One moves to a new place for a year. Then, having lived in the new home for three and a half months, one returns to one’s actual home and spends a few weeks in all the old familiar places, before heading back to the new residence. And as one undertakes all this to-and-fro’ing, “home” loses and gains meanings, seems a notion at once indisputably real and utterly unreal…
So I’m back here in Castiglione del Terziere, where cats currently outnumber residents, 3-to-1. What struck me most upon my return, four days ago? The silence. It’s splendidly quiet here, though the donkeys still bray when they please. There’s no subway rumbling under our little house.
And no noisy election madness underway, either. No one to talk to, here, about how wacky Romney’s running-mate is, or how plastic Mitt himself is—plastic in the sense of endlessly malleable, and plastic in the sense that his body and persona alike seem composed only and purely of the stuff; and plastic, too, in the sense that watching this contender for the presidency, I cannot help but share Dustin Hoffman’s unnerved reaction at that moment in “The Graduate” when the LA businessman says to him “just one word—plastics,” and he realizes that the future lying before him is, well, lying to him.
Another thing about Castiglione: cars are way smaller here than in New York! Or in Philadelphia, where my parents’ assisted-living community is located. Some of the residents there, my 88-year-old father among them, have hung onto the big honkin’ cars they bought fifteen or twenty years ago—hence the parking lot is quite something to behold…
My father’s Lincoln Town Car is an old soul, black, with leather seats and the sort of deep cool purr to its engine that no ordinary cat could reproduce. Its dashboard is fake cherry wood, quite snazzy. When the car’s exterior started showing its age a few months ago, my father took a small paintbrush and some wall paint and re-did the whole rear end of the car. It now has a half-glossy, half-matte finish, très recherché.
My father’s vehicle happens to look just like one of those superannuated car-service sedans that ply Park Slope’s streets and ferry folks to the airports. I once drove the Lincoln from Philly to Brooklyn and, in an effort to park it, tooled around a four-block radius for a solid half-hour, praying for some SUV to liberate a spot. At a stoplight, a young woman with a heavy knapsack tapped on my window and asked me frantically if I could take her to JFK. She was entirely serious, and I realized only after I’d declined that I could’ve earned an easy C-note by saying yes.
My Italian husband, a true sport, doesn’t mind my father’s mafia jokes or mock-Italian accent. Indeed, Antonio even consented to hopping into the Lincoln’s trunk to prove that yes, a mobster could indeed fit a body in there, easily! It’s a lounge-worthy space. (Explaining the notion of “cement overshoes” to Antonio took a few moments, but he laughed when he got it.) We both marveled at how comfy the car was, how easy to drive, how nostalgia-inducing... How Romney-ish, really: a frightening waste of energy, a comic and vulgar emblem of power, a flashback to a myth of superiority that never had any validity yet has nonetheless managed—is still, alas, managing—to reassure a great many of our fellow-citizens, as well-wrought, well-funded lies can do.
What’s the Republican Party now? A wholesale manufacturer of fear and prejudice. With those two poisonous products, it’s managed to drug roughly half our nation. May the other rough half (the 47 percent, a.k.a. the 99 percent) prevail…
