Back To School

Souvenirs from Sicily, part XI
It's been a while since I wrote part X of this series, so let me remind you of where we left off:
At the end of Maria Pia's birthday party, I was invited to go to school with her the next morning to visit a German class, so that the students would have a native speaker to talk to for an hour or two.

So, after the usual Sicilian breakfast consisting of a large bowl of milky coffee and some bisquits (called merendina), we set off to school together.

It is not very far to walk, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and Maria Pia tells me to look where we are going in order for me to find my way back to the flat on my own, as she will be working all day, whereas I am supposed to stay only for an hour or two.

When we arrive at the school, she takes me straight to the classroom where her colleague, the German teacher, is giving her lesson, and moments later, I am introduced to a class of maybe 30 kids - 15-year-olds, with me being only four years their senior.
The boys and girls are all extremely polite and look extremely well bred and groomed; hardly surprising, if you consider that this is a private school where only those parents who can afford it send their children.

My own school days are not so long ago; in fact, I attend Librarian school every four weeks for a month or so, with yet another year to go before the course is complete. And yet, it feels as if it is a lifetime ago, like something you remember when looking at old photographs of your grandparents when they were young, and even though you remember them well, you have only ever seen them when they were already middle-aged or elderly people, but you still recognize them as being the people in the picture.
That is how being at that school felt for me; like looking at pictures of how school should be like but was not how I remembered it personally.

The last five or six years at school, before starting Librarian school, were a seemingly endless row of days spent either bored out of my mind at class, or skipping school (I was the record holder in my class when I was 15-16) and spending the day in the town center, watching music videos at C&A until the shop assistants booted us out and occupying the benches outside McDonald's, watching the world (namely boys) go by.
At the school I went to and in the years I went there, words like discipline and politeness were not part of our vocabulary. We pretty much dressed like we wanted, did our homework only when we felt like it, and showed no respect towards most of our teachers. This is not something I am proud of; I am merely mentioning it here to show the contrast to what I found at this private school in Catania.

Most of the girls are a bit gigglish (pretty normal for 15-year-olds), and it takes them a while until they dare asking me questions, but one of the boys in the last row, apparently the "star" student of this class, asks permissoin to speak and - unbelievably to me! - actually gets up and stands there, holding himself VERY straight.
Now, more than 20 years later, I can not remember what he said, but I guess it was general stuff like "My name is so-and-so and I have been learning German for x years".
What I do remember though is that his pronounciation was rather mechanic, and although there was not a single mistake in what he said, I somehow felt sorry for him - he seemed to have filled his head with all that knowledge of a language foreign to him , but unable to add colour and life to it.

Some questions and answers ensue, shyly moderated by the kind teacher, and I carefully avoid speaking my dialect (thankfully, I am rather good at speaking "proper" German - good enough for some of my customers at work having asked me how I ended up in Southern Germany; they didn't believe I am a true native Swabian).

One of the girls finally musters up her courage and asks me whether I know any nice German boys whose addresses I can give them to start being penfriends.
(Those were the days! No emails, no mobile phones for everyone back then in 1987!)
With a sudden burst of enthusiasm, the other girls join in: yes, they ALL want to be penfriends with nice German boys!
(Strangely enough, I can not remember any of the boys requesting the address of any nice German girls.)
I explain to them that I do not know any boys their age (which is true - at 19, I am not dealing with any 15-year-olds on a regular base) but through my mother's work at the school's library, I still have access to my former school, and will put their requests for penfriends on the black board.
Immediately, they start writing down their addresses, and I am handed a long list - all in very neat and slightly odd-looking handwriting. Odd only to my eyes; years later, when I am already married to my first husband, I find that those who originally learnt to write in an Italian school, all have a specific way of writing certain letters, like the "r" and the "T", or the "z".

How long the lesson actually went, I do not recall; but after a while, I find myself outside the building again, and walking back towards the flat where Brigitte is waiting to hear about my morning at school.

Some insignificant details I remember very vividly about that morning are the clothes I was wearing (a grey pair of jeans and my "Tutti i colori del mondo" Benetton jumper) and the scent of the rose deodorant I always used at the time and which, sadly, is not available any more (mine was pink, but the brand was the same).

Funny, isn't it, how something like that sticks to our memory, whereas we forget so much other information we once knew?

(I did, by the way, actually pin the address list to my former school's black board, but I never found out whether anyone really became penfriends through it.)

As usual, I found all pictures shown here by google picture search.

Sweet Little Serial Killer

My current read is Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us". It is a good read, important, informative, frightening and entertaining at the same time, and I highly recommend it to anyone (which really should be everyone) who cares about the current and future state of the planet.
Some chapters and paragraphs go into a little too much detail for my taste, in some others, I would have wanted to know more.

But why I am actually writing this blog today is because of the author calling the four-legged furry creature so many of us have living with them, Felis silvestris catus, a small serial killer.

He basically says that our pet cats are genetically identical with the small wild species still existing (albeit at very limited numbers) in Europe, Africa and some parts of Asia. In spite of having adapted over the past millenia to living alongside humans (to mutual benefit, I wish to add), they as a species have never lost their hunting instinct, and birds still fit their prey pattern very well.

Much as I like Alan Weisman's book, I can not agree with his affirmation that cats (at least those regularly fed by humans) kill birds purely out of bloodlust. Animals do not kill for bloodlust; that is an entirely human invention, I dare say. Animals kill out of instinct, for various reasons (prey to feed on, territorial fights, partner fights, and so on).

He further cites several statistics in the book: Compared to the doubling of human world population over the past 50 years, cat population has increased in the 20 years from 1970 to 1990 alone from 30 to 60 million. The average stray town cat will kill 28 birds a year (is that a lot? It is just a bit more than one every two weeks. Most humans eat, in terms of meat, the equivalent of more than one dead bird every two weeks - and we all know that the way these animals are usually raised and killed is entirely different from what we COULD do if we were willing to spend a bit more money on meat and not insist on buying the cheap stuff from the supermarket freezer).

The study he cites also states that cats living in the countryside will kill a lot more than those 28 birds per year. Examining the numbers for the state of Wisconsin, said study concluded that the roughly two million cats roaming the rural areas there were responsible for the death of more than 219 million birds/year.

A few pages before getting to the "furry serial killer" bit, the author writes of an estimated billion birds that smash themselves to death every year by flying into windows. Another 120 million get killed by humans on purpose. 80 million end up as a bloody mash on the cars and trucks speeding along our highways. A further half billion birds fly into sending masts, and an unspecified number gets killed by flying into the high voltage lines crossing our landscapes (not from the voltage, but from the impact). Add to that those poisoned by pesticides, and you don't even want to know the number anymore.

Cats are nasty little buggers with sharp teeth and claws, as selfish as they need to be, masking their nastiness behind their cuteness and beauty. But they are no different from other animals hunting and killing in that respect, and I repeat: they do it because it is their nature to do so.

I am glad to have my own little serial killer, who, in the 8 years she's been living with me now, has not even brought in a mouse, let alone a bird. She is a bit on the clumsy side, as opposed to my old cat Mimi, who brought mice in every day, and on a handful of occasions a bird.

Your Very Own Time Machine

Almost everyone - except for some poor individuals who have had an accident or other medical issues - possesses their very own in-built time machine.

It has nothing in common with any of the famous devices pictured in books and films, like the original one from the 1895 novel by H.G. Wells, or the De Lorean DMC-12 used by Marty McFly and "Doc" Emmet Brown in "Back To The Future" (which was released in 1985 - something for the numerologists among you to think about).

It is our olfactory sense, one of the most ancient (in evolutionary terms) and important senses any animal on this planet, ourselves included, has at their disposition.

Of course, the olfactory time machine has a limited reach of those comparatively few years of life we can each look back on individually. It can not take you to, say, Ancient Egypt just as it can not show you what life will be like on Earth in 100 years (or even the next hour, for that matter).

But it can send you in an instant through time and space, and it is very powerful.

I assume each of you who read this blog associate certain songs with certain events; there was that song they used to play on the radio all the time when you were doing that summer job at the petrol station, or the one that made you get up and dance every night at the beach disco during that holiday, and probably more than one of us know songs that we attribute to specific people.
There is a whole set of club favourites from the mid-eighties which will forever remind me of a boy who was part of our extended clique and who I had a crush on, with him barely knowing that I exist (yes, Ralf Bauer, it is you I am talking about. I can safely mention your name here as neither you nor anyone who knows you is ever going to read this anyway, right?).

So, yes, songs can act as time machines as well, as can other sounds.
For me, ever since the night I came home from work and found my husband dead on the floor in the living room, the sound of an ambulance causes me some distress. Other sounds, like the buzzard's cry, evoke in me a longing for something I still do not fully understand. Some pieces of music can even move cold-blooded lizardy Me to tears.

And yet, scents have a different power, it seems.

Last week, I was in the Provence (South France) for a short holiday, a family gathering actually.
Due to the number of people, my sister, my father and I were staying not at one of our relatives' places, but at a small hotel, an ancient house with five of its rooms having been converted into guest rooms.
To reach our rooms, we had to cross our host's kitchen, their study, a tiny walled courtyard with an old wall fountain, and then climb up a set of ancient, uneven stone steps in a rather grand-looking staircase.

I opened the big dark wooden door to the staircase for the first time and WHAM! was instantly taken back to Mirabella Imbaccari and the house of my ex-parents-in-law, where I spent many summers while I was still part of the Sicilian family that gave me their surname for eleven years.

It was a very characteristic scent, not uncommon to old houses; a mixture of deep, damp stone cellars and the beeswax used to polish the wooden doors, and for those who are familiar with it, sand can be detected as well. On Sicily, the sand in the air is carried with the wind from the Sahara, collecting in a small heap inside the closed doors where no-one sets a foot for most of the year, until summer, when people return to their home village for a month or two and their hibernating houses come alive again. There in the Provence, I can only assume that the sandy smell comes from the ochre dust which lays on the landscape, as a large part of the ground around there is ochre.

The last time I was in Mirabella was in 1998. I have not been that far South since then; all the holidays after 1998 were spent elsewhere, such as Florida (1999), England and Germany.
My nostrils had not come across this particular mixture of scents for 12 years, either, and therefore you can maybe imagine what a strange and unexpected experience that little time-travelling was.

After the initial mild shock at finding myself so suddenly in a place I thought I'd never see (or smell) again, I began looking forward to opening that big wooden door every time we came back to our hotel. Every time, I took the scent in with deep breaths, enjoying the knowledge that, although I was able to picture quite well the person I was back then, the people I dealt with and the places I went to, I have come a long way since, with no need and no motivation to go back.

Human memory is fragmentary and not very reliable, as everyone who has ever been involved with a police investigation knows. But those things we do remember, even if they are less than accurate, form part of our present character, and to rediscover them from time to time through a bit of time-travelling can be anything from fun to eye-opening, and sometimes both.

So, next time you happen to stumble across your very own time machine, use it, and use it well.

(The pictures of the time machine and the Delorean are from elsewhere on the internet, not mine. The staircase picture is my own. You can have a look at the hotel's website here: http://www.lasarrasine.net/index_uk.html )

Scents of June

A very chilly Saturday it's been, a maximum of 13 Celsius today is certainly not what I'd expect in mid-to-end June here, but there you go.

All day, I was unsure about whether to go running or not.

My hometown's CityRun is only three weeks away, one of which I will be spending in the South of France for a family gathering, and although I intend to take my running clobber with me, I doubt I'll have that much occasion for running.

I went out in the afternoon to visit my downstairs neighbour in hospital; she is expecting a baby and not very well. Her husband offered to give me a lift back home, but I wanted to leave before him, so that the two of them would get some time on their own, and it looked as if it was going to keep dry - there was even a bit of sun visible finally! - so I walked home.

It was still chilly enough for me to be wearing my coat, and I settled for an evening in.
As soon as I had started up my computer game, though, I changed my mind, and before said mind had a chance to change again, I slipped into my trainers and ran.

And I am glad I did!

The chilly weather as well as the ongoing football worldcup kept most people inside, so I had the fields almost entirely to myself.

Not even the usual group of half-naked, tanned, muscular Polish workers were on the fields; they were probably enjoying a well-deserved night off, now that the asparagus is done with and the strawberries can still do with a few more sunny days.

It being so quiet on the fields, I could fully focus on taking in all the sights, sounds and, most enjoyably, the scents.

Twice, big light brown hares crossed my path. On a freshly cut meadow, magpies, crows and big plump doves were searching for food side by side. The scent of the cut grass and, further on, that of the strawberry fields was overwhelming. Primroses are as good as gone, and the cherries will only need a week or so of sun to be ready for picking.

About 50 minutes and a bit more than 8 km later, I arrived back home, glad that I did go for that run, and glad that, even though it doesn't feel like summer temperature-wise, all the other signs are there, spelling summer.

(Pictures of hare and strawberry field courtesy google picture search; picture of rye field is my own.)

So different...!

A lot has been said and written about birds, by people who know infinitely more about them than I do, and I won't even attempt to write anything scientific here; just a personal observation and the thoughts that came along with it - actually, years ago, before I discovered blogging as the literary form most suited to me.

(This is not the first bit I am writing about those - mostly - small modern-day winged dinosaurs; if you are interested, you can read here about larks and here about buzzards.)

Whether we like it or not, we do have a lot in common not only with birds, but with a large amount of other species roaming the planet alongside us; our basic needs for food, water, shelter and wanting to procreate are pretty much the same, as is a lot of the territorial behaviour that can be seen.

There are fundamental differences, though, and I think one very noticeable one is the apparent inability of birds to predict the trajectory of an approaching human.

What I mean is this:
When you walk along a path, maybe lined with hedgerows or fences, and a bird - blackbird, sparrow, finch, doesn't matter which one - is sat on the fence or on the ground, and it spots you coming, what does it do?
Usually, it will just fly further up along the fence or hop along the path a few yards, until you almost catch up with it, then repeat the same maneuver, possibly (especially if it is a blackbird) shouting some very rude swearwords in birdish at you, and so on, until you reach the end of the path or take a turn anyway.

Why, I used to wonder, don't they just stay put on the fence and let you pass, when - for another human - it is so obvious that you are simply going to keep moving in that same direction and are unlikely to suddenly jump on the fence?
Dogs and, to an extent, even cats are quite capable of predicting where a human is headed under normal circumstances, in particular if it is "their" human, whose patterns they have closely observed and sometimes know a lot better than we realize.
But birds lack this; they can not conclude from our initial direction of movement to the most probable trajectory.

Which strikes me as partly logical - they do not have mirror neurons, do they? - and partly odd: when it comes to their own flying, they show an amazing knack for (mostly) failure-free three dimensional judging of distances and speed, rarely knocking against obstacles or bumping into other birds while airborne, this being especially true for those species whose food mainly consists of flying insects such as the incredibly agile swifts; they surely can work out insect trajectories, even though these are, I suppose, a lot more erratic and less linear in their direction of movement than those of humans who are by nature bound to stay on the ground while walking, and typically prone to follow a more or less straight line to get as effortless as possible from A to B.

Some people, by the way, are like that.
I meet them almost every morning when I get off the train on my way to work.
The stairs which are the only way to leave the platform and eventually the station are always at the same place; they do not change over night. It should be obvious to any human who applies even the most rudimentary of logic thinking that those people who get off the train are going to head for those stairs. And yet, there are those who invariably will stand at exactly the wrong side of the door, blocking the way for everybody, sometimes even reacting in an exasperated manner at the impoliteness of the passengers who, wanting to get to the stairs and having no other choice, brush past them.

Maybe we aren't so different after all.

Seven Months & Seven Days

That is the length of time I have, until today, spent as a widow.
And life has been surprisingly good.

I have made several new friends and re-established old friendships, my family has supported me in every possible way, and I have become closer to my mother-in-law and my sisters-in-law over in England. There's been a lot of learning, thinking, crying and laughing.
I made experiences and opened doors and did things I have never done before.

Not all the thoughts I have been thinking in relation with Steve's death are flattering for me and the kind of character I possess, but I am not ashamed of anything I do or think; it is simply the way I am, and my way of dealing with this rather drastic change in my life.
This change has brought with it experiences that have made me stronger and, as odd as it may sound, happier in a way, more content.

Of course, I did not ask to have this experience and wouldn't wish on anybody to come home from work and find their partner dead on the floor in their living room without any forewarning, like signs of illness or a known heart condition.

But life and death do not ask, they just happen.

And so I deal with what is happening in my life, exerting influence when and how best I can to make these happenings acceptable for me, and accepting those things I can not change with as much nonchalance and grace and courage I can muster up.

Were I living in a different part of the world, or had this happened 50 years ago, there wouldn't be so many doors open to me and so many possibilities to choose from. A widow in her forties in, say, Afghanistan is pretty much subject to the kindness of her relatives who either feed her or not, unless she manages to find someone willing to marry her now simply in order to have her modest economical needs taken care of.

After Steve died on Nov. 5th 2009, totally out of the blue and only a few days after his 41st birthday, for a while I counted the passing of time in weeks. Two weeks that I'm a widow now, three, then suddenly it were eight, nine, ten weeks, and if I remember correctly, I stopped counting the weeks at around week 15 or so and switched to months.
Eventually, I know I will come to think in terms of years.

So, by the time it will be seven years, seven months and seven days, where and what will I be?
I have no idea, and actually I don't want to know - I rather like surprises, and the twists and turns my path in life can take.

Some things are for sure, though: a great number of people will have died by then, and an even greater number born. Several more species of plants and animals will have become extinct, while others will have managed to conquer new habitats. Governments will have changed and political and economical constellations will continue to alter. New technologies will keep being developed and old ones disappear from use. Our knowledge in so many fields will increase, whereas we still won't be able to answer some very fundamental questions or at least act according to what we know to be true.

The planet will keep its spinning race along its orbit, and what I will do or not, what I think and write and say, won't make any difference to anyone. That is, actually, a comforting thought, because it means freedom. At the price of loneliness, true, but still freedom.

Maria Pia's Birthday

Souvenirs from Sicily, part X

It is Maria Pia's birthday, and Brigitte and I would have politely gone out for the evening if it had not been Maria Pia herself to insist that we stay for her little gathering of friends and meet everybody.
Don't ask me how old she is on this October day in 1987; she can't be 30 yet, as it would be highly unusual for someone like her to still live unmarried, sharing a flat with other girls, but she surely must be at least 25 to have already landed a prestigious position as a valued teacher at one of Catania's private schools.
Her being one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen makes it even more difficult to estimate her age.
(For an introduction to Maria Pia, read here: http://librarianwithsecrets.blogspot.com/2010/05/off-to-catania.html)

I am quite sure that Brigitte and I venture out to the shops to buy a small birthday present for her, but I absolutely can not remember what it is.
By the time we get back to the flat, preparations are in full swing, and when Maria Pia emerges from her room, she looks absolutely perfect in a very classy little black dress, her hair beautifully done without being too elaborate (she does not need elaborate to look great), and wearing a timeless single string of pearls with the dress.
These pearls, much admired by us and the other girls, are her fidanzato's birthday gift, she informs us.

(Of course this picture is not really Maria Pia, but it gives you quite a realistic idea of what she looked like back then)

We help in placing every chair we can find in the flat and on the balcony into the biggest room, set the sweet snacks - some of them home-made, others bought - on some small rickety coffee tables, and wait for the guests.

Until then, I was not familiar with typical Sicilian sweets, but today I learn about pan di spagna, pasta di mandorle and torrone.

Pan di spagna can best be compared to angel cake, I suppose; it is very soft and lightweight. Pasta di mandorle is almond pastry, very sweet and sticky; one of the many things in Sicilian cuisine that clearly show Arabic influence. Needless to say, I love it! Torrone exists in various forms, but the most popular home-made one is the variety shown here, made of almonds and nuts, caramelized. A tooth breaker if you're not careful.

I also learn that people in Northern Italy look forever down on the Southerners, especially on those from Sicily; the Sicilians are called Torrones, and they in turn call the Northerners Polentones. Sicilians are considered lazy, maybe streetwise but otherwise stupid, unable to speak proper Italian, and only coming to Northern Italy to take away the jobs (which the Northerners themselves don't want to do anyway).
Sounds familiar?
I'm afraid this kind of prejudice is not exclusively an Italian phenomenon, but can be observed similarly everywhere in the world.

The guests arrive, mostly in couples, except for Maria Pia's fidanzato, who is the perfect partner for her - a handsome, kind man with intelligent eyes and impeccable manners. We are told he is professor for physics, and one of his colleagues is there, too. That colleague is the only guest whose name I have not forgotten, for a very valid reason: years later, he married my friend Brigitte, and she moved to Catania (actually, Aci Castello, which is just a few miles along the coast North of Catania) for him, where they still live with their three children.
Of course, nobody knows that yet - after all, we are still in October 1987, and Brigitte and Antonio meet for the very first time, being guests at Maria Pia's birthday gathering like everybody else.

We eat, we drink (more coffee than anything else), we laugh and talk and play games.

One of the games consists in someone having to pantomime a film or a song, and the others guessing which film or song it is.
A plump, rather unassuming young woman with very white skin and black curly hair does an impression of a lady taking her clothes off (she does not really take anything off, of course - this is the utterly Catholic Sicily, and those present are all respectable young citizens, even intellectuals to a certain degree) and then having a shower.
To my big surprise, almost everybody shouts at unison: "Ti voglio nuda e bagnata!", and the room is ringing with laughter - they are right, that is the title of the film the plump girl had them guess.
Back then, I do not understand more than a few words in Italian, and so Brigitte has to translate for me, which she does with a lot of giggling (I am the youngest at 19 years and still very innocent and inexperienced, everybody else being in their mid-twenties): "I want you naked and wet", an apparently highly popular porn movie in those days.
(I've done a bit of research. The film really exists, I remembered the title correctly. It was released earlier in the eighties, starring John Holmes, whose life the movie "Boogie Nights" was later based on.)

After the guests say good-night and we help in restoring the room to its former condition and clean up the kitchen, Maria Pia has Brigitte ask me a favour for her:
Would I come to school with her the next morning? Her colleague, teaching German, has heard of us, and she would so much like me to visit her class, in order for the students to have a native speaker talk to them for an hour or two, answering their questions and so on.

I have always loved meeting new people - that has not changed since 1987! - and so I agree without hesitating.

(Once again, none of the pictures belongs to me. I have nicked them whereever I found them on the internet.)