crazysalad

Buon Natale

Buon Natale da Reggio Emilia.

I’m back in Reggio Emilia, my Italian home away from home, visiting good friends and looking forward to welcoming in a new year.  We arrived the day after Christmas but all of the decorations are still up.  In addition to the regular Christmas lights in the historic center of town (centro storico), most of the piazzas have light shows playing at night during the month of December.  Each piazza has a different display. 

Piazzas are one of the many things I miss about Italy.  La piazza. The town square.  The closest American equivalent is the shopping mall, but it’s just not the same.  The piazza is the heart of the city.  It’s the place where everyone comes, where the market is held. Everyone passes through here.  We haven’t lived here in 3 years, but the first night we walked through the square we ran into someone we knew.  Benvenuti!  Welcome home. 

(In summer all of the cafes set out tables in the center of the square and friends gather for drinks (apperitivi) before dinner and then again afterwards, late into the night, out under the stars in the sultry air.  Concerts, rallies, parades, giant chocolate Easter eggs, everything takes place in the piazzas.)

Piazza Prampolini, the largest and most central piazza, currently features a dazzling display of black-and-white patterned and colored lights gliding across the cobblestones of the huge square and up the faces of the buildings. 

It was fun seeing the main clock tower building, which houses a bank, covered in colored dots.  Not even the Duomo (Cathedral) was spared.  In fact, the Duomo looks even better this way, an improvement on the unfinished facade (apparently the money ran out a few centuries ago when the building was being finished so only the base is covered in marble).

My kids love running around this piazza and tonight was no exception. Though the night air was cold, the lights added warmth to this place. It was like being in the center of a circus stage, music blaring out of the speakers, lights sweeping over us, and my kids chasing each other around the square, running in and out of the shadows, bathed in green, red, yellow and purple light.   

Magic. 

That feeling you get when you are so immersed in the moment that you lose all sense of time, when you look up at the sky again with a sense of wonder, that even the cold air numbing your face feels right and good and you remember what it feels like to be happy. 

'The Dying West'

                                                                           Photo: Rob Davis

"Monday, Dec. 17, 2007 | Used to be that Jim Kemp would run cows along dirt paths from Campo north to Mount Laguna and south to Mexico. But then the roads through the region were paved, so he began using them to move the cows from pasture to pasture.

"Now, I shudder just to drive them across the highway," he says, speaking quietly, his voice carrying a hint of Jack Palance gravel.

At 77 years old, Kemp is a remnant of a once-vibrant breed. Cattle ranchers, dusty denim and spur-wearing cowboys, are fading into San Diego County's history. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of cattle farms in the county dropped 40 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since 1975, the USDA says the number of cattle dropped from 61,000 to 22,000"

Continue reading this voiceofsandiego.org article and see the video here.

 

What Are We Eating This Holiday Season?

If you are not already familiar with the work of photographer Peter Menzel, you should check out his work here.

Menzel and his wife, Faith D'Aluisio, explore the lives of people around the world by documenting their consumption and material goods.  As someone who loves to travel and wants to understand how other people live, I was fascinated by their first book, Material World: A Global Family Portrait (1994). 

Their latest book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (2005) is equally startling, beautiful, and insightful, rich with details and breathtaking photographs.  It even comes with recipes, so it would make a great gift for a thoughtful foodie.

(Italy) Manzo family of Sicily: Food expenditure for one week: €214.36 ($260.11)  (Germany) Melander family of Bargteheide: Food for 1 week: €375.39 ($500.07)

A Partial History of My Stupidity

I love when poets speak to one another in their poems and how one poet will write in response to a line or poem by another poet, sometimes speaking to each other across centuries, across languages. 

I recently heard Ed Hirsch read this poem and he said he got the idea from a line in a poem by Czeslaw Milosz in which he says that the “history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”

A Partial History of My Stupidity

      

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge

and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

--Edward Hirsch

Here is that Milosz poem:

Account

      

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle's flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own -- but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it's late. And the truth is laborious.

--Czeslaw Milosz

(Trans. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky)