Away With Words

Communication can be difficult.  I remember groping my way blindly through my third semester Italian class.  That's the semester we learned to formulate hypothetical statements which in the Italian language is a complex and nuanced art form which like painting or gold smithing, can take years or even decades to truly master.  

I remember one day another student, in the middle of a grammar exercise, cried out in frustration,

"I just can't tell the difference between reality and imagination!"

"That," responded our professor who was wise and Sicilian, "is the result of watching too many Disney movies as a child."

And it makes me laugh to think about it now, but there's an unexpected bit of truth in it.  Language is like a filter in our brains through which all of our thoughts have to pass.  It affects our perception of time, of essence, maybe even of where the line is between what is real and what is hypothetical.  It's one of a million reasons that two people having the same experience can perceive things differently.

As for me, although I would not consider myself fully bilingual, I do live bilingually, in constant flux.  But "bilingual" is a term I don't like. I have always been resentful of it because it implies that there are two different systems that can be kept separate, that there is a switch that you hit or a line that you cross and suddenly everything has changed.  Now in English.  Ora in italiano.  

If only the world were so clean and clear cut!!!!

Linguistically speaking, it's more of gooey, melty, sticky mess.  Picture a dog eating peanut butter.  When I think about writing, speaking or social interaction within this inescapably bilingual context, a life experience that comes to mind is the time I almost drowned in one of those playground ball pits when I was a child. I feel like I'm constantly flailing around, grabbing for something, for anything that is solid.  Searching for the right words, you take what you can get and hope to make it out alive.  It's chaotic and confusing and crazy, yet somehow in the end, I always find myself wanting more.

Of course, I expect that there will be some lingering traces of English in my Italian.  It's my native tongue after all.  What I did not anticipate is the way that Italian has crept in and taken up residence in the English-speaking part of my life. 

The idioms and Italianisms are inescapable!  Suddenly, I find myself asking my friends if they would like to take a coffee with me.  I picture myself running up to the counter with a ninja suit on, grabbing the espresso and making a run for it.  

We don't say that in English, I remind myself.

And come in language, cosi' in life.  I find myself feeling like I am constantly caught between two different cultures: too American to be proprio italiana and too changed by my experiences abroad to be simply American.  

At moments, it's a priveleged position.  I've always enjoyed having the opportunity to be the go-between, the translator, the mediator.  Building bridges suits me; it's a role in which I find fulfillment.  But at moments, it can also be confusing, frustrating and even lonely.  When my thoughts wander towards the existential, I start to consider questions like where do I belong?  At times, it feels like the answer is everywhere.  At other times, nowhere. The line between the two is astonishingly thin.

But sometimes I find a place where everything falls away into a quiet tranquility.  Sitting on the couch in a close friend's apartment with a glass of wine in hand.  Whatever challenges the universe may present to us, we are in it together.  At the corner table in my favorite restaurant where the waiters greet me with a warm smile and kiss on the cheek.  Somehow food tastes better when you can shake the hand that prepared it. A scenic place to sit in the springtime sunshine. 

These are life's less-discussed joys: friendships that are equally comfortable in silence, glances that say everything without words, the first bite of your favorite meal, the tingling warmth of sunshine on bare skin for the first time since winter.  These things are beautiful, maybe because they don't require words or maybe because they're beyond words.  

Maybe because it's those little things that occasionally leave you speechless.  

Finding My Way

Recently, I've been running up against this word, a word that I hate so much it makes my blood boil, just hearing it.  A concept that I feel like I'm constantly defying, pushing back against, trying to tear down.  But trying to break through this idea, it's like going up against a wall: I can hit and punch and fight, but ultimately, the wall is still there and not any worse for the wear.  The word is perfection.  And everytime I hear it, it makes me want to scream.

Because we have this idea that perfection is something that we can attain, that we need to attain.  The perfect body, the perfect partner, the perfect house, the perfect life.  But we find in this life that we can never be skinny enough or pretty enough or rich enough or successful enough.  There will always be someone on Facebook whose life looks more appealing than our own.  When we seek our happiness from perfection, we talk about it like an earthquake, something that will just violently and suddenly happen to us, without warning, when all the conditions are just right.  It is something that we have no control over, that is totally beyond our reach.

It leaves us afraid of the messy and the uncontrollable, the things that don't fit in the proverbial box that we have already decided must contain our whole life.  Some of the things that won't fit are failure and uncertainty, ruining everything and looking like an idiot.  I'm not sure about all of you, but I've encountered so much of these things in my life (and in myself) that I've had to expand my proverbial box to accommodate plenty of screw ups.

But where does this fear of failing come from?  It is the nervousness of standing in front of the blackboard trying to do a math problem in front of the whole class (show your work!).  It is the anxiety of giving a presentation at work, speaking before a group of people whose respect you value (In conclusion...).  It is the excruciating decision of which words you will choose when you are talking to the someone who means everything to you and you want to pronounce one of those painfully simple yet painfully difficult phrases: I love you or I'm sorry.  

I have seen it in students over the past three years as they try to tackle the Italian language, which is a struggle that I've personally been living along with them.  At the beginning, there is always the fear that you will make a mistake, or say something wrong or look like an idiot.  I want to tell them that if they keep working at it that they will stop making mistakes, stop saying things wrong and be perfect.  But the fact is that in language learning as in life, you never stop making mistakes, you just learn that most of the mistakes ultimately don't matter: sometimes they're even funny, sometimes they're even useful.  At a certain point, you accept imperfection as a fact of life and you get over it. 

Recently, I've felt the need to remind myself to think of my life in the same terms.

Maybe it's especially because the last month has been overwhelming for me.  Moving to a new city and starting a new job, coupled with all the usual general daily frustrations of being an expat, of being a foreigner has proven enough to drive me insane at moments.  There are days when I feel like I can't do anything right!  (Let me remind everyone once again to please be kind to the foreigners and stranieri in your life--we need all the help we can get!)  

And all this has me asking myself how my life would be different had I chosen a different path, a different course, one with fewer rocks and pitfalls and places to stumble.  I think all of us twenty-somethings have at one moment found ourselves scrolling through Facebook, comparing lives with our friends and thinking to ourselves in a moment of existential panic, has everything I've done up until this point been some kind of a terrible mistake?  Am I wasting my life?  

I think we're all looking for road signs here, for things to reassure us that we're headed in the right direction.  We want the clarity, solid lines, definitions and borders that we took for granted growing up.  But what nobody ever bothered to tell us in school or in college is precisely how messy life can be.  It's less a peaceful stroll in the park and more one of those military-grade obstacle courses.  With mud.  Lots of mud.  Did I mention that it's also raining?  We'll reach the end eventually, but not without a lot of sliding, a lot of falling and a lot of pulling ourselves back up, even when we'd rather just throw in the towel.  

Life isn't some kind of an equation that we solve, discovering at the end that x=42, as much as we would like it to be.  Usually, I have found that x=? or x=some-imaginary-number or something equally  frustratingly unfathomable.  Although we want to see in black and white, reality is fraught with grey areas and ambiguity and moral dilemmas and paradoxes that we will never "solve," never reconcile with our beliefs or the world that we so desperately want to live in and it is for that reason that we will continue asking ourselves is this all some kind of terrible mistake???  If you're not asking yourself that question, maybe you just haven't thought about it enough.

But to be honest, I was never satisfied with answers that didn't lead to more questions and I've always thought that those people who claim to "have it all figured out" are either lying or terribly deluded.  I'm learning to enjoy a good roll in the mud, or at least learning to have a good laugh about it afterward.  

Being human, I will probably continue scrolling through Facebook and making comparisons when I shouldn't.  I'll see friends who appear to be doing significantly better than me at taking a perfectly respectable path, doing better than me at having things like stable jobs and houses and spouses.  And I'll wonder where that leaves me and whether or not I'll eventually find the right way, the perfect way.

But then I'll remind myself that there is no manual on how to do this, no surefire 100% money-back guaranteed guide to perfection.  At the end of the day, we're all playing by ear, making it up as we go along.  My choices constitute as valid an attempt as any and so do yours and yours and yours.  

Will we ever find our way?

Maybe there is no right way.

How I Made Peace With my Last Name

“They are a generous and warm-hearted people and these traits must have belonged to their ancestors from the earliest times.”

-A few words by Richard Foley on the O’Heffernan family, from the biography of 18^th-century poet Liam Dall O’Heffernan*

It’s the second day of lessons and the professoressa at the front of the room is calling roll.  The last names of the other students roll gracefully off of her tongue, beautiful, melodic Italian names with vowels to spare.  It’s all a, e, i, o, u—sounds that gently leave her lips and flit around for a second like butterflies before gracefully disappearing.

But it happens when she starts to call the “F” names, suddenly I am conscious of my heart beat in my chest.  By the time she reaches “G,” my heart is racing and I realize that I have a death grip on my pen.  Is the room suddenly really warm or is that just me?  And when I see a brief look of puzzlement on her face, there is a pause.  I know that she has arrived at my name.  There is no vowel at the end, no easy place for your tongue to gently leave the word.  That could probably be forgiven if it weren’t for the horribly breathy H+e combination at the very beginning.  It’s a cursed pairing of letters, something terrible, an arrangement so frightening in the Italian language that it can only be read with a down-turned, uncertain scowl and inevitably followed by a markedly pronounced question mark.

“Eeeef-fer-NAWN?  erEEN Eeeef-fer-NAWN?”

Timidly, I lower my eyes and raise my hand and in the littlest voice I can find…

“si.”

Yes.  I’m here.

Likely, the reality of the situation is that everyone is staring at their phones, not paying any attention at all to me—but I can’t help but feel as if all eyes are on me and all ears on that name.  I feel exposed, my foreignness laid bare.  I’m not from around here, my name announces proudly to anyone that is even a little bit listening.  Once again, my last name has betrayed me.  I just want to hide.

Having an unpronounceable last name makes even simple tasks difficult.  Signing for a package from the FedEx guy?  Forget about it.  When you pronounce the name you just signed, he gives you a look of profound confusion.  Making reservations for something?  Don’t bother—better to use someone else’s name or better yet make up a fake one.  And God forbid you should have to spell out your email address.  Excuse me, but do you have an hour and a half to discuss this?

And for months (maybe even years at this point), I have been secretly trying on other people’s last names in the way that other people try on sweaters.  How much easier would it be a Rossi? Bianchi? Innocenti?  I picture myself walking around, randomly introducing myself to strangers on the street, for the pure ease of it all!  How lovely it could be! Si, tanto piacere!  But something feels un-genuine about appropriating other people’s names.  After all, a last name with no past is like a tree without roots.  Not to mention, it’s creepy.

So I decided that if I must be branded with this name, if it is bound to follow me, stamped on passport no matter how far I travel—maybe I should learn to embrace it.  And so I started to learn.

As it turns out, “Heffernan” or an alternative spelling “Hiffernan” both derive from an old Irish Gaelic family name, “Ua h-Ifearnain,” a name which I had to copy letter for letter out of the pages of a book* because it looks so dreadfully and delightfully foreign.  It possibly comes from the Gaelic word meaning “horse-lords” or more interestingly, “spawns of Hell.”  It’s an ancient name too, which appears in the written records for the first time in 1047* (!!!!!).

And trying to sift through names of people and places I can scarcely understand or recall, grappling to pin down long-gone, forgotten societies of which I know nothing, I realize that history is multi-leveled and multi-layered.  And it makes me feel fragile to settle with the fact that my blood and my genes, the fabric of me, my eventual existence all hang in the balance of these other lives and loves and kings and wars, twists and turns that are so far beyond my grasp.  1047 is a long time before my great-great-great grandfather, John Heffernan arrived in America in the 1850s and an even longer time before I am sweating in a classroom in Italy, embarrassed by the inevitable unpronouncibility of my name, returned to the Old World, but not quite back to the country that John Heffernan fled all those years ago, a place he would hardly recognize now.

But out of lists and names and counties and anecdotes, there emerges in my study the eternal constant of change hard at work.  There is movement of people facing war or political exile or famine, re-emerging and re-settling, loving and living and fighting and doing it all over again the next generation.  And in the New World, the blood of those “generous and warm-hearted” folks would meet blood from other reaches of the world and somehow the outcome (or more accurately another intermediary form) is me, me and this name, surviving long beyond all those poets or scholars or horse-lords or whatever.  And I take comfort knowing that it will surely out-live me too, that I am but a single chapter in a greater narrative. 

And looking at all this movement and change over the centuries, I can’t help but wonder how many Ua h-Iefearnains and O’Heffernans and Hiffernans have shared my experience of being a stranger with a strange name.  Certainly a whole generation did with the anglicizing loss of the “O,” signaling the eventual loss of the entire Gaelic language.  Certainly John Heffernan did when he arrived as an Irishman in a country that remained hostile towards the Irish immigrants, fleeing a desperate famine.  And I come to understand that this bastardized pronunciation is only the most recent development in an unfathomably complicated story. Names, like the humans they designate, are not fragile, static things.  They don’t sit on shelves or hang on walls or rest undisturbed for centuries—they are malleable, changeable and most of all transportable.  And in carrying this name with me, I am part of a noble tradition.

And after all, erEEN Eeeef-fer-NAWN, it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

---------

*I’m drawing from a book called The Heffernans and their Times: A Study in Irish History written by Dr. Patrick Heffernan.  Thanks to my Dad for sharing it with me and for generally being a great source of Heffernan history.

**I'll also add that the professore eventually settled on calling me by my first name, a benevolent gesture sparing everyone involved a lot of frustration.

On Light and Darkness

On my recent visit to Lecce, I really fell in love with the leccese baroque style of architecture.  What Baroque things I see in Florence or in Rome have tended to overwhelm me and to make me want to run and hide, escaping into a room of Renaissance order or Medieval stylized predictability.  But in Lecce, everything was elegant but somehow less aspirational, more content just to exist or to be admired or to decay, whatever the universe might mandate for that particular day.  For this traveller, it gave a sense of ease to everything in the city.

The most beautiful place I visited was the Basilica of Santa Croce, one of the city's treasures, and I went back several times during my stay to reflect and meditate and spend a few uninterrupted moments being awe-struck.

One particular evening, I lit a candle and placed it on the metal tree and sat down to reflect in the peace of the moment.  When I looked up again, I realized that the fragile flame had gone out completely.  I frowned and stood up, re-lit the candle and returned to where I had been sitting, watching my candle and the others around it flicker, restlessly on the verge of going out.

The problem, I quickly realized was that I had chosen the most inopportune place in the church to try to light my candle.  Only a few feet away, an open door was letting cool, clean air into the church and a persistent breeze was teasing and toying with the small fires, threatening to put them out.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the basilica, far from the outside world and under the gaze of a beaming Madonna, another set of candles was burning brightly, proudly and without difficulty.

However, being a restless soul, my focus stuck on the vulnerable little fires in my chosen spot, struggling just to stay a-light: now flickering, now nearly out, now re-kindling to burn twice as bright.  Bending and leaning, it was a deadly dance, a chiaroscuric tango, a visible struggle between the light and the darkness.

It drew my attention to my own fragile spirit and how, as a traveler and a human, I am often leaving my own candle in wind-swept places.  Because trying to have a compassionate heart and a sense of hope in a world where so many people are hurting and suffering, where there is so much inequality is something like trying to light a candle in the wind--everything is against it.  To try to find the best, without denying the worst, can be a heart-wrenching task.  And with hope, as with candles, there are moments when it flickers and fades.  Yet just when you think it has finally gone out for good, it comes back with a vengeance, burning twice as bright.

But as rough as the constant back-and-forth can be, the un-examined alternative is less appealing still.  I think of what it means to hide in the quiet part of the church--to burn brightly without doubt and struggle. For me, this is to live, consciously or unconsciously, in denial of the world's realities, which are decidedly not all Madonnas and cherubs and vaguely-inspired upturned glances.

Not being satisfied any other way, I will likely continue to light my candles in all the literallytheworst places that I can find, in defiance of all comfort and good sense.  I will continue to flirt with the darkness and to let myself be haunted by all the uncertainties, doubts and contradictions of the world. After all, seeking refuge in the moral and intellectual quiet corner was never really my style.

And despite my best efforts, I know that my flame will never calm itself, that it will continue to flicker and fade when the wind comes to call, as it inevitably does.  But I will try to console myself that at the moments when the flame is at its lowest point, about to be extinguished for good, it's only a second away from coming back twice as bright.

I don't know who is in control here, but it certainly isn't me....

Some people believe that they have guardian angels watching over them.  I believe something like that, but maybe the opposite.  If I have a guardian angel, I suppose he has my best interests at heart (evidence: I am still alive), but sometimes I question his methods.  Because there are moments occasionally when I start to think that I have everything in life figured out, that I have it all down. On days like this, I stroll confidently around, knowing that I am that girl, the one who has everything under control.

And it is in moments like these that I inevitably feel my foot falling into a crack in the cobblestones as I'm walking along and I know that I am powerless to prevent what is about to happen.  And I fall down.  On my face.  In the middle of the street.  In front of dozens of people.

Humility is certainly something that the world could use a bit more of and at moments, it certainly feels like there is someone out there making sure that I have my fair share. (That thing about falling on my face, that's not a metaphor, by the way.)

But I admit that sometimes these not-so-subtle reminders are needed.  Because occasionally I decide, in my own mind, for whatever reason, that I personally run the world.  I see rain in the forecast and (ever the optimist) I decide that it will not rain today. I decide to travel to a new town, which I have never visited before because, despite all indications to the contrary, it is going to be beautiful today.  Being something of an over-confident traveler, I also decide on this particular day that I instinctively know how to arrive to the city center from the train station and that I do not need to ask for directions.  (Anyone who knows me well or has ever traveled with me knows that there is absolutely ZERO precedent in my life to indicate that I instinctively know the way anywhere.  Not ever.  Not one single time.)

And that is how I somehow end up wandering a deserted street of trulli in Alberobello, by myself, in the pouring rain.  My shoes are wet, my rain coat has completely soaked through and I am surrounded by this charming, miraculous beauty which I have all to myself.  It would be absolutely magical--if I weren't so incredibly miserable.

Uhm...hello....is anybody there?  Anybody?

So I duck under the porch on someone's delightful little holiday house, as the rain pours sideways, soaking me even more and I ask myself, what sane person would do this?

And the universe answers back to me, only a completely insane person would find themselves in this situation.

So I take a moment to evaluate my own actions over the past twenty-four years that have led me up to this exact time and place and suddenly everything becomes clear.  Yes, completely insane, that sounds about right.

And at a moment like this, all I can do is laugh: at this place, at this rain and mostly at myself.

Laugh and promise myself an extra glass of wine at lunch (if I ever find lunch).

And pray that someone will sell me dry trullo-themed socks.

And remind myself that humility is certainly something the world could use a bit more of.

In the end, it did turn out to be a beautiful day.  So maybe I was right after all?

Alberobello and I parted on good, if soggy, terms.

Yellow Leaves

I was stopped in my tracks the other day by the first tree with yellow leaves.  I just stood there as we confronted each other-- me with all my preconceived notions of what a tree should look like during the month of August, it with its own defiant existence speaking for itself.

In that moment, I was so surprised by the sudden change that I had not yet built up my own existential defenses.  And I've been trying this whole time to put a label on the feeling that assaulted me in that moment when I had my guard down.  It was something like awe-- seeing the power of nature in its earliest moment of visible change.  But it was also something like dread, the yellow leaves having always been for me something of a memento mori.  At the same time, it was something like joy, a looking forward to scarves and new olive oil and young wine.  But it was also a deep, lamenting sadness, knowing that the days of tingling sunshine warmth on bare skin are numbered.  And so I found myself standing dumb-founded in the piazza like an idiot, laid emotionally bare at the sight of a single tree, with this almost-awe, almost-dread, almost-sadness, almost-joy coming together in an aching knot in the pit my stomach.

I speculate that I find myself so defenseless, so powerless in the face of the onset of the Fall because I grew up in place where the fluctuation of seasons was minimal.  When the variety of seasons ranges from not-that-cold to warm to hot to inferno, the changing of the leaves is less dramatic and the change in temperature and life even less so.  Although I grew up coloring pictures of yellow leaves as backdrops for turkeys and pumpkins, I did not so much recognize them in the world around me and so I don't yet take this endless, beautiful cycle of death and re-birth for granted.

In the moment when those yellow leaves entered my consciousness and I was feeling in my gut and in my bones that wrenching and releasing, I was somehow feeling how many times this moment, this breathless moment at the cusp of two seasons, had existed without me here to witness it and how many times it will continue to exist when I am long gone.  And in confronting these yellow leaves, I am standing face-to-face with how little this whole system has to do with my own wishes and desires, how little control I have and that ultimately, I am but a single, microscopic piece of something incomprehensibly bigger than myself.

I can't help but think that this is all good preparation for the day when I will wake up and again be stopped in my tracks by the yellowing of my own leaves.  I hope that I will remind myself of and take consolation in the beautiful, fiery Fall landscapes and the abundance of the autumnal harvest.   And when the yellow leaves of my own Autumn yield to the brown of Winter, as they inevitably do, I hope I'll remember how equally inevitably, the brown of Winter always yields to the fresh, hopeful green of Spring.

On Flight

Looking at the top side of clouds

My earliest memory of flight is seen from the pilot's seat: all knobs and buttons and windows, soaring above the ground, blue sky as far as the eye can see.  Sometimes when I think back, I see little parachuters in the sky in front of me, dancing like fearless ballerinas (although I'm fairly certain that this part was imagined and melded together with the real memories by time).  My Dad owned a little plane and we would go flying together, just the two of us, landing at the tiniest air fields around Oklahoma and Texas, always just in time to enjoy the warm, corn frittery goodness known as hush puppies for lunch.  (On a side note, my now-health-nut-militant-vegan Father probably laments that in addition to instilling in me a love of flight, he also instilled in me a love for all things battered and fried.)

I think that, having less life experience then, I didn't realize what a sheer miracle flight is.  As children, we are so near to a state where everything is totally novel and mystifying that nothing seems impossible.  Even gravity, that magical force that binds our world together, seems less obvious, less guaranteed, less taken-for-granted in those years.

But now that I'm older, I learned to be skeptical and I have so many doubts.  Like why should this huge metal tube be able to go hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour?  Nowadays, this is the thing that seems less obvious to me.  If I had been less resistant to learning physics, I could probably explain to you that the air on top of the wing is moving faster than the air on the bottom and blah blah blah.  But in this case, I'm happy to simply be enchanted by this beguiling trick of movement and matter and lift.  I'm content to remain blissfully mystified.  Because what other emotion can you experience in the face of something as beautiful as flight?

We go up and up and up and the ground gets so small--first the cars look like toy cars and then they disappear completely.  I always picture all my problems and anxieties diminishing like that too.  If only for an hour or two, I see everything in perspective.

And then suddenly a burst and we are inside the clouds and with a second burst, we are above them!  We are seeing something incredible: the top sides of clouds and the landscape below is replaced by cloud mountains and cloud rivers and cloud castles.  This, for me, never gets old.

And for some reason, at this point in the flight, I always start to think about Leonardo da Vinci and his flying contraptions half-a-millennium ago.  And I wonder what he would give to trade places with me, right in this moment, to be able to see the top side of the clouds.

And I remember a particular spot, on the hillside of Fiesole, where there is a plaque commemorating how he would throw his apprentices, strapped into who-knows-what crazy flying machine, sending them tumbling into the valley below.  I especially wonder about those apprentices and what it must have been like for them, thunk thunk thunk down the hill in the name of curiosity.  But I think that surely at some point, one of them must have caught some lift, or at least hit the wind in just the right way and realized that, like anything in life, the thing that makes it scary is also the thing that makes it magnificent.  The climbing, the weightlessness, the nothing between you and the ground, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of falling.  I hope that for all that they went through, they caught some taste of this breathlessness.

And I think of my own descent on my most recent trip, falling into a startling sunrise sky above Paris.  A layer of solid grey clouds above, a layer of thin wispy grey clouds below and in between the most fiery, passionate, soul-awakening red sky I have ever seen.  And here I am right with them: the weightlessness, the nothing between me and the ground, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of falling.  In a word: breathlessness.