No Air-Kissing in Italy, Please!

The New York Times recently published an article by Sarah Kershaw about the latest teenage fad in America, an overtly physical activity that is alarming school officials from one end of the country to the other. The shocking truth is that when kids meet up they no longer engage in high-fives or elaborate finger locks and knuckle knocks. They hug.

Apparently a lot of junior high and high school principals,"wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching . . . have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule." Well, of course they have. And they probably stand around with Tasers to protect students whose parents forbid hugging at home.

After all, this might be serious. Our kids could become addicted to hugs and grow up to be chronic huggers, unfit to live in a puritanical society that fears overt physical affection. In order to feed their habit, these misfits would have to emigrate to Italy.

That's what happened to me. I was a closet hugger for nearly half my life and now I'm in squeeze heaven. In Italy we not only hug "hello", we also hug "good-bye" and often throw in a one-armed shoulder clutch right in the middle of a happy conversation! Of course, we also give and receive double-cheek kisses, but a hug is a whole pizza and a kiss on the cheek is just a slice of mozzarella.

My favorite "hiya!" hug is usually the good old-fashioned bear variety (average length: between four and seven seconds), followed by mutual four-handed shoulder or upper arm grabs wherein my hugging partner and I remain connected but otherwise stand separated by approximately 15-20 inches while shouting greetings and compliments at each other.

Not to say that less athletic hugs aren't nice, too. In fact, it's a good idea to do a hardiness calculation before clenching; some folks can only support a gentle, yet sincere clasp with soft back pats and you sure don't want to knock somebody off her or his feet.

Friends of both sexes, in any combination, also assume the handshake position and cheek-kiss while using the spare hand and arm to pull the other person a bit closer. This takes coordination and a particular choreography that must be learned. It's not very satisfying, though, and I don't think it counts as a hug.

As pleased as I am to hug and be hugged, I still have difficulty remembering certain Italian conventions. Although hugs are performed by veering to the left and squishing right sides of the head together, it's the opposite with kisses. When kissing, it's always left cheek first, then right cheek. To err in the first instance bangs foreheads or noses together, causing the participants to laugh but also to lose face. On the other hand, I've made a lot of pleasant mistakes in the cheek-kiss department. Smacko! Dead center! I love Italy.

Priorities of the Tuderti

The recent terremoto in Abruzze is not a subject for light-hearted blogging. Still, even a horrible natural disaster can provide a glimpse into how a culture functions and thrives.

The morning after the earthquake, our little hill town of Todi sprang into action. The local civil defense committee put together a cooperative of public, private and religious aid organizations and residents were given donation information within 36 hours. A truck with emergency supplies began making daily trips to L'Aquila as fast as residents could fill it up.

"So what?" you're asking. After all, the same thing happens in most of the world. Well, the difference is that Todi normally doesn't do anything in a hurry, let alone in an organized fashion.

First of all, we love getting together for planning purposes but we hate making decisions. It takes weeks, months, even years before the town council votes on a proposition as banal as what color to paint the walls of the new public WC. As soon as everyone thinks the issue finally has been resolved in favor of cappuccino, another concerned citizen will stand up and filibuster for medium-light pistacchio and the matter is tabled all over again.

Second, initial interest in a project is always huge and subsequent action is practically non-existent, even on the part of the organizers. If 100 people enthusiastically show up to help create a social center for new Todi residents (in this case, immigrant workers who embrace Islam), they'll probably never receive so much as a follow-up note announcing another meeting. The social center is a great idea, but it's never been tried before and nobody knows how to proceed. By the time someone takes a first step toward realizing the project, the original "new residents" will be Italian citizens on retirement pensions and their grandchildren will be totally assimilated.

The third reason nothing gets done is that we stubbornly cling to our old methods of mass communication. The favored way to spread the news is still by word of mouth and in today's world the Tuderti are publicity-challenged. Nobody finds out about anything in a timely manner.

If a famous musician is booked to serenade us in our splendid theater, the posters may go up on sidewalk sandwich boards a week beforehand, but the ticket office will be open for only one undisclosed day in advance and at a time that is never announced. This is probably the reason all our performances begin at least 30, and often 45, minutes late: everyone shows up at the last minute hoping to secure a seat.

A great many events are publicized after they occur, perhaps as a kind of review: when we read about it in the paper, we're all assured that Wednesday's dedication of the new bus shelter was a fine occasion and well attended. And if we'd been alert we would have seen that photocopied notice somebody taped to a lamp post on Tuesday.

It occurs to me that this last-minute dissemination of news may be related to the Italian tradition of burial within 24 hours of death. Each town and village has its own wall for death notices and it's imperative to check for new ones first thing every morning. If you're tardy in your perusal, you may miss the 10:00 funeral mass altogether unless you also subscribe to the system of news by word of mouth.

From this practice it's just one step sideways to Todi's ability to make an uncharacteristically swift response to L'Aquila. Everyone is accustomed to moving fast when it comes to honoring the dead, known or unknown, and to speedily comforting the family with home made offerings of cakes or vegetable soup. When it comes to this, just about everything else in our life can wait.

Don't tell anybody!

Dear Robert,

Re: your comments about my current lacasellaumbria.com essay, I cropped and enlarged the picture of the field and now I can see what you're talking about. Those parallel lines are really strange! I immediately thought of Crop Circles, so this morning I checked the Internet to see if I could find something similar, maybe a sort of "crew cut" design.

Well, I finally found a reference in the archives of the Yahoo Linear Aliens Foundation (www.yalie.edu) and, Robert, this is amazing! I absolutely got chills when I realized that I had photographed a rare form of the spaceship field aptly named Corn Rows -- and it's right here in Todi!

Scientists have determined that Corn Rows are created by an entire fleet of space vehicles landing simultaneously and, obviously, in precise formation. Imagine what a spectacular sight that would be!

But there's more: my research indicates that this is the first complete example ever found of a Corn Row field called Pinstripe Parking! Only two partial and indistinct landing fields of this type have been uncovered to date -- one in Minsk and the other next to an outlet store in New Jersey.

I don't need to tell you the significance of this field in terms of its impact on science and our bank accounts. For now, I suggest we keep it to ourselves until we've made the necessary security arrangements and secured our rights to the discovery. At that point we can launch a 10-point public relations and media campaign that will firmly establish our legal position, including the ownership of all copyrights in perpetuity. To that end, the initial announcement should be published on Facebook and closely followed by a video preview on YouTube. I will have an outline prepared by the end of the week.

Congratulations to both of us!

Linda

A Mimosa bouquet

This afternoon as I drove past the Izzalini-Romazzano cemetery, I saw a middle-aged woman bringing a spray of mimosa to brighten the tomb of her mother, grandma, sister or perhaps a friend. In our village church, the shrine to the Madonna already held a vase full of the cheery, fluffy flowers that Italians have chosen as their symbol of International Women's Day. No roses for us, thank you.

In a country that has been dragged reluctantly into acknowledging greeting card holidays, the celebration of IWD stands out as a tender and spirited salute among women in Italy and all over the world and, clearly, even beyond.

Although articles and ads insist that it's husbands and lovers who give us our annual sprigs of mimosa, my female friends say that it's just not so. "We give them to each other, of course," commented my neighbor, Loredana. "They symbolize friendship and solidarity, not love and romance. It has nothing to do with men."

Still, men (translation: the political establishment) have been subtly and righteously moving women to the periphery of organizing and directing their own Day. In 1975, the United Nations "formally" recognized the movement and this year their official theme is "Women and men united to end violence against women and girls."

In Washington, President Obama scheduled a Briefing Breakfast to discuss women's progress -- or lack of it -- in Afghanistan and the National Democratic Party beat their own women's caucus to an appropriate statement about April 8th. In Italy the same lip service has been paid but, because IWD falls on a Sunday in 2009, the inevitable commercial events were moved to the day before. Bars, restaurants and hotels are now eager to benefit from what began as a demand for the Vote and other equal opportunities. From male strippers to a ubiquitous gooey white and yellow cake to Suite Specials for Two, enterprises are working hard to capitalize on the celebration in these perilous economic times.

There is a self-declared "Official International Women's Day" web site, but it doesn't even list Italy as a participating country. Little do those people realize that we know the real meaning of IWD: let's be kind to each other, sisters; we all need a lot of strength to put up with this exploitation.

I waited since September for THIS?

There are consumer items available in the USA and the UK for which we ex-pats in Italy pine. One is bed sheets and clothing woven of a nice balance of cotton and polyester. Another is three-way light bulbs that give low, medium and high intensity light with a mere twist of a corresponding knob on the lamp. The third is any item that we see advertised but cannot find in our stores.

For at least six months we've been subjected to TV ads for a room deodorizing product that somehow automatically senses when the human occupant of said room is offended by the smell of boiled cabbage, tobacco smoke or wet dogs. It's called "Sense & Spray"." I immediately wanted one, but didn't find it in a store until today. This is a consumer critique.

1. Assembly is simple.
2. The enclosed AA batteries work.
3. The scent (called Vanilla) I chose over Lavender is rather sweet, but not disgustingly so.
4. The deodorizer doesn't work unless you pick it up and blow directly into the sensor. Otherwise, you still have to walk over and punch it before it releases a spritz of cheap cookie vanilla flavoring.

I tried fanning smoke at the thing, vigorously opening and closing the front door and, finally, running around the room with the deodorizer in my hand, but it simply would not spritz on its own.
Having shelled out Euro 4,85 (US $6.50 -- oops, rate change: $6.75) in order to save electricity, I expect this white plastic product by Glade (Johnson & Johnson) to work as advertised. I want to throw a cat pillow towards the thing or walk in the front door wearing Wellingtons covered with cow pats and have "Sense & Spray" live up to its name. In Italy you can't get your money back.

"Good evening, is this President Barack H. Obama?"

Today's favorite space-waster in The New York Times electronic edition is a piece on who has, and who does not have, President Obama's new e-mail address. Apparently this information is of great importance to someone, but I would hope it's not necessarily the editors of The Times. Why measure insider status by e-mail access? I'd rather have the President's private phone number. And if I were a corporate evil-doer, I'd want the one that rings in the dining room while the family is having dinner.

Companies know there's nothing like a human voice to get a message across and in Italy we are just as plagued by marketing calls as the rest of the world. None of us feels bad about hanging up on a canned voice, but a real, live person who's trying desperately to earn a couple of Euros surely deserves a few seconds of our time before we say "No, thank you."

Unlike my brother-in-law, who simply hangs up the phone as soon as he recognizes a sales call, I almost always let the person spin through her or his opening lines before explaining that I am not interested. I wouldn't want to be the straw that breaks the sanity threshold of one of those part-time, under-paid operators.

I did feel exasperated a week ago when I received six live pitches within two days from Telecom, the beleaguered communications institution we love to hate. The most annoying part of Telecom is that their marketing consists entirely of "cold calls" by thousands of slaves who have no idea whether or not you are already a customer, let alone one who is currently utilizing the very service they are promoting. That makes us all cranky, doesn't it?

So last week, when it became obvious that the calls were not going to stop, I simply switched to English and then ended my response with "Grazie! Buona Sera!" The startled operators stopped speaking long enough for me to make a semi-graceful exit and they also had an anecdote to share with co-workers during break time.

The Magic of Light

It's 17.40 Central European Time and if I were just arriving home I would still have one minute to unlock the front door without aiming the car headlights at the steps. Five weeks after the Winter Solstice is a heady time of year because we can really see a meaningful difference in the length of the days.

No matter how cold or wet or winter-gloomy the weather might be at this time of year, just having that little extra bit of daylight at our disposal is as cheerful as a bouquet of hothouse iris and as optimistic as an ad for outdoor furniture.

There are still an awful lot of outdoor chores to be performed before the trees begin to bud in March, but now we can actually see what we're doing between 07.00 and 17.30. In the countryside, the possibility of starting and finishing a weekend project on the same day raises our spirits. We're felling trees for next year's firewood, pruning the olive trees and sharpening our scythes and scissors. Believe it or not, it's almost time to plant the annual flower seeds we've coddled since October and settle the flats on a sunny window sill. February is exciting and March is thrilling, but even the end of January is just fine with us.