behind a job that over the course of my year and a half there made me feel both guilty and bored).  But what if I closed out my life in San Francisco, went to Florence and then didn’t get in to the conservatory?
            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. 


6.  Blood Relations

           Though I look forward to their visit, I know I can never pay back what I owe them because it is a debt beyond number.  They have not been to Florence since they visited me in the tiny apartment of a struggling music student 35 years before, when I slept on a hard marble floor so they could have my bed.  As then, they bring what they have raised and made – the vegetables, eggs, cheeses, liqueurs, chickens, and pork products.  They no longer make their own wine; they are trying to lessen their chores as the years pass.  Carla apologizes for not bringing more as all the empty spaces in our refrigerator fill up.  Her husband Ricardo almost never travels by train, preferring to stay in the valley just below L’Aquila where he was born.  But the devastating earthquake of a year before and their son Sergio’s impending divorce have seriously beaten up their traditional sense of home and family.  
            I first knew them as my grandmother’s nephew and niece, but they have welcomed me into their home so often that they have become my Italian uncle and aunt.  At least, that’s the way I think of them, though they are only 10 years older than me.   I learned from their example the virtues of self-sufficiency, planting & harvesting with them, feeding the chickens, rabbits, sheep and pigs, making wine, prosciutto, and ricotta cheese.  Like all my other relatives there, they built their own home, methodically and patiently, moving to the next step only when there was enough money to buy high quality materials.  It can take the better part of a decade.  An extra floor was prepared but left unfinished for when the first son married.  They were surprised to learn I had never done these things.  I was surprised at how rooted their lives were in centuries-old customs, and how far removed a single generation in the United States had transported me away from all that. 
           I have long carried the guilt of a man who can never reciprocate.  Riccardo and Carla will not fly, making a visit to my New England home impossible.  So I host them at our Florence apartment, with the spacious guest bedroom that didn’t exist before.   Conversation is easy and familiar, often reminiscent.
          “Your first visit is when I learned how much more seriously Italians take their Labor Day holiday (“May Day”) than we do in America.  Everything shut down, even the city buses that ran on all the other holidays.”
          “Yes,” Carla said, “I remember the long walks to the city center and back that day.  Riccardo’s feet both had blisters afterwards!”
          Riccardo smiles as he recalls sitting in my only chair, with Carla soaking his feet in warm water and salt.  When they left the next day back then, was it because of his aching feet? Or had they noticed I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on a floor in the empty room between the bedroom & kitchen and didn’t want to inconvenience me?  I resolved this visit would last longer, and early on give them a quick tour of the apartment so they see that it has comfortable bedrooms for all of us.  I also make liberal use of cabs & buses as we tour the city over the next few days.   I try to be an informative tour guide, but Riccardo makes it poignantly clear when he’s had enough.
          “Pietro, after awhile these palaces and cathedrals all look alike to me.  I don’t know much about history or art - I only finished elementary school!  Don’t waste any more money.”
          The days end with a long dinner, and the two prepared by my wife are more enthusiastically consumed than the one in the middle that I made, built around the toughest pork chops I’d ever encountered.  The man who showed me many years before how they butcher their pigs, explained why.
          “Pietro, when you went to the market, you picked the nice-looking pink chops?”
          “Yes”
          “They look better, but the best-tasting chops come from a different part of the pig.”  He pointed to a part of his back.  “They’re more tender.” 
          He looked back at his chop, took a deep breath and pressed hard on his knife, determinedly sawing his way through this highly resilient meat.  I saw a metaphor for his life, but merely apologized for my misguided selection at the butcher shop.
          After dinner, we remain at the table, our conversation now accompanied by fruit, nuts and small glasses of the liqueur Carla made from local herbs.  I knew from earlier phone conversations that the devastating earthquake one year earlier had dramatically transformed their lives, and was eager to learn more about it.
          “What was that first night like?”
          “Our animals had been nervous all evening, and the loud noise of the first shock woke us up,” Carla says.   “It made the house shake.  The second one came a few minutes later and was even stronger.  Sergio came down from upstairs.  It was cold but the two of us went outside; we were afraid the house would fall down.  Riccardo wouldn’t leave – he just stayed in bed.”
          “I thought we’d be ok inside,” says Riccardo, without convincing any of us.  I wondered why  he stayed in the house.  Perhaps when you’ve built it yourself, seen all the concrete and iron in its structural elements, invested years of your work and that of your brothers, made it the center of your life, a place you almost never leave overnight, “house” takes on a different meaning for you.   I was there for a few days helping out while they built a younger brother’s house, amazed by the solidity of their traditional construction practices, but doubted that faith in the strength of what he had built provided a full explanation for his staying inside.  This was an irrational act by a man close to nature in the face of one of nature’s most powerful forces.  A few hours later, after still more shocks, Riccardo reconsidered and joined his wife and son outside. 
          I ask about the response of the government, and hear them describe it as uncharacteristically swift and efficient.
          Carla -  “By the next evening, the civilian authorities and army had organized food distribution centers, and tents were set up for sleeping.  The food was good and the tents were heated.”
          Riccardo -  “Berlusconi [the controversial right-wing prime minister] said his government would give us the money to rebuild our homes and they did.  They started sending steel containers to live in during reconstruction a few days later.”
          I had read about accusations of corruption, and ask him “Didn’t Berlusconi give the lucrative reconstruction contracts to his friends?”
          “Some people say that but I don’t care.  He got the job done, not like the big earthquake a few years ago in a region down south when the left was in power.  They took a long time to do hardly anything – who knows where the money wound up.  We expect our politicians to be corrupt.  What counts is if they get the job done.  Usually in Italy they don’t; but Berlusconi did.”
          I thought of how often my salt-of-the-earth relatives had provided a counterbalance to the opinions of my Florentine friends, almost all of whom lean decidedly to the left, even the wealthy lawyers.  Regardless of political orientation, Italians share a deep cynicism, the result of a civilization that, as it evolved through the millennia, has seen the very best and chillingly worst of which humanity is capable.  In Florence, I feel carried away by the flights of artistic and intellectual imagination so evident everywhere.  With my relatives in the mountains of the Abruzzi, however, I return to a reality rooted in peasant traditions and, above all, in experience.

                       The first time I met them was a true test of family.  It was over the Christmas holidays after my arrival in Florence to study at the conservatory.  I had moved into a small Florentine rooming house that fall and began to develop a feeling for Italian family life from the owners, a very friendly middle-aged couple who lived there with their two children.  Signora and Signore Taiuti spoke no English, and most of their eight boarders were Italian.  It was an ideal living arrangement for me – learning their language and way of life, inexpensive, a bountiful daily meal included, normally with all twelve of us at the table for one to two hours of good food and animated conversation.  Becoming fluent in a new language is hard at 29, especially when your mind hasn’t already been thoroughly exercised by successfully doing it before.  High school Latin and traveler’s Spanish showed me I didn’t have a special talent for it.  Certainly, fluency would be required if I expected to develop genuine relationships with Italians and enter their culture.  Most of my day was spent on music study, a solitary activity.  But I almost always made room for an hour or more of reading Italian or learning grammar, and often listened to news and discussions on radio or TV. 
            Speaking with a new tongue has a deceptively low initial hurdle.  You can pretty easily learn the tourist talk because most of it is simple questions to elicit a simple answer.  Wow – I can get directions and other useful information, and be courteous to boot by just making some memorized sound combinations!  You control the sound-making in speaking, but not in understanding; and so the second hurdle is enormous – how to make sense of that flood of new sounds you can get in return, especially in a country with talkative people.  Understanding – what a challenge! 
            By the time I went to my relatives, I was well beyond tourist talk and could sustain a social conversation as long as the comments and questions were fairly simple.  And I was willing to guess, whether speaking or listening, though always with a feeling of discomfort.  What if I misunderstood and responded with something inappropriate, perhaps highly embarrassing?  But guessing was a necessary step.  Otherwise, you’d stand still, waiting for a level of comfort from study alone that is not attainable without first taking your chances with experience. 

            L’Aquila - a former fortress city, the highest in the Appenine spine of Italy, set in the valley below its imposing summit, the Grand Sasso (“big rock”).  There is a solidity here that has spread to the people from their surroundings.  They are short of stature, but with the sturdiness that comes from broad bodies and wide faces, close to the ground.  Surrounded by solidity - yet the earth here has violently shaken itself with crippling force, each time unexpectedly (though the animals sense its approach), forcing an acknowledgment of overwhelming, uncontrollable power even where everything seems to us most strong.
          There is a resilience here in the face of adversity.  My grandmother’s sister sent her husband Domenico and a middle period son to pick me up at the train station.  Domenico lost an eye in a mishap many years before; in place of a patch, he had scar tissue covering the socket, squarely set in his smiling face.  I smiled back, we shook hands and exchanged some pleasantries. 
            “You’re Angela’s grandson?”
            “Yes. Hello, it’s so good to meet you.”
            “Welcome. This is my son, Dino.”
             Especially when compared to his very lively father, Dino was a man whose appearance suggested some slowness of mind.  He responded with a string of sounds so mumbled I had no chance of comprehension, which however did not keep me from speaking to him.
            “Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
            Dino again mumbled unintelligible sounds, then smiled nicely.
            “Aha…” I said.
            More undecodeable sounds from Dino, followed by that unfeigned smile.
            “Yes…” I responded.
            Normally, pleasantries are no problem, but Dino was a master mumbler.  He had such a gentle laugh (also mumbled) and cordial demeanor, however, that even when I didn’t have a clue what he was saying, an occasional smile or affirmative nod seemed safe.  I often did that then.  Of course, our conversation could easily have gone:
            “Nice to meet you, too. Your face reminds me of my grandmother.”
             Unintelligible sounds
            “Sorry, I didn’t understand.”
             Unintelligible sounds
            “Excuse me, but can you please repeat that?”
             Unintelligible sounds
            “Sorry.”
            That would be the honest way to handle not only extreme situations such as this, but also the cases of partial comprehension I routinely experienced even with clearly enunciating Italians.  Between the embarrassment possibly resulting from faking understanding and the embarrassment from repeatedly admitting I was still incapable of consistent comprehension, I usually chose to take my chances with the former.  I preferred to keep the conversation moving forward in the hope I would better understand the next sentences.  That would often make obvious at least the subject matter; with luck, all the content too. Instead of bringing everything to a grinding halt with honesty, I gambled.

            We drove in Dino’s car to the old family farmhouse five minutes outside the city.  This visit started with my grandmother writing her younger sister, Angela Maria, who now stood before me.
            “Ciao, Pietro – welcome to our home.”
            “Ciao – thank you, Zia (Aunt).”
            I was struck by her resemblance to my grandmother as we exchanged the alternating cheek kisses that serve as the common Italian greeting.  We were in the sparsely furnished large room that served as the dining & living room, surrounded by more than a dozen smiling faces, all double kissed and greeted during the blur of the next several minutes.  The enthusiasm and warmth, though not all the words, came readily through; and I did manage to figure out that the family plot provided a home to the families of three of Angela Maria & Domenico’s five children, including an assortment of grandchildren.
            “Please sit here.  You must be hungry after the long train ride,” Angela Maria said, as Carla placed a dish of soup before me.
            “Oh, thank you.  I ate on the train, but yes, I’ll try some.”  In fact, I wasn’t at all hungry.  The train arrived around 9 PM, and I had already eaten two sandwiches on board a little earlier.  But I knew how important food was in Italian culture and didn’t want to refuse their hospitality.  They had all already eaten dinner, so I was the only one eating, trying simultaneously to respond to the questions and comments coming from all around. 
            “Here’s a picture of your grandmother during her last visit ten years ago.”
            “She hasn’t changed much since.  Still looks in charge.  She sends her greetings to all of you.”
            “Here – have some home-made pasta.”
            “I’m pretty full.  But it really tastes good!”
            The food was excellent, but as I ate the pasta I realized that my stomach was rapidly running out of room.
            “How do you like Florence? What is it like in America?  Do you have a family? How is….”
            This was the kind of simple conversation I had already mastered, but it was harder tonight.  They often used words from their Abruzzese regional dialect that were different from the Italian words I expected.   However, I felt comfortable guessing because they were all so friendly.  Zia Angela Maria was especially sweet and soft-spoken, and I realized that her resemblance to my grandmother was only physical.  I wondered if they had different personalities growing up together in Italy, determining which of them would be drawn to cross the ocean in search of something better, or if instead the challenges of immigrant life produced the assertiveness in the older sister that the younger one lacked.
            “Have some of our chicken and salad from the garden.”
            “Thanks, but I’m really too full.”
            “You’ll enjoy it – it’s good!”
            Before I could protest again, the plate was in front of me.  Not wishing to offend, I did my best to eat the food though I was now moving well past the threshold of pain.  When Dino’s wife Giuseppina placed yet another dish in front of me, I realized I had to take a more dramatic defensive step.  I had been using the word “pieno” which I knew meant “full”, but that obviously wasn’t working.  I really felt stuffed, and that sensation hatched my new plan.  I had already learned that there are many Italian adjectives that have the same base as in English, but with “ato” at the end instead of “ed” – governato=governed, privilegiato=privileged, guidato=guided.   If I was stuck for an adjective, I sometimes tried an English word and Italianized it by adding “ato” at the end.  I felt stuffed and so told them earnestly that I was “stufato.”  I felt comfortable taking a chance with that word because I remembered hearing it used in Florence, though I didn’t remember the context or know its meaning.  It definitely produced an effect – the food was taken away, the festive conversation ended and shortly thereafter, people began saying “Good night” to me as Riccardo led me up the stairs to show me my bedroom.
            What had I said?  When I saw the somewhat startled expressions on a few of their faces, I quickly followed up “stufato” by saying again how “pieno” I was, simultaneously patting my belly; but it felt like the damage had already been done and it would probably be futile to attempt further explanation.  I normally carried a little dictionary in my back pocket, but I had forgotten to bring it with me for this trip.  With a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, I flipped through its pages as soon as I returned to my room in Florence a few days later:
            "Stufato – adj.  bored, annoyed."


              Notwithstanding, my relatives invited me back a few months later for Easter – a fact which amply demonstrates how seriously the family bond is taken in this country.  And we had some good laughs when I explained how I came to such a maladapted word choice on my first evening in their midst. 
            “What must you have been thinking about me?” I asked.
            “It was an odd thing to say,” commented Marcello, one of Riccardo’s younger brothers, using the mischievous tone that was often accompanied by a twinkle in his eyes.  He had both the quickest smile and mind among the brothers. 
            “But you all were so nice to me, taking turns inviting me for meals with your families, showing me how to make pasta and butcher a pig.”
            Making taglatelli was pretty easy during that first visit, mixing the flour, water and eggs, working the dough, flattening it with the rolling pin and cutting it into the long, thin strips that go so well with tomato sauce and parmesan cheese.  On another day I ventured into the risky world of gnocchi – too much potato and they become lead sinkers, too much water and they turn into a gluey mess.  Under the guidance of Zia Angela Maria and Carla, the gnochhi I made were well-received.
            “Complementi, Pietro.” 
            “Very good!”
            “Indeed!”
            That made me cocky.  I announced I would make them on my own the next day, followed the same procedures as before, and produced a slimy pile of little turd-shaped inedibles; no one, including me, had more than a spoonful. 
            “Don’t feel so bad, Pietro.  Good gnocchi are hard to make. It’s a very fussy form of pasta; even the weather can affect it!”
            Joining them in the butchering of Riccardo’s pig required getting past some queasiness.   I didn’t like the idea of assisting in the killing of an animal.  I wasn’t even comfortable with the idea of watching it.  But I ate meat.  Why not directly confront what that necessarily implies, in the traditional peasant manner, far from the industrial-strength procedures that isolate us from what we eat.  If I’m going to eat meat, I should be aware of what that means, look it straight in the eye.  Most of what you eat here you either plant and then harvest, or raise feed and then kill.  If it’s a chicken, you break its neck with your hands; if it’s a pig, calf, rabbit or lamb, you slit its throat with a knife.
            The pig is quite an intelligent animal.  That much I surmised when I heard its apprehensive squeals as the three brothers and Sergio, Riccardo’s son, approached its pen.  They tied the pig with some difficulty because of its agitated, forceful movements.  Carla brought out the knife and a large pan which would soon catch its blood.  Though the pig had never before seen an animal slaughtered and couldn’t see (nor would it have recognized) the butcher’s tools, it fought frantically the entire twenty meters between the pen and the pan, forcing the men to drag its more than 300 pounds the whole way.  Its squeals had now become shrieks, loud and desperate.  How did it know?  These men the pig was now resisting with all its strength were the same ones it was accustomed to seeing peacefully gathered around it; two of them regularly cleaned its pen and brought it food every day.  Perhaps that was a clue – the pig is not fed the last few days so its intestines can empty, making them easier to clean for the sausages and salamis they will encase.  But if you were hungry and hadn’t seen the person who fed you for awhile, wouldn’t you be happy to see that person approaching you again?  Those early squeals I heard, however, were clearly not of delight – how did it figure things out so quickly?
            The pig was close to the pan when Marcello slipped another rope around its body and the men pulled it to the ground on its side.  Riccardo thrust the point of the dagger into its neck, then again, opening the wound so the blood could drain.  The pig continued its shrieks, violently kicked with its legs, then less so as its life flowed out, the stream of blood gradually turning into dark red droplets, dripping into the pan. After the convulsions ended, there were some muffled sounds and heaving attempts at breathing, then all was still.  At least, the scene I saw became still, but it was replayed in those days after Christmas throughout the region, throughout the centuries.
            The pig was carried to the garage where it was hung upside down, cut lengthwise, and its organs removed.  A few days later, we gathered in the room where I first met my relatives and spent the entire day turning that pig into prosciutto, salami, sausages, pork chops and many other cuts.  The blood had coagulated and was used for making the special type of sausage that carries its name.  Nothing was thrown away except the eyes; the many odd scraps remaining were ground up and vigorously boiled in the fireplace kettle on their way to becoming a form of scrapple which looks very unappetizing in its natural grey color, though not for that reason alone.
            We all shared a celebratory dinner at Riccardo’s house that evening, enjoying the choicest cuts just brought in from his wood-burning grill.  The bread they made in the outdoor brick oven was being dipped into a large dish filled with a liquid.
            “What’s that?”
            “Melted pig fat – we always have it the first night.  Here, dip some bread into it – it’s good.”
            “Don’t you normally use olive oil for that?”
            “Yes, but this is a special occasion.”
            It did taste good, and I fortunately was still years away from learning about cholesterol, though I could tell from watching the liquid slowly thicken as it cooled and then turn into a mix of white grease-spots in yellowish sludge that this was probably not healthy.  And the pork chops?  If I were at all inclined toward vegetarianism, what I experienced on the day the pig was killed should have pushed me over the line.  But the chops from the grill smelled great and tasted still better.  Even the revulsion of mind and heart can be trumped by the pleasure of the senses.

            Three of Zio and Zia’s four sons lived on the family parcel.  A daughter, Gina, had moved to her husband’s village when they married almost twenty years before.  The youngest son, Parisi, left for Rome, an hour and a half away, when he got a job there as a policeman.  He married a Roman woman, who was treated cordially but not really liked by the family because of what they called her city “airs.”  All the other spouses were from nearby villages.  As his sons came of age, Zio added simple, small apartments to the original farmhouse, combining his mason’s skills with the construction abilities that were possessed to one extent or another by various relatives and friends.  Dino and Marcello still lived in these apartments, each with a wife and two children; but they were slowly saving enough money to build their own homes on small plots within the original family parcel, as Riccardo had recently done.  They had helped him build his house, and he would reciprocate later on.   
            This generation had learned the peasant’s broad range of life skills from their parents, but also had jobs.  Riccardo used to make money as a mason, and now worked in a unionized factory that made telephones.  Dino was a delivery driver and Marcello an orderly in a hospital; neither earned much, but because Marcello’s wife Adriana also worked in the hospital, they were able to start building their home before older brother Dino.  The main difference from the prior generation was that the building materials purchased were of a higher quality, especially the marble, and money was sometimes paid in exchange for more complicated labor provided by friends, such as electrical work, though often that too was bartered.  Relatives were never paid, but they definitely kept score of who had done what for whom, creating the risk of resentments later on.  My initial visits with my Italian relatives, however, were bathed in such warm family spirit that I thoroughly romanticized that part of their lives.  And no wonder.  I had long, engaging meals with each of the four families there, getting to know them better in smaller groups.  Moving around at mealtime lessened the stress I often felt when conversing in this still uncomfortable language because I could talk about the same subjects and ask similar questions.  When your repertory is limited, it’s good to have different groups to play through it with.
            At first, I was worried about not having enough in common with them to have extended conversations.  But that concern was quickly erased.
            “Zia, what was it like when you & my grandmother were growing up?”
            “Angelica was smart, so our parents let her stay in school until fourth grade.  The rest of us left after second or third grade to work in the home and on the farm.  There was no electricity or indoor plumbing then.  We ate more potatoes than pasta – pasta was more of a luxury before Mussolini’s time.  When we got older, our parents talked with other parents about what marriages might be made.   But that was not the only way couples came together.  We had an older sister, and normally, you wouldn’t marry someone until after your older sister was married.  But our older sister was a little lame.  That made others less interested in her.  Besides, your grandmother had a mind of her own.  When your grandfather came courting from the next village over, she married him.  A few years later, after your mother was born, they went to America.”
            “Did you ever think of going to America?”
            “No, no,” she said after a gentle laugh.  “My home is here. “
            I smiled and looked at her husband.
            “Zio Domenico, what happened here during World War II?”
            “It was a dangerous time.  We went in the cellar when we heard the American planes overhead, but they dropped most of their bombs on the cities.  The German soldiers were very bad.  They took what they wanted and didn’t care at all about us.  If they were angry, they could be ruthless. And the Italian partisans weren’t much better.”
            “But I’m reading a book now that describes the partisans as heroic fighters for the resistance.” 
            “What heroes!  They took food from us and other things they needed, then went back to hiding in the mountains, attacking the Germans.  When they killed a German soldier, the partisans returned to their hiding places and we suffered the consequences.  The Germans randomly gathered up the nearest Italian villagers.  They shot and killed ten of us for each German killed by the partisans.”
            “”Weren’t you afraid?”
            “I watched out for myself and my family.”
            “Did you ever go hungry?”
            “Life was harder, but we kept growing our food and had enough to eat.  Many of the people who had moved to the city before the war came back.  Sometimes wealthy people from Rome came here, trying to buy food, but what good was their money then!” 
            He shook his head, his voice trailing off as he added “It was a difficult time…”
            I tried to imagine what it must have been like.  I had grown up in safe, prospering post-war America.  What I knew about war came mainly from books.  But this direct, dramatic testimony hit me in a way that book words could not. 
            Zio was quiet for awhile, his eyes cast down.  Then he looked up and asked “Pietro, how do you support yourself studying music in Florence?”
            “I saved as much money as I could working as a lawyer for almost two years and living very simply.  I also live very simply in Florence, but it’s fine because I love studying music.  I started out in an inexpensive pensione, and will move next month to share a small attic apartment with a Sicilian tailor and a student from Syria.  It doesn’t have central heat or hot water, so it’s very cheap; but I’ll have my own room and will buy a small electric heater.  I also heard about a special dining hall for conservatory and fine arts students.  I can get government subsidized meal tickets for about 25 cents each and will start eating there when I leave the pensione.”
            Though I had only met this financially rather poor peasant relative a few days before, he looked at me with concern in his eyes and earnestly said “If you need money for your studies in Florence, tell me.  I’ll give you the money.”

             When I wasn’t learning about family matters or history, I was hearing from different relatives about how to make wine or harvest crops or do a hundred other practical things that my ancestors had done for hundreds of years, basic life skills they took for granted that had been completely lost to me in a single generation.  I was determined to soak up as much of their life experience as I could.  I suspected (correctly) that I was not ambitious enough to integrate their skills into my daily life, but recognized (also correctly) that here was a worthwhile opportunity among good, unpretentious people.
            The central role of food in Italian culture meant that meals were almost always special occasions.  The appetite-stimulating antipasto was usually followed by homemade soup or that marvelous blending of taste and practicality called pasta.  Next up, normally, was a grilled meat and vegetables or salad, then local fruit, cheeses and nuts, finished off with an herbal or walnut based liqueur, purportedly to help in the digestion of all that came before.  Virtually everything that entered the mouth was either planted or raised and nourished with something else grown by them.  Simple ingredients, basic flavors – olive oil, garlic, tomatoes, salt …  The only weak link in this food chain was their wine.  Because of the high mountain elevation, the growing season was too short for the grapes to properly mature, lowering not only the alcohol content but also the flavor of the wine.  Years later, after harvesting the grapes and making wine with them, I came to believe that its simple purity at least partially compensated for its weak body.  You could also wash down more of their sturdy food without getting drunk. There were of course no sulfites, just juice from the grapes in wooden barrels, maturing into the clear wine they would begin drinking after a few months, lasting until the next year’s wine was ready.  There was a cyclical nature to the entire food enterprise, genuine and self-sustaining.
            Whichever of the families I ate supper with, the whole group eventually wound up in Zio & Zia’s living/dining room afterwards in front of the fireplace, the crackling sound of dry wood accompanying the simultaneous conversations that invariably developed.  We didn’t gather round the fireplace, as I do with my family, because it was esthetically and emotionally pleasing – it was a warm corner in a cold mountain.  For festive celebrations such as Christmas, the pig dinner and New Years Eve, we all gathered together at Riccardo’s or at his parent’s.   Riccardo’s kitchen/dining room also had a fireplace in the corner where we would roast chestnuts after the meal and play briscola (which I already knew from playing with my grandmother) or scopa (which took some time to learn because it used a different deck of cards, with Neapolitan symbols).  At midnight on New Year’s eve, the men and boys set off small firecrackers, while Riccardo and Sergio shot rifles into the air.  I played several folk fiddle tunes and got some of them dancing with a few tarantellas.
            Besides its entertainment value, music gave me a break from the heavy concentration required by conversation in Italian.  Since I was a conservatory student, my relatives understood that I needed to practice my violin for a few hours each day; but I don’t think they realized how important that time alone was for me.  I needed to recharge, away from words and the pressure to understand and respond.  They were always pleasant, sometimes delightful; but I’m not built for continuous socializing, and usually took a nap after lunch, though I almost never fell asleep.  There were also some day trips to smaller villages nearby, to have dinner with Zia’s daughter Gina, her husband and three children, and to meet Anselmo, my grandmother’s youngest brother and make the rounds of more relatives.  Each stop involved something to eat and a glass of wine, filled to the rim – “if not, your sons will become priests” their local expression warned.

             It was perhaps to be expected that their young American relative, raised in an individualistic society that prized specialization in higher education and beyond, would find much to admire in this collaborative way of life, still so close to nature and self-sufficient.  But I recognized even during these first contacts that it came at a high price.  Despite their healthy organic diet, they all looked older than their years, with leathery, furrowed skin.  The endless chores and outdoor work took a heavy toll on their bodies and minds.  None of the three brothers’ children seemed interested in preparing for a university education, though Italian society offered it free of charge.  For my train ride back to Florence, they filled my bags with their food and my mind with much to think about.


7.  The Trembling Bow in Its Second Apparition, with a Return to Its First

              I call the cab that will take Riccardo, Carla and me to the Florence train station for their train back to L’Aquila.  They have stayed the five days that I hoped they would, and our time together has for the most part gone very well.  I don’t have home-grown food to give them, but the results of my earlier struggles with their language enable me to tell them with fluency and sincerity how grateful I am to them for everything they’ve done over the years, how glad I am that I could host them for a change.  We exchange warm embraces on the platform.  They step onto the local train which will take twice as long to get them home, but at a much lower price than the high-speed alternatives they quickly dismissed from consideration.  Sergio has taken care of the daily chores that normally structure their time in lives otherwise lived in large part outside of time.
             I think of the routines we will now return to, and of how different mine is because my grandmother chose to leave theirs ninety years earlier.  A light sleeper, I normally awake early but instead of feeding the animals, listen to news and commentary on Italian radio.  During a typical day here I read, write, play my violin and walk around Florence, occasionally visiting with friends.  I especially enjoy going to concerts at Teatro della Pergola, a beautiful seventeenth century gem that is said to be the oldest opera house in Italy.  Its intimate size now makes it more appropriate for chamber music, and I have been looking forward to tonight’s concert featuring Salvatore Accardo playing in the string quartet he formed with the ex-student who became his second wife.  He long ago established a major international reputation by flawlessly playing the fiendishly difficult concertos and caprices of Paganini.  He had dazzled me decades earlier with the extraordinary musicality, rich tone, and technical mastery of his performances with Florence’s symphony orchestra.  His musical personality was so strong that he deceived my ears for the one and only time that I am aware of in my entire life.
             The concerto repertory is filled with great leaps of the left hand from the bottom of the instrument’s fingerboard to its top.  Since the fingerboard has no frets to hide behind, the end of these dramatic leaps must be perfectly positioned or the note will be out of tune.  Your ear must be exquisitely sensitive to the slightest gradations of pitch by gift of nature - if not, you can’t even learn the violin or other fretless stringed instruments.  And the physics of strings, which is more forgiving on lower notes, leaves absolutely no margin for error on the highest notes.  Total fluidity of motion is essential.  It takes years of repeatedly practicing those leaps to master them, yet even the greatest virtuosi are not capable of hitting them 100% of the time.  Accardo undershot a highly exposed leap in the Tchaikovsky concerto by an entire semi-tone, which had a startling, grating effect on my ears.  But his countenance and musical conviction were such that I called my own trusted ears into question.  The perfection of his playing before and immediately after the error, without the slightest physical manifestation of discomfort or loss of concentration, caused me to wonder if perhaps I had misheard. 
             Thirty years later, it is apparent from the beginning of the concert that something is wrong.  There are empty seats in a hall that he would have easily sold out before. Too many of Accardo’s notes are out of tune, his sound thin and constrained, his formerly rich vibrato virtually non-existent in the higher positions on the fingerboard.  His wife and the quartet’s other two musicians play well, but Accardo apparently has developed serious limitations in his left hand.  What a fall from such a pinnacle!  Why is he still performing in public?  Now almost seventy, he had recently fathered a child with his new wife, who seems at least thirty years younger.  Is it so they can have a career together for awhile, as she launches hers and he ends his?  When Jasha Heifitz first noticed his phenomenal technique beginning to slip a bit, he stopped performing in public; likewise for Michelucci, who put his Stradivarius in its case and never played it again, not even for himself.  He said if he couldn’t play at the level he was accustomed to, he preferred not to play at all, and instead devoted his time to collecting art. 
            Pride can be a dangerous emotion; when felt to excess, it can easily lead to humiliation, even downfall.  But it can also protect us, as it did Heifitz and Michelucci.  Accardo had been in the top tier of the classical music world for several decades, but has not yet realized that it is time to leave the stage.  His many admirers will not forget the thrilling performances he has given us in the past; but sadly, we will also remember and speak of his sorry decline, as an old friend, Richard Maury, and I now do during intermission. 
             “Can you believe how badly he plays now?” he says to start our conversation. 
            I first met Richard when I was at the conservatory; he was a serious amateur violinist who, with his cellist wife, constituted the hub of Florence’s amateur chamber music life.  I had been at their place many times for delightful evenings of dinner and string quartets.  He was a gifted artist, struggling to support his young expatriate family in a rent-controlled apartment with his brilliant but then unfashionable style of realistic painting.  Gradually, the art market came to recognize his talents, but both before and after achieving success, he always dedicated an hour or more a day to practicing his violin, bringing the same passionate intensity to his music-making as to his art work.  So when I approach him to see how he’s been doing during the almost ten years since we last talked and played at his home, it does not surprise me that he avoids preliminary small talk and immediately tears into Accardo.
            “His sound dies for everything above third position.  Something must be wrong with his left hand, so many notes slightly out of tune…”
            “Yes, and his intonation used to be so flawless that he once caused me to-“
            “How can he still play in public?” Richard interrupts, agitatedly.  “It’s so sad.  That solo passage in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn quartet had no life in it.  He must hear how it sounds, must notice how tepid the audience applause is.”
            “Especially compared to the enthusiastic ‘Bravos’ we showered him with years ago.  But Richard, you’re looking well; how have you been?”
            He does carry his seventy-odd years well.  His eyes sparkle, as always, above an animated, whiskered face, set firmly above a well-tailored sports jacket that he could never have afforded decades earlier when we would occasionally run into each other in the balcony upstairs.
            “Actually, I’ve been recuperating from some serious health problems.  I was pretty much on my back for several months.  Couldn’t paint, couldn’t do much of anything.  But it turned out well and I’m much better now.  Back to painting, too.”
            “How about chamber music?  Let’s get together for some string quartets”, I suggested.
            “I don’t play my violin anymore,” he said, shaking his head with a pained expression.  “I wasn’t able to play at all during my recuperation, and sounded like shit when I tried practicing again.  The long lay-off, combined with the effects of the illness … I realized I’d never get back to where I’d been before, not even close, no matter how much I worked at it.  So I gave it up.  It’s been a hard thing to adjust to, hard to accept…”

            Even though I was there beside my wife as she fought through cancer shortly after the birth of our second child, I don’t pretend to understand what it’s like to confront a life-threatening disease    But I do understand Richard’s loss because I have been struggling with a similar problem, trying to postpone its distressing result.  Several years ago, I noticed my handwriting getting worse.  I also had problems parting my hair – there was a slight wobble in my right hand just as the comb was about to make contact with my head.  Since my handwriting was still legible (and never had been very good anyway), and since I could get a straight part by holding the comb with two hands, I did nothing about these minor annoyances.  I hoped they would go away on their own. 
            I also seemed to have less bow control when playing my violin, but at first attributed that to not playing enough, or perhaps not being sufficiently focused or relaxed.  Eventually, I began to wonder if these things were related.  A few visits to a neurologist specialized in movement disorders resulted in a diagnosis of “essential tremor” in my right hand, an often hereditary breakdown of connections between neurons.  In my case, it affects the end of voluntary movements.  It was not that long ago that scientists realized a distinction should be drawn between these tremors that afflict almost ten per cent of Americans over the age of 60 and the tremors of Parkinson’s Disease, which are unrelated to voluntary movements.  Although much research is now underway, the doctor told me that the disease is not yet well-understood, but that it would probably get worse over time and in about ninety per cent of cases spreads to both hands.  Brief trial runs of the commonly prescribed medications used to treat the tremor resulted in improvement from one of them, but it made me very nauseous the first day.  Even though there was only a little nausea the second day and none noticeable after that, my body’s initial reaction tells me to avoid using it as long as possible.  If the time arrives when a shaky hand keeps me from socializing over food or playing music I enjoy, I will revisit this medication but probably not before then.

            In the meantime I must decide what adjustments to make, what non-prescription therapies to try.  Legible writing becomes much slower, requiring a different grip of the pen.  Eating is filled with voluntary, targeted movements but not much affected yet.  Drinking is fine except for picking up small coffee or tea cups - not a problem since I rarely do that and can avoid the embarrassing shake entirely by using both hands.  Although I like the aroma of good coffee brewing, I never developed a taste for caffeinated beverages because I didn’t like the wired feeling they created in me.  Caffeine significantly aggravates the symptoms of essential tremor, so I have an additional reason for avoiding it. 
            Violin playing has many potential problem areas, one of which fortunately is not the escape-proof one afflicting the grand Accardo - inaccuracies in placing the fingers on the string.  I shouldn’t have those intonation problems until/unless the tremor moves into my left hand.  But placing the bow on the string is the end of a complex voluntary movement of my dominant right hand.  In order to do that without an unpleasant scratching sound, violin students practice arduously to cultivate a wide range of landings, some of which must be very delicate.  My wobble at the movement’s last moment makes that impossible.  Playing on the string as much as possible is a way around the problem, but that takes away several bowings needed for classical music.  Fortunately, the impact on other styles of playing is much less.  But all violin music gets its pulse, its life from the right hand’s subtle adjustments of bow pressure, and this is a capability I am gradually losing.  I don’t want my music-making to end, but neither do I want to end up viewed by the friends I play music with as someone who kept at it too long, an amateur version of Salvatore Accardo.  One way or another, I have to resolve this dilemma. 

 
            My tiny room at Pensione Taiuti had a mirror on the door that enabled me to watch my right arm movements as I patiently practiced the beginner level exercises Michelucci prescribed for my bowing problem.   We spent the first several lessons on the mechanics of a smooth stroke, and he impressed upon me the importance of a fluid wrist, a soft thumb, and letting go somewhat.  I was too controlling, and the sound I produced reflected a certain rigidity in my body and physical movements.  Michelucci modified the way I held the bow.  It felt very awkward, but I was willing to try whatever he advised to get rid of that annoying hiccup in my down stroke.  Two to three hours a day with no music to play, just exercises using an uncomfortable new grip made the next several weeks go by very slowly.  I was elated when something seemed to suddenly click, but in our next lesson, Michelucci demonstrated how the solution I found created more problems than it solved.   I was discouraged but returned again to his fundamentals.  The will required by this effort left me feeling drained, but my hopes for what might result kept me going.  I made some progress, and was rewarded with an etude and other more musical assignments being added to the exercises and scales I had been studying exclusively.  That became self-reinforcing, and as I worked my way up to five or more hours a day of systematic practicing, the pace of my improvement accelerated.  The down bow hitch lessened in intensity, then gradually receded into the shadows as I worked hard on learning one by one the imposing number of difficult bow strokes necessary for solid classical technique. 
            Most of my fellow students were teenagers.  I envied the way their more flexible muscles and young brain circuitry enabled them to learn more spontaneously what I labored to accomplish.  But even for them, youthful natural ability was no substitute for hard work on such a demanding instrument.  I later befriended two conservatory students majoring in conducting, which required a year or more of lessons on each of ten different instruments – both said that the violin was the most difficult to learn.  We all had to study some piano, music theory and sight-singing, but the focus was always on the twice-a-week lessons with the maestro of your instrument, in a class setting with three to five fellow students, so you could learn from watching each other’s lesson.  At Michelucci’s discretion, your lesson could last anywhere from 15 minutes to more than an hour; if he felt after a few minutes that you were unprepared, he would gruffly command you to go home, take some deep drags on the ever-present cigarette between his fingers and mutter about how he hated having his time wasted.   It was somewhat intimidating to be called up to the lesson stand after such a scene, but the many hours of effort I put in between lessons meant I almost always got conscientious instruction from him.  If you worked hard, he did, too.  Michelucci was somewhat restrained with praise, making his occasional “Buona lezione” (“Good lesson”) all the more appreciated.  One of the things that helped me make it through my early struggles with the bow was overhearing him tell his protégé’ about his new older student from America who had the “passione & talento” to overcome some serious bowing defects.
            The left hand technique was less problematic because my foundation there was merely insufficient rather than defective.  It still required a huge investment of time with scales, chords, and etudes designed for its specific challenges.  The Italian conservatory diploma in violin performance occupies ten years of study.  I had no interest in obtaining the degree; I just wanted to get to a level where I could play chamber music well with good musicians.  As I worked over the fall and winter to get rid of the bow hitch, Michelucci also gave me material to study from the third and fourth years of the violin curriculum.  I realized that achieving my goal would require a few more years of concentrated study.  The motivation was certainly there.  My conservatory ID got me into the Saturday afternoon chamber music series at Teatro della Pergola for free, where I heard many of the world’s greatest musicians playing the music I most loved.  As the beautiful Florentine spring unfolded, delighting my eyes, I had already made enough progress to appreciate that it was just a question of time, effort and will.  I could feel my ears salivating at the prospect of playing that music with satisfaction rather than frustration.   I had lucked into an ideal situation at the conservatory, was living very cheaply, but had to develop a way of sustaining it all.  I had saved enough money for a year or so abroad but hadn’t really thought things through beyond that  – it was all so vague when I left the States.  
            I had a solid relationship with my parents, but one thing I definitely did not want to do was ask them for money.  They had grown up in lower class immigrant families and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II.  The GI Bill enabled my dad to go to college in his mid-30’s, at the same time working multiple part-time jobs to support his young family.  They scrimped their way into the middle class, and education was the entry ticket.  They were somewhat bewildered by a son who had graduated from Harvard Law School less than two years before and then left a lucrative law firm job to study an instrument which he had abandoned, against their wishes, as a young teen.  If I wanted to be independent, I should also be self-supporting.  I didn't even know at that point what "busking" was.  But I did know that if I wanted to stay at the conservatory, there would have to be another way to pay for it than asking my parents.


8.  Florence Outside the Notes  

            Sublimation is one way to characterize all the time I was spending on music, because underneath I was getting pretty horny.  Florence has long had a large American community, many of them students in the multitude of American programs based there.  It probably would have been easy to organize a robust social life within this community, but I deliberately avoided that.  Instead, I sought out friendships with Italians and was very much focused on learning their language and ways.  I met a group of Italian architecture students through one of them who lived in the room next to mine at Pensione Taiuti.  The leaders of this fun-loving group were Tommaso and Vito, both from the heel of the Italian boot, and Mauro, the group’s lone northerner.  These three shared a nearby apartment where a dozen or more students informally gathered several nights each week.  I wondered how seriously they took their studies because they spent a great deal of time socializing and obviously gave it a high priority in their lives.  The conversation was noisy and multi-layered, the constant joking around often based on slang or word-play, all of which made comprehension difficult for me; but a smile and simple questions or statements got me through most evenings. 
            They kept inviting me back, though, not because of my lame conversation, nor because I was their token foreigner.  I think instead it was my yodeling.  One of my first times there, they were passing a guitar around the room, energetically singing Italian pop tunes.  I knew a few chords on the guitar and sang “Mother, the Queen of My Heart,” a country music classic with a humorous story line, the gist of which I translated before singing (most of them spoke no English despite having studied it for years).  When I got to the mother’s line (in falsetto) chastising her son for becoming a hard-drinking gambler and then the son’s mournful yodeling after forever swearing off his vices, they erupted in raucous laughter and stomped their feet.  From then on, I frequently had a guitar handed to me at these get-togethers with a request for the funny song about the mamma with the high voice and her yodeling son.  They also enjoyed the tunes I occasionally fiddled, and I was grateful they included me in their socializing. 
            The group’s Italian women to whom I was attracted, though, all had Italian boyfriends.  The same situation applied among the friendships I began forming at the conservatory.  I did develop a good relationship with Juliette, an elegantly attractive, very bright student from Belgium who moved into Pensione Taiuti soon after I did, and who shortly thereafter also entered the circle of Tommaso et al.  Although she spoke excellent English, we usually conversed in Italian so we could both get better at it, lapsing into English whenever either of us got stuck.  She had a broad range of cultural interests, and we went to concerts, museums and the opera together.  One evening the two of us were in her room and, not wishing to be misunderstood, I switched over to English.
            “Juliette, I enjoy the time we spend together, and I like you a lot.  How do you feel about moving our relationship beyond just being friends.”
            She looked down for awhile and then responded, “Well, I’m thinking about it.” After another pause, she continued, “I like doing things together, too; but I don’t want to ruin a good friendship.  That is what has happened to me in the past.”
            I was moderately horny by then and perfectly willing to take that chance, though I didn’t put it that way.  I asked her to think about it some more.  She said she would, and soon after began an affair with one of her Italian professors, probably thirty years her senior.  Her roommate gave me more details than I cared to hear, such as finding grey pubic hairs on the bed of the apartment they had recently moved into.  But we stayed good friends and left it at that.

             Shortly after returning to Florence from that Christmas holiday visit with my relatives, I moved into a sixth floor attic apartment in a five hundred year old, rather poorly maintained building opposite Santa Maria Novella, one of the city’s most historic churches.  My room in Pensione Taiuti had looked out on an even more impressive piazza in the very heart of Florence, containing the enormous cathedral and medieval baptistery, but I needed something cheaper.  With no elevator, no heat or hot water and two other tenants to divide the rent with, my share for this new place came to less than twenty dollars a month. 
            The man I paid the rent to was Gianni, a sly Sicilian who years before had found work in Florence along with this apartment.  It was ridiculously low-priced because of a rigid rent control law that the communist local government had passed to deal with a speculative real estate crisis that was pushing working class families out of the city’s low-cost housing.  The law blocked evictions in this category of housing, froze rents at a tiny fraction of their current market rate as long as the tenant remained in the apartment, and made subletting of all rent-controlled units illegal.  Among the side-effects of this well-intentioned regulation were that landlords spent little or nothing on maintenance but often did spend tens of thousands of dollars bribing tenants to leave so that the apartments could be converted to renovated condominiums and then sold at the inflated market prices.   When Gianni got married and moved into his wife’s apartment, he illegally sub-let his apartment at enough of a profit to cover the expenses of defending (more accurately described as “stalling”) a years long eviction lawsuit being prosecuted by his landlord yet still put money in his pocket.  The tortoise-paced Italian court system, plus a lawyer who was a relative of his from Sicily, made this an economically rational decision for him because he and the landlord could not agree on a bribe amount.  But at some future point there would either be an eviction or an agreement on the buona uscita (“good exit”), as Italians euphemistically called the bribe.
             And so in mid-winter I moved into this somewhat precarious location with my violin and a newly acquired electric space heater.  My room had its own little terrace opening onto the building’s air shaft and looking out over thousands of picturesque red-tiled rooftops toward the imposing tower of Palazzo Vecchio, built in the 14th century by unrestrained proto-capitalists and the current seat of the communist city government which had blocked any increases in our building’s rents.
 
            My music routine now was to practice scales, arpeggios and technical exercises for two or three hours starting about 10 AM, then after lunch work on etudes (music designed to address specific problems of violin technique).  After a break, I worked on a Tartini sonata, Vivaldi concerto, or other piece assigned by Michelucci that was not too technically demanding but still provided an opportunity to play real music.  I looked on this final segment as my daily reward for all the solid effort preceding it, and by the time I finished it was often 8 PM or later. 
            I wondered how much sound carried down the air shaft and whether it affected the people living on the floors below.  The answer, albeit indirectly, came several weeks later when I was walking down the stairs on my way to a lesson.  After passing the door to the third floor apartment, I encountered the elderly woman who lived there with her son and his family.  She stopped her slow, methodical ascent and responded to my “Good morning, signora” by pointing to my violin while saying
             “You’re the one who plays……. always.”
             The heavy sigh that prefaced “always” combined with its melancholy, plaintive delivery to tell me everything.  On the way back from my lesson, I stopped at a music store and bought a practice mute, the lead-filled sound-deadening variety, which I thereafter often used to dampen at least the scales and technical exercises.  Virtually everyone loves to hear beautiful music well-performed, but the process which makes that possible comes at significant cost not only to the student musician but also to his immediate neighbors. 
            During the warmer months when the windows were open, these unfortunate families living on the floors beneath my attic flat were actually doubly afflicted.  Next to the airshaft on the ground floor was the bedroom of a prostitute who lived in the apartment and serviced her customers there.  An hour or two after my violin practicing stopped sending its sounds down the airshaft, the sounds of her work often began traveling up the airshaft.  Being a professional, she never made noise, but the same could not be said of her bedsprings and clients, especially the ones vigorous in movement or vocalization.  I felt bad for the families in between us, but took some comfort in knowing that the parents could more easily explain to their young children my sounds than hers. 
            Just around the corner from our building was the Via delle Belle Donne, the “Street of the Beautiful Women,” in an earlier time the bustling red light district of Florence, now the cheerless site where crusted women with thick legs encased in unflattering skirts occasionally hung around, looking to turn a trick.  I was horny but not desperate, the opposite of how they appeared.  I often passed through the street on my way about the city; when I saw my neighbor from the ground floor apartment I would say hello.  In a different but similar part of the city with women less worn, a thought once crossed my mind but made my stomach slightly nauseous, and I walked quickly away.

            As spring approached, however, sublimation through music was in danger of being swamped by hormones.  I had already decided to liberalize my policy about socializing with Americans when I received a letter from Rosalie, the French woman I had met on the plane to Europe and then briefly visited on my way to Italy.  She had separated from her husband after several years of marital problems, was coming to Florence on vacation and asked if we could meet. 
            On the evening of her arrival, we enjoyed a pleasant dinner in a local trattoria and then headed back to her hotel, both with the same thing in mind.  During her week-long visit, we spent much time strolling leisurely about the city, charmed by its blossoming spring; we spent almost as much time in bed, satisfying long-felt needs, delighting in each other’s re-awakening touch.  The last several months’ inactivity could have turned me into a voracious, greedy animal that week, but Rosalie was a few years older than me, with a different life experience rooted in motherhood and her job as a teacher.  The smile on her pretty face seemed to express a tested, sober form of contentment.  Her gentleness and maturity channeled our passion, the heat and flames transforming themselves into a warm glow that lingered well past our goodbye kiss at the train station. 




To be continued via random updates.....

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© Peter Contuzzi 2010-12