The Things We Carry

I will be packing up my books again, which is the bulk of my material possessions, so I mention them as a part for the whole, the synecdoche of my worldly existence. So, I will be packing up the books for a move across town.

It reminds me of the move that we made in Italy, but for all intents and purposes, it was a move I made across Italy. It was a huge transition from the limelight of being a visiting Joycean under the auspices of the esteemed Madame of Joycean Studies, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, a woman whom I hold in the highest regards and with whom I was humbled to be able teach with at L’Università di Bologna, to the study abroad program in Castiglione Fiorentino, where the now deceased Paolo Barucchieri led Italart, a consortium of universities established to explore and convey the Beauty and Art that Italy has to offer. It was a change. A transition.

We were living in Piazza Aldrovandi, in the best part of Bologna, in a fourth-story apartment overlooking the reddish, clay-tiled rooftops of a city that is forever deeply rooted in my heart and soul. A town I would move back to in a heartbeat, given the chance. It is a town with a Soul, deeply embedded in culture, cuisine, literature, philosophy, pride, and family. It, like Antwerp, Santa Fe, Austin, and Madurai, is a city different. It lives.

I was sad to leave Bologna, but equally excited to move to the hilltop town of CF, an original Etruscan settlement with equally rooted history and a highlight of a piazza designed by Vasari himself apparently, so this was no move downwards, but sideways, as is my current one, and ones I have engineered in the past. I live where I live, so it is paramount to me where I live, I love.

I loved Bologna and I loved Castiglione Fiorentino. I guess you could say that I am romanced by cities (though nature—Maine Coast, New Mexican back roads, American West, the Dolimites—move me just as much). I love a sense of place, a sense of Space.

When moving, my ex-wife was settled in Rome for the month for research purposes, so it was up to me to make the move from Bologna to CF, which was the norm. Being on the 4^th floor, with no lift/elevator, and about forty trips up and down to load the Furgone by myself, with the notion that it was parked illegally and I had to keep moving it to keep it “legal,” which in Italy is a loose term.

But, in addition to scaling Le Scale multiple times in the matter of an hour or two, meanwhile abating the howls and concerns of our two cats I had locked in the bathroom, soon, said two felines and myself were on the road in a rented furgone and on the way to a new chapter in my life, one that was both definitive in many positive and negative ways alike. It was the balance of the life we live.

Driving across Italy, with now two semi-docile cats and the feeling of change in the air, it was a bit daunting to drive into a very small, secluded, hill-top Tuscan hamlet to a dead-end street in which the van I had rented only fit with bring the mirrors in and a wing a prayer. I had only been in a tighter squeeze in Limone, Italy with a rental car in which literally I had about a ½ inch on each side of the car not to repeat a Chevy Chase “European Vacation” moment. That is not an exaggeration. It may have been a ¼ of an inch…

But, I and the kitties made the journey through beautiful back roads of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, pulled into town with an entourage of village rugrats in train behind us, waiting to see if lo straniero could pull it off.  I did, and did not displace a single flowerpot of the flowerpot-lined lane.

I have moved quite a bit in my life, and even when married, I usually managed the majority of the move. I have packed boxes, lugged them and furniture up and down many stairs, hired many vans, and have seen my life parceled into boxes, enough to know that it is not the material, but the things we carry with us, to paraphrase Tim O’Brien, which make us who we are.

My life is changing, as it did there in Italy, from Emilia Romagna to Tuscany, but, when we remember the core of who we are, change is irrelevant.