Year 28

"Say cheese?"
"Why aren't you smiling, you've got such a nice smile?"
Let me tell you why. I'm twenty eight. When I smile large crow's feet appear and my forehead starts to grow lines like it's getting paid to do it. Smile. Hell no. I'm going to stare off into the distance and then put the picture on the front of a book that I'm going to write about Italy.

Some mornings I dream of Italy, during the time when you are walking that thin tightrope between sleeping and waking. I dream of the graveyards that are at the tops of hills in small towns. I remember thinking how strange it was that the dead always had a much grander view than the living, how the reason for this was a dictate by Napoleon that commanded that it be this way. But on this morning that I dream of it is warm. We are eating prosciutto on fresh bread with soft parmigiano cheese the likes of which we’ve never tasted before. The smell is of freshly mown hay, and a few hundred feet below, we hear the whisper of water coming together with rocks. This is how I remember Italy.

You start your twenty eighth birthday with a cake. Unfortunately the cake is made of ice cream and lit up like a blow torch. On the positive side you're old enough to not start crying when the fake candles won't go out. On the down side, you wind up tossing the candles into bowls of cold water because they will not ever be extinguished. In fact the birthday wish that you wished as you attempted to blow the candles out was a hope that your birthday cake wouldn't burn down your apartment building. That's a lie, but that's the sort of thing that you can lie about when you're twenty eight. However, you still love cake, just the same as you did when you were eight.


There are a few downsides to being twenty eight.
Con-You're in the midst of getting an MFA in creative writing.
In the immortal words of Gob Bluth, "I've made a huge mistake."
Con-They are also charging you an obscene amount of money to obtain your impractical degree. Somewhere in a mansion comprised entirely of diamonds, a man is cackling with glee about creating yet another impractical degree in the humanities.

Pro-You have like a million hours a day in which to not write the next great American novel. You get in the best shape of your life. Your sister constantly e-mails to remind you to occasionally eat food. You do eat food. But the glorious life of a graduate student leaves you enough time to work at for over an hour a day. Yes, you're acquiring massive amounts of debt but at least you got in good shape. Note to others: Please just use your local gym for this purpose rather than frittering away tens of thousands of dollars on an MFA. This is the best shape you will ever be in for the rest of your life unless you can snag that job as an American Gladiator that you've always dreamed of.





You listen to this song, but it is hard to listen to because it is long and slow, and you have to listen to the words for it to make sense. And we don't usually have time for that by the time you're twenty eight you're certain someone has e-mailed you or posted something on your facebook wall that's more important than just being where you are for eight minutes. You listen to this song on the way home after learning that a friend has been paralyzed in a car accident, the world, even now, still not managing to make sense.

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But really, twenty eight is about Italy. It is about taking a nap in the Cinque Terre and waking up to find the people of the town parading through the streets and spreading rose petals on the ground. It is about buying a belt on the frenzied streets of Florence that you still treasure. It is about meeting your amazing sister's new husband. It is about climbing to the top of buildings touched by the hands of the one of, if not the greatest artistic geniuses Michelangelo and looking down at the city below. It is about learning that you love to travel.



It is about stories like the following:

Fine story. As you become acculturated to a foreign country you begin to pronounce all of the words in that particular accent. Thus, when in Italy, we begin to emphasize certain portions of words that we would not otherwise. In every place we go we follow our guide book as if it were the Bible. The Vatican museum is overwhelming and as we tried to stay on track we read about a statue of the peena coneh (phonetically) applying our newly discovered Italian accents to the word. Well, we wandered around the sun splashed courtyard past statues formed by the hands of long dead men, the statues themselves of long dead gods, forgotten in time except as relics of another age. We stood beside a huge circular black ball that seemed to absorb all of the sunlight around it as if it were a black hole. We went in lock step around that rectangular courtyard without ever finding the peenah coneh. Finally, as we stood at the opposite edge of the courtyard, where we had entered and looked up into the distance, where the sun was brightest at a large statue of a pine cone, which we’d been pronouncing peenah coneh. And then we laughed.


My wife and I sat in the airport at a small sandwich shop practicing important Italian phrases from dueling books. The phrases define us as outsiders, Dove il bano? Non parlo Italiano. Parla Inglese? The coffee steams between us as we lean over a map of Florence. I’ve finally started engaging in the trip planning now that we’re hours away from being in a foreign country. “We’ll go there,” I say, pointing to the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its incredible view of Florence and its chintzy copy of David, making decisions almost instantly, like I was created for this.




In the Accademia, when I first saw the David by Michelangelo I was stunned, the seventeen foot marble statue is the closest I have seen to an artist to achieving the handiwork of God. The white stone is lit from three sides by the sun and placed in the transept of a church-like building. David is 504 years old. Adam lived to 923. Only one outlived his creator, which is I suppose the difference between man and God.











In Vernazza the cats line the streets like flowers: a tabby sleeping in a red planter six feet off the ground, a black and white cat eating fish from a silver can, a one eyed grey purring in front of the gelateria. In the Cinque Terre region, we drink the local dry white, and take a thousand pictures of the picturesque towns tucked into harbors, and beyond, the great unknowable sea that one day perhaps flooded the earth.


It is hot in Rome. All the touring groups in the Forum and on Palatine Hill are hiding in the shade. I’ve read a book about the history of Rome and I want to see the house of Caesar Augustus. My wife tells me that it is too hot and the line is too long. And I relent, so we sit in the shade passing a loaf of bread and cheese back and forth in the shade of silver leafed olive trees. And I think about how I’ll see the house next time, in some other life. I do not think I believe in reincarnation.



In Vernazza the small fishing boats and long lights of the small city lay across the harbor like a lover’s silky slip, and the combination of the dark ocean water and being stranded from even language, made us feel so gloriously alone. When we left, the tracks wandered through hills striped by vineyards and into mountain tunnels that opened onto views of the Mediterranean, and the whole ride my wife took pictures while I read a book about the founding of Rome, and no one bothered to check our tickets or ask us any questions to make sure we belonged, and we still arrived safely, in the arms of some far away heavenly city.

Elegy For a Silk Tree

A few years ago, long after the girlfriend had left you, married some other man a few states away, you sat at the kitchen table talking to your mother. The two of you had finished your water’s. You were each taking out the ice, she with her fingers, you by shaking the glass, and chewing it slowly, grinding it between your teeth. She was beginning to show her age, her hair peppered with salt. The afternoon light was golden. She puts her left hand on yours, a thin band of white skin around her ring finger, pale moon. You notice the gesture, look idly at the hand, feel the annulations of time. Your brother is dead, passed away in a car accident somewhere in the Midwest. That is why you are here. The table cloth has changed colors, a solid red now. She says to you, in that calm, quiet way of hers, something about children. Her mouth barely forms the words, and her tongue pushes them forth into the room with all the softness of the wings of summer butterflies. The ice is crunchy and cold in your mouth. You are focusing on your bottom lip, which has gone numb. The words don’t sink in right away, it is as if you are far away, in the yard somewhere, and she is calling you to dinner. Dinner? What a silly thing to spend your time on. “They change things,” she said, the wrinkles around her eyes tightening as if expecting something to come of this.
The tree is a boundless thing, untethered in time. You have spent an entire summer in the crook of its arm, watching the pods go brown, and fly away like migrating birds. The two of you have watched time unfurl its sail and pass you by. You wave hello from that tiny depression, unsure when things will change, when time will pull you along, like your brother who no longer talks about trees having spirits, even in jest.