My Week in Italy

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I’ll admit I was worried.  The whole driving in Italy thing had me so preoccupied before I left on my trip that I scarcely had time for my usual panic about my plane crashing.  I landed in Roma last Saturday to the tune of Slip Sliding Away playing on the American Airlines speakers and all of a sudden my fears about the drive were renewed with vigor.

In the end, it was fine.  I didn’t stall the car once and I made it out of Rome without getting lost.  By the end of my week, I wasn’t exactly driving like an Italian–in other words crazily like my friend Laura–but I was able to take the winding roads with a respectable amount of speed.  This was of course helped because the weather turned out to be sunny and wonderful.

I knew going into this trip that I would either be moving to Italy when I came back, or I would be giving in to my fears and staying put in New York.  The first day pretty much made the decision for me.

I went into Montepulciano to walk around and get my bearings.  I’d forgotten just how steep the climb through the town was.  The old stone streets worn smooth by hundreds of years of use beckoned me higher and higher as I tried to reconnect with the town.  Unfortunately, it was Sunday and everything was closed.  The streets were barren and except for a tasting of the first Vino Nobile of the season going on in Piazza Grande, it felt like a ghost town.  I walked by my favorite restaurant and noticed it had gone out of business.  In fact, there seemed to be quite a few stores no longer there.  I began to panic.  What was I thinking?  Could I really make a living in this country with my limited Italian.  Knowing my resources were even more limited than my speech, I felt a weight descending upon me.  The few Italians who passed me looked at the strange American without returning my smiles.  By the time I made it back to Laura’s agriturismo, I was talking myself out of moving.  I wouldn’t have friends, it was too big a step, etc…

I went to my room and the quiet loneliness of traveling by myself, no doubt exacerbated by jet lag, made me feel quite sad, so I decided to go down to the agriturismo’s kitchen and ask Laura’s mom, Marisa, if I could watch her cook.  Marisa doesn’t speak a word of English, but she took one look at my face when I came in and asked me what was wrong.  I began to cry.  And then I told her in my halting Italian about my fears and my doubts.  Within fifteen minutes she had me cooking.  It was almost as if she’d intuited that cooking is the one task that always makes me feel at peace.  She gave me porcini mushrooms to chop (frozen because they weren’t in season) and by the end of the afternoon, I was at home.  I helped cook the meal for the party that was planned for that evening.  Laura is getting married this week and so I wanted to help with all of the preparations for the wedding.  And I did.  I cooked, cleaned, made favors for the rice to be thrown, and ate with the family.  Marisa took me under her wing and within a day, I was over my fears and certain I was making the right decision.

I met the entire family, and was happy to learn that my sense of humor translated into Italian.  Of course, I did have my moments of Italian embarrassments, but I was growing more confident with my speech so I didn’t care.  We ordered flowers for the church, the weddding cake, organized the table seating–basically all of the wedding things that would take a year in the US, Laura was attempting to do in a week.  The stress was palpable and I was glad I was there to lend a hand.  In between lots of cries of “Maddona Mia” and “Porca Miseria” and my favorite “Vaffanculo,”  everything was getting accomplished.  I was in charge of the list to keep us on track, and we happily ticked things off as the week went on.  On Wednesday, after Laura had had her own breakdown because she hadn’t liked the way the gifts for the guests had turned out, Marisa got involved and we all trouped over to speak to the owner of the shop where the bomboniere were made.  While we waiting, Laura’s mom commented that the favors with the candied almonds were moscia.  I’d never heard that word before so I looked it up.  It meant limp.  Laura whose English is good, but also wants to improve, added limp to her vocabulary.  Then I said, “Non bene per il uomo.” (limp isn’t good for the man).  Laura and her mom cracked up and we had another nice bonding moment.  Unfortunately to my utter mortification, Laura regaled her father and brother with my comment over dinner that evening.  And that was how the week went.  I was treated as part of the family.  Laura delighted in repeating my comments in a nightly wrap up for everyone’s enjoyment, sometimes because the comments themselves were funny, or because the way I expressed myself in Italian was.  I felt comfortable and at home.

With the help of Laura and Marisa, I was able to open a bank account, find an apartment to rent, buy an Italian cell phone, and have several leads on employment to follow up on when I return.  Marisa has decided that she will work on finding me a husband, a job and a car in the intervening months.  Apparently my husband is a man named Lucca whom I haven’t met!

The week was wonderful.  Not a vacation for sure as I think I worked harder there than I do here in New York, but I realized that with a little support, it is possible to take those big leaps forward.  When I left on Saturday, laden with olive oil from the recent harvest, Marisa, Laura and I all cried.  I will see Laura in New York while she’s here on her honeymoon, and I’ve promised Marisa that I will text her regularly.  I will see her in a few months.  Laura’s dad joked that they’ll be waiting for me at the airport upon my return.

I have a lot to accomplish in the next couple of months, but I feel confident that I’m heading down the right path…up the mountain to Montepulciano.

the view from my new apartment

the view from my new apartment

What the manicurist knows…

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There are definitely a few things I’m going to miss about New York.  Cheap manis and pedis are at the top of my list.   Tiny, smushed nail salons crammed with always smiling, anxious-to-please staff are a fixture on almost every block.  You can get in and out in under an hour and go from being a dog walker with hands who look like they belong to a lumberjack to someone who feels pampered and pretty.  Because the recession has hit the beauty industry hard, my nail salon has been having a 40% off sale for the last three months.  This means you can get a mani and pedi pretty much for free.

My favorite part of the experience isn’t the massage chairs, or even the services themselves.  I just love to people watch.  Today’s experience was typical of what goes on there.

I hadn’t been in since December, so I was greeted like an old friend.  Well, after being harshly told to “Pick a color,” which is what the owner Kim says to everyone, I was greeted warmly by the women who work there.  I see them fairly regularly in the summer and on warmish days in the winter–I refuse to put shoes back on after the pedicure, so it has to be above freezing for me to do the two block sprint back to my house in flip-flops.

The two people who caught my attention today were a sixty-year-old, balding man with some gnarly toes and a woman who was getting acrylic nails and bitching the whole time.  The bitching woman spent two hours, or so she kept saying, spent around $50 on services, then left the manicurist a $4 tip.  The poor girl was so happy to see her go, I don’t think she even noticed the crappy tip, but I was outraged on her behalf.

The balding guy was extremely polite until it came time to do the polish.  I know some guys like the clear polish on their toes, but this guy wanted silver sparkles.   Much snickering in Spanish occurred as it was made clear that this is what Funky Feet wanted.  He then explained to the rest of us who were sitting on the chairs near him that he wasn’t gay.  Well, first he tried to use a slang derogatory Spanish expression to explain it to the pedicurists, then resorted to all manner of insulting gay words in his vocabulary to try to convince us of his heterosexuality.  I believed him on sight.  No self-respecting gay man of my acquaintance would be sporting feet like those.  Apparently the man’s wife forces him to go in and likes it when he paints his toes.  Fine.  Each to his own.  But when the man mentioned they were heading to Florida tomorrow, I finally let out a barking laugh of my own.  The thought of those ugly, humongous, silver-lame, sparkling toes walking on the beach was just too much.

As for me, I got my beauty in, over tipped my people to compensate for the bitching woman, then did my flip-flop sprint home.  Cinder, always happy to see me, greeted me by promptly stepping on my toes.

How do you say stress in Italian?

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I’m heading to Italy in two weeks for my scouting mission.  I’m hoping to find an apartment to rent for Cinder and me.  I also want to get acclimated in the town I’ve chosen, put in my application for Italian Citizenship and, in my down time, drink lots of vino rosso.   Sounds lovely, right?  A week off in Tuscany.  No dogs, no work.  What could be better?

Well, I am a little stressed out about driving.  On my last two trips, my travel companions have done the bulk of the driving.  And by bulk, I mean all but maybe five minutes.  I haven’t really driven since I moved to New York.  Even on weekends away, I’ve managed not to drive.  So how rusty do you get in eight years?  I hope not too.  Because first I have to get myself out of Rome successfully.  My friend Will and I did not manage this well on our last trip, ending up driving in circles around the fringes of Rome.  It was a stressful start to our trip.  So I don’t even have the knowledge of having done that much right to visualize as I do deep breathing and give pep talks to myself.  The next piece of stress happened last week when I went to rent the car.  First, the stress of having to use my debit card instead of a credit card for the rental, which everyone online warns is a nightmare.  And then realizing that I have to rent a stick shift because the price of an automatic is $500 more.  Aiuta!!!  (Help is actually one of the words I learned early on, so if I do run into trouble I hope I remember it.)  My first and last cars were stick shifts so I’m just praying that it is like riding a bike and that it all comes back to me…preferably before I get out of the rental car garage as I don’t want to stall on the Autostrada.

Then today, flush with the sense of accomplishment that comes from ticking things off your checklist, I decided to peruse the long range forecast for my trip.  In the town where I’m staying, they are calling for SNOW!  Almost every day.

All of sudden getting lost in Rome seems much more manageable compared with sliding off a cliff in Tuscany.

The walls of my new town

The walls of my new town

My friend Laura's agriturismo

My friend Laura's agriturismo

Laura's grapes

Laura's grapes

The Truth about Cats and Dogs

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When you stay with someone’s dog, it can be challenging.  You’re sleeping in a strange place, you have to trek back and forth between your home and theirs, and you have an extra animal on the bed so you end up sleeping in uncomfortable contorted positions in order to accommodate everyone.  Those are my concerns.  But Cinder has always had her own.  How to behave when the house you are staying in has a cat, as well as a dog?

Because I’ve been dog sitting for so long, I don’t worry about this stuff much any more.  I have a routine down and the dogs we stay with are like members of my family.  We’re staying with Feather this week.  One of my “Pink Ladies,” Feather is a six year Golden Retriever whom I’ve been walking since she was a puppy.  I know all of her habits, both good and bad.  I know that when I wake up in the morning, she will be sitting on the bed just staring at me with her intense brown eyes, that she will find it necessary to sit on my foot at every opportunity, and that she takes forever to find that perfect spot to pee.  Because she is well-behaved, I sometimes bring Feather to my place for her stays, but we can’t do that this time.  The cat that Feather’s family has now is ancient, so the owners requested that we split our time so Gaby would have company rather than me just stopping in to feed and check on her.

When we first began staying with Feather, Cinder freaked out whenever she saw Gaby.  She’s always been highly excitable when it comes to cats.  Unlike my last dog who’d actually lived with a cat in peaceful coexistence, Cinder was a rescue so I didn’t know what her frame of reference was when it came to cats.  We’d had one who lived next door to us in Miami.  The cat would walk along the fence of our yard, taunting my dogs and practically begging them to chase her back and forth.  They were happy to oblige.  Then one morning, after we’d just come back from an early morning outing to the beach, I noticed that the cat had come into our yard.  The dogs hadn’t noticed, since I was hosing off their sand and grit, so I willed the cat back over the fence.  For some reason, this didn’t work.  When Cinder spotted the cat, all hell broke loose.  She dashed across the yard, caught it by the neck, and flung it against the fence.   I think my heart stopped when I saw the cat lying still in the bougainvillea.  Miraculously the cat was fine.  It somehow got up and scrambled back over the fence, never to be heard from again.  I checked with my neighbors who said the cat was uninjured.

Needless to say, I have been a little leery of Cinder’s interaction with cats ever since.  Thankfully, Feather is the only dog I stay with who has a cat.  When we had our first stay, I kept the french doors between the back and front of the house closed, and then at night I would barricade us into the bedroom with Gaby safely on the other side.  Cinder would lie on the bed, shaking, unable to sleep.  “There’s a cat out there,” she seemed to say.  “Shouldn’t we do something?”  While I understood that there was some instinctual cat/dog stuff going on, I still tried to explain to Cinder that Gaby was our friend.

Over the years, I noticed a subtle shift in Cinder’s behavior.  She still found Gaby immensely fascinating, but she no longer seemed to view her as an enemy.  I would leave her leash on and let her walk over to Gaby and have a sniff, always prepared to pull her away if she got in Gaby’s face.  I didn’t want Gaby to swat her and then have a blood bath on my hands.  I still would keep Gaby and Cinder separated when we there, but I could see that while Cinder still found Gaby intriguing, she no longer found her a threat.

During the stay this week, Cinder and Gaby reached an accord.  Perhaps it’s because they are both in their dotage now, but Cinder went up to Gaby, gave her a sniff, and then walked away to take a nap on the couch.  At first, I wondered if this behavior was some diabolical plot that Cinder had hatched to lure me and Gaby into a sense of complacency before she attacked, but this wasn’t the case.  Cinder had finally accepted that Gaby was part of the household.  I was able to leave all the doors open and Gaby even slept in the bedroom with us.  It felt a little like slipping down the rabbit hole to see such odd behavior from a dog I thought would never be friendly with cats, but it was a pleasant surprise.  Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Of course, I still slept in a contorted position and awoke to Feather staring at me, but you can’t have everything.

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Feather and friends

Saving the world…one nip at a time

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My Weimaraner Cinder doesn’t know how to play.   Well, she plays, but not in the way you normally see dogs play–rolling around, chasing a ball, frolicking with another dog.   She’s been a little awkward from the time she was rescued at just over a year.  In the house, she always wrestled with my last dog, Miranda, but even then there was a clumsy ineptitude, probably resultant from living on the streets during her formative puppy months.   She enjoys wrestling with her friend Rex, but only inside and preferably on the bed.  She doesn’t often interact with other dogs in the park.   This is probably because they don’t know what to make of her.

Because Cinder is an alpha, she greets every dog at the gate with the same stony glare of a bouncer at a nightclub.  Then as they come in, it’s right to sniffing and making sure they are fit to enter.  Almost every dog she meets backs down from her.  This is lucky for her because when she has been challenged, she never knows what to do.  In other words, she talks a good game, but doesn’t have any follow through.

Her usual job at the dog run is to walk around marking other dogs’ pee and maintaining the peace.  If it’s warm, she does this from the comfort of  bench where she can bark in a dog’s face if he gets too close to me and the cookie bag.  She rarely wants to play.  Actually very few of my friends have ever even seen Cinder run around.  It’s always a source of amazement when she does.   “Look, Cinder’s playing,” someone will cry out when it happens, like he’s just spotted a rare bird out of it’s natural habitat (In her case, the couch).

This week with snow on the ground, Cinder has been friskier than usual.  And she’s wanted to play.  This has sent most of Cinder’s good friends running for cover.  Not because they don’t love Cinder, but because Cinder’s idea of play is to run up to them, give them a quick nip on the ass, a “tag, you’re it,” and then scoot away waiting for them to engage her.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she was a cattle dog of some sort.  You kind of expect them to nip and chase.  But an eighty pound Weimaraner?

It’s really embarrassing when Cinder does this with a dog she doesn’t know well.  She came away from a standard poodle the other day with a clump of his black hair in her mouth.  I quickly disposed of the evidence, but not before the owner saw it.  “That was a very expensive haircut,” she told me.  She didn’t seem mad, but I apologized anyway, trying to explain my child’s strange behavior.  As it turns out, the poodle was some sort of world champion and he’d just won a major competition.  “Don’t worry,” the woman said, “his best friend is a “Weimaraner.  That’s not odd behavior.”  Really?  Who knew.  I felt slightly better, but still a bit embarrassed by her social awkwardness.  On the plus side, she’s eleven and it does make me feel good to know that she still wants to play and enjoy her life.  I only hope the Italian dogs will be as accepting of her quirkiness as her New York friends have been.

Super Cinder

Super Cinder