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I slept through the same class twice this semester. My professor told me, "if this were your job, you'd be fired." I wanted to tell her,"if this were my job, I'd kill myself."
Twenty-one credit hours and homework. A part-time job as fine arts editor at our daily paper. A problematic long distance relationship. Consistent financial instability. One parent recently flown to Alabama to marry his e-mail order bride. The other two hours away, supporting my younger, physically disabled brother.
I don't want you to feel bad for me. But I will blame all of this for redefining stress, permanent circles under my eyes, and an unspeakable desire to leave all of it and forget, even if only for a little while. And I did.
Ten days in Sicily was an asylum. At JFK airport, I boarded the plane, the first that would take me across the ocean, with a trance-like awareness that I was about to do something so important I couldn't really fathom it. I was mildly nervous that I wouldn't get to know any of my 30 traveling companions, ecstatic that when we landed I would be in another country.
Instantly, I was in love. Walking through customs an old woman gracefully gestured that I go ahead of her. "Per favore." Young men and women draped in black smoked cigarettes at a bar in the airport. Signs were painted in spiraling words I'd never seen but somehow understood. The staleness of my expression 12 hours ago--on the phone with a lover, trying to finish one more assignment, returning the call of another local art museum wanting coverage-transformed into wide-eyes and all teeth.
On our first night in Palermo, the island's capital, I met Nino. Our hotel had a campy bar in its basement and out of obligation as a college student, I joined the rest of my group there after dinner. A few of us discovered that the basement also had a small souvenier shop and, oddly, at 10 p.m. it was open. The old man operating the store urged us to look around and gave each of us a small, cheap pendant when we entered. When one of our group didn't understand why he was giving her something I said regalo, Italian for gift. I must have seen or heard the word and somehow retained it. The old man assumed I knew Italian and began conversing with me.
Because I was so determined to communicate in Italian, because I was completely enchanted with the fact that I was finally in Europe, because I had been physically plucked from burden and responsibility and comfortably rested on Sicilian soil, because Sicilians are remarkably patient and anxious to talk to anyone, Nino and I chatted for at least 20 minutes. We managed to discuss that the other 20 kids surrounding the bar and I were students from America travelling all over the island for a week and that he also owned a second shop in Cefalu, where we'd be visiting the next day. He told me I'd love Taormina, a city at the end of the trip. I told him my mother's family was Sicilian. Before I returned to the group he asked me to come back the next night so he could buy me a drink. And on my way out of the bar for the evening he told me I was the most beautiful woman in the room.
Although it may sound like Nino was a perverted old man, he wasn't. He, like so many other Sicilians I met, was as genuine and warm as grandparents. That kind of effort to welcome, to share in something human, wasn't limited to men. Waiting in line at the ancient Greek temples of
Segesta, I saw Christina, one of my travelling companions, looking terrified as a group of old women girdled her, trying to understand where she was from. Presuming I had mastered the language by practicing six key phrases in my "Just Enough Italian" book, I walked over to try to save her.
In five minutes the women were hugging and kissing me, suggesting I return to Sicily to marry one of their sons. All I had to do was struggle to hear their words, stumble over a base response, make grand gestures with my hands and smile a lot to receive this kind of affection.
When has a bus of tourists ever unloaded in any spot in the U.S. to find such generosity? When have I ever found such generosity in the U.S.? I'm sure there is some erudite social/cultural explanation for the difference, but it doesn't matter much because the difference is there, indelibly. Being embraced, encouraged by complete strangers can do so much for a person. I always appreciate compliments and attention from those who aren't required to give it, more than I would from someone else. Brief, not entirely coherent conversations with Sicilians in a fish market, with children on a field trip at the Greek ruins of Agrigento, with musicans rehearsing at Catania opera house, with Nino and the old women made me remember how nice it was to just speak, and taste, see, hear, and touch everything within my reach--and how easy success was in those endeavors. I was 20 years old again.
Nino was right about me and Taormina. After a week of ancient cities, eight course meals, sweeping landscapes at every sight, gorgeous people, brilliant colors, and a sense of everything bright and everything fertile yelling to me, I didn't think Sicily could get more beautiful. But it did.
Physically, Taormina was paradise. To reach our hotel we had to drive up a tortuous road that at every turn revealed another view of lush trees and flowers hanging off a cliff, floating above the ocean. The center of the town, though clearly targeted to the tourist industry, was my vision of Europe. Chic and quaint stores lined the narrow, cobble roads. Gelato and coffee shops spilled into the street with plastic chairs and tables. There were oceanside lookouts, the perfect hybrid of old and new, and everywhere a constant invisible act of connection.
Our first night in town, exhausted, a handful of us walked the main road for a closer look. I don't remember a moment before or since when I was happier. During those two hours time and place came together seamlessly. I realized I was in the most perfect spot in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing with nothing in my immediate future to prevent me. No trepidation, just blissful, blissful rest.
I hung on to that euphoria for the rest of the trip. Everyone I met got a come sta?, a buon giorno, and several gratuitous grazies. I felt like I had an IV streaming caffeine into my blood. I ran to see one more shop, smiled insanely at an old couple sharing a moped, bounced from one end of a market to the other astounded by the completely unexpected in the normal.
I tried my best to sustain that energy when I came home. But I could only recall my time in Sicily as a continuous moment that existed somewhere outside of real time and dimension. Still, I returned to everything different. It occurred to me that it was okay to be selfish, if selfishness meant repose and contentment. I dropped my relationship, I dropped a class, I remembered my social life. I went to class and to work with an opened face and found people were actually interested in talking to me.
Sicilian people steeped in life, with priorities disordered or nonexistent awakened in me the need to be less serious, to make the blankness of a page less predictable than before, to dig into me for that smile--to return to Sicily. And until then, to remember I had once been there.
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