Just Another Monday Morning
Labor Day 2019 has little labor in store for me. I am up early, as usual, only a bit earlier since I was exceedingly tired last night and hit the hay by 9:30pm since I had Nyquiled myself into a stupor. It takes a lot of tired to cause me to be unable to write and I had a sufficient dose to do the trick. I still can’t tell if I’m getting a cold or just a bit sniffly, but I can only stay in bed for so long before my body insists that getting up and about will feel better than lying longer and rustling Kim out of her necessary sleep. So, here I am once again at the kitchen counter in my comfortable and comforting Ithaca home that has felt like home to me for twenty-three years.
The kitchen in Ithaca is yet again a story of my life. While it is decidedly country in design with a green and white decor, the high ceilinged cathedral gave rise to an opportunity those many years ago to hang the seventeen flags of the Contrade or communities of Siena, Italy. These are the colorful banners you see on display in costume and flags during the famous Palio horse race run every year in this Tuscan hill town with the over-large piazza. Just to make sure no one misses the symbolism, at the far end of the pavilion are two framed posters of the seventeen flags and their flag bearers. In addition, I have stocked the kitchen with a combination of country patterned dishware and pottery dishes and enameled pots from the Abruze hill town of Deruta, long famous for its elegantly ornate ceramics. It all reminds me of my affiliation with Italy, rooted in the rolling hills of upstate Finger Lake New York.
The funny thing about the heritage is that my mother and her family were from this area, or at least had emigrated to this area 130 years or so ago, and hence the country theme. Strangely enough, when I acquired this house in its derelict state twenty-three years ago, my mother’s comment was, “I have spent a lifetime getting away from this farm country and here you are buying back into it. Do you have a clue what you are doing?” I honestly had no clue, she was right, but I did have a gut feeling that I had a bond to this land, and I have. Among other connections, my granddaughters swim each summer in this pool as their parents, both Cornellians with a similarly strong bond to this area, enjoy the Upstate rural vibe of Ithaca.
Funnier yet is the Italian connection. My father was from northern Italy (Bolzano, north of Venice) but he and his family had escaped to Venezuela, one of the havens for post-WWII fascists on the run. He and my mother had met in Caracas in 1948 or so, one an emigrant from Italy and the other an escapee from Upstate New York. The irony of their only son finding himself attached to a home in Upstate New York with a Italiante kitchen decorated with the combined heritage of Upstate and Italy, is cause for wonder about the ways of the world. Interestingly enough this weekend, i have two Venezuelan house guests, enjoying the countryside. But you must then add the ultimate irony that my Italian connection comes not from my father, but from my mother. She took a job in Rome at FAO, the big development agency of the UN, and we moved as a family to Rome in 1968. It was those three years in Rome which brought Italy into my blood. During those years, my mother went to work each day in a massive building near the Circo Massimo and the Terme de Caracalla that had been built by Mussolini to house his Ministry of Ethiopian Affairs. It went instead to FAO after the war. Had things gone differently for Mussolini, my paternal grandfather would have been the head honcho in that very building. And so the world turns.
I spent my life wandering the globe, first behind my mother as a trailing family member, and then as a career banker who was perceived to be more worldly and less afraid of the dangers lurking in the darker corners of the globe. It is true that for some odd reason, it never occurs to me to be afraid to go where others fear to tread. I’m sure if a gun were pointed at me I would wet my pants as quickly as anyone else, but for some inexplicable reason I never think that is likely to happen. The odds certainly favor me, but they do not justify the subconsciously fatalistic attitude I have towards travel danger.
In a month, Kim and I will be traveling across Turkey on a motorcycle. We will start in Istanbul, that exotic east-meets-west mecca of Byzantium with the mid-millennium flair of Constantinople and the Topkapi flair of modern Istanbul. We will stay in the remade prison in Sultanahmet that is now the Four Seasons, but which served as the scene for Midnight Express and the ills of unintended drug trafficking. We will ride down the Gallipoli peninsula where Mel Gibson died at the hands of pro-Prussian Turkish resistance orchestrated by Ataturk and ushering in the modern Muslim conquest of this ancient land. Then its down the coast to Troy to see where Brad Pitt’s Achilles lost his heel and the fair Helen to boot. From there, Ephesus and its ruins of the Greek Wonders of the Ancient World will be laid out before us. After a few more Ionian islands, we will find our way to Cappadocia and its Whirling Dervishes and Fairy Chimneys. This is truly the spot where east meets west as the forces of Persia and the Achaemenid Empire succumbed to the powers of Alexander the Great of Macedon. It was the battles in this region that gave rise to one of the greatest and most expansive empires spanning three continents.
We will be within a few hundred miles of Aleppo, Syria, so within that distance of the start of one of the great war zones of mankind. This cross-roads of cultures and religions continues to this day to be the battlefield of all the ills one can imagine. Jews and Muslims struggle here. Shiites and Sunnis struggle here. Russians and Americans struggle here. Organizers and terrorists struggle here. There is something about the cradle of civilization that seems worth fighting for, or perhaps it is a divine statement of the human condition that as he began in the Garden of Eden in conflict, so shall man remain in conflict. It will make for an interesting trip to say the least, with danger much further in mind than in reality.
The sun is starting to break through the eastern horizon now and my Labor Day Monday awaits. I never think I have written so I have cleared my mind, but I have at least unburdened myself with some of this morning’s random thought of love, life and the beyond. In other words and in my particular and peculiar world, it seems to be just another Monday morning.