~a column by Colleen O’Brien
After 10 days of ignoring American political news, I am home again to the onslaught of even more dire happenings than ever. The quiet vacation was at first vaguely uncomfortable – where is my newsfeed? – and then my vacation became perfect. I packed away my phone for lack of WiFi on the boat I cruised on and spent my leisure watching the sea slide by and then slowly docking quayside, then the clockwork busyness of a port in the Mediterranean unloading endless plats of white plastic-wrapped cargo from deep holds amidships of a Chinese vessel onto waiting flatbed semis taking it away to vast warehouses.
No one could tell me what was being transferred that looked like thousands of filing cabinets carefully wrapped, but the process was as absorbing as the ports we walked through, thousands of us stepping carefully down our own gangplanks to investigate different ways of life than we live. Or just to shop for the folks at home, apparent to me soon enough as a common reason for traveling to Europe.
I enjoyed the ports and the life there more than the life on the cruise line that took me to them, but it is a good way to see lots of cities I could never afford to fly to individually. Taking such a cruise is like taking a bus tour of all of Rome and deciding which places I now know I want to return to for the rest of the week; in this analogy, when I fly to Rome and know where I need to go without getting on a bus where the tour guide often talks too much or not enough, speaks broken English to Americans who can speak no foreign tongue at all or sounds so bored, I wonder if I’ve chosen the wrong city to visit.
The couple of times I’ve traveled outside the country, my goal has been to talk to the natives about their opinions of America; I know this sounds self-absorbed and perhaps even Ugly American-like, but it’s because I’ve learned that foreigners have wild opinions of us and our goings-on, and I want to listen to them rather than reinforce them, as well as write about them.
Their opinions are firm: we are crime-ridden, we have dirty streets and falling bridges, we are not nice to one another, our politics is confusing to the rest of the world that counts on us. In other words, we are no shining beacon on a hill; we are their great disillusionment about the democracy we pretend to be.
I don’t explain that we have never lived up to the goals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, nor even mention that we did have forefathers who wrote it, ensuing generations of new and old Americans trying dutifully to fulfill its sensible (mostly) ideas, difficult to keep in place, hard work to maintain. We also wound up with a complement of people who arrived from all over the world to find a better place than where they’d been born, and it turned out to be true for those who sought it and were not dragged here in chains.
In so many immigrant lives, this is what happened; not every one of them found gold lying in the streets. The ideas of an enlightened government run by the people is still shining up there on that hill, however. We know it’s not all-encompassing, but it’s truer than in many places on this wide planet. The conclusion among us humans is that if there’s a chance, we take it. America has been the chance for millions, including just about all our white forebearers. Which is why we now have a large country more diverse in population and opinion than most.
I listened to the guy who owned a pizza/wine bar on the Naples promenade by the incoming cruise ships. He and his brothers ran a tidy, well-lit place with typical Italian pizza (not too much cheese, no sauce except what came from the grilled tomatoes), homemade pasta, great house wine with no sulfites. And a story to tell: “Our grandparents fled Napoli between the wars, my parents grew up in New York City. I was born there. I came back. I like it better here.”
Why?
“It’s Italia, that’s why!” he said with his arms wide, his hands cupped as if full of goodness.
I hitched a ride with a fellow eating his sandwich out of the back of his little car along the harbor in Cannes. When I couldn’t hail a taxi and asked him, he said he could take me back to my boat and I said, “Perfect.”
He moved his pups to the back where they looked at me indignantly as the fellow held the door and I sat down in their seat. Off we went. He told me he’d been to the States, visiting connections as far west as Chicago — “I liked everything fine,” he said, “except . . . I never saw a lot of people on the streets drinking wine and talking to each other and listening to some guy who starts playing a guitar. It just wasn’t, like, uh, here,” he said, waving an arm out his window at the people on the street, in the sidewalk cafes, standing around talking with their hands (always). “You know, people being with people whether they know them or not.”
He paused for a minute, laughed, and added, “Or like them or not. Lots of arguing out there with those guys.” True. Four guys at a table with wine or lattes or espressos talking, arguing? in big voices, hands wildly adding emphasis . . . a kind of sitting down, sidewalk ballet with deep basso arias repeated endlessly.
He let me off near the port, told me he would take no money…. “I just like to talk to Americans now and then,” he said with a smile. I told him I liked to talk to real Italians, he smiled even wider, we both said ‘Ciao,” and he putted off in his little European vehicle.
I am regretting that I hadn’t asked him to stop for a glass of wine so we could join the scene, shouting and gesticulating about anything, everything, politics included, happy as Italians.
