by Mark Falanga
You will go to Milan, Florence, Rome, and Venice. You will go spend a day with your relatives near Sorrento. You will travel along the Amalfi coast and you will go to small towns like Positano and Siena in the Tuscany region. She knows the best things to do and see in each place because she has done her homework. This will be a great trip.
You feel connected to Italy in some ways. Your grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1920. He arrived in America through Ellis Island, where he is now honored with a plaque. That was a time that a lot of people moved from Italy to the States, because it was no fun in Europe after World War I.
When your grandfather was alive, you always had difficulty understanding him because of his strong accent. He worked hard and said little. When he did say something, everyone listened, because what he said was always worth listening to. He was most comfortable speaking Italian, but he did not around you. He was an American, and Americans speak English. He had an important job in getting his next generation of Americans prepared as best he could.
Your father grew up in a house with your grandfather and grandmother, whose parents also moved to the United States from Italy. Your grandmother spoke Italian, too. Because your grandparents were more comfortable speaking Italian than English, your father spoke Italian as well.
Despite all this Italian language, the only Italian you ever heard growing up was at family gatherings, sitting around a dining room table, when the adults were saying something that they did not want the kids to understand. These conversations were the ones that you listened most closely to, in an effort to understand what the adults felt you shouldn't. At this task you always failed.
After this first trip to Italy, it would become your favorite foreign country and the country that you visit once or sometimes twice a year. You connect with everything in this country, except the language.
On your first trip to this country, where the people respect their elders and where they know how to balance work and hanging out better than anyone in the world, your wife, who has a proclivity for picking up foreign languages, starts to get it. You rely on her to assist you in ordering food in restaurants and asking for directions, the only two things that you find you really have to communicate with the outside world about.
You, on the other hand, after a week of travel, have taken the effort to learn one word, grazie, which means “thank you.” You then combine it with the other Italian word that you have brought with you from America, ciao, which, during the first two years after you learned this word, you would spell “chow.”
In learning this new word, you become the single most polite person in all of Italy. You say grazie to everyone, for everything. Your wife will engage in lengthy Italian conversations with people while you stand silent at her side—that is, until the conversation concludes. This is your cue. It is your turn to speak and you say, “Grazie.” You are a polite American, not like the ugly Americans who do not make the effort to learn the language.
You are amazed at your wife. She has really picked up a lot and she is not shy about putting together new phrases. It is about midway through this trip and you work your way to Sorrento and then to the small town where your family lives, Masse Lubrenze. You arrive at the home of one of your relatives and many come to greet you. They live in a home above the bakery that has been in the family for four generations. Fortunately, there is one woman, whom one of your cousins married, who is Australian and as a result speaks English. Other than that, you, Mr. Grazie, are on your own.
You gather around and all the other relatives, who live minutes away, are summoned. Your twenty-five relatives gather, and Assunta, the Australian, is the person you rely on as your translator. On the other hand, your twenty-five relatives have fallen in love with your wife, who is actually carrying on conversations with them in Italian while they are trying to understand why you are telling them thank you all the time. What impresses you most is that you believe, but are not entirely sure, that your wife is not asking them for directions or ordering food from them. She has a house full of twenty-five non–English-speaking Italians captivated. You think that she may be telling them the story of you saying grazie all the time. You soon find out differently.
In her conversation, she says something and you see twenty-five startled expressions, then you see a few of your male cousins and uncles—Mario, in particular—laugh, sort of embarrassed, to themselves. Your wife senses that she may have said something that she did not intend to, but, undeterred, she keeps on speaking, in Italian.
Sensing that something is wrong, she looks to Assunta to better understand what has just transpired, to understand why the sudden change in facial expressions. Assunta looks at you and to your wife. The room goes silent and she tells your wife, in English, that she just told your twenty-five Old World relatives, as she thought she was describing the beautiful sights of Florence and the Duomo, that she “loves to suck my husband.” This is an expression that has never, you guess, in four generations of Falangas, been uttered in this house. You think this because in your life you have never once heard your mother or father or grandparents ever say a curse, not even “hell” or “damn.”
You look around, and your wife, who—if she didn't have anyone's attention before, she does now—looks at them all and starts laughing hysterically. They do, too. And that draws you closer to these Italian relatives than anything else you can do or say. It is a story that you are sure they will repeat often to their friends, and one that you hope will come true.
With your relatives, you see the church that your great-grandfather built and meet other relatives who live in the country in a beautiful old stone house with a small vineyard. These are people who know how to live, you think.
Your entire family is there, because none of the remaining people have moved from this small town in southern Italy except your grandfather and his brother, who moved to Buenos Aires. The rest have stayed put, with one exception, Fabrizzio, who lives in Rome.
After you cement this connection with your family, you are off to Rome, after telling them grazie and ciao, to check out the city and visit with Fabrizzio, this cousin of yours who everyone says looks and gestures like you. In Rome, there are many amazing things to see and one of them is the Vatican. To you, this place has meaning. It is where the Pope lives, and when you were a boy growing up it was the origin of the many conservative and rigid rules that governed your life until you were in high school.
You bring your wife to the Vatican, though for her it does not carry the same meaning. However, you cannot help but be taken with the enormousness of the plaza and the tribute that this structure is to the holy. You tour the entire Vatican and you see opulence like you have never seen before in your life. These Italians, when they built the Vatican, built it to show God how much they loved, respected, and regarded Him. They broke the bank on this and did not care about any change orders. To the financiers, architects, and contractors of this marvel, it was their ticket to Heaven; thus there were no limits. Everything was on a grand scale.
Your wife takes this all in and, while usually overly enthusiastic about everything and nothing, she does not react at all throughout your entire Vatican tour. “This is where the Pope lives,” you tell her. “That is the window where he makes his Wednesday addresses to the public. Look at the scale of this place, the gold, the marble, the ceiling heights, and all the symbolism and history surrounding you. Can you believe that we are here?” you say.
Your wife, who did not celebrate Christmas while growing up, is unfazed and unmoved. You walk out of the Vatican and into the large oval plaza. As you are walking through the plaza toward the exit, there are a few construction barricades surrounding a yellow John Deere bulldozer, which you know was made in Peoria, Illinois. Apparently, they are doing some routine maintenance at this unroutine structure. Your wife takes note of this common, American-made yellow bulldozer and focuses on the seat. Her eyes widen and her attention is drawn. You know this expression and can tell
that she has seen something that excites her. Then she turns to you and says, “Look at the seat on that bulldozer! Could you believe that? It is the most beautiful leather bulldozer seat that I have ever seen! I have never seen anything like that before in my life!” Her reaction to this bulldozer seat reminds you of her reaction to the draperies she noticed years earlier when you toured the White House.
So there you have it: you now know that everyone sees God in different things and in different ways. The big take-away for your wife at the Vatican was seeing the leather seat on the bulldozer, something that you never knew she cared about. God works in mysterious ways, you think.
You arrive back in America, where you can be more than polite. As you reflect on your trip, your wife tells your friends what wonderful bulldozer seats they have in Italy. You imagine your uncles, Mario and Sergio, talking among themselves, recapping the trip. You think they say, in Italian, “Mark is so polite, and how lucky is he, having such a beautiful wife who loves to suck him.”
Coach Football
Your second-grade kid wants to play flag football and you think that is great. You volunteer to coach his team, because you enjoy coaching more than you enjoy spectating. You think that it is a great way to spend time with your kid and to get to know his friends. You don't think that you really knew how to play football when you were in second grade. Your memories of playing this sport start in fourth grade, maybe fifth, and you mostly played in the street outside of your suburban Long Island home. When you played, you had plays like “you do a banana,” which was running out, in a curved fashion, for a pass. You did “buttonhooks,” which meant running out quickly then turning around to catch the ball just as you turned around. You did “down and outs” and “down and ins.” You went for the long bomb. Those were your passing patterns. Sometimes you just “went short” for the third completion, which would give you a first down. You had to do all these plays by the count of five Mississippi. Things have changed.
You show up for your flag-football coaches' orientation and are given a playbook as you walk into the classroom. It is labeled “Play Book,” because it actually is a book containing the many offensive and defensive plays that your team will run this season. The league vice president, as you want to call him, tells you that he is the author of “Play Book.” He informs you that any offensive or defensive plays that your teams will run this season will come from the “Play Book” that is sitting before you right now, the one that you are trying to, but can't really, figure out. You think that it is a good idea for you to understand it first, before getting your second-grade team to embrace it, and you can tell already that you are going to invest more time in your football-coaching effort this season than you were anticipating.
“Play Book” is perfect-bound and it has pages and pages of plays. It is, you would estimate, a little over half an inch thick. There are Xs and Os delineating offensive and defensive players, and straight and curved lines with arrows showing running patterns for each of the Xs and Os. You flip through “Play Book” and you do not see buttonhooks, bananas, down and outs, down and ins, long bombs, or going short. In fact, there is nothing that is really familiar to you at all in “Play Book.” You realize that you will not be handing down the traditions of your football youth to your kid and his teammates during this football season.
To further complicate things, each offensive and defensive play that your team will be deploying this football season has a fancy, impossible-to-remember name that perhaps made sense to the league vice president when he was busy during the off-season crafting this book, but will be meaningless to you and your team. There is not even anything close to the self-explanatory names that you gave your plays as a youth. Here is what some of the plays are called:
Center Curl-back Short-right End Long Left End Medium
Center Medium Left End Around Short-back Right Long
QB Handoff to Back and QB Right Short-right End Short Turnout Center Medium-left End Long
You know that you are going to have a terrific time this football season explaining these plays to your second-grade team. There is a section in “Play Book” called “Defensive Plays.” When you were a kid and you played defense, you simply tried to match up with a kid on the other team who was about as athletic as you. It went something like this: “I got Ray,” meaning that for the entire game you would go anywhere and everywhere Ray would go, or that was the idea, anyway. While it didn't always work out like that, if nothing else you understood what you were supposed to do.
There is no such advice in “Play Book.” The defensive plays in your book are mostly what you would call zone defense, the idea being that, rather than covering one kid wherever that kid would go, you cover a territory, say, five yards by five yards, or twenty-five square yards. With the defensive plays outlined in “Play Book,” labeled Two-Three, Two-Two-One, and names like that, each team member's job is to deal with anything that happens within his territory. You regard zone defense as a bit more of an abstract concept than man-to-man, and you assume that your second-grade players will too.
You and all the other coaches are told again during this orientation meeting that all the plays you run this season must be from “Play Book.” You ask jokingly if you can slip in a buttonhook or a banana every once in a while and the league vice president does not laugh. He asks if there are any other questions. There are none.
Then the league vice president hands out a separate book called “Rule Book,” which is about half an inch thick. You believe that the league vice president is the author of the “Rule Book” as well, although in your coaches' orientation he doesn't claim authorship, like he did for “Play Book.” One thing for sure is that the league vice president has been very busy during the off-season.
What's interesting about “Rule Book” is that the rules are very different from the way that football is really played and also different from the rules that your second-grade boys will be familiar with. As coach, it will be your job to make sure that, in addition to your team gaining a full understanding of the plays outlined in “Play Book,” you must also make sure they understand the rules outlined in “Rule Book.”
Some of the rules in “Rule Book” are as follows:
The offensive team takes possession of the ball at its 5-yard line and has three (3) plays to cross midfield. Once a team crosses midfield, it has three (3) plays to score a touchdown. If the offensive fails to score, the ball changes possession and the new offensive team takes over on its 5-yard line.
Interceptions change the possession of the ball at the point of interception. Interceptions are the only changes of possession that do not start on the 5-yard line.
Each time the ball is spotted a team has 30 seconds to snap the ball. Teams will receive one warning before a delay-of-game penalty is enforced.
This last rule referenced is particularly interesting to you because what you interpret it to mean is that in each huddle you will have a maximum of thirty seconds to explain to your second-grade team how to, say, run the Center Medium Left End Around Short-back Right Long play or the QB Handoff to Back and QB Right Short-right End Short Turnout Center Medium-left End Long. No sweat, plenty of time.
You walk out of your orientation meeting with documents that are more than one inch thick, realizing that you know much less about football than you thought you did an hour before. You realize that your key competitive challenge this season will be between you and “Play Book” and “Rule Book.”
Go on a Treasure Hunt
You come home from work one day and squeeze your German luxury car into the ultra-narrow space that your wife allocated for it in your garage because she wanted to make sure that she had plenty of room for herself and your five-year-old, thirty-five-pound daughter to disembark from the SUV and walk to the service door. You squeeze out of your car trying not to ding any panel on either of these overpriced vehicles, because you know that removing a ding from either of these two cars will cost at least one zero more t
han removing dings from other regular cars.
You then sashay between the two cars, because there is not enough room to walk straight on, and you are thin. You maneuver around the back of the SUV and then breathe easy along the homestretch, where there is enough room for you, your entire family, and your neighbor's kids, if they were so inclined, to walk six abreast.
As you approach the windowed service door to exit the garage, you observe an item in your backyard that you have never before noticed. It is huge, almost flat—except for the two warped surfaces—faded green, with a rusted metal base. The wood on top and along the edges is delaminated and appears to have swelled with moisture. It's a Ping-Pong table. It is warped, it is coming apart, it is chipped, and it is in your backyard. You like Ping-Pong, and in fact you played Ping-Pong frequently with your uncle when you were a kid. You think that perhaps you can fit in a few games with your kids before this monster in your backyard disappears and goes back to wherever it belongs.
As you walk past the table, you wonder how it got there and who may have brought it there. You wonder why it did not end up in someone else's yard. Why my yard? you ask yourself. You can't think of any scenario that makes sense.
As you go inside, your son comes running up to you, and, more excited than you have seen him about many things in his life, he says, “Dad, Dad, did you see the Ping-Pong table in the backyard? We got it for free.” “For free?” you ask, in mock amazement, really thinking, How much did someone pay my son for him to store this piece of shit in our yard, and, Whatever they paid him, it is not enough.
He responds, “Yeah, we found it in the alley.” “Who found it in the alley?” “Ed, Tom, and I found it.” “Who else was with you with when you found it?” you ask, probing to see what adult would be responsible for this atrocity in your backyard. “Mom was with us.” “Mom let you bring that home and put it in our yard?” “Yeah, Ed and Tom's moms would not let us put it in their backyards,” your son says, answering the question that had previously formed in your mind as to why this Ping-Pong table didn't land in someone else's yard. “Oh? I wonder why not?” you ask jokingly. “Could you believe that someone was throwing away this Ping-Pong table? It must be worth $1,000,” he says. You are not sure how to reply to this, knowing that the only appropriate place for this Ping-Pong table is in a landfill in someone else's suburb. “The people let us take it, could you believe that?” he says, sparing you the agony of answering his last question. “We need to get a net, ball, and paddles,” he says excitedly. Your wife enters the room and it is clear that she shares your kid's enthusiasm for the table. She has told your son how Daddy can fix up the table with a little paint and glue. You look at her in utter disbelief, knowing that the only appropriate fix for this Ping-Pong table is putting it in a landfill.