At Home in the World

by Tsh Oxenreider

  Kyle stops me before he unlocks the car, and he kisses me, newlywed-style, under a lamppost on a foggy night in Provence.

  16

  ITALY

  It is hard to leave France, but it means being in Italy, a handsome exchange. We cross the French-Italian border via train and watch chiaroscuro shadows dance on Tuscan hills. Barreling through the countryside at 223 miles per hour in an aluminum tube is a spectacular way to remember how loud a herd of traveling children can be, particularly when the only seats left are in the business carriage. The train stops in Milan, and men board in smart-cut suits, cross their legs, slip on tortoiseshell glasses, snap open the morning’s issue of Corriere della Sera. I pull Reed onto my lap. We are surrounded by class. A painting whirs by out the windows.

  Both of our families, all eleven of us, will share an oversize apartment in Rome. We leave the train station and walk six blocks to our apartment, a trail of adults and children in backpacks, several of them crying and gnashing their teeth at the weight they carry. Our apartment is on a Roman side street in an ordinary neighborhood, but still a stone’s throw from the density of it all: Colosseum, Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Vatican City. Ryan and Stephanie already explored the city with their kids several years ago, so we plan to divide and conquer for most of the week.

  Our apartment’s owner is waiting inside when we arrive, and she laughs at the sight of us.

  “Che bello! Bambini che viaggiano!” she says, clasping her hands and pinching our kids’ cheeks.

  We feed our kids cheap pizza we picked up from the neighborhood street for dinner, and it tastes like fare from our favorite artisan restaurant in Bend. The next morning, the five of us walk down our gray street to hop on a tram. We are meeting friends we first met when we visited Italy last summer, an American family who lives in nearby Perugia.

  They know of a public park where we can picnic on pizza. I sense we will eat a lot of pizza this week. But when in Rome . . .

  We enter a family-run pizzerie, and Dan rattles off an order for the lot of us while I inspect the options behind the glass. This pizza is rectangular and thick, like focaccia bread, with toppings like prosciutto, peppers, and fig. The man behind the counter slices oblong hunks, weighs them on a scale, and wraps them in paper.

  “You pay by the gram,” explains Dan.

  Traditional Roman pizza is paper-thin and charred on the edges, but this is pizza al taglio, thick, rustic, and handheld. Although Italians dispute which city invented this style, it is popular throughout the country as an easy takeaway fast food. Dan says it’s his favorite because he grew up in Venice. I’m not sure what this means.

  Dan and Bethany, his wife, and their two young girls have skipped a day of school and work to show us their favorite Roman spots, so we walk toward the Circus Maximus, now a public park, to start our day with lunch.

  We pass a caffé, and Bethany asks, “Would anyone like a quick coffee before lunch?”

  “I’m always up for coffee,” I say. We walk into the coffee bar and I order a macchiato, an espresso served in a small demitasse cup with a layer of foamed milk on top. Unlike the giant American chain’s counterpart, a true Italian macchiato is a cross between a straight espresso and a cappuccino. And unlike American coffee shops, Italian coffee bars aren’t filled with patrons who stay for hours to chat, let alone work from their laptops.

  Coffee bars have a literal bar—people quaff their coffees standing elbow to elbow at the counter, debating the latest neighborhood news. They can also opt for soft drinks or alcohol, and everything is consumed quickly, a hit of caffeine or a buzz before moving on with the day. Most caffés have a few tables for patrons, and they charge extra for the seat.

  We swig our coffee and, as we leave the bar, Dan says, “Don’t worry, we’ll get more coffee in a few hours.”

  The nine of us settle on a grassy hill overlooking the Circus Maximus, a decaying stadium built around 50 BCE and last used in 549 CE; it was quarried for building materials soon after and eventually morphed into a market garden in the 1500s. At the turn of this millennium, it was still being used for public events—the Rolling Stones played here in 2014. We munch on blocks of pizza and talk about expat life while the kids roll their bodies down the hill toward the Circus.

  “They’ll want to watch out for old stones,” Bethany warns.

  “What—like ancient Roman Empire stuff?” I joke.

  “Well—yeah,” she says.

  Kyle asks Dan about Italian culture. Yes, it really is run by the Mafia in certain pockets. Yes, Italians communicate with their hands, and each gesture has its own distinct meaning (point your finger into your cheek to tell a waiter your food was delicious; brush the tops of your fingers underneath your chin to tell your friend I don’t care). Except for university years in Texas, where he met Bethany, Dan has lived his entire life in Italy, growing up in the outskirts of Venice. His parents live in Milan and another brother lives elsewhere in the country. I ask Bethany if it was hard to follow him back to Italy when they married.

  “It was hard at first,” she says. “But we’ve lived here so long now, it’s home. The States feel foreign.”

  They share their upcoming family travel plans: once the school year ends, they’ll take their girls camping through Scotland and explore Paris and London. They’ll drive through Tuscany, the Alps, the French countryside with camping gear in the trunk. This is their road trip to the Grand Canyon, their visit to Chicago and New York.

  Before we left for our year of travels, we received a smattering of criticism when we announced our trip around the world. Most people we told found it an amazing idea, but a few wondered why we’d invest money in something the kids wouldn’t remember later in life. For a split second, I’d second-guess our sanity, wonder if we should wait until the kids were older.

  “I’d say the best thing my parents did for my brothers and me was raising us with a normal family life and traveling a lot,” Dan says. “We didn’t have much money, but we always went on family vacations. Always. We’d go to the Alps in Switzerland or Austria every summer, and we did normal family stuff.”

  I think of our expat friends who feel guilty about traveling because of the cost. They live somewhere exotic, they deduce, so why should they still feel the need to travel?

  “My parents got a lot of flak for taking time off, mostly from the other expats in town,” Dan explains. “But they chose not to worry about them and do what was best for our family anyway. To this day, we all still get along great.”

  The act of travel, the constant moving and shuffling of our bodies and backpacks, our dotted lines across the map, the simplicity of owning less to see more—these small acts are weaving our family’s tapestry. Threads of pliable spirits when the train is delayed, rubbing sweaty shoulders with people of different races, sleeping in close quarters, converting new currency every week—these fibers are becoming the heft of our ancestral fabric, the patterns we will show our grandchildren and say, “Here—this corner of the tapestry. This is why you are who you are.” We are learning presence, how to delight in each other’s mere existence, muster affection in spite of our quirks. As Hemingway says, “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”1

  Dan and Bethany lead us to the Pantheon and we spend a few minutes sampling a troubadour’s cello. The kids drop euros into his instrument case, then we find another caffé and another macchiato. Dan takes us to his favorite gelateria nearby, and I spoon lemon cream into my mouth and imagine the summer afternoon when the fruit was plucked from its tree. I taste sunshine.

  We will not be in Rome as long as it insists, with its infinite arched alleyways and timeworn landmarks. Its trams lead us to places on a postcard; we survey the Colosseum and imagine gladiators and lions and bloody Christians. We walk through the Vatican and scratch the smallest country in the world off our list, spin around and gaze at the 140 saints carved as statues standing guard along the balustrade columns. We overwhelm our senses in the Vatican museum, gawk in
wonder at Renaissance artistry and gape at Michelangelo’s offering to the Sistine Chapel. The boys keep asking about chapels one through fifteen.

  I want my kids to understand the magnitude of this history but I don’t think I understand it myself. My brain, not yet forty, cannot compute the immensity of human talent, the red-letter vigor for contributing art to a broken and beautiful world. Raphael, Caravaggio, and da Vinci have painted operas with oils and have given us the gift of seeing them. We sample more gelato by the papal residence and marvel at our midday dessert’s opulence, its simplicity of milk, cream, sugar that mingle into a song.

  Anthony Doerr says, “Rome is beautiful, Rome is ugly.” It is “American before coffee was ‘to go,’ when a playground was a patch of gravel, some cigarette butts, and an uninspected swing set; when everybody smoked; when businesses in your neighborhood were owned by people who lived in your neighborhood; when children still stood on the front seats of moving cars and spread their fingers across the dash.”2 It is the crumbling walls of the Roman Forum, and it’s a model in a see-through dress plastered on a wall down our street. It’s murky tobacco shops on every corner, and it’s strangers who smile at our children. It’s a fountainhead of historic innovation, and it’s 40 percent of the population in their thirties who still live with their parents. It is the world’s magnificence of architecture and divine devotion. It is throngs of Vespas, with drivers flicking each other off.

  A trio of musicians play jazz outside the Roman Forum at sunset, pealing sounds more apropos on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. We toss euros into their upturned hats, then find a bar for dinner. There are four tables, and we sit at the empty one.

  The cameriere takes our order—pasta, sparkling water—and when the table next to us clears, he takes a seat.

  “It’s bellissimo to see children on holiday with mamas and papas,” he says, kissing his fingers like an Italian stereotype. “Usually in here it’s couples without kids. Or it’s grandissimo groups of kids from school.” He shakes his head at the chaos of the thought.

  After our meal we say Grazie, ciao, and he waves, says, “Families, they are nice. It’s good to do things while they are young.” He winks at Finn. “They don’t stay so small. Mine are here.” He points to an imaginary spot next to him, above his head. “They grow big.”

  Tonight, as I lie in bed in our Roman apartment, I scroll through photos from Beijing at the beginning of our trip. All three kids look like they’ve grown a foot and have lost some pudge from their cheeks.

  If all roads lead to Rome, those same roads can lead you away. We take the one that leads us one hundred miles north to Assisi. There’s not much in minuscule Assisi, but that’s its charm. Narrow roads, impassable by cars, spiral up a hillside and cradle limestone houses connected as one long, multiwindowed facade. As a known settlement from a thousand years before Christ, the entire town is declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. People still live in the village and worship at the Basilica Papale di San Francesco d’Assisi, built in 1228. After Rome, we spend a day here with Dan and Bethany to wander shops of wood-carved trinkets and ogle frescoes of its favorite citizen, Saint Francis. The kids run with glee down carless streets and Finn chases pigeons through the Piazza del Comune. We sample fragola and stracciatella gelato. The sun falls asleep behind farmhouses in fields, and we witness the spectacle from Assisi’s pinnacle. The sky transmutes from powder to amaranth and St. Francis’s six bells knell its ominous, warbling song on the hour. The moment is sacred, and it is earthy. Francis would be pleased.

  We commute ten minutes downhill on a bus to the nearby twenty-first-century town of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where our guesthouse perches above a store on the main street. Dan knows of a pizzerie named Penny Lane where the menu options are named after Beatles songs. Kyle orders Sexy Sadie; I order Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. The kids split Get Back. After dinner, we stroll a few blocks to the Papal Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, where an evening service has begun.

  The kids are amused for two minutes, then beg to leave. In Kenya and Australia, flamboyant animals are hyperbole, yet safari drives and zoo excursions become commonplace, predictable. In Italy, every gilded chapel is a pageant of legendary art. Visit them in abundance at rapid-fire pace, and they might become banal, monotonous even. We want to guard the kids from the danger of renowned artistry becoming sidewalk art. Kyle agrees to watch them play in the piazza so I can stay a few more minutes.

  The service in session isn’t technically in the basilica; it’s in the Porziuncola, a miniscule chapel erected in 1211 and parked inside this standard-size basilica. Its location marks where Saint Francis established his order and where he was brought to die in 1226. It’s a chapel plonked in the middle of a grand cathedral, built with rough stones hewn by the saint himself, and eventually covered with frescoes in the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. The newer cathedral, built in the seventeenth century, pulses light through its windows and ricochets through chandeliers above while Francis’s humble church prostrates, dark, with a few flickering candles scintillating a yellow-lit altar. The entire structure is ten by eighteen feet, squeezing the crowd inside. I join them, cross myself, and let an Italian homily wash over me.

  This is a Catholic service, and as a low-church Protestant my entire life, I am personally in the midst of walking the Canterbury trail of Anglicanism. With some intention, we aren’t visiting local church services this year, keeping near instead our Bibles and our Book of Common Prayer. Neither Kyle nor I doubt the tenets of our faith, but we are on a spiritual pilgrimage, desperate for freedom to question, brood, and venerate, without the necessities of ecclesiastical culture. We went to church twice in Chiang Mai, and it was enough.

  Tonight, in the flush glimmer of Santa Maria degli Angeli’s tapers, I hear a merciful, moored voice. The priest prays in Italian, and a voice in English whispers, It’s time for you to return.

  God, I never left, I reply.

  Neither have I, says the whisper.

  I think of Nora in Chiang Mai. There in her office, I would stare at my own bitterness, turn it over and over in my hands, beg God to reveal its purpose. I would sit in silence and hear God say, Your bitterness is not about me. It is about your brokenness, the weight of this world from which I’ve already set you free. I tell Nora what I hear. She would put her hand under mine, help me unclench and release the bitterness, throw it away, wash my hands. She would pray a blessing over me, then tell me to go write a poem.

  I stare at the yellow candles at the altar.

  Where do I return? I ask. The priest speaks, and people stand. I copy.

  Community. To the order of humanity and neighbors. Home.

  God, I ask, where is home?

  Silence. The answer I hear every time I ask this question. This silence has grown louder on our travels. Tonight, however, my shoulders slack and my spirit loosens; some of my frustration releases into the candlelight. My question still lacks an answer. I resolve that perhaps I’m not yet to know.

  People of the earth make home all over its crust, but their particular whereabouts aren’t the chief concern. These people cluster together, huddle into families, and flock into parishes, neighborhoods, precincts, villages. Saint Francis gathered twelve men to break bread and live in the mountains near birds and trees. He made his home wherever; the whereabouts weren’t the issue. He lived in community.

  It’s getting late, and Kyle is still outside with the kids. I cross myself, leave the chapel-in-a-chapel, and walk to the main doors. As I leave, I notice leaflets in a basket, blessings from Saint Francis typed out and offered for passersby. I snag one. It reads:

  May the Lord bless you.

  May the Lord keep you.

  May He show His face to you and have mercy.

  May He turn to you His countenance and give you peace.

  The Lord bless you.

  I slide the blessing into my pocket and slip out of the church.

  Venice has an unfair reputation. When we planned ou
r trip, American friends swarmed us with unsolicited advice to avoid Venice—it’s touristy, smelly, not as impressive as you’d think. We go anyway. It’s one of my favorite places.

  It’s March, low on tourists, and the mildewy canal odor is divorced from summer’s heat and humidity. Boats hug winding sidewalks, bobbing in waterways and parked like carpool pickup lines. Row houses share laundry lines, pristine sheets and shirts hanging brave, spanning canals like a tightrope. Venetians have an odd obsession with pocket-size dogs; most stride the sidewalks dressed up in sweaters and hoodies as if they own the place. Why a city with no actual grass and plentiful opportunities to descend into dark waters is a haven for miniature canines, I’ll never know.

  It is a city of art and architecture, ancient maritime power and home of Titian and Tintoretto, Bellini, and Vivaldi. Its Renaissance nickname was the Republic of Music. It is Constantinople’s medieval wartime foe, a curious haven for eighteenth-century Jews, and was left largely intact by World War II. An official Disney Store is now parked in one of its cavernous fifteenth-century storefronts.

  This is Dan’s hometown, and he has given us a laundry list of Venice’s greatest hits off the beaten path. Wind whips through cramped alleyways, but sunrays splay past rooftops and bullet our faces. It is a beautiful day. Vaporettos are Venice’s buses, water ferries with service lines as detailed as London’s Tube and twice as expensive. The kids beg to ride one. We are back traveling with Ryan and Stephanie’s family, so that means there are eleven of us, which also means eleven tickets.

  “We will eventually,” Kyle says. “But we’re gonna walk most of this city.” Venice is a floating city two and a half miles from dry land; during high tide pilgrims must walk on wooden platforms in St. Mark’s Square. There are miles of alleys in which to get lost. This is our plan for the weekend.

  Dan’s directions guide us to the best gelato in town, and we patronize it twice a day. He leads us to a dock for a coveted gondola-riding photo for two euro per adult—a 175-foot ride across the Grand Canal, where four strokes of the oar commutes Venetians to their homes. Dan’s savviness saves our budget in this costly city.