“It is a fake,” pronounced Dino matter-of-factly, his arms crossed. He was leaning against the counter of the developing kitchen. Behind him a piece of plastic sheeting hung almost to the floor from a missing piece of roof above our breakfast table.

“His family owned the place. He visited maybe a couple of times. It is not that old, maybe a few hundred years.”

Dino and Federico’s bed-and-breakfast advertised itself as “next to Dante’s house,” a structure a few doors down actually, the reference apparently given more for marketing than orientation. We had asked casually during our first breakfast what Dante’s house was like.

“He couldn’t get along with the city and they exiled him.” Dino warmed to his role.

“He died in Ravenna. So he’s buried there and now he’s famous. The city made his family’s place into a museum. All that Florence can do is send money once a year to buy oil for his eternal flame.”

“We saw tourists there when we arrived yesterday,” we said. People with cameras were waiting in lines headed by someone holding a collapsible chrome antenna with a handkerchief tied to the tip.

“It’s not worth a visit. They make sure they call it a museum because it isn’t really his house. But if you like to go, go.”

Dino was frustrated. His plan was simple, really. Break down a shared wall between the third stories of adjacent buildings and expand a successful B&B by 100%. But he was having trouble just getting a telephone line installed. Interminable delays hampered seemingly basic construction. It was raining on the see-through vinyl roof over the newly expanded breakfast area.

The morning pound cake was done. Federico removed it carefully from the oven across the kitchen from where we were sitting and laid slices on plates. Four of us were having breakfast this morning, a pair of heavily pierced and tattooed body artists from New Jersey, Carolyn and me. Dino stood nearby holding his fluffy little white dog.

Federico served the cake with a heavily accented “Good morning,” not attempting further conversation. He handed Dino a broken piece of pound cake which Dino fed in small bites to his dog. Dino was not finished.

Restaurants? Here are the best values. Here in fact are their business cards, each with a map on the back to find it. Things to see? There are too many. You will of course go to the Uffizi, then the Duomo where everybody goes. Just look around. It is everywhere.

Dino went through his list of recommendations dryly, knowing we would find history on our own. He was more specific in response to questions.

It turned out he had spent time in Paris. We had been there for a few weeks, we said, before coming to Florence.

“Paris and Florence are like cousins,” Dino observed. “Neither one likes change.”

What about the plethora of Internet shops in Florence and their near absence in Paris? Certainly that would indicate Florence’s receptivity to change. How are they “cousins?”

“They want to keep the status quo. There are old families, especially in Florence. They like to keep things as they are.”

What about the Internet?

“Both countries needed to deal with it. Italians have a different approach than the French, more accepting of innovation.”

He shifted his position against the plastic and let the dog down to the floor.

Italy, he said, incorporated the English word “computer” directly into the language. France, on the other hand, felt an obligation to coin a new word, ordinateur, based on the organizational functionality of the machine. He rested his case.

Later that day we looked up computer in our Italian/English dictionary, a fat little blue and red book we had picked up at the train station. Though it had infinitely more than we needed in the way of words, it didn’t list computer. “Computerize,” however, was translated in both directions. Computerizzare, it said. Verbo, transitivo.  “To computerize.” Apparently computer/computer was unnecessary.

One morning at breakfast we met a singing coach from the U.K. with a carefully trimmed beard and wire rimmed glasses.

Did he know Charlotte Church, we asked by way of conversation. No response. We were impressed, we went on, that when she was asked to sing for Christmas Eve in 1999 by the Queen and the Pope, she had turned them both down to celebrate with her family. Just shows her family values, we thought. We had seen her perform on television. How talented!

“Yes, she has talent.” He put down his cup and folded his hands.

“She is being pushed too hard. Her voice will be ruined by her late teens. Maybe earlier.”

What did he think of Andrea Bocelli, one of our favorites? We listen to his CD “sogno” nearly every evening as we prepare dinner at home.

The coach rolled his eyes ever so slightly. Bocelli, he allowed gently, is a pop singer. His own expertise, of course, was in coaching opera.

Yes, Bocelli has a good voice. Well, breakfast seems to be pretty much finished. Ta-ta, then.

We stayed at their B&B for two weeks, never seeing the same guests twice. We could have gone to breakfast every day for another month enjoying the colorful ease with which Dino’s guests, made to feel comfortable, opened up about themselves. Whether we took breakfast in the new area under the plastic tarp or in the smaller breakfast room in the original B&B, Dino would be standing by as facilitator, leaning against the counter in his black pullover and jeans.

No wonder. Florence grows on you. We felt as if we could have moved in and canceled the rest of our trip, except for the money it would have cost and the time we didn’t have and the fact we knew no one and didn’t speak Italian. Still, that shouldn’t have held us back.

Exploring restaurants on Dino’s list, we dropped in at a trattoria near the Duomo. They gave us seats at a table for six. Two of the other chairs were occupied by a chatty couple from Vermont, delighted to share stories in English about their adventures in Florence. The other couple at the table spoke to each other in Italian, mostly listening to American conversation.

We greeted the Italian couple in English. They responded in kind, particularly the husband, who allowed he had been to New York City. A business trip. His family had a textile business in Florence. They sold to Ralph Lauren.

How did he like New York? Fine, though a bit big.

Had he and his wife always lived in Florence? Always.

Many North Americans, we offered, tend to move from place to place. Florence was beautiful and interesting, but had he and his wife ever considered living elsewhere?

“Why would I live anywhere else?”

His wife remained silent. One of her eyebrows arched slightly. She bought a rose from a boy making rounds in the restaurant, held the bloom to her nose appreciatively.

It was time for them to go, he said. They had tickets for a concert. Arrividerci all around.

The next morning, Dino set up for breakfast in the small room. Another couple speaking Italian was there alone. They greeted us in English as we sat down.

Florence, commented the man hesitantly but amiably as we spread strawberry jam on our toast, was a perfect weekend retreat. Both of them worked in Milan, a big city with all the problems. Their three children were with his mother for a few days. He apologized for what he thought was poor English.

Milan, we burst out, was our next stop! We had rented an apartment there for a week. We knew about the shopping and the opera. What else was there to do in Milan which they would consider “not to miss?”

“Why would you want to go to Milan?”

Dino wandered in. It turned out the four of us were the only guests at the moment. We should make ourselves comfortable. He leaned back against the counter.

We enjoy visiting large cities, we told the couple on holiday from Milan. It’s variety for us; we live in a small town in the United States. They smiled, nodded.

Dino had been in the United States.  New York. Rockefeller Center.

Where in the United States are you from?

“Wisconsin.”

“Oh.” Half a smile. “What’s in Wisconsin?”

“Cows. Farms. Lakes. It’s very beautiful.”

Dino expressed sketchy interest in future visits to the U.S. The renovation project was keeping him very busy.

Months later, whiling away an hour in a bookstore near our home, I came across a guidebook to traveling in Wisconsin. It would be perfect, I thought, for Dino’s collection of travel books.

As a guidebook it wasn’t bad. The grabber was its cover, a color photo of an aging white barn. On the building’s side facing the new interstate highway, someone had painted a barn-size portrait of the Mona Lisa.

Why, indeed, would one live anywhere else?

 

 

 

Foundations for three houses showed just above ground when our team arrived at Orange Farm Township outside Johannesburg. I was assigned to help build House #143 from a stack of concrete blocks and a pile of sand sitting in front of the new owners’ tin shack.

As we drove up in a van over rutted clay, William and Naomi came out to greet us, their daughter Mbali riding in a cloth sling on Naomi’s back. I was excited about being in Africa, of being able to participate as a volunteer six months into retirement; the hands-on of concrete block and nails recalling for me summer construction jobs I had while in school. I had been blessed living all my life in America; now it was time to “give back.”

We wheelbarrowed dusky yellow sand, mixing it with cement powder poured from brown paper bags. Mounding the mix in a circle, we made a lake in the middle with water from the neighborhood spigot. Caving in the edge a half-shovelful at a time, the plan was to run out of lake and shoreline at the same moment. Then stepping in shoes and all, turning over shovelful after shovelful, we had mortar.

The local workers liked their mortar pretty wet, to fill spaces between block sizes that didn’t match up. Depending upon which machine they came from, the blocks varied, pressed two or three at a time out of portable electric equipment filled with concrete mixed by hand. The few Americans on the crew with masonry construction experience shared a belief, based on sound engineering principles, that the wetter the mortar, the weaker the wall. We discussed this among ourselves, shaking our heads. But we were working guests in a local culture sustained by hand labor, so we did it the African way. Besides, the house next door built this way seemed to be standing just fine.

We had brought work gloves from home for handling the blocks and mortar. I gave an extra pair to William during a break.

“The lifestyle in your country must be very different,” he said as he put them on. He was facing partly away from me, working his fingers into the stiff canvas and leather.

“Americans depend on machines; we’re not so used to handwork,” I replied. It was a cop-out; I didn’t really know how to respond. It felt embarrassing, pointless even, to talk about American addiction to cars and videos, standing in front of his 100 square foot shack with no plumbing.

On the second day, William invited me into his shack. Besides the gesture of hospitality, he had seemed to want me to appreciate the magnitude of change he and his family were experiencing. He volunteered he was embarrassed his wife had to live in a tin shack and that he was glad to be getting a house.

William is a gentle man, soft-spoken, with light brown eyes and quiet determination. Before being laid off at a Johannesburg plastic foam factory, he commuted four hours one way to a ten-hour job. Now he sells kitchen utensils he makes from sheet metal. Our crew ordered pots to take home. Making them at night and still working with us on his house each day, he got them done before the project ended.

One day, exhausted, he just sort of melted in a heap right in front of the mortar pile. I went over to where he lay on his back, eyes closed. As a physician, I figured people would expect me to do something.  Kneeling next to him, I thought he looked healthy, just completely spent. He needed magic, not medicine; I touched him lightly three times in the middle of his chest. It seemed like a good number. Anyway, he got right up and went back to wheeling sand.

William wore his work gloves to the dedication of the nearly completed house built for Louisa, some blocks over. Rain fell during the ceremony, shortening speeches and clattering on the new metal roof.

Louisa’s house was packed with people eating pizza and drinking warm soda pop. William was inside, looking out a window; no glass yet, just the brown painted metal frame mortared into a rectangle of absent block. Of all the people there, he seemed to be someone I needed to talk to, a person with whom I needed some kind of closure. I took some pizza and leaned against the wall alongside him, feeling through my T-shirt the roughness of concrete block, damp from drying mortar. I noticed he was still wearing his gloves. Maybe he had already eaten. Maybe he didn’t care and just ate pizza with his gloves on.

Without warning he looked at me and said, “I will never forget you.” Here it was: thanks and a separation statement, said in words that could never go back, words that dug deep into the spongy terrain of my uncertain feelings, and stuck.  I was new at volunteering, and I was never very good at thanks. Really thanking somebody puts you both on the line, like telling someone you love them; high stakes.

Besides, there was the way William said it; very quietly, very seriously, very finally. It transcended thanks. He had blessed me. In five words, all I had brought of myself and all to which I would return had been encompassed in a single benevolent gesture. As we stood there by a window in his country, in his township, in a life as distant socio-economically and politically as could be from mine, he had acknowledged without reserve the whole of me, my return air ticket to Chicago in a safety pouch under my belt.  He did it easily, as if no one else were in the room, as if we stood outside at the red dirt crossroad preparing to part for good.

I wasn’t ready to be blessed. In fact, I was pretty much pumped up with my own contribution to this project. I had gained new insights and made new friends during an intense experience. I felt myself to be a blessor, not a blessee. I had a stack of blessings stored up, more than I needed, and I was coming to Africa to give back, not to get blessed.

But with William’s blessing came forgiveness. He was telling me as the voice of my incomplete cross-cultural journey that it was acceptable to him, even expected, for me to feel confused, for each of us not to see each other again, for our lives to pick up later where we had left off. His words meant to me that despite the naïvely altruistic slant I came with, the flow of working together had carried us both along; that each of us had been given this time; that truly experiencing this moment is what life is about.

While we worked alongside William, Naomi and their friends, I had not been able to really connect with why I and not someone else had come; why certain people in our volunteer group seemed more immediately able to immerse themselves in the experience; why some people wept at circumstances which seemed to me to be merely confusing.

And then William blessed me, and I knew. He just went ahead and did it, in a little sacrament of five words with pepperoni and orange pop, in a five hundred square foot building full of the smell of curing concrete and the noise of children with pink and yellow beads in their hair. Rain dripped off the metal roof into red dust along the side of Louisa’s house. William waited, no apologies.

“Thank you,” I said. “I will not forget you either.”  He slowly removed his gloves, and we shook hands.

 

In The Lutheran, online edition, 2003.

In The Lutheran Digest, 61, 1, 2013.

 

 

 

It is a special feeling when your boat fills.

A nautical term, “fills.” Dispassionate.

It means that your vessel, the displacing entity in which you ride atop the soul of the world, is awash. It is stunning how limpid water resides quietly inside the boat, the clarity of a different reality.

On the beach at Hagios Nikolaos, at the eastern end of Crete, four middle aged men and a younger one slid a boat toward the Aegean. It was of wood, newly painted, white with cobalt blue gunwales and stem. One man slathered on red bottom paint while others aimed her trailer down the hard sand.

The boats in the harbor were also wood, mostly open, with small roofed cabins on the foredeck and inboard engines amidships. In the brilliant sun their colors blend to their purpose, cobalt of the sky and sea, green of the pines, blood red, salt white. The water was clear to the bottom of the harbor.

The young man, perhaps in his late teens, paced silently. The driver of the faded pickup opened its window, once stopping and leaning out over his elbow as if disbelieving his mirror. The one with red paint was already in the sea, mopping the last from the bucket, slapping it under the stern, when someone said something. They all laughed. The young man stood holding a rope leading to the bow.

Launching a small boat from a trailer should be a simple thing. If you turn the steering wheel of your vehicle hard over, the trailer starts to back the opposite way. Then you turn the wheel in the opposite direction, bring it back and follow the fair curve of truck and trailer square on to the shore. Assuming you have removed tethers holding the boat to the trailer, you can watch through your mirror as the boat lifts, floating free while its trailer follows the sea bed down. When you drive forward, the boat is in its element, the balance of load against displacement, of graceful bow cleaving unsuspecting water.

Which is not how it went with our own boat the year before.

Steve had come with me to launch our runabout at a ramp two miles across the lake from our Wisconsin cabin. I backed the trailer, freed the straps, checked the bilge plug and slipped our seventeen-footer into the cold, still surface of a new boating season. Engine started, Steve stepped in and I drove off.

Back at the cabin, I was waiting on our dock for him when the phone rang. The boat was not quite a third full, he said. He was ashore a quarter mile from the ramp on the sand beach of a Mr. Vann who was working on some paving stones in his yard.

During the ten-minute ride over I had time to think. It took about three minutes to run through the possibilities. Could the prop shaft bushing have come loose, like it did on our 29-foot sailboat off Raspberry Island, taking on six inches of Lake Superior when I wrapped the dinghy rope? On that one, our sailing partner Gary had boarded, responding to our frantic calls. Leaning into the aft berth and sliding the door aside over the engine, he looked at me, my door open, waiting on the opposite side. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he intoned before helping me stuff the bushing into place.

Nope, this was an inboard/outboard, no prop shaft.

Could it have opened a seam, like our elderly plywood dinghy with two children rowing madly back to the dock? Not that either, this was a virtual fiberglass bathtub.

Could it have been holed? Maybe. Its 25-year old predecessor, Sea Sprite, partly filled at the same launch ramp two years earlier through a gash from a misplaced trailer roller, punched through the fiberglass the previous autumn. But there was nothing to hit between the launch ramp and where Steve now sat alongside our partly filled, slowly emptying boat, its electric bilge pump humming.

I took off the engine cover. A pair of blue hoses hung off into space. Cooling hoses for seawater, left unconnected when someone serviced the engine. We reconnected them, pushed the boat out, started the engine. No more water. An uneventful ride across the lake to our dock.

At the harbor of Hagios Nikolaos, we watched the young man, now in yellow rubber overalls, move around his boat, swaying gently as he shifted lines and nets to their working positions. No quick movements, just setting up gear. The morning air would be chill and dark, the land breeze at his back. He would start the engine, slip the lines and slide away from the dock, motoring quietly with the brightly colored fleet to the sea outside, where the men of Hagios Nikolaos would go fishing.

 

 

 

 

In the Border Museum at El Paso, there is no natural light. Its home is a purpose-built, windowless concrete box opened for business in 1994 on the Rio Grande, the Texas side, across from Ciudad Juarez.

Working the reception desk when we visited in 2001 was a pleasant, angular man with glasses, wearing a beige cotton shirt and blue jeans. No uniform, no pressure, no visitors except the two of us. Carolyn remarked on the forecast of rain.

“We’ll get our share, looks like,” he replied. He disappeared into a back room and returned with a photograph of yellow flowers.

“Poppies.”  He angled the snapshot to divert the glare of overhead fluorescents.

   “The whole desert. A sea of gold flowers. Six years ago. The last big rain we had.”

   He laid the photo on the counter, letting us soak up the image.

“Beautiful,” we managed. He smiled.

There wasn’t much to smile about in this place, a homegrown repository dedicated to the agents and families of the United States Border Patrol. It is a personal and political history made of guns and pictures, letters and news clippings, handwritten memoirs and historical documents. It’s family, the collective memory of people who lived the job.

A sheet metal rudder welded to an iron pipe stuck off the stern of a flatboat constructed from sheet metal scraps, the inboard end of its propeller shaft buried inside a precarious-looking engine. Border Patrol agents, Carolyn read from a typewritten index card, apprehended the occupants off Florida. Across the way, a display of confiscated knives and homemade guns described in hand-lettered signage their use by illegal Mexican border crossers to prey upon those following them.

We remarked to the counter man that we were on our way to San Diego. He suggested a videotape, motioning toward a TV monitor in front of a row of brown steel folding chairs. We found the tape, slipped it into the VCR and pressed “PLAY.”

 As it begins, an elderly man in a red and white checked shirt stands in his front yard talking to an interviewer. He feels safer, he says, since the fence went up. There is less drug trafficking in his part of town, which for him means Imperial Beach, across the Tijuana River from Mexico.

Carolyn and I look at each other. We have rented a cottage for a month in Imperial Beach, sending reservations and money a month ago over the Internet from our home in Wisconsin. The tape continues, reeling off short clips one after the other: a corrugated iron fence snaking through southern San Diego before poking hundreds of feet out into the Pacific; people apprehended at night swimming across a drainage ditch to the United States; sunlit graded dirt paths on the U.S. side showing crisp footprints of people who got through overnight.

The southern edge of the U.S. human containment effort, parts of it physical and parts natural, starts at the fence’s wet, salty end in San Diego. Running a hundred fifty miles east along the cultural fault between North and Meso-America, it turns briefly southward at Yuma by the Colorado River, then angles in a straight geopolitical line southeast through six hundred miles of desert to El Paso. Its eastern end follows the Rio Grande’s eight hundred fifty-mile drift to the Gulf of Mexico.

Before we happened upon the Border Patrol Museum, we were stopped by police in Zapata, Texas, a faded town on the Rio Grande four miles downstream from Laredo. The cop came to the passenger side of our car. Carolyn handed my driving license to him. He said we were going 45 miles an hour. We agreed.

We missed a “25 MPH” sign a block back, he said. He pretended not to peer intently into our back seat where there was nothing. He eyeballed our stuff filling up the open space in the rear of our SUV. Nobody there either. He sent us off with a warning. 

The border seems virtual enough when you get away from steel walls, wire fences and dirt surveillance tracks, out of reach of the floodlights. Radio stations along the road from Harlingen to El Paso carry five or ten Spanish language stations for every one in English. Yellow road signs miles from the border in California show running figures of a man and woman, the woman holding a child’s hand. Above them it says CAUTION. 

So I’m thinking, what is “alien,” really? How do I define myself at the border of my own country if I can understand, on a good day, 20% of what’s on the radio?