Jeanne journals

I don't like it when the word 'journal' is used as a verb. Let's journal about this. OR: She spent the afternoon journaling...

It feels a bit like saying, 'I crochet' ... or ... 'I like scrapbooking.' Or, 'Excuse me while I get ready for an afternoon of canning.' (I know people enjoy these kinds of activities, but not me. Of course, for some of these people, the idea of writing in a physical journal would probably cause the same reaction).

But it's what I do -- a lot. I journal. In fact, I spend a good deal of time writing in my journal, reading what I've written in my journal or even simply admiring the physical appearance of my journals. What I am doing, really, is gazing at a kind of security blanket the journal represents -- when all goes awry, I can write it down in the journal. Or, whenever I have a thought about something I want to do, I must do, I should do: I can write it in my journal and the thought is preserved. Looking at a journal from last year is a little like looking at my favorite sweater. I've also found the journal to be not only a confidant who receives my inner thoughts but also one who accompanies me on my life's journey. In other words, it’s often a document of what I’ve achieved.

I mainly use my journals to write (as opposed to draw or log information like the number of miles one has run) but I also attach ephemera to some of the pages -- drawings by Leo, receipts from vacation stops, post-it notes destined for posterity, et al -- so they sometimes actually do have the air of scrapbooks. They capture a moment of my life. (I occasionally post diary entries on this blog. I also occasionally write diary entries in Italian).

As I've mentioned here before, I do keep a digital journal (an extensive one that’s composed of two dozen Word documents that span more than a decade), but I have a 13-year-old, which means two things to me:

*I don't want him to see me hunched over a computer 24/7 or constantly glancing at my phone, even if my purpose is to log a thought

*...And that's because: I want him to understand what I do and if he can see me writing with a pen in my journal from across the room or transcribing a translation into my journal or even stapling something onto a page of the journal that I want to keep, he may be able to understand what his writer-editor-translator-adjunct mom does for a living. (Maybe. Alternately, he might just think I twirl my hair for a living.)

Why you should press 'record' on Thanksgiving (my Bos. Globe essay)

I'm reposting a version of an essay I wrote for The Boston Globe several years ago that contains some advice I still like to offer folks, especially at this time of year. It's an essay about the power of recording our loved ones' words, and the power specifically of recording my son's words and also those of my mother, in what was one of the last good recordings I made with her. 

Be fair warned, though: "Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."

Here's the essay:

During a weekend visit to New York last winter, I recorded my son’s impressions of the city. I began by asking where we were. I thought he would simply say “Manhattan” or “at the hotel,” but Leo, then 9, said, “We’re in a hotel in New York City, in North America, on a planet known as Earth, in a galaxy known as the Milky Way, in a universe known as the Universe.”

When I became a mother in my late 30s, I wanted to do more than take photos or videos of my son. I wanted to remember his speech development by preserving his sounds. So I recorded him.

Jay Allison, the founder of “The Moth Radio Hour,” once told me that humans relate to sound in a way that’s distinct from other media.

“Sound literally gets inside of you — it inhabits you,” Allison said. “It can break your heart. That’s different from photos, which remain on the outside.”

I recorded Leo’s snores, his gurgles, his first words. Some recordings are filled with his guffawing as he watches TV. His belly laughs are a tonic.

Recording has been a tradition in my family. My late father recorded conversations with my sisters and me on a handheld tape deck. Piling into his den, we crowded around his desk as he pressed the two large play and record buttons. Later, we would listen back to the tape with glee.

Far too late, I grasped the importance of recording my mother and father. If pure joy compelled me to record Leo, pure dread inspired me to begin recording my parents a few years ago. What would happen to their stories when they died?

Before it was too late, I needed to piece together one bit of crucial family history that had never been fully explained: What had happened when my mother’s younger brother died in a car accident at age 18?

She rarely mentioned him during my childhood, except to say that my grandparents never recovered from the loss of their oldest son, whom everyone called Spike. I only gleaned a few snippets about him during the adults’ cocktail hour at my grandparents’ house: He had an outgoing personality and was a football star.

My mother was 19 when he died. Now, in part because of my recordings, I see his death, in 1957, as an event that has hovered over her entire adult life.

Recording my mother’s words made sense for another reason: Video is for action, and her action days are behind her. At the time of my last good recording, she was 83. She sat down in her chair at the foot of the stairs, and, bathed in the glow of a floor lamp, she lit a cigarette. She was game to talk about anything but the present or recent past, which dementia had begun to scramble in her brain. More or less housebound, she spent most days chain-smoking and dozing off, unsure of the month or sometimes even the season.

Her mental fog would soon force us to move her to a nursing home, but when I asked about the circumstances of Spike’s accident, barely a second elapsed before she began reciting a chronology of events. It was as if she was supplying answers she’d had at the ready for decades.

The accident had occurred during the summer. Spike was driving a convertible. A top student, he’d been given the car as a graduation gift from my grandparents, following his acceptance at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He’d been killed instantly when his car collided with an embankment and flipped over.

The funeral was held at his Catholic high school. “Oh God, thousands of people came,” my mother told me. “Thousands.” It doesn’t matter that she’s likely wrong about the number — it matters only that in her mind’s eye, legions of people came to pay their respects to the luminous brother she’d lost.

It wasn’t until months later, when I listened again to the recording, that I discovered a moment I had overlooked. After the funeral, my mother told me, they drove out to the cemetery, which was some distance away. At one point during the muggy hour-long drive, the road curved, and my mother turned to look behind her. And that’s when she glimpsed through the back windshield the headlights of the dozens and dozens of cars following the hearse to her brother’s final resting place.

More than anything else, that image crystallized for me the tragic loss she’d borne for 65 years.

Recording affords us the ability to save not just our parents’ voices but their stories.

“People would tell us, ‘I have a recording of my father’s voice, and it’s all I have left,’” Allison told me. “It was an actual part of the person — it contained his breath.”

In the years to come, these recordings that contain my mother’s breath will remain precious to me. And the little that I learned about Spike furnishes me with an outline of the uncle I never knew and his role in my mother’s life.

This holiday season, consider pressing “record” on your smartphone when you’re around the table. The sounds of gathering — the voices, the stories, the ambient clatter — will fill an audio time capsule you’ll cherish on some future day when you’re longing in vain to hear a loved one’s voice.

You can also read the essay (with the full image of the wonderful photo they chose) on the Globe site:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/23/opinion/why-you-should-record-your-holiday-dinner-conversations/ 

What I never say (Liz)

I was thinking recently about my Edith Bruck translation and all of the public readings I’d completed when suddenly I realized I'd only once said aloud something I'm constantly thinking, albeit in such a subtle, subliminal kind of way that it almost transforms thinking into unthinking:

I wish Liz were alive to hear about the translation and the readings.

It’s obvious and with people we know well, we never have to say the obvious. Everyone I know is aware she died two years ago on Sept. 6, 2023, at the age of 54, after a lifetime of illness.

But as wonderful as all of the readings have been and as meaningful as it’s been to meet friends and family throughout this mini book-tour, there’s still no denying that my librarian sister who lived for words and loved books even more than I do would have enjoyed the publication of my first book-length translation and the attendant promotional activities. And I would have enjoyed any pleasure she might have felt over the book (Where ‘enjoyed’ sounds so trite compared to how truly kaleidoscopically awesome it would have been for me to share this moment with her).

She would have asked me 1,000 questions by phone and text and in person -- the deadlines, the reviews, the details about the readings I'd scheduled, the questions posed by the audience. She would have fangirled it up when I told her Elena Ferrante’s translator (Ann Goldstein) attended the reading in New York.

She would have read the translation closely -- far closer than it would seem humanly possible (a reflection of HER dedication to literature, her intense curiosity about the written word -- not the merit of the translation). I like to think she would have appreciated, somewhat grimly, the title that I chose for the translation, which deviates from the original Italian: This Darkness Will Never End.

But wait, there’s more!

And I don’t just mean the profound sadness I feel over her death. I don’t even mean the gaping hole she left – my partner-in-crime for all things literary (and also wicked thoughts you shouldn't say aloud and anything that reflects the ongoing conversation siblings, if they're lucky, share over the course of their lives).

What I mean when I say there's more: if I, who write often and blog regularly and admit that I more or less still openly grieve the loss of my personal Holy Trinity (Mommy, Daddy, Liz) – if I do not say how much I miss my sister in this instance, how many other people are going around this world with a similar ache that's rarely revealed?

It’s like I'm taking a walk or having a conversation with a bee buzzing about my face. 

This bee’s persistent buzzing could be translated as, ‘I wish Liz were here,’ or, ‘I wish I could talk to Liz.' 

OR, ‘I wish Liz could have heard the question the man at Newtonville Books asked.’

Surely everyone is like this!

If love (or actually hope) is the thing with feathers, grief is the one with talons.

And it's no one's fault. We stay silent often because it's more convenient -- for us. There was a lot to say when I gave the readings in the Spring -- why say more?

Yet it’s like a song that gets lodged in your head after you hear it on the radio one day.

Visually it would be quite obvious: in a movie, they would show the character’s face, maybe close up, then there would be a closeup of the thought visualized. Maybe in my case, an image of Liz as she was attached to all the beeping buzzing bleating monitors in the hospital on Long Island before she died. Then my face again, outwardly impassive. Then another shot of Liz, pale, jaundiced, with a temperature of 93, days before the end. Then a shot, maybe, of my sisters and me surrounding Liz on her deathbed after the doctor said, “There’s no hope.” (This was after he’d let us hope in vain, but I digress).

As I write this, I am perfectly calm.

So’s everyone you know who carries around an ache of this kind (or another kind).

The guy I call a jerk during a traffic jam. The annoying father on the sidelines at a soccer game. The local official who makes a decision I disagree with (I don’t mean anyone specifically).

The inner landscape of each of these people could be exactly like my own.

Now I stand at the podium of the conference room at my public library.

Now I begin to say how wonderful it is to read at a library.

Now I say my sister was a librarian.

Now I say how much she would have enjoyed this talk with a smile on my face.

Now I continue with my remarks about the translation and appear perfectly happy to read from it because I am, despite being stuck on a channel of grief (because really and truly, how is it possible this translation was published only after its biggest supporter had died?)

Now I walk out of the library and talk with friends.

Now I go home and eat dinner.

And unless I am an aberration, everyone we know older than, say, 30 years of age, is the same way.

(The percentage of those older than 50 who might feel this way? 500 percent.)

The United States of Grief. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization of the Bereaved. The United Nations of Sorrow.

Or simply what I never say.

And maybe also what YOU never say. All of our dead, all of our regrets, all that's gone. Weighing on us like a millstone and all you can hear is silence.

-30-

Tiny moments of exquisite beauty in Italy

The apartment in Florence where we stayed this month during our trip to Italy had a top-floor terrace that stares directly at the Torre di Arnolfo, which defines the Palazzo Vecchio and is arguably the symbol of Florence. In the early morning hours as Leo and Mike (and the rest of the city) slept, I had my coffee while staring back at it. One morning, the silence surrounding me was so profound that the flapping of a bird's wing overhead was singularly audible. 

(Fun fact: the apartment is on the top floor -- 75 steps up!)

Each trip contains certain touchstones -- I revisit my old apartments, I retrace my steps along treasured walking routes, I prowl beloved bookstores and newsstands for all of the written material that I feel as though I need to live. I observe the small moments of exquisite beauty, something I believe my mother would have done (a habit she almost certainly instilled in me by modeling it).  

But each trip is also different, and engenders a specific set of preoccupations. 

At one point during our travels, I developed an obsession with the Roma-Viterbo train line, which is separate from Trenitalia. It's not entirely odd: our apartment in Rome overlooked one of the stations on the line. And when I am in Italy, I am immersed in "my beat," which I define as the ordinary aspects of Italian life, the parts of Italian life that an average Italian contends with. 

It reminded me of the PATH trains that link lower Manhattan to New Jersey inasmuch as it's both local and separate. They are like an alt subway line, which is slightly odd. If you were a traveler to NYC, you could mistake them for the actual subway system, no?  

When I poked my head inside the station I could see from the window, it was as old-school as it comes. The tracks were visible from the entranceway (the long train tunnel simply deadends into the lobby of the station) and on them sat old tram-like trains. There was a bustling coffee bar attached, of course, and I had my breakfast there one day, knowing that while it appeared scruffy, the volume of customers and the people who frequented it (real Italians) guaranteed a fine cappuccino and a light, fluffy ciambellina. Yet still, I am both irked by this random, standalone train line and also by my obsession with it!

More from the Rome Journal: You can buy calendars where each month is a photo of a young Italian priest. Yes, I, too, am wondering how on Earth I left Rome without one of those calendars! I mean, dai, per l'amor di Dio ... you cannot top that. I tried to explain it to Leo by saying it was driven by the dearth of vocations and that the notion of a slew of new young priests would give older Catholics such joy....

There’s an article in the current L’Espresso that is so funny: Italian politicians who years after they’ve left office continue to enjoy la scorta (police escort/secret service-level protection), which is to say they still jump the line (in traffic, at the airport, etc) when it’s convenient. The article cites a two-century-old line of poetry:

Io so’ io

E voi non siete un cazzo

Not a poem I've ever read. (From Wikipedia: La celebre frase che il Marchese rivolge a un gruppo di popolani («Mi dispiace, ma io so' io e voi non siete un cazzo!») è ripresa dal sonetto Li soprani der Monno vecchio di Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, che comincia così: «C'era una vorta un Re cche ddar palazzo / mannò ffora a li popoli st'editto: / "Io sò io, e vvoi nun zete un cazzo"».)

ENGLISH SUMMARY: The gist of the line of poetry, spoken by a nobleman to commoners, is roughly: I'm important (or I'm someone) and you're a nobody (said more colorfully in the Italian: 'You're not jack squat,' or, 'You're a fuckin' nobody.')

I was walking through Piazza della Signoria one evening only to find a concert in the loggia behind the Uffizi – a gorgeous soprano and a small ensemble. Leo didn’t want to linger but luckily the singer’s voice lingered, following me out of the piazza (I walked extra slow).

New 'addresses' emerge on each trip, often connected with coffee bars or bakeries that serve good ciambelle/ciambelline (who would care? Yes, yes I know. There's a reason few people read this blog!). I stopped at Caffe Le Logge by the post office one morning for a cappuccino. I was out on my morning walk and needed to refuel before venturing across the river. When I returned later to buy some pastries (which were quite good), the barman said, "Ri-buongiorno." I believe that's the first time I've ever had someone say that to me. Good morning -- again. (Not that you would care if you weren't obsessed with Italian and why should you be?!)

And while we're on the topic ... The trip was especially fruitful in one delicious way: I ate some of the best ciambelle I've ever had (none would qualify as a ciambellina, where -ina indicates little). Soft, doughy, enormous, and of course covered in sugar.

Taking the pulse of Firenze -- and my own

Dante considered Florence a den of snakes, and I can see why, but he also lamented his exile from this bejeweled city and I can absolutely see why -- years into my own (voluntary?) exile from Florence.

It’s truly beguiling as cities go -- not one you can write off easily (though he and I have both tried!).

Beguiling describes its allures and also its current state, mired as it is in overtourism -- but can we blame anyone for wanting to visit this enchanting city I once called home?

(Not unlike the notion that Italy is familiar to me, I also revel in saying that Florence is a city I once called home. Maybe how native-born Manhattanites feel? Though that level of entitlement I could never approach). 

As I write, I’m sitting in a living room on Via della Vigna Vecchia – not #1 but rather #12, and outside, from a tiny terrace, there’s an up close-and-personal view of the tower in Palazzo Vecchio. At this moment, the churches are chiming out 7 o’clock and I feel compelled to go out on the terrace to hear the bells – like the world coming alive in surround sound.

We arrived on Monday, and as usual, I have professed my love for Florence -- and spent time getting reacquainted with her -- by walking her streets. That is the way for me to take the city’s pulse, and my own. Will you grow weary of reading that only when I have prowled the streets for hours each day do I feel as though I am truly visiting Florence? Speriamo no.

Denise posted on Facebook that she was at the Shore for her birthday, and I had a serious case of FOMO.

And yet, while she was at the beach, I was meeting with my one-time roommate, Irene, and her husband, and reveling in the joys of old friendships. We chose to meet up at this ridiculously cool bar by the Sant’Ambrogio market, where Mike and I found seats outside while we waited but when Irene arrived, she said, “Well, have you seen the internal courtyard?” I had not and let’s just say the nuns who once lived at the convent now converted into a bar had some nice green space (would they have enjoyed the glass of Bolgheri we had? Maybe).

Yesterday I found two books I’d been looking for at the Florence branch of Il Libraccio: Vita immaginaria by Ginzburg and Lettera da Francoforte by Edith Bruck (finally!). Who knows how many more books I’ll try to schlep home? The quantity I’d like to buy is probably a number in the low three figures.

I also shopped at my old market (in Italian, Il Mercato di Sant’Ambrogio) yesterday. Still authentic, still wonderful, still selling qualche etto di prosciutto (crudo, always crudo, for chrissakes) that I can’t resist.

State of the city: positively infested with tourists, and the main part of centro storico is now full of quickie snack stops for travelers (rather than residents), as I wrote during an earlier trip. If back then, there were 15 snack stops (panini shops, wine bars geared toward foreigners, convenience stores) in a half-mile, now there are 40. And they've displaced local shops that served residents.

State of Leonardo (as he is known here, not far from Vinci, home of the other Leonardo): Well, we saw my old friend, Chiara, last night for a walk through centro & then dinner, which was lovely until we said our goodbyes and Leo yelled at me, “Three hours of you talking in Italian!” But what was nice: I suggested we go to a bookstore (so Chiara could pick out a book for her upcoming vacation) but instead she said she wanted to find Andremo in città, (i.e., the book I translated) which they didn’t have (alas).

(Update: The state of Leonardo was quite good at the Ferrari store where we bought him a pricey shirt and also before in the mountains where he was surrounded by cats and dogs.) 

I spend my days taking an inventory of what was and what is, especially since Mike insisted we rent a place on our old street (which is also around the corner from my last apartment in Florence). My old tower of course is still there but now at the base, there’s yet another restaurant for tourists (meanwhile our bread bakery not far away is long gone; oh the focaccia you could get there!). At Vivoli, there’s a line out the door – not so surprising, as even at 8:30 a.m., gelato is yummy (apparently) – but they’ve also expanded and taken over the corner grocery Paola used to run. I guess no one needs gorgonzola anymore.

Morning coffee with biscotti: enjoyed on the tiny terrace while the Torre di Arnolfo looks on (see above). The only cool respite in a city baked by the August sun.

My church is open most days and more gorgeous than I remember (just a neighborhood church) plus the ‘Crazy Drycleaner’ (our nickname, not the name of his shop) is still there – but the macellaria (butcher) where we bought the Thanksgiving turkey one year is gone.

Italy? Still stunning

Of all the ways I've aged, perhaps the one I like best is how easily I am satisfied at times. 

I've written before in this space about the 24 hours I spent in Rome a few years back, and how utterly wonderful they were, no matter the scant time I had to enjoy the Eternal City. Now I come again to say almost any amount of time I spend in Italy is a cure for a life-threatening disease I didn't know I had.

If you read nothing else, let me also say this: We arrived in Italy a week ago and as usual it is both breathtaking and familiar! How lucky can I be that Italy feels familiar? So very lucky indeed. Also: I don't consider myself one to have a bucket list but something that could top it for me? Biking on the ancient Appian Way in Rome.

Pinch me -- maybe my bike tire rolled over a cobblestone once tread on by Julius Caesar's chariot! (Because yes, there are sections of the road with the original cobblestones). You can visit some interesting ruins and of course the catacombs.

That's one of the special things we did in Rome. We also visited (again) the Borghese Gardens and saw the Ara Pacis for the first time. Perhaps most importantly, for me, I visited with "my author" Edith Bruck and she is well (for a 94-year-old woman). I spent three glorious hours with her! She has a new book coming out in the Fall, I am pleased to say. She is not very mobile but as long as she is near a pack of cigarettes, she's OK! (She smoked those tiny thin cigarettes my entire visit).

Also, for the record: Seeing SPQR on every manhole cover in Rome is still cool! (Also cool: knowing it means senatus populusque romanus; the Roman Senate and people)

Oh and you can buy a calendar that features the faces of fresh, young priests every month of the year!

We explored Piazza del Popolo and the area around it (including Via del Corso, site of the nightly passaggiata) quite a bit since we stayed on Via Flaminia, one block outside of the piazza (thus we had to pass through a gorgeous monumental gate each day to enter Piazza del Popolo). It was ground zero for all of the young people visiting Rome last week for the Jubilee youth summit, owing to the fact that one of the churches on the piazza is a pre-requisite for all pilgrims before heading to the Vatican.

Rome was hot, somewhat crowded and still the Eternal City.

Best food so far:

Extra large, extra doughy ciambella (Rome)

Crostini with rabbit ragu

Pinsa with mozzarella di bufala and pomodorini

Fiori di zucca fritti

Verdure fritte miste

My favorite chocolate bar: dark chocolate ('fondente') with whole hazelnuts

Best walks so far

-- Cross the bridge closest to Piazza del Popolo, walk along Tevere to the bridge by Piazza Navona, stumble into the piazza where the Pantheon is located, then Via della Scrofa, which becomes Via di Ripetta until you reach Piazza del Popolo (Rome)

-- Walk along Arno in the town of Onda (mountain town outside of Florence)

I’m in the mountains now – the mountains of Italy – and need I say, it is absolutely beautiful? We visited small, run-of-the-mill towns yesterday and my heart broke from the beauty. It was the Jeanne-small-town variety of beautiful: a rocky stream with multiple small waterfalls ran through the center of town and you could walk along the stream (the towns of Londa and Stia). You could stand on a bridge and look over at the stream, and ogle the buildings that line the stream (including, in Stia, a restaurant where we ate).

At one point, we walked through the town of Stia during lunch hour, and the sound of Italian radio filtered out of a door or a window, much to my delight!

We try to do something different each trip, and this trip we have chosen to stay a few nights at an agriturismo in the mountains east of Florence. Good decision! We have visited mountain towns before but I don’t recall our ever staying overnight at a farmhouse as we are now. So imagine you’re visiting Vermont but all the signage is in Italian, the quirky tavern keeper speaks Italian, the tourists you find at the secret swimming hole are Italian (or German – but of course). Oh and it's somewhat hot.

And then there’s a certain extremity to the matter – the roads we travel to reach this farmhouse are so narrow, no American could possibly consider them fit for two-way traffic. I have visited Vermont many times and probably there are a few roads like this but are the locals going 90 mph around each turn?

While right now I am using my laptop and I have been texting with Italian friends, I am largely offline, content to read my Natalia Ginzburg book (Tutti i nostri ieri) (I've tried to read this novel before but it never appealed to me as much as her other books) and articles in the copy of L’Espresso I bought in Rome.

Right now, as I write: One of the barnyard cats is meowing outside our kitchen window. The silence is so complete, it is loud!

So far in Italy: I have walked – run – swum – biked.

What else? Leo (known as "Leonardo" here) has begun to tease me while I’m talking on the phone here to Italian friends:

I say: “Si,si.” And then he says, “Si,si.”

I say: “Certo.” And then he says, “Certo.”

My mind is not totally 'bifurcated' yet between English and Italian but getting there. 

So to sum up: Italy is still marvelous! And hearing Italian is still marvelous. Wish you were here! Especially some of you -- and you know who you are.

-30-

Happy birthday to Edith Bruck: 'My Author'

May 3 is Edith Bruck's birthday. Edith, or "my author."

That's how I refer to her, more often than not.

And I am here to wish her a happy (early) birthday.

This photo was taken in 2022 when we met for a second time at her apartment in Rome.

I'm eager to see her again so we can look through This Darkness Will Never End together!

Edith turns 94 this year! Whenever I call or email her, she tells me about her current projects. She's always working on something. She's also frequently quoted in the newspapers and she's appeared on Italian television hundreds of times (she worked in TV earlier in her career). All of this to say, her creativity and industriousness don't ever stop. She's constantly inspired by this world, even though it conspired against her and "swallowed up" her parents, her brother, her way of life.

If you want to learn more about Edith Bruck, go here.

If you want to read a sample of my translation, you can find a story called "Silvia" published in translation by Hunger Mountain here.

If you want to read some of Edith's poems, go here.

If you want to read about women survivors such as Edith Bruck and how their stories have been overlooked, take a look at this article I wrote for the American Scholar.

Tanti auguri a Edith!

-30-

Birthday journal

Normally for my birthday, I record an entry in my digital journal. A habit whose name in shorthand is, 'Birthday Journal.' Just a diary entry designed to note and provide my mental temperature for future me, who will be re-reading Birthday Journal entries to revisit, to reminisce, to relive.

And I intend to continue with the tradition but I also decided to do something else this year.

I am feeling particular vulnerable this birthday and so I am reaching for my security blanket -- writing. The writing I've managed to produce AND publish. It's a selfish exercise -- safely indulged perhaps only on one's birthday or death bed, and not sure about the former -- but perhaps it could shed a bit of light for those similarly vulnerable this year for any kind of reason.

So here are bits of of my own writing that fill me with pride, and which are not behind a paywall that I can't scale (the links to the pieces for The New York Times are gift articles):

About motherhood (The New York Times):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/well/family/recording-the-sound-of-my-childs-voice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.104.mPll.Ay79fdY7jDCL&smid=url-share

About issues of great personal interest, including our Down Syndrome friends (NYT):

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/well/family/in-toy-ads-and-on-the-catwalk-models-with-down-syndrome.html?unlocked_article_code=1.104.cPce.3-6WkMS7lv1k&smid=url-share

About grief (Brevity):

https://themillions.com/2023/01/the-books-that-made-my-father.html

About the glorious 1980s!!! (CNN)

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/entertainment/brat-pack-documentary-mccarthy-cec/index.html

About dogs! (namely Caramel!)

https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/the-dog-journal/

About language and its intoxicating ways (The Millions):

https://themillions.com/2023/11/the-quiet-exhilaration-of-reading-in-italian.html

Thank you all for your support!

-30-

Il paese dei miei antenati

Vado pazza per le parole, sia in inglese che in italiano. E una volta un mio amico fiorentino mi mandò una cartolina dall'Irlanda, e ci scrisse:

"Il paese dei tuoi antenati è la fine del mondo."

Mi è rimasto impresso questo suo commento perché mi sembrava cosi gentile -- certamente mi aveva ascoltato con grande pazienza mentre gli parlavo diverse volte, come americana, del paese di mio bisnonno -- ed anche perché Irlanda è davvero spettacolare. 

Quando ci sono tornata a giugno, spesso mi dicevo, "Il paese dei tuoi antenati è la fine del mondo."

Le parole: a volte possono avere un peso sacro anche quando si tratta di frasi che non hanno niente a che fare con Dio. Hanno una dimensione religiosa nascosta, direi.

Grazie, Floriano! (la cartolina ce l'ho ancora).

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Montreal Journal & the joys of travel in 2023

I go to Montreal to speak Italian and shop at an Italian grocery store.

And this year, I got to do both when I visited the Francophile Canadian city, while also writing about it! 

Call me an Italophile in French-speaking Montreal, and a grateful traveler whenever I can get there, which is now more often since I live in New England (the gateway to Montreal, in my opinion).

The post-war period saw a surge of Italian immigration to Canada such that the Italian community is slightly less assimilated there -- or slightly better at keeping traditions -- than in the States, and the culture a little more intact than in say New York's Little Italy. Plus, Montreal has had to fight for its Francophone existence in the wider sea of Canada’s English speakers, and now sees the value in safeguarding other cultures, including their languages. So a stroll through Little Italy ("Petite Italie") is often an occasion for Italian language practice.

At a bakery across the street from the Jean Talon market, a young cashier immediately switched to Italian when he saw my shirt, which had an image of the iconic Italian coffee pot called the Moka. His grandfather was from Puglia, in Southern Italy, he told me, and he learned to speak fluent Italian as a child.

As one person in Montreal told me, "We all speak three languages."

Little did I know when I visited as a child that Montreal would eventually become one of my kindred spots (assuming that places can be kindred spirits in the way people can -- sure feels like it).

Leo's Coronavirus Journal

Well, it's not really his Coronavirus Journal -- it's an excerpt of my own journal that features pithy comments from Leo.

May 12, 2020

Leo is learning about poetry this week and will even have to write two poems. Out for a walk, we’re discussing the types of poems he’s studying and suddenly he says, “What kind of poem is the one by Sean O’Casey? Where he says, ‘An I assed meself, what is the stars?’”

THIS REALLY HAPPENED.

It shows he’s reading the walls of our house since that's where we have the famous poster about Irish writers, which features 12 quotations (including the one from O'Casey). But still! My 7-year-old American son said the name ‘Sean O’Casey.’

We then went back to my parents' house to study their version of the poster. Truth: as often as I looked at the poster, I never actually studied the rhymes in the quotations! Never studied the meter! And there we were counting syllables in a poem by Sean O’Casey. 

LITERATURE IS REAL. 

And...

WE ARE ALL POETRY PEOPLE when we start out reading.

August 9, 2020

Leo picks up a long, curved stick, and says, “This could be a good steering wheel for animals.”

Nov 2. 2020

Leo: “Your brain is like a library.”

Nov. 3, 2020

Leo and I talk a lot about fur. What’s lined with fur. Like sweatpants and hoodies. When he calls something “super furry,” my brain becomes cozy. I yearn for all things furry. And I’m thankful for this lovely little boy who makes lovely little observations. 

Coronavirus Journal, three years later

A publisher put out a call a while back for Coronavirus diary entries and I happily obliged since, of course, I'd been writing in my journal during those initial dark, confused days. I've heard nothing from the publication so I am publishing the entries here. In our particular corner of the world -- by which I mean, the Bonner sisters and their families -- we were simultaneously handling the initial phase of my father's decline. It feels individual and unique and yet I have the sensation so many of us were juggling two problems -- two pandemics, as it were. The wider emergency of Covid taking over the planet, and the personal imprint of a local tragedy, complicated by the restrictions and the terror of those early pandemic days.

March 25, 2020

Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my class at Wesleyan, except it’s not actually at Wesleyan anymore.

He’s above average in reading and he likes Math a lot so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t fear he will miss out on as much.

Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.

Yet I am always of two minds. I mean, quite literally always -- before coronavirus and probably since I was born. (Or) I think of it as an occupational hazard as a journalist.

He should be in school, but in my home school, he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least). He can stand up to do math problems, and he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh, and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.

And yet – the other mind weighing in again – he has not played with a friend in a week.

March 27, 2020

My coronavirus diary walks side by side with my Daddy-Is-Sick journal. I spoke with him yesterday and it was not the same person I knew. It was like talking to a hybrid of Mommy and an exhausted Daddy. He kept repeating certain key details of his fluid transfusion – that it took four-and-a-half hours hours, for example. He told me there are good days and bad, and the bad ones are when he wants to pull the blanket over his head. What was yesterday, I asked? A pull-the-blanket-over-your-head kind of day.

When I like to write

I like to write in the morning after a fractured night’s sleep has left me feeling so emotionally fragile it feels like a form of grief. I’m overcome and on the verge of tears, and my brain suddenly alights on a thought, then 10 thoughts, then 100. The words quickly filling my mind need a space to live. Feelings I left festering under the surface emerge and demand to be heard. I’m running on adrenaline, and at my wit’s end, and too tired to be careful. What makes me ache, what tortures me, what I truly think comes pouring out. I confess that I feel as though I am in mourning at fall’s first warnings, when the sudden chill in the morning air is so jarring since until yesterday, there was nothing but heavy, humid air mugging my every breath. Or I whisper to the journal I keep in my car, “I think I’m losing my fingerprints.”

I wrote this gush of words above after beginning a graduate writing program in my early 40s. I was finally attempting to fulfill my third-grade teacher’s prediction that I would be a writer when I grew up. Trying my hand at fiction for the first time, I had the zeal of a convert. I’d deferred my writing dreams (and my vague grad school plans) for so long, I never thought I’d be someone who lived to write. Then a series of unforeseen events – motherhood in my late 30s, among other things -- lead me to the magic door. I found the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write – like an itch you keep scratching or better yet, a lover you can’t stop kissing. If I showed up to write, I would write, then write a little more. Later after I’d taken a pause, a new thought might occur to me and I would race to my laptop to record it.

In the early days of this writing frenzy, which began during my maternity leave, I convinced myself it was all tied to breastfeeding and post-pregnancy hormones. (My true religion is a combination of Catholic guilt and jinx theory.) Plus, writing felt magical, too good to be true. I feared it would all disappear once I ceased to nurse and my body went back to its old self.

When this pessimist’s fantasy lifted, I found I wanted to write fairly often; some days, every spare minute. Not that every day produced the same kind of writing or quantity. Oh no.

So while writing after a night of broken sleep unleashes in me highly emotional, highly unstructured thoughts, writing after I’ve had eight hours of solid slumber produces an excess of energy that converts my mind into a trampoline, and I find myself revising multiple pieces in one sitting, organizing notes for a future piece and gathering details on, say, a fellowship for writers. I’m full of wonder and confidence; I have something to prove and I want to fight – on the page.

(Note to young writers: Sleep is cool if it allows you to go wild in your writing).

Why does it have to be so hard?

April 12, 2022

Lost diary entry

Last night after a day of working in the garden in Avon and admiring my father’s books and running on the beach with Caramel, I couldn’t resist any longer – I began to cry, saying to Mike, “Why does it have to be so hard?” But really I should have said, Why do we have to only appreciate everything when it's gone? Most interesting man I ever knew, my father, and yet I often shooed him away like he was some bothersome child. Like everyone had a father who was an encyclopedia of musical knowledge (among other things) and a master gardener and a minor comedian.

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Writing about Didion for CNN and revisiting 'The Second Coming'

I spent yesterday writing a piece about the Joan Didion auction, and immersing myself once again in her seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I couldn't help but think over the lines of verse from Yeats that inspired the title:

...what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So I re-read the poem ("The Second Coming") and now it's all my head can conjure.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Read the poem here courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.

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(P.S. I sought it out first in the 1944 anthology of British and American verse that I cadged from my father decades ago but it wasn't there; what was there, once again: "Dulce et decorum est": 'the ecstasy of fumbling' and the bitter descriptions of how war distorts the very flesh of the men forced to wage it)

The Little Artist Whose Mother is Addicted to Post-it Notes

Post-it art by our Leonardo. Leonardo d'Atlanta.

Now on display in the Gallery of the Master Bedroom.

Oh I know Marie Kondo wouldn't approve. But what does one do with these little scraps of paper? You are not meant to preserve something to show that while you were reading bedtime stories to your son he was whiling away the time doodling on post-it notes? Doodling in ways you never could. Or did.

So for now the show is still up in the gallery.

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Fall grief

One day in Atlanta, circa 2015

Lost diary entry 

It feels a bit like grief, the first warnings of fall -- that sudden chill in the morning air when until yesterday, there was nothing but heavy, humid, hot air mugging every breath out of me.

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World domination -- from the Leo Journal

Aug 14, 2020

Leo looks at the geese in the school field behind our house and says, “Geese are totally close to world domination.” 

A few days later he asks me what ‘domination’ means.

Lost diary entry

In Italy the streets are my lab (Seconda volta)

The first morning in Milan (which is to say the first morning of the trip), I wake at 6:50 a.m. and head out subito -- immediately -- on foot while Leo and Mike sleep. 

Left out of the hotel, and left onto Via Turati (where Mike is delighted to discover the San Carlo potato chip HQ is) to find the perfect caffe for a cappuccino & una ciambellina. I did OK – a small corner job, workman-like but some of the paste (pastries) I bought were still hot! And fancy isn't always the ticket. 

I begin collecting information immediately because in Italy, the street is part of my lab -- language lab, culture lab, architecture lab. The coffee bars, too, and any surface that contains Italian writing. They are my beat.

So I notice the massive macchinetta for the coffee is giving the barista trouble and the building that houses the American embassy is also home to Radio Monte Carlo (the station name, when I read or say it quietly to myself, is broadcast in my head in the original Italian that you would hear on the radio).

I also notice, much to my chagrin, that English is everywhere – everywhere. But for different audiences. In some cases, it's there to communicate to people born speaking English. In other cases, it's an absurd flourish (or whatever the opposite of flourish is) to an otherwise Italian-only public service message or advertisement (Trenitalia, I am looking at you!).

Morning #2, I go to Il Chiosco Manin, an outdoor coffee counter in Milan, just to the left of an entrance to the public gardens. A customer beside me ordered, “Un caffe per cortesia.” (‘A coffee, please,’ except that he used the form of please that includes the word ‘courtesy’ – and the order feels extra courtly. Also, for those of you playing along at home, un caffe = an espresso. If you want a cappuccino -- and I do -- you have to say cappuccino).

Another man bikes up to get his coffee. “Ciao Salvatore,” he says to the barman.

While I have my cappuccino at the tiny bancone that sits on the street, the radio is on, and it’s perfection.

Another woman arrives at Il Chiosco and the barista says, “Ciao Lorena.” It's like I'm gatecrashing a party where everyone else knows each other, but no one minds I am there.

I eye the oranges that are used for smoothies – tempting. Meanwhile someone calls out, “Buon di!” Then the garbage truck arrives – and the sanitation workers get out of the truck to have their coffees, too.

I am observing. And when I am done observing while standing still, I say my goodbyes to the barista and begin walking again to observe some more. I feel like I could walk all day and only then would I be sated, happy, fully on vacation. 

Vacation for Jeanne = walking in Italy (while someone speaks behind me, next to me, near me in Italian -- and yes, Heather D-R from St. Anthony's, also when someone speaks Italian directly to me, but I didn't want to get greedy. Those first few days, I am almost struck speechless by how thorough the change of scenery is from America to Italy).

Now I am walking through a stone gate that’s part of the old walls of the city – next to the fancy shopping street Via della Spiga – and the sidewalk ducks under a portico (do we have porticos in America? We should). 

Internal courtyards abound in Milan and the portoni (front doors/main entrances of buildings) to them reveal oases of greenery and sometimes sculpture.

I’ve struggled to find an open giornalaio in Milan – even the concierge at our hotel shrugged his shoulders. Victims of the pandemic, which is heartbreaking because newsstands are Italian mom-and-pop stores that double as mini-piazzas. A place for an exchange. (They also sell Pokemon cards! Ask me how I know!)

But Mike manages to buy for me at Milano Centrale:

-La Settimana Enigmistica (weekly puzzle magazine)

-Bell’Italia (most beautiful travel magazine you've ever seen)

-La Cucina Italiana (food mag)

Doing the frontpage crossword in the puzzle mag ('Settimana Enigmistica' -- you can see the word 'enigma' in there), I learn, or re-learn, that 'musicare' is a verb (clue: “Musicò Tosca.”)

I am collecting information about 1,000 tiny moments, 1,000 tiny encounters between myself and Italy. Later in Rome, I trip over myself to snap a photo of the perfect graffiti spotted as we entered the Villa Borghese from Piazza del Popolo: ‘Sei bella come Roma’ = You're as beautiful as Rome. Not sure there is a way to top that, other than -- maybe -- you're as beautiful as the Taj Mahal or a hologram of your face should be beamed permanently from the sky.

Everything that has words draws my attention (as I may have, ahem, mentioned). I walk the streets each morning silently repeating phrases from ads, billboards, shop windows ("Idraulico, giorno e notte" = Plumber available all hours; "Traslochi/sgomberi" = relocations, junk removal; "Saldi" = sales).  I am shopping a lot but mainly my kind of acquisti, like anything sold at the giornalaio (newsstand). Yesterday I bought La Gazzetta dello Sport just so Leo could see Italy’s pink sports newspaper (he marveled that there seemed to be 35 pages about soccer and 1 page about car racing and maybe 1 page about volleyball and that’s it). I told him that anywhere in Italy, when you see someone across the bar or piazza holding a pink newspaper, you know at a glance he or she (OR HE!) is reading the national sports newspaper.

What I bought so far:

*Il Corriere della Sera (2X)

*L’Espresso (magazine)

*Panorama (magazine)

*A new red Moka coffee pot from Bialetti (yes I now have probably 10 Mokas of various sizes)

*La Gazzetta dello Sport (see above)

*A lightweight plastic basketball for Leo (dal giornalaio!)

*A kitchen towel

*A place mat with the “definition” of Spaghetti

*A bare midriff shirt (ma sei matta? Am shopping around now for a new lifestyle so I can actually wear it)

*A green wool sweater from Benetton like the brown one I've had for more years than I care to admit

*10 or so books (including two by Edith Bruck; when Leo saw another copy of Andremo in Città, he said, ‘Mommy, you have that one already!’ I suppose seeing it around the house for a few years will do that.)

I am no different than all the other tourists snapping photos. Except I snap photos of the 'Missing dog' flyers on utility poles and the tree stumps some cracker jack street artist has transformed into sculpture, not to mention compelling graffiti and street signs of particular relevance (I will always take a photo of  the sign for Via della Vigna Vecchia anytime I visit Florence -- it was once my home).

We are taking trams in Milan and some of them are “antiques.” The #1 tram line that we took to Castello Sforzesco is just such a model. Wooden bench seats line the walls of the tram. There’s a shimmy and shake to its accelerations. Like a mobile museum that allows a step back in time in addition to a method of transportation.

One of the major streets in Milan is Via Alessandro Manzoni and that tickles me for some reason. Like, where in New York is the F. Scott Fitzgerald Boulevard?!

Italy is basically just one big Tickle-me Elmo doll. Every damn thing -- good or bad -- intrigues me.

That's all for now from Il Belpaese.

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