Old Charlie

Post 5

As we go on through this blog exercise I grow more and more conscious of the huge quantity of intangible treasures hidden behind the banality of our everyday life. The main reason of this hiding is due, in my opinion, to the fact that we get accustomed to the good and we hardly notice it any more. Thus we are used to our mother’s love and attention, and we fully realize the gift only when we lose it, when she dies. 

In this way you prepare yourself to be losers forever!  Why not to learn how to timely recognize the hidden good around? What about attaining the ability of those super-scout reconnaissance pilots who can spot targets anywhere on a large, apparently desert land under the wings of their aircraft?

Lo! Don’t look for a cathedral, in the desert. A simple blade of grass is all we need to find out. Let’s stop repeating the praise of that Albanian nun who did extraordinary things for the poor in Calcutta— let me remember with you an old friend of mine, Mr. Nelsen, a cobbler, a self-content man who all his life did nothing more brilliant than cobbling hundreds, perhaps thousands of worn shoes! But he did it asking for a really modest reward, and he smiled to everybody so he had a huge crowd of happy clients … another friend of mine was a priest, and in one of his Sunday sermons I remember having heard him say that the Lord is not expecting great things from us: just doing well the ordinary things that we are supposed to do— and if our job is to peel potatoes, and we peel them well, He is happy with us not less than with those who do grand things and their life is celebrated by the media.

Now it is September, and Hildegard came here in Zoagli with me because our son Andrew— well maybe you did read on my frequently mentioned book Fun for the Crippled in Paris that this son of ours is the one who didn’t marry and lives with us as an unrepentant bachelor … when he stays with us— but often he is in Rome with his job of software expert, and sometimes, as now, he loves to have some days off here in our cottage on the seaside near Zoagli, some forty kilometers from Genua. It’s a lovely place on the Riviera, in view of Portofino - just in front of us, it seems painted in watercolors as it emerges from the waves of the bay - and everybody says it’s one of the most picturesque spot in the world.

So we came here to stay a few days with our son. And I come always willingly too, of course; what’s the use of me remaining alone in Torino? No use! I can carry here my laptop computer and waste my time on it precisely as I could do in downtown Torino. (I suspect this is the widespread opinion held by my closest relatives, who tolerate this writing mania of mine with a deep sincere feeling of compassion).

Well, dear readers-and-friends, not everybody shares everybody’s tastes, and though the view of Portofino is probably a pleasure for all, the company of the people we find here is not necessarily a source of happiness for all, and particularly for me. La signora Ripalta Grosso Lanza, for example, though greeted with joy by Hildegard, is not at all an attraction for me, and when I learn that she is in this place while we are here, all the delight caused by watercolor Portofino’s view disappears.

Alas, in her immense benevolence and kindheartedness Hildegard feels obliged to invite the Grosso Lanza lady to share some afternoon hours with us, with the pretext of the tea party, so I am condemned to some exercise of desperate, pointless endurance of her conversation – as she calls a sort of asphyxiating monologue, a list of recently visited Seychelles and Caribbean locations, along with a punctilious catalogue of her most recent reading … ahah, dear friends!  She believes to amaze us citing as instance of her recent literary “discoveries” … the Buddenbrooks!!

Yes! And perceiving my odd grimace of surprise, she felt necessary to help my ignorance adding, in a low tone, “You know, that book by Thomas Mann”. Oh boys!

She could never suspect that we had read her recent “discovery” long time ago, along with Der Kleine Herr Friedemann and even that we saw the Buddenbrooks in an Italian TV sequel-film in 1971, with Nando Gazzolo, Valentina Cortese, Paolo Stoppa… who else?

Oh boys! Oh girls! She drives me mad, the conceited ass.

She loves to tell again and again how she enjoyed Dominicana island for its sea landscapes and old churches, and yet she knows nothing about Rafael LeonidasTrujillo Molina… his Rectitud Libertad Trabajo Program, for which he was granted by our Honourable President of that time his Gran Cordone al merito della Repubblica Italiana on July 31,1954— ahah, dear friends ... Sometime later the man lost the favor of his American tutors, was suddenly labeled a felon and was shot on his chauffeur-driven car by a rifle-toting hired killer (who turned out to be Charles Calthrop in Frederic Forsyth’s best-selling novel The Day of the Jackal, impersonated by Edward Fox in Fred Zinnemann’s film). Our pedantic bluestocking knows nothing about all that. She even never heard that Santo Domingo, the capital of the republic sharing the island with Haiti, was called for many years Ciudad Trujillo, to honor the dictator. She just talks and talks and talks … You can imagine my sigh of relief at the news that she leaves.

JJJ

Today is October 1 and this afternoon I brought Hildegard to the Auchan shopping center in Venaria, a small town few kilometers north of Torino. As usually, she went alone inside the large building and I waited outside in my old Punto car (why on earth should I plod along inside there, limping with my stick?  It is so good to stay sitting in the immense car parking): there I can listen through my shrill-and-woofer loudspeakers to the symphonies broadcasted 24 hours a day by program FD5 of our city FM-radio, and switch to the car-CD with the music of Charles Trenet or Edith Piaf when the symphonies transmitted by the radio turn out less catchy, you know, Alban Berg and Stockhausen are a bit too difficult for my primitive tastes.

I love to stay in that huge parking place: there is room for innumerable cars, rows of trees cast a pleasant shadow in warm days, and a giant green meadow with wild flowers offers on its borders fantastic possibilities to halt and rest … I like the place.

While sitting in my car there on the border of the spacious meadow, I saw in my rearview mirror a white minibus-van, you know, one of those vehicles that have six or eight sitting places inside. It came pretty close to the back of my car, and pulled up there.

Having nothing much to do, just listening to the music, I kept observing the scene in the rear-vision mirror … so I saw the driver jump down, opening a slide door on one side and drawing out a sort of double rail on which he let roll down a wheelchair. Yes, a wheelchair, main focus of my attentions, in these last months of mine! Meanwhile a group of people had emerged from the van and circled around— when I turned again at the rear mirror, few seconds later, a big man was sitting on the wheelchair and a sort of procession started to unwind. First the wheeled invalid, pushed by a youth, then a lady walking arm-in-arm with two boys, and finally a young man having a little girl at his arm. Proceeding toward the shopping premises they passed near my drop window and I noticed clearly that the young boys and the girl showed neatly their Down syndrome traits and the accompanying lady— Chapeau! Give praise where praise is due.

As soon as they were gone I got out of my Punto, reached my stick on the rear seat and waddled to the van driver who was doing something under his engine bonnet.

< Excuse me – I said – I believe to know that lady who is helping in your group. Is she perhaps a Mrs. Grosso Lanza?>

                                                              

<Sure she is. Comes every other day, she is a part-time teacher, something like that. She particularly cares for mongoloid children; she can listen to them for hours, even though it’s hard to understand what they say. She says it is important that they feel somebody is listening>

So, that’s it: I suddenly felt I am a brute, my friends. Unable to recognize the good hidden around us, and that’s the answer to my question at the very opening of this post: Why not to find out how to timely recognize the hidden good around? 

Hmm! The problem probably is how to learn to be humble enough to accept reality, i.e. that other people are worth of consideration, even though at first sight we do not appreciate; much more, we ought to pick up from everybody, there is no lesser-level human, everybody has something to teach us, including the children and the so-called uninformed. It’s our stupid pride that makes us blind and deaf. And now I see that lady is right in saying that everybody needs to feel that somebody is listening.

Carletto Scara