YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW

June 26 2012            

PART 1

Today, Joel and I have back-to-back sessions with Rupert, a wonderful healer here in Buonconvento, to whom we have been happily surrendering our bodies for 16 years. Joel goes first today and so I have an hour to pass until it’s my turn. I wander the little streets looking for a shady place to spend the time, knowing full well that I am headed toward the gelateria where I will sit under an umbrella next to the linden trees while licking a cone of coffee ice-cream. 

As I pass the church the sound of organ music begins its lament and I crack open the door to peer in at the organist who is maybe practicing for next Sunday, or maybe he’s just come here to be in the cool dark of this sanctuary in order to play out his own lament through the communing with ancient liturgy. I am tempted to stay, for the poignancy of the music is seductive, but really I want the happiness of a carefree cone. Although, for a moment, it does occur to me that true bliss would be to bring the cone back the church where I could lick happiness in the back pew, much like I used to devour Smarties in the back pew of my childhood church, said sweeties bought courtesy of the money meant for the collection plate. But then I remember, if guilt will find you anywhere it will certainly be while enjoying the spoils of pleasure on the hallowed ground of a religious institution.

Lord knows, I can still feel the horror and shame that descended instantly when, at age 11, while chomping a tube of Smarties – the congregation all ears to the vicar’s sermon – I was smote by the invisible Angel Squad who upended the tube sending a rain of its contents all over the centuries old stone floor, it’s never-ending cascade a purgatory that still heats my cheeks with shame. 

Today, I opt for the gelataria and content myself with listening to the organ music accompany me down the alley, its sweet sorrow diminishing with every step.

PART 2

We’re conjugating like crazy; present, past, future. Man-made categories of time, the only one of which none of us can get fancy with being the present: ‘is’ – no matter what Bill Clinton may choose to believe – just is. But the past, well it’s a tricky thing: passato prossimo, or recent past; Imperfect – and whose past isn’t? – is a little further back and passato remoto, otherwise known as the remote past – and the older you get the more remote it becomes until it’s the trepassato remoto, 3 times removed you might say. Personally, while I’m prepared to memorize, agonizingly, slowly, all the tenses, I have decided to stick with the Imperfect as far as the past goes and will use it along with a little wave over my shoulder to indicate just how long ago it was that something I did had profound consequences on the present and may well come a-knocking in the not too distant future.

As for the conditional, I’d really like to opt out of that altogether. As I said to Rupert, when I and my gelato finally made in onto his massage table, “I’ve had it with conditional.” The would’s and should’s. I know that ‘would’ has a certain gentility to it as in ‘would you be kind enough to shut the door?’ But surely at this stage in life it’s time to cut the crap and speak the truth which sounds more like ‘I want you to shut the door,’ without resorting to ‘on the condition that if you shut the f—king door I will not shoot you between the eyes.’

Forgive me.  Between conjugation and the flies I’m a tad tense. Two days ago we momentarily left the honeymoon phase of life on the farm. There were flies here last year, for sure, but not enough to exasperate one while trying to eat dinner outside. Perhaps it’s the heat, which also was not this intense last year. Or, maybe it’s the unavoidable fact that because there are twice as many cows this year there are therefore twice as many flies. Whatever, the present became imperfect by mid-week and so yesterday we packed our verbs along with our swimsuits and a picnic and took off for the beach.

Tuscany is so justly known for its rolling landscape and hilltop towns that it’s easy to forget that there are some 200 miles of Tuscan coast. Our favorite stretch being the Marema, just over an hour’s drive from here which takes us from the hills to the fields and finally through the woods to the wild beach and a calm sea.

Imagine, if you will, the final stretch; a straight narrow road through an alley of pine trees, the type which yield those delicious little nuts we grind into a pesto sauce. Roll down the windows and listen to the urgent, mesmerizing din of the cicadas, all the while focusing on the rectangle of aquamarine in the distance, pulling you towards it with its sirenic beckon. And then you are there, facing toward America.

This stretch of the coast is National Seashore, not a building in sight. So you park the car in the shade of the trees, walk a few yards and suddenly you feel as though you are standing on a distant shore, and you hope the tribe is friendly. For a tribe is what seems to be settled here, with makeshift abodes of driftwood and bits of fabric; a sheet or a sarong perhaps. We walk a couple of hundred yards down the beach, away from the tribe, and find our home for today; an abandoned driftwood teepee, just big enough for these two stick-bugs. We fashion a small veranda and voila, it’s picnic time. We spend 4 hours in this fly and verb-free idyll. We barely talk, in any language, but gaze out to sea, frequently entering its perfect body for something close to conjugal bliss. 

Refreshed, in love again, and ready for a gelato we walk the water’s edge back to the car and drive into a nearby village for a cone. Thus fortified we head back toward the hills conjugating ‘to be’ all the way home where the present will once again become imperfect when we discover we have no water; the pump is broken and will remain so into the future of tomorrow, by which time its momentary annoyance will have become a thing of the past.