Old Charlie
Post 1
So, here we are at last. Today it’s not my 83rd birthday but I’m going to start my first post here, feeling somehow "reborn" today.
It is like going back in time: I wrote some 80 pages many
years ago (on a blog owned by Rizzoli publishers where anybody had the permission
to write anything provided in compliance with the most obvious rules of decency
and legality), and each weekly post of mine was a chapter of a book, whose
title would be “Following confused tracks” – then that blog was suddenly closed
without explanations and I never finished that book. It went down in the
waste-paper virtual bin together with many other stories that I wrote in my
long life without consequences of sort.
Now this blog belongs to me,
thanks to Google’s blogger and the technical advice of a new friend of mine,
Mr. Gianni Crestani, and I am happy as a child toying with a new knick-knack. Look, it is fascinating, huh? The URL is carletto (that means Charlie) scara (which is a shortening of my family name Scarafiotti). When I was a small boy at the primary school my most intimate friends called me Carletto, while the teacher used Scara for brevity. So I feel somehow reborn, you see. Carletto Scara, a.k.a. Carlo Federico Scarafiotti.
Today I got a visit of my two sons and three daughters, who joined my wife Hildegard and me here in this old mansion of mine along with our seven grandchildren. It was a huge joy indeed, they all look so eager to meet. Of course this is one of the occasions in which each of them deems right to investigate how well I am feeling with my health, and I could never disappoint such nice empathizers confessing that right this morning I fell ruinously again in the bathtub after skidding mindlessly on the wet floor! Having lost my equilibrium I was unable to grab any towel rail on my trajectory … so now there is a remarkable bump swelling hidden under my silver-white hair but during the meeting of this morning it went unnoticed.
After some years when I was
diagnosed a Parkinson’s sick I learned something: and the first lesson I can transmit
as authoritative expert to you, dear colleagues in ailing, is this: always downplay your plight, never
dramatize. Never let your dears worry about you. What for? Why to make heavier the
burden of the good persons who care for us and our inability, supplying unnecessary
details to them?
I always
enjoyed telling humorous stories about myself, I felt quite gentlemanly showing
a good dose of understatement and self-irony: sort of Oscar Wilde style, you
know, laughing at yourself makes feel yourself
clever and applause-worthy. A snob way
of concealing a subtle form of vanity, yes: we are so clever with our self-sneer that only the most sagacious among people can suspect how intelligent we
are, behind the apparent banality of our crippled life.
But recently I realized that this
might be a source of troubles. I recounted with a smiling self-indulgent
attitude, while dining with one of my daughters, that maneuvering the car
within my garage in Torino I over sighted something and bumped hitting a
protruding low pillar. How foolish of me, to joke about this! That same evening
my daughter called my wife and said that
maybe it would be safer not to let me drive the car any longer— who could be so
irresponsible letting a Parkinson sick old man to go around bumping and
crashing at will?
How foolish of me! Forget any sense of
humorous understatement and self-irony, dear disabled colleagues: silence is
more rewarding than any show of bright humor. In fact I decided right now that
in the future I won’t tell anything about my (funny) misfortunes, even though in
this way some hilarious stories of mine might go missing. Shut up, pipe down
and just smile!
Carletto Scara
