PART 2: I EMBRACE ITALY

Many expectant years later I arrive in Italy. Its cold and grey and rain mirror the state of my soul. Then one day a wise old peasant offers me a glass of his home-made wine with his rough, dirty-nailed hand. His eyes twinkle above his lousy whiskers as he asks, "Te piac'?" I drink. A new world opens. I weep. I have found the Italy of my dreams at last. He smells like my grandmother. I am sick for a week afterwards. But no matter. I am transfigured.

Thereafter I pass my days in a kind of fever, a benign madness bestowed by Bacchus himself, traveling from one end of Italy to another, tasting wines, meeting winemakers, enduring foul country hotels and cadging indifferent meals from cubes of parmigiano-reggiano served with toothpicks in frigid cantinas. I seek the authentic, the unspoofilated, the autochthonous, the unusual, preferably the cheap. I build a portfolio.

I buy a scarf.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Comments

[EAST VILLAGE WINE GEEK]

I LOVE IT! keep going!

[fredric koeppel]

you seem to have discovered your true and authentic literary style. im imagining a whole novel written in this vein.

[terence]

Thanks but I think it's best in short bits.

Btw, didn't you shiver when you read "I bought a scarf"? It's like whoa Mistah Kurtz you really done gone native.

(I am currently hurtling across the Friulian countryside to Trieste, where I soon will catch a flight to Rome and, finally, home. Which is I think in New York.

[David J]

Some of the short bits in th comments section are little jewels too. All those grinding, burnout years in la pubblicita have not been for naught.
Maybe we both grew up making up alternate plotlines for matinee serials when we missed an episode??
You don't take compliments well at all, do ya? All th stroking in th world will not validate us beyond (apart from? behind th sheltering ramparts of? oy vey, stop, d!) --our hard-earned, hard-boiled personas...
'Home is where th heart is/Home is so remote'
Remember th rest? My fave Lene Lovich song...baci, djr

[Strappo]

I am by nature a modest soul.

With, of course, a ravenous ego.