Leftovers and Hangovers

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Leftovers

Or

Hangovers

“I don’t want to work away, doin’ just what they all say; work hard boy, you’ll find, someday you’ll have a job like mine” Cat Stevens

        Make a New Year’s resolution to carve some time out from your harried hurried half-happy life here; go spend time someplace that you’ve never been. Perhaps where your people originate (preferably as a non-judgmental  open-minded visitor). We’re ALL immigrants here, seek a place where time stops and go there, chill and practice passeggiata.

        As you know, I visited my grandparent’s little village in the hills outside of Messina in Sicily this year. Eighteen days and nights. To show how remote this village is, it took me thirty-six continuous hours of traveling to get there; plane, plane, plane, bus, train; a missed bus but, thankfully a forty-five-minute taxi up a winding mountainous road. There’s nothing going on there but life as they know it.

        It’s a simple place called San Piero Patti and known in faraway times as Petra; Petra is the feminine form of the word Petros (Peter) which in Greek means ‘Rock’; the village in Sicily that I went to was definitely carved from a very rocky mountain. It’s assumed that it was originally a Greek settlement; I was told that the area has been inhabited for thousands of years.

        There are twenty-seven hundred people who live there, spread out across miles; it’s not densely populated. There’s a piazza (plaza) large enough for a car to turn around and a large church that together account for relatively few level surfaces; everything, all the stone streets and pathways, are either uphill or downhill (of course, it’s the same thing one way or another) and there’s a lot of walking to do if you want to get from point A to point B. Knees and leg muscles are apt to get a workout whether you like it or not.

        The usual attitude for folks in a thousand-year-old culture is: shops open in early morning and close for a four-to-five-hour break at mid-day; opening back up for the early evening and then to dinner, date and/or drink (or two). A bakery, bookstore, green grocer and commodities shopping, one each, enough to satisfy. A jeweler, hardware, auto parts and repair, pharmacy, electronics and local police etc. There is also a City(?) Hall and records department. The whole place is run ‘Piano-Piano’, in other words, ‘as time and moods dictate’.

        The younger ones travel down the hill to larger towns for work or to get away and eventually come back and stay because there’s nothing out there that they really want or need. It reminds me of the French Quarter back in the day; the smell of baking bread in the morning; everyone knowing each other; the lazy time-enough-for-everything attitude.

        The roads are crooked and hazardous, everyone drives as fast as they can (stick shift); majority smoke tobacco, drink espresso and if they want, have gelato for breakfast. Food is simple and satisfying; the fruit and vegetables are always at their peak of fresh and ripeness. The air is clean and the surrounding mountains lush and verdant. There’re more people in the cemetery than live in town.

        I stayed in a guest house in the middle of town, right on the Piazza, birds called ‘Swifts’ darted about; old men walking their dogs; people buying foodstuffs, wine, olive oil and bread. The second day I was there, I wished that I had gone to Paris or Rome; the third day, I never wanted to leave. I didn’t miss the food here; I ate olives, cheeses, ripe tomatoes and freshly baked bread, remarkable Ricotta al Forno, pistachio pesto and good red wine.

        What I missed while there was my home and my family, such as it is; however, I didn’t wish that I was back stateside, I wished that they were where I was. This is not how I feel about New Orleans; although New Orleans still is, in my mind, the only place worth living in this country, this was the way I felt when I first came to New Orleans which was before New Orleans turned into a tourist mecca. I sensed community over there, which I think has been a comfort I’d been lacking back in New Orleans, and it was a curiosity; I kept a journal, took photos, threw the I CHING and wrote back to Deb daily.

        I visited the cemetery, took long walks on cobbled streets (up-and-down-and-up-and-down) I got into a rhythm called ‘passeggiata’, which contrary to the English translation occurs at all hours and it’s more of an attitude than an evening walk-about. I ate when I was hungry, I drank when I was thirsty, I napped when I felt like it and got up and about when I saw fit; there were no rules, there are no rules there. You know what you have to do and just do it; if you’re not happy, it is no one else’s fault. Passeggiata. Chill. Take it easy. And to be truthful, not everyone in Sicily, Italy or anywhere else can be passeggiata. It’s a calm life philosophy with a little indolent Zen thrown in. Everything is as it is, even in your work-a-day chosen profession. Piano Piano.

        I am pursuing a dual citizenship, if for nothing else but to pass on to my children and/or children’s children. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but it’s crazy here, it’s really f**king crazy here; and, I might have had on rose-colored glasses, but it is not that way where my family came from, and possibly not from where yours came from either.