Scusi me while I touch the sky...

September 9, 2011

A young couple invited me into the cabinovia to ride up the hill with them to Erice. He wanted to practice his English, and his wife-to-be is a photographer. They live in a small town in Calabria and are planning a wedding in October.

We chatted about my travels in Italy and he was surprised that I had visited Bari, Matera and the Sassi. I told him that I liked to travel, and have done it alone since my husband died. He reached into his wallet and took out a laminated business card with a photo of a man, molto bello e simpatico, on one side. On the other side was a very short bio and a religious passage. This was his father who died on April 24, he said. The young man's voice quavered a bit. He said his father was a wonderful man and he missed him very much. He'd died of cancer, and he'd held his hand when he died.

He said he felt as if his father would be there if he turned around, and I said I understood how that feels. The silence in the cabinovia grew thick. It turned out that his father was beloved by so many friends - he was called the professor - that in the little town of 2500 people where the family lived, over 5000 had attended the funeral. "I felt very strange the day of the funeral," he said. "It was unreal. I felt like a block of ice in the sun."

Those words have stayed with me ever since he spoke them. It is the exact way to describe grief, an unnatural out of the body experience. An altered state.

Later I ran into them in a small osteria at the top. I was looking for gelato, and they were buying lunch. "Let me get you an ice cream," he said. "Something cold to drink, too." How nice they were. I could not say no. I could only say "Grazie mille."