Dressed 2 Kill in a Red Vogue Dress

When Mom turned 90, she chose this, her favorite dress, to wear to the big party. She had some difficulty dressing herself in those days and I assumed I would help her into this formidable construction. But while I made us breakfast that morning, she put it on by herself in her room. I was astonished. Old memories stored in her body must have magically dressed  her that day. The only concession to age she made in this outfit was her decision to forego high heels. Thank goodness! Here she is, 90, and dressed to kill.

My mother loved beautiful things and took great care of everything she owned because "money doesn't grow on trees." No wonder then that this red wool dress trimmed in white ostrich is in as good condition now as it was when Maxine Ward sewed it from a Vogue "Paris Original" pattern in Chester in the '60s.

Mom is tiny and hard-to-fit, so when she wanted a special dress, she turned to Maxine who was, and probably still is, an equisite seamstress. Only someone with Maxine's skill could have made this dress, which was more constructed than sewn.

As you can see here, the dress is zipped up the front (you have to put it on over the head). Covering the zipper is a panel with 8 buttons, 4 on each side secured with 6 snaps at the top. Whew! Just getting into it required dexterity and resolve.

Ostrich feathers were all the rage in the 60s. Mom had a blue housecoat trimmed in ostrich. I suspect that the white ostrich trim on this dress wasn't part of the Vogue pattern, but Mom's fanciful personal stamp on this confection.

Pillbox hats were fashionable in the 60s, too, thanks to Jackie Kennedy's trend-setting millinery. Mom loved hats, wore them to church and other dress up events. But I think this is her only pillbox. It's white mink. I'm sure ostrich wouldn't have withstood Montana wind, dirt, and pelting snow, so mink was of course the hardier choice.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom, on this beautiful day in May! Your little red dress awaits its next party!

Saying Goodbye 2 Mom's House

This stream-of-conscious post from September 2014 was written on the last night I spent in my mother's Chester duplex before the new owners moved in.

Tonight I am going to try to sleep on a yoga mat that my brother brought up from Bilings on his second round trip of this big move out of my mother's apartment where she lived 11 years before the nursing home became the better option. I am surrounded by objects from my past which I find hard to spend time absorbing, like scripts from the plays I acted in during 1972 in Santa Maria, California when I realized that to succeed in theatre meant immersion in theatre and sacrificing other interests. My world was too large then to commit to a laser focus on theatre. But in looking at my old scripts, I feel the joy of participating in productions where actors gave their hearts to characters and the resulting creations sent audiences into appreciative laughter, tears, and feeling a part of something beyond themselves.

It's very quiet here in Chester now between trains and with an impending snow in mid-September. Not the Indian summer I was hoping to go out on, but maybe more fitting of my mood. Quiet. Contemplative. Soft. I have loved seeing my mother every day and seeing her recognize me and call me by name. She remembers I live in Washington. That I work in an office. During today's visit, I took some pictures of her which she didn't recognize as herself. Then I showed her some of her clothes I've photographed and she recognized a few, and looking at those pictures provided the most extended conversation I've had with her. What a window into her mind. If only I can find other ways to engage her. My dear mother, tomorrow your children will leave your last house. What will you know or feel of our good-byes to a phase of your long and instructive life?

Chester, Montana: Odyssey on Highway 2

I wrote this stream-of-consciousness post nearly a month ago as my odyssey began.

I am here to clear out my mother's apartment in her duplex. After nearly three years of trying, I have sold it. In going through my mother's things, accumulated over 95 years of living, I see my life and my brother's play across landscapes and dreams of the lives our parents bred us to embrace. Part of me wants to be unsentimental and to dispense with the things left in Mom's apartment quickly and rationally. A whole other part of me wants to stop time and hold every single object and feel its familial weight before letting it go to the pile for the church rummage sale or in the box going to the neice who doesn't really want another English china tea cup. One of my friends is enthused about getting something from my mother's last effects. I bless her because she affirms my mother's life, therefore my own. Another of my nieces wants the workhorse Singer sewing machine my mother patched our clothes on and I tried to learn how to sew on and my heart cries so gladly for her wanting it.

A life's things are no less for being mere objects if they infuse memories with love and respect. I have begun an art project inspired by a full page display in The New  York Times last Mother's Day called "Mom's Genes." I am photographing my mother's iconic and oh-so-fashionable-back-then clothes on a manikin that belonged to my mother-in-law who recently died. Before I consign my mother's beautiful clothes to the Methodist Church rummage sale, I'm photographing them to remember the great taste she had and the panache with which she wore her clothes in this small Montana town where the streets were not paved until the 60s when my father briefly became mayor.

Now I'm back, contemplating a lifetime of lessons from my parents in this town that loves its young without reservation and still claims them, like me, when they're getting on in years even if they don't vote Republican. 

On this moonlit night, the trains whistle every hour or 40 minutes: wheat and some coal to west coast ports. Oil from the Bakken. Amtrak passengers get sidetracked when commodity loads thunder by. Once I stood on our wood pile in the backyard with my friend Donise and waved frantically at an eastbound train which she convinced me carried Elvis Presley. The world here is huge in imagination. Reality is, I need to clear out my mother's house and all of the treasures I hold in my hands will be but oddities in others' arms. 

Journey 2 Another Walled Roman Town -- Chester, England!

San Michele in Foro in Lucca, Italy
Do you see the Archangel on the very top?
Pisan style, multicolored marble, exquisite

That's right! About a year ago, I was in Lucca, Italy where I daily perambulated the beautiful wall that encloses that delightful Tuscan city. Now I'm on my way to Chester in Cheshire which is also encircled and whose wall is even older than Lucca's which wasn't started until the 1500s.

Although Chester, Montana (no wall!) was probably named for Chester, Pennsylvannia, the American "Chesters" must have been inspired by the ancient English town. The Romans' settlement in England, dating from the 1st century AD,  was called Deva, a fort next to the Dee River from which they deployed their largest permanent legion. There is still a section of Roman masonry in Chester's wall and the outline follows the Roman's outer fort for much of its length. 

What a treat to be able to compare two walled cities to which I am tied by blood, birth, and circumstance. The circularity of my journey from Chester to Lucca to Chester strikes me as an inevitable consequence in my longing to find my way back home. I have many homes, as it turns out. I've just begun to discover them all!

While I make my way to  England, I will gaze at beautiful Lucca, Italy and long for her wall. May Chester's be as mighty and as beautiful. 

Lucca's wall and lush green meadow on its outside

The top of the wall where everyone goes to see and be seen

Lucca's wall, the perfect place for an evening passeggiata

Presepi di Natale: Beautiful 2 Behold!

Since our arrival in Naples a week ago, the traditional presepi (nativity scenes) have been appearing throughout the city. Every church displays one or more tableaus which can be very small or big and grand. There are three components to presepi: one, when the shepherds are told that Christ has been born; two, the scene in the manger which is always set in a grotto; and three, the tavern in which there was no room for Mary and Joseph and where secular life continues in all of its vivacity. These three scenes, ranging from the sacred to the profane, are arranged in a pre-formed "set," much like the model theatre sets I used to build in college. 

The presepi in these photos came to life in our hotel yesterday. The figures are particularly fine--they have terra cotta heads and appendages with cloth/straw bodies (the oldest presepi are carved wooden figures). We discovered the Christ child hidden on a ledge in the grotto awaiting his cue to join the others on December 25!

The Shepherds (one fast asleep)

The Manger (minus the baby, for now)

The Tavern (unaware of the momentous event in the grotto)

Buon Natale!

Ciao.

Torna a Surriento (Return 2 Sorrento): Thanksgiving in Italia

My little dog Lucca is not pleased. She watched the suitcases emerge from storage this morning and rightly surmised that our departure is imminent.When I told her that we were going back to Italy, this time to Naples, she demanded a belly rub. I think that's a fitting response, don't you? Going to Italy makes me feel like a belly rub is about to materialize, too.

Thirty years ago on my first trip to Italy with my mother, we went to the Amalfi coast. Sorrento was our base for a couple of days' sightseeing in Pompeii and Capri. At night we strolled the streets during the passeggiata, eating gelato and marveling at the many street musicians playing Neapolitan songs which made you want to simultaneously cry and laugh. The songs grabbed my heart despite not understanding more than a word here or there, especially Torna a Surriento. That song squeezes my heart hard, a little like what the Trevi Fountain in Rome does to me. "How can you abandon this place of love?"

Sorrento derives its name from the ancient mythological sirens calling seafarers to their everlasting fate:

"Look! How lovely the sea!
The fragrance of orange blossoms fills the air.
Sea maidens encircle, enchant, watch, and wish to kiss you.
And yet you say, 'Farewell, I leave?'
But can you abandon this place of love?
Don't go! Don't torment me!
Return to Sorrento so that I won't die!"

So, thirty years on, I'm going back. It's my fate.

Ciao!

A Quixotic Quest 2 Find My Lucchesi Family

Three Tries Before I Can Say "Sono Lucchesi!" to a Living Relative

First Try

Ever since my first trip to Italy in 1982 with my mother, I have yearned to meet someone connected by blood to her father, my Italian grandfather. On that first trip, we got as close as Florence, but I couldn't convince Mom to go further west from Florence to Altopascio and Badia Pozzeveri to search for family. I think she was self-conscious about depending too much on the willingness of a guide to bridge not only the language gap but also the decades of broken connection with her father's birthplace since he had emigrated to the U.S. never to return. 

Second Try

In 1998, I traveled to Tuscany again, this time with Kit and friends Bill and Mia. We hadn't planned to visit the Lucca area, but fate intervened in the form of a little car accident (a woman talking on her phone ran into our car) and we found ourselves on the road to Lucca. When the signs for Altopascio began to appear, we decided to take a look at this (fabled, in my mind anyway) place. No matter that none of us spoke Italiano, we rolled up to the post office where I inquired (with creative sign language and my repertoire of five Italian words) about the local cemetery where I hoped to find a few residents who shared my grandfather's surname. Miraculously, we were able to understand enough Italian to follow the directions to a cemetery where we found so many gravestones bearing grandpa's surname that I cried in amazement at all these ancestors together in this ancient place. I felt rooted to the spot.

Third Try's a Charm

When I went to Lucca Italian School last May, one of my goals was to learn enough Italiano to be able to talk with relatives in Altopascio or Badia Pozzeveri if I were lucky enough to find anyone. But where should my search begin? Could I find that cemetery again? Was it the one on my maps, outside of Altopascio? I really had just two slender threads to follow, a 31-year-old address for someone in Badia Pozzeveri who might or might not be related and a 60-year-old letter from my grandfather's sister to my grandmother. 

Again, fate intervened. A friend of a friend produced another friend who works as a guide in Tuscany; David Beatty, guide and raconteur, calls his business "Follow Your Nose." I immediately followed my nose right to him, and "yes!" he had a day available to take me in search of my relatives. David and his trusty GPS got us to the Altopascio cemetery, but, alas, it didn't look familiar to me and there were just a few familiar surnames, not the scores I'd remembered. Undeterred, David encouraged me to put my Italiano to work by asking a couple of cemetery visitors if we were in the "right" cemetery. 

Per favore, signora...

Three weeks of Italiano made me fearless in approaching them, but it was the 60-year-old letter in Italiano from my grandfather's sister that bridged the language gap and produced answers. We were advised to go back to Altopascio to pick up the road leading to Badia Pozzeveri and its cemetery. There we would likely find the gravestones I sought.

Dritto, poi a sinistra, per via Francigena...

After a couple of hiccoughs (GPS loves exact addresses and abhors place names or proper nouns), David put us on the right road to the cemetery. I hadn't remembered the small medieval church outside the cemetery wall, nor the fact that it lies on via Francigena, the ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury Cathedral in England to Rome. Although no one was working on the day we visited, archaeological work in the area and church restoration have begun, and relatively new directional signs now mark the pilgrim path. No doubt the growing interest in these medieval survivors has been fed by awareness of potential tourism opportunities in difficult economic times.

Abbazia di Pozzeveri, founded in 1103 as a Camaldolese congregation of the Order of St. Benedict

I considered finding the cemetery and paying my respects to the ancestors a great coup and would have happily wandered on to some other adventure, but David, for whom "follow your nose" is not just a business but a way of life, reminded me that I still had the 60-year-old letter from my grandfather's sister and a 31-year-old street address for her son in Badia Pozzeveri to use as clues in the search for relatives. So, we plugged the address into the GPS and went to find a dwelling that could potentially yield information about my family.

We found this house at the address, but before we even approached the door, a neighbor came to greet us. Like the kind people at the Altopascio cemetery, she spoke no English, but I produced the 60-year-old letter pronto having learned that it could explain the reason for my presence and my questions better than I could do in my fledgling Italiano. The letter released a torrent of information along with regret that I had come too late to meet the relatives who once lived here. Indeed, my grandfather's sister's son had lived here, but mother and son were both deceased and someone else, most certainly not a relative, lived in the house. 

My grandfather's nephew lived here. His mother wrote the 60-year-old letter in my hand.

I pressed the neighbor for information about any other relatives, perhaps descendants who might live in the area. As if to throw more resources into this language-challenged exchange, she briefly disappeared into her house and reappeared with her husband who produced an index card and pencil and began to write what seemed to be a rough family tree. I'm not sure what I finally said that made him understand I was interested in finding a living relative, but he took out his cell phone, dialed someone, talked for a minute, then hung up and smiled. Whoever had been on the other end of the line was going to join us. 

Soon, from across the street, I saw a man coming toward us. As he approached, I was amazed by his resemblance to my grandfather. Same body build. Same facial shape. Same nose! He didn't speak any English, but by this time, English was irrelevant. He took the index card with the names written down by his neighbor, then added more names, including his own, Vasco. If I followed the outline of the index card lineage correctly, Vasco's mother was my grandfather's sister. That made us cousins. Davvero!

Vasco

I can't express how surprised and thrilled I was to meet Vasco. But no sooner had I begun to absorb this happy event than Vasco's son arrived home from work. Another cousin, another generation! When I learned his name, Luca, I tried to explain that my beloved dog (who I imagined was languishing at home awaiting my return) is named Lucca (feminine, after Lucca, the city). If only my Italiano had been good enough, I would have mused romantically about the thread in my life connecting Lucca, Italy with Lucca my dog, and now Luca my cousin.

Luca

 Dizzy with the realization that I'd fulfilled a wish held for most of my life, and overwhelmed by the language challenge, I bid farewell to my new-found family with the promise that I would return. In my "I-can't-believe-this-just-happened" state, I forgot to ask for their addresses! Thanks to David who followed his nose back to Badia Pozzeveri a few days later, I now have addresses and an e-mail for Luca. I can retire the old address and put away the old letter and look forward to a future in which our Italian and American families stay connected.

I sure hope I interpreted that family tree on the index card correctly! What a great incentive to keep working on my Italiano so that the next time I visit I can confirm I didn't just will this connection into being! To be continued...

Cousins

Ciao!