Out of Rome

Out of Rome

As I head back home to San Diego in my Jet Blue seat, I have just watched for the umpteenth time, Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. There are few movies that I find so beautiful. It is beautiful in cinematography, beautiful in its haunting soundtrack, beautiful in its turn-of-the-century costuming of the adventurous safari set and beautiful in its narration as though we are hearing directly from the Baroness Karen von Blixen with all of her best danish accent. Watching the movie has made me think about the places of our lives that are embed with the best memories of our youth. The Baroness had a farm in Africa where she tried to grow coffee. But what started as a foreign and inhospitable land to her became a wondrous land where the landscape, the animals and the local tribesmen all spoke to her and became beloved to her. All the things she found lacking at the start of her stay became endearing over time. This is a case of someone embracing their surroundings and coming to love it for what it is and love it for the times they have had in its glorious presence.

I will never have a farm in Africa, but I did have a youth in Rome. That was a special time for me. I would venture to say that adolescence is a special time for us all even though some like to remember their high school days for all the peer cruelty inflicted upon them. For the most part, people remember their coming of age times fondly. Sometimes it was in a place they call home because it was where they spent their youth and perhaps even their adulthood. But for me, Rome was a brief shining moment in my existence. I lived there for three years, arriving at age fourteen and leaving for college at age seventeen. I moved there from Maine and after one year of life in a traditional New England Prep School called Hebron Academy. It proved to be a valuable transition from life at home with Mom and two sisters to life amongst a gang of unruly pre-adolescent freshman who were just getting their first tastes of testosterone and real education (as opposed to whatever it was that I got in Middle School at the Poland Community School in Poland, Maine.) After finishing that freshman year, living alone in a single room on the third floor of the freshman dormitory, I spent a summer at home working, as I had the prior two summers, at the Poland Spring Golf Course, doing whatever needed doing around the place. Some days I shagged balls for the pro’s lessons, some days I managed the fleet of golf carts. But it flew by quickly because in August we drove down to New York City and boarded the SS Michelangelo of the Italian Line for a seven day trip across the Atlantic to Italy.

If Hebron was a transition and the summer at Poland Spring Golf Course was the waiting room, I’m not sure how best to characterize the week at sea other than to say it was eye-opening as well. Meryl Streep travels to Kenya from Denmark via some combination of ship and rail that gives her enough time to contemplate where she is headed. It’s like a mountain climber acclimating to the altitude. It gives her time to recalibrate herself to her new surroundings. I feel the Michelangelo did the same for me. I quickly connected with a gang of kids that were returning for school in Rome. They were mostly Americans and mostly had already had a year or two to adjust to life in Rome. Some went to the Overseas School, some to St. Stevens (the closest thing to Hebron Academy), a few went to stranger selections like St. George’s British school, but a fair number were also attendees of Notre Dame International Prep for Boys, where I was destined to attend. NDI was run by the Brothers of the Holy Cross and for some reason, my mother thought that would be the best fit for me. I had been baptized Catholic, but raised Presbyterian, but that seemed of little consequence to the Brothers, who were prepared to accept me as either denomination since it wasn’t really a parochial school in the formal sense of the word.

A week on the Italian ocean liner was also valuable in acclimating to the Italian way of life. The waiters and bartenders were friendly and almost conspiratorial with us teenagers. They had very liberal attitudes to every vice and after all, it was 1968, perhaps the peak of carefree and permissive 60’s…especially in Europe and super-especially in Italy. As soon as we landed in Naples and got in a car headed for Rome, I could tell from the traffic patterns alone (all very random compared to a far more structured driving environment in the U.S.) that this was going to be a wild ride. Italians in 1968 were just transitioning from their post-war paucity to some degree of prosperity. This translated into a shift underway from scooter transport to cars. Instead of a Vespa with a family of four aboard, they were starting to cram the family into a Fiat Cinquecento, at the time the smallest car known to man. It had a 500 cc engine, which means that it is about the third the size of either of the motorcycles I drive today. It’s top speed was perhaps 60 mph if not too overloaded and riding slightly downhill….with a wind at its back. And trust me, performance-oriented testosterone-fueled Italians drove those little beasts to the limit of what those little cylinders could take. They all had a cloth sunroof and the typical summer drive consisted of two people in the car and two people standing up and out of the sunroof, usually cat-calling passing women of any shape or size.

We had lived in a very rural area for three years in Maine, so the move to an urban center like Rome, with all its complex traffic patterns and customs was like throwing a farmboy into downtown Bangkok. It was all eye-popingly wild to me. I was Meryl Streep on the African veldt, gawking at the Water Buffalo and charging lions wondering how she got there and how she would survive it all. The fauna was perhaps less dangerous at face value, but no less strange to a boy of fourteen who had tasted some freedom and was wanting plenty more. I have always admired my mother for many things, but one in particular was the fact that she allowed me to buy a scooter, which I could legally drive around Rome (at fourteen you can drive up a to a 50cc vehicle without a license). That was like giving Meryl Streep a Land Rover, and since her UN employment came with a stipend of gas coupons and I owned the only vehicle in the house, I had almost unlimited mobility and friends who wanted to share in the coupon largess.

Graduating high school three years later was not like having your coffee barns burn to the ground as Meryl suffered, but I did have a motorcycle accident on the Cristofero Colombo that caused me to dismount at 70 mph and leave some serious thigh skin on the pavement. It was my message that I needed to return home to my roots in the U.S. I suppose. I didn’t have to plead for my Kikuyu to have a home, but I did have to store my Triumph motorcycle for an indeterminate period of time. I left Rome in May ahead of my planned graduation ceremony from NDI. I had already mentally moved on and was summering in Cleveland in my mind before boarding the plane even though I was leaving my beloved Triumph behind.

When I hear the John Barry music at the ending of Out of Africa, I see the African veldt and Denys Finch-Hattan flying off to Tsavo in his biplane, but in my heart I feel myself boarding a TWA 747 at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome. I had come of age and it was now time to get out of Rome and on with my life. I had a motorcycle in Rome.