Why does anyone argue that online reviewing cannot be of the highest caliber? (And let me stress that I didn’t write the above lines, they are by an online-reviewing colleague, C. E. Torok.) In any event, after reading Ms. Torok’s fine work, I made sure the general manager at the Sheraton Downtown St. Augustine was the recipient of this token of our esteem. ★ (Posted 2/22/2014)
The Inn at Harvard, 1201 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 6–7, 2013
I miss the child, I miss the child, every day I miss the child, I miss a certain way that the child says things, the er-um stammer that seems to precede her significant utterances, I miss a certain range of the child’s voice, especially when the child is singing, I miss even the child’s incessant repetition of the “Do-Re-Mi” song, I miss the child, I miss the tangles in her hair, I miss the wear and tear on the knees of her jeans, I miss how the child insists that her pants are not jeans but jeggings, I miss even the child’s numberless requests to watch television, I miss the child’s spitting out of apple skin, should there happen to be one last speck of apple skin among the slices of apple provided, I miss the child at the moment she wants to be hugged and at the moment after she wants to be hugged, I miss the child’s naked, enthusiastic sprints through our tiny apartment before she takes a bath, I miss the child hanging upside down, I miss the child reciting plot points in superhero books, I miss the child, and I experience missing the child as a kind of physical lack, as though I have not eaten properly, have not ingested a sufficiency of calories, I miss the child when she skips to try to keep up with the pace of adults walking, I miss the child when she (still) demands to be picked up, I miss the child and the way she eats string cheese horizontally, some days I miss even a tantrum by the child, I miss her falling on the floor and shouting as she intones the words You are the worst father ever, or the bizarre request that she never be called by her name again, I miss the child on sunny days and on days when it is too cold to go outside, I miss the ceaseless chatter that characterizes the child while in a swing, Three little maids who all unwary come from a lady’s seminary, I miss being able to hear her, from the other room, screech at the television set, I miss the child, I miss the child’s smell, I miss the child’s insistence on wearing all the time that pink nightgown, now in shreds, I miss seeing the child in bed with the nightgown wrenched around half backward, I miss her waking me up to say, Is it time yet?, I miss the child refusing to go to bed, saying that she isn’t tired, she isn’t tired, right before collapsing into total exhaustion, I miss even the irritating hours of time that have slipped out of my human life span when all I was doing was trying to persuade the child that it was time to go to sleep, I miss the child, I miss when she says she is scared, so scared, even though nothing particularly scary has happened on the television or in the book, and how this requires me to say that I will protect her, even though I know there are some ways in which I cannot protect her.
I have not protected her from the fact that her mother and I are no longer together, and as I also have parents who ended their marriage, I am in a very good position to know that I have not protected the child, I rue my failures, yet I miss claiming that I will protect her, even though I feel the vacuity of this claim and understand the ways in which I have failed to protect her, I miss even the profoundly boring moments of being in her company, moments when respiration seems like activity enough, moments when the task is repetition, repetition, repetition, coloring in one more line, I miss even the princesses, I miss all the talk of princesses, I miss making up stories about princesses, for example, a story about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella all having a dinner party and getting snowed in and needing the princes to fetch the carriages so that they, the princesses, will not need to walk in the snow, after which the princes bring snowblowers and blow off the sidewalk, and the prince who does the best job of plowing out the driveway gets to take home the comeliest of the princesses, who happens to be the princess called Snow White, I miss the child’s proclamations about wanting to dye her hair black like Snow White, I miss the subtle gradations of consciousness, the emerging into consciousness that is the child, I miss the subtle emanations of a vanishing self-centeredness as the child begins to understand the world around her, and, nevertheless, I miss the child’s demanding to have another birthday present, I miss the child saying that she never gets a present, even though my guilt about the facts of the child’s life and my inability to protect her from the slings and arrows lead me to give her presents with some frequency, I miss the child’s eyes, which are the color of flagstone, a better and more superior flagstone than the color of my own eyes, I miss the child’s blond highlights, I miss the earlier, ghostly presences in the child of now, though this child of now will be a ghostly manifestation in some future iteration, I both do and do not miss all the manhandling of diapers and so on, but miss especially the growth that has made those things no longer part of my life, I miss the moment when the child tumbled out of her mother, and I miss being joyous about family as I was in that moment, which means that I miss what I once gave the child but can give her no more, I miss the child past and the child present and I miss the moments that I will miss of her in the future, I miss listening to the child breathe, I miss listening to the child cough in the moments when she coughs, I miss the child’s detailed descriptions of her own waste production, her distinguishing of one kind of waste production from another, her requests for company while producing waste, I miss the child’s remarks about her friends, which are almost always contradictory and paradoxical, I love Mark he is my best friend even though he doesn’t want to play with me, I miss the child’s vulnerability, and I miss the steely invincible times of the child, when her very resilience proves how broken and lost I am sometimes, and how what I struggle with, the loss of the child, proves that I am less able to withstand the slings and arrows of being than the child is, which means, in some way, that there is more that she can do for me, by schooling me in resilience, than I can do for her, I miss the child’s sneakers, which are a size too large as I write these lines but will not be six months from now, I miss the way she used to apply the Velcro fasteners on the sneakers, as she often did before she began the process of mastering the tying of her shoes, I miss the spot behind the child’s ear that I often remind her to wash carefully, I miss the area of her cheeks that is somewhat windburned by the gusts of January and February, I miss her sweaters, I miss her coats, I miss her socks, I miss her books, I miss her sleep friends, whom she now disdains, I miss the times with her and I rue the times without her, and I especially regret the times without her that are caused by my going on the road, and so as I go on the road and attempt to conduct business and stay, for example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right near a university of some note, I ask myself, Who gives a shit about Harvard, who gives a shit about the sullen client-services professional at the front desk, who cares about the Hamworthy design of the toilet at the Inn at Harvard, who cares about the view of the English Department out the window, who cares about the crowded bars of Cambridge, with their flocks of the best and the brightest, who cares about any of this when there is the absence of the child? ★★★ (Posted 3/1/2014)
Masseria Salinola, Strada Provinciale 29, KM 1, 5, Contrada Salinola, Ostuni, Italia, July 1–16, 2000
Things can go wrong during your vacation. For example, you could suffer a detached retina, which is a very serious condition and requires surgery. It is also possible that during your vacation, upon boarding the cruise liner or while changing planes in Geneva, you could begin to exhibit the symptoms of a bleeding ulcer, resulting in a sudden drop in blood pressure. (I believe there are hemoglobin issues as well, due to the acute decrease in blood volume secondary to a massive upper-GI bleed, or that is my understanding, though I am not a medical professional.) And sometimes people have little strokes; you know, not terribly complex strokes, but just little strokes where they have temporary aphasia and can’t repeat numbers in the correct order. You could e
xperience one of these very disturbing phenomena on your vacation. This could be your fate. (Or, as I have related elsewhere, your passport could be lifted from your pocket by Carpathian-speaking youths.) It is impossible to plan for all these difficulties. Why not stay home? But if instead of staying home, you insist on going on vacation, then this entry, about agroturismo in Italia, is for you.
In 1999, I was helping to conduct wine-tasting classes for a friend who had organized a number of trips in which foreign travel and wine-tasting went together, and I agreed to go along and serve as a wine expert, though I am not a wine expert. At first I thought it was going to be in Tuscany, and for months I went around saying I was going to Tuscany, and then it turned out that it was not Tuscany at all, but Puglia, which I believe was Mussolini’s homeland. Puglia is not exactly cosmopolitan Europe—there are not cutting-edge runway shows there—but it is attractive in a Pleistocene sort of way. Puglia eliminated malaria only recently, you know, and basically what it does is produce olives and olive oil and a few other things, orecchiette, very good mozzarella, etc., and so the farms of Puglia established this agroturismo in order to try to create a market for tourists in the region.
The idea was simple: You go and live on a working farm for a few days, and you get to sample the wares of the farm, in the process learning how cultivation and animal husbandry are practiced in another part of the world. I know that some of you are probably thinking about farms in the United States and imagining traveling to that farm in Iowa that has a toxic sludge lake of pig waste that’s several miles long, where the sounds of pigs having their testicles cut off ring abundantly through the air each spring. I had the same kinds of thoughts about this trip but they were unwarranted. It was not as bad as all that! The farms in Italy are a great deal more attractive. What were those flowers that lined the road? They were like frangipani or bougainvillea, some miracle that bloomed everywhere in the still silent countryside of Italian cultivation. I’d brought my wife, because how often did one get a free trip to Italy, and they were willing to cover my wife and two weeks in Italy, and while I would not get paid, I would get the trip. I needed the money, and yet it was the free trip with which I won over my wife. Ostuni, the town nearby, is called the “White City” because it is all bleached and Mediterranean. It could have been built at any time, the alleys empty and cobblestoned, and you could feel the moisture from the sea, the centuries of occupation in Puglia, the way its fortunes had twisted and turned with a range of imperial masters, the Cyrillic on the buildings here and there. Who would not have wanted to take a crack at Puglia?
At last we arrived at the farm, which dated back to the seventeenth century, or at least that was what we gathered from the sparse literature available in English and the gesturing of the rather truculent proprietor. He had a sort of Ernest Borgnine rubberiness to his face, but without the mugging and grinning. He answered yes to each and every question, even those questions that manifestly required answers in the negative, and if you tried to trip him up by asking him a question and its obverse in rapid succession, he would say yes to each anyhow and then quickly slip away before you bore down. At a certain hour in the morning, he and his brothers, or so we presumed the other men to be, would set off for the olive groves with their tractor and be gone for the day, though I never saw any olives being brought back later. Sometimes it felt as though we were staying on an olive-grove film set rather than in an actual olive grove.
Did I mention that the farm was a ruin? I’m going to say that the last wholesale renovation was probably during the early nineteenth century, before Italy was unified. There were a number of small, nearly windowless cells in which we were meant to conduct our wine-tasting classes, always at the end of narrow corridors to which you arrived via winding staircases, and in all of these rooms, cracks in the stonework overspilled with moisture and, one assumes, a bounteous harvest of mold. There was also a chapel at one end of the courtyard, which no one visited at all, and which was haunted. We were told by our guide that there were some bones underneath the chapel, though whose bones they were was never made clear. Inside the courtyard, the grass and scrub had been allowed to grow up without restraint, in a way that demonstrated the neglect like almost nothing else, and yet in the centermost courtyard, the sanctum sanctorum, there was a birdcage, which, despite the general disorder and lassitude of the place, was always inhabited by a pair of partridges, or pheasants, clucking and pecking at the tin floor beneath them.
No one but our group of wine-tasting Americans seemed to be staying at the farm, and so there were two tables at dinner, which was always outdoors, under the stars, and one table was the famiglia and the other table was the Americans. The dinners were at least three hours long every night and came with endless amounts of wine. There was always an antipasto, a pasta course, a second pasta course, a meat course, a salad course, and dessert. I was usually ready to go to bed after the antipasto. The wine tasters—mostly fine upstanding citizens of suburbs of the United States with a generous capacity for European pretenses, people who went to the ballet, or wore berets, or had children who were experts on Jane Austen—were ready to drink some wine, and even though Italian wine is not known to be as culturally exacting as French wine, it was all part of this experience for them, the wine, the food, the fragrance of the Adriatic, the fresh olives of a sort you have never tasted in your life. They would all hit the wine hard, and it did not take long into the two weeks we all spent together for certain marriages that had seemed rock-solid at the outset, like that of Brenda and Dave McAllister, a couple from Indianapolis who had been to Italy together three times, to unravel. It became clear that Dave’s inability to let his wife finish a sentence had taken a real toll on her, and Brenda rolled her eyes at him the more drunk he got, and once, barely out of earshot, she made a joke about asphyxiating him.
Only a few nights elapsed before I was leaving dinner early with the excuse of preparing the next day’s lecture and discussion while really I was leaving my wife there with the Midwestern culture experts and going back to our room to watch Italian programming on a thirteen-inch television with a coat-hanger antenna. At one time, our room had been the rabbit hutch. Probably I am interpreting the specific wording in my own way, but the word rabbit was definitely employed. The rabbit hutch, like its chimney, was essentially open-air, and if you opened a window in the midsummer heat, you found there were no screens on the windows. We were told, when we asked, that there were screens—Yes! We will fetch them, yes!—but no screens materialized, and here in the land of only recently eradicated malaria, the local mosquitoes descended on us with a force such as I have rarely encountered. Every night at dusk there was a swarm around my head, and the swarm stayed until morning unless I pulled the sheets over me entirely. Eventually I needed to come up for air. My upper lip swelled from the volume of clotting agent injected into it by the mosquito hordes, and I had to give one or two classes looking like a boxer fresh from some KO.
In the afternoons, we would go out to see things in the area around Puglia, like a chapel that was filled with the bones of martyrs, or some thatched cottages called trulli that looked like the backdrop for an elvish fantasy spectacular. We went to the tip of the boot heel of Italia, Leuca, to see the Adriatic and the Mediterranean meet, and there were a lot of attractive young Italians there eating gelato. We were not them. One day we were on our way to see some mosaic somewhere—Otranto, I think—and my wife became sick from the heat and had to sit down or have some food, and I began to feel in that moment that my obligation to teach, and my vanishing from dinner to watch Italian television on my own, and her inability to keep up on the long marches of tourism were disparate examples of the pain that is vacation.
One night, toward the end of our stay, we noticed that the birds in the birdcage in the center of the farm had disappeared since that morning. What had looked so lovely and symbolic in the morning, a mating pair of some lovely species, destined to replenish their numbers in the fullness of theological t
ime, was now symbolic only of loss, a few feathers, some bird shit, and kernels of cracked corn. My wife realized at once what we should have realized all along, namely, that we had been eating the birds. Every day a different bird, and it had seemed so picturesque, so fecund, and really it was just about the myriad ways you could kill those animals. Had the others known what we were too naive to know? That night at dinner, in broken Italian, we asked the Ernest Borgnine proprietor to tell us what had happened to the pair of grouse or pheasants or turkeys or chickens that had been in the cage that morning, and he looked up at the ceiling and without a trace of a smile said, They have gone to their Heavenly Father. Everyone had a good laugh.