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In my home country the clock is striking midnight, opening our independence day. What do we celebrate? A few hours ago I finished The Poisonwood Bible. The Congo: another country we robbed of independence. We chop down so many plants like this after they struggle so long just to sprout. Arundhati Roy gave a list of the countries the US has had military involvement with since the Vietnam War. I can remember them all as easily as I might carry a fist full of sand from this beach through my day without spilling.
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In college I could not study abroad because I could not, I thought, go anywhere except as a tourist (missionary, colonizer, gentrifier, it amounted to the same thing). Parsing the ethical dilemmas involved was scary, so I took the easy way out and stayed "home." Now I am in Italy, a country I feel OK visiting because my ethnic roots are here. The connection is thin, though, stretched by time and distance. My great (great?) grandparents crossed an ocean to the United States, and then two generations later my mother put a whole continent between herself and her family/ethnic enclave in Connecticut. Everyone who knows anything of the people with my my mother's maiden name, Sirica, are dead. The handful of Italian words I know I learned off a language CD. But I have a third cousin name Tony and a third cousin named Vinny, guys with grey hair slicked back over ruddy domes, arms bulging out of tank top they won at a sock hop in the 50s. They say if I go to a town called Cercemaggiore and ask for a man named Domenico Rainone, I'll be greeted as family. I guess I'm desperate enough to take their word for it.
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When I understand places and landscapes relative to one another, am I connecting or am I confusing myself, shrouding the underglimmer of a particular place? The way east Texas was southern Michigan, the Battle Creek to Detroit interstate corridor; or Dorchester, Vermont in the mist almost reminded me of Chilean Patagonia. Yesterday the path out of Lévanto was eerie in its likeness to a path that runs out of my hometown, the Matt Davis Trail below Table Rock. The trail narrow, dusty, cut with stone steps; the foliage oak and what looked like bay. Granted, olive trees were interspersed and the forest was a bit drier than that part of Mt. Tam. But the mountain faced the same south-westerly direction out on the ocean and the sun set just off the shoulder of a landmass like Bolinas mesa. In a few hours they'll be unwinding a long rope there for the town vs. town tug-of-war. Then there'll be a floats, dancing, the national anthem sung off the balcony of "the oldest bar west of the Mississippi." We'll eat pork ribs, coconut popscicles, shrimp tamales, mango on a stick amidst the smell of smell of pot, hamburgers and firecrackers. Celebrating independence, from something.
