Natural Traveler Magazine, Spring 2022

NATURAL TRAVELER ® M A G A Z I N E V O L . I V , S P R I N G

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P R I C E

POSTCARD FROM RAQMU

Photo by Buddy Mays

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One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Miller

© 2022 Natural Traveler LLC 5 Brewster Street Unit 2, No. 204 Glen Cove, New York 11542

Natural Traveler Magazine ® Spring 2022 Editor & Publisher Tony Tedeschi Senior Editor Bill Scheller Staff Writers Ginny Craven Aglaia Davis Andrea England David E. Hubler Jay Jacobs Samantha Manuzza Buddy Mays John H. Ostdick Pedro Pereira Frank I. Sillay Kasia Staniaszek Kendric W. Taylor Photography Katie Cappeller Karen Dinan Buddy Mays Janet Safris Kasia Staniaszek

Art Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin

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Table of Contents

Editor’s Letter

Page 3

Contributors

Page 4

Fogg’s Horn:

Page 5

Windblown Dunes

Karen Dinan

Page 7

Postcard from Raqmu

Buddy Mays

Page 8

A Conversation with God

[Anonymous]

Page 14

My Legacy as a Car Engine Chef

Bill Scheller

Page 23

Street Photography

Kasia Staniaszek, Michael Giovanniello

Page 28

The Heart in the Storm

Jay Jacobs

Page 29

Four Poems

Samantha Marie

Page 30

Return to Campania

Bill Scheller

Page 35

Baseball and Proust

Kendric W. Taylor

Page 42

Winged Art

Janet Safris

Page 47

The Gift

Ginny Craven

Page 52

Notebooks

Tony Tedeschi

Page 55

A Voice in the Chorus Cover Photo by Buddy Mays

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Page 59

Editor’s Letter Covering Buddy Mays

As an inveterate reader of bylines and photo credits, I had been an admirer of Buddy Mays’s work for a number of years before I met him in 1992. I was on assignment for Audubon magazine aboard a small cruise ship hopscotching down the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, visiting beautiful rainforests teaming with wildlife, including birdlife whose collective plumage was an endless pallet for nature’s art.

Buddy and I had an immediate connection, which began a 30-year friendship and collaborations along the way, including overseas assignments from Venezuela to the Czech Republic. In the mid-‘90s, we collaborated on a Berlitz Guide to Costa Rica, documenting what we saw, finishing each other’s sentences in Spanish as we researched in-country. (Fortunately, many Costa Ricans, especially those in the travel industry, are bilingual, so there were not too many furrowed eyebrows during verbal exchanges with the locals.)

When the concept for Natural Traveler Magazine sprang fully formed from my head

in late 2018, Buddy, of course, was on my Alist call list. Fourteen issues later, his work has found its way into all of them. Over the years, I have known many journalists who write and photograph, but Buddy is among the tiny few I consider masters of both disciplines.

Buddy’s cover story on the ancient city of Raqmu is just one example of his expansive work, his writing taking you to a place you’re not likely to ever visit; his photographs making you wish you could go.

My memory of that initial meeting includes his responding that he had been an admirer of my work as well, but that may be just my using my rewrite abilities to create some level of parity with Buddy’s work, an impossible challenge for anyone.

You can find examples of all Buddy’s contributions to Natural Traveler Magazine by visiting our issuu.com site: https://issuu.com/search?q=%22Natural%20 Traveler%20Magazine%22. Visit his website at: https://buddy-mays.pixels.com/

-- Tony Tedeschi 3

Photo ©Peter Serling Car engine chefs Bill Scheller (left) and Chris Maynard as they appeared in the July 11, 1988 issue of People magazine.

Contributors Two stunning photos by Karen Dinan grace Page 7 as “Windblown Dunes.” Kasia Staniaszek and Michael Giovanniello give us some “Street Photography on Page 28.

In words and photos of his “Postcard from Raqmu,” Buddy Mays takes us to the ancient Jordanian metropolis where buildings were works of art carved from the walls of the stone canyons that rim the city. (Page 8) An anonymous “Conversation with God” is revealed, beginning on Page 14.

Bill Scheller presents the techniques of vehicular cuisine, in the story behind his car engine cookbook, “Manifold Destiny,” beginning on Page 23.

The heartfelt poem “The Heart in the Storm,” by Jay Jacobs appears on Page 29.

Four poems by Samantha Marie with artwork by Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin begins on Page 30.

“Return to Campania,” from Bill Scheller’s new book of travel memoirs, In All Directions, begins on Page 35.

“Memories of Games Past,” are filtered through a Proustian lens by Kendric W. Taylor. (Page 42) Avian photography by Janet Safris via her Winged Art, begin on Page 47.

“The giver receives the real gift – an emotional bequest, borne only of true, selfless service,” Ginny Craven writes in her memoir, “The Gift.” (Page 52) In his short story, “Notebooks,” Tony Tedeschi’s protagonist plays with his illusions, beginning on Page 55.

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Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus

Content to be a Thousandaire

These days it’s tough to avoid stories about billionaires. Some Russian billionaire has a yacht the size of a cruise ship. OK, half the size of a cruise ship. I Googled its length versus that of the Cunard Queen Mary 2, my ride across the Atlantic multiple times. But the Russian’s ship has two helipads: the QM2 only one. What’s next, air traffic control for helicopter congestion above the damned boat?

I am a lifelong thousandaire. Recently I was wondering what manner of deprivations I must have suffered living my life two levels below a billionaire. I’ve certainly not suffered any lack of diversity in my travels.

I’ve been a passenger on everything from puddle-jumpers in Central America to sipping cocktails in the first class lounge upstairs on a transcon 747. I’ve stayed in huts and hotel suites; eaten in hamburger joints, had fish around a campfire with Fiji firewalkers and dined on ridiculously delicious dinners served by white-gloved waiters in five star restaurants in world capitals. I’ve had polo lessons from a ninegoal player in the Dominican Republic, learned to scuba the reefs in the British Virgin Islands, set foot on Antarctica and could literally feel the vibrations in shafts of light coming directly from Heaven in a glittering ice cave in Iceland . . . among many, many experiences that cost mere hundreds

or sometimes some thousands of dollars.

Nothing requiring the kind of money a billionaire can boast.

In fact that’s it, I’ve been told: it’s all about bragging rights. A game I don’t understand. I want to be a billionaire so I can lord it over lesser billionaires or peasant millionaires? I’m still stuck on the missing bennies thing. We have a billionaire (allegedly) ex-president who apparently spends all day watching TV and eating junk food, playing an occasional game of golf and popping into the dining room at his estate to the accolades of well-wishers. I am trying to understand trading my thousandaire lifestyle for that one.

OK, I’ve not been launched aboard a rocket into space for an incomparable view of our planet, and that would be worth the trip if it were available to thousandaires, but for now I’ll just revel in the glorious photos taken by real astronauts.

I’ve done some googling to understand the context of what it means to be a billionaire. Well, why hold back, to be the numero uno billionaire, Elon Musk. His wealth is estimated at $302 billion. If he were a country, he’d be ranked 41st in terms of GDP, ahead of 154 countries, just below Pakistan and just above Chile. If he were company, he’d be 29th, bigger than Toyota, Coca Cola and Disney based on market cap.

(The fact that Tesla is No. 6 is helpful to his 5

ranking.) Numero dos, Jeff Bezos, at a mere $172 billion, would be all the way down at 53, just short of Iraq and above Algeria; tied with AT&T for 66th place among wealthiest companies, ahead of T-Mobile, UPS and Morgan Stanley.

So, I ask myself, would the Cliffs of Moher on the Irish coast look any better to those guys than they did to me? Would the Catedral de Sevilla? Would the spectacle of all those Egyptian soldiers and animals marching across the stage to the glorious music of Verdi’s “Aida” be any more spectacular or sound any better to them?

Would the impressionist artwork at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris be any more inspirational? Or dinner at Le Grand Venise later that evening taste any better?

A story in The New York Times reported that Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, is the one giving away the lion’s share of Bezos billions. Whenever the question is posed among us thousandaires as to what we would do if we were billionaires, the answer invariably gets around the MacKenzie Scott model. That would be my answer as well, but I’d prefer to never be able to pile up that kind of wealth in the first place, hoping that it would have been distributed far more equitably before it ever got to me.

Oh well, I’m off on another thousandaire adventure and hopefully a column filled with subject matter far more entertaining in the next issue of this magazine.

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Two from Natural Traveler Books Available on Amazon.Com

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Windblown Dunes Long Beach, New York Photos by Karen Dinan

Since we first featured her work on the cover of our third issue, we don’t let an issue pass without the art of photographer Karen Dinan. Whether spectacular summer sunsets, a chill you can feel in waves crashing against jetties or people enjoying the shoreline of her hometown, Long Beach, Long Island, New York, it is virtually impossible not to be moved by Dinan’s artistry. Trying to select between these two was an impossible task. It is our honor to share both of them with you.

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Visitors are greeted by a series of ancient tombs carved into pink sandstone walls of the Bab-as-Siq. Most of them date from the first century A.D.

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Postcard From Raqmu Rose-Red City Half As Old As Time Story & Photos by Buddy Mays

Eighty feet wide and 130 feet high, Al Khazneh, Arabic for “The Treasury,” was hand-carved from a solid cliff-face of pink sandstone.

Until western civilization “lost” it to the sands of time sometime around 800 A.D., the ancient city of Raqmu, Jordan was the hub of a kingdom so rich and powerful that it controlled an area the size of Ohio. Its army challenged even the mighty legions of Rome.

Nineteenth-century English biblical scholar John William Burgon accurately described the place as a “rose-red city half as old as Time.” Archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones, not to be outdone, searched for, and discovered, both the city, and its numinous Holy Grail, tucked away in the Canyon of the Crescent Moon during The Last Crusade.

Known as Petra to the Greeks, Raqmu was constructed during the first century B.C. by a powerful tribe of nomadic Bedouin Arabs, known as Nabataens, who had occupied parts of the Middle East since 800 B.C. It was built in a hidden, well-guarded desert canyon, and during its golden era was home to 20,000 inhabitants. The city’s location was strategic, straddling the southern leg of the Incense Routes, a 1,200-mile-long network of roads and sea lanes that connected merchants in what is now Arabia, China, India and the Horn of Africa with buyers in Alexandria, Egypt and other Mediterranean ports to the west. Heavily laden camel caravans, carrying primarily frankincense, myrrh, fine silks, and precious stones, passed through Raqmu daily. Every caravan that entered Nabataen territory (present-day Jordan), was taxed heavily.

Business was brisk and profitable, and the city was bursting at the seams with wealth.

By the time Jesus began preaching in Galilee to the north, Raqmu had become the most powerful trading center in the region.

But in 106 A.D. the city was attacked and soundly defeated by Herod the Great’s army, and the Nabataen Kingdom lost control of the Incense Routes and was annexed into the Roman Empire. Two centuries later, in 363 A.D., a massive earthquake destroyed much of Raqmu’s infrastructure, and the devastated city was abandoned by many of its residents.

By 700 A.D., Raqmu’s only inhabitants were a few nomadic shepherds who pastured their goats in the rubble, and for the next 1,100 years, the city was lost completely to the outside world. Not until 1812, when the ruins were rediscovered by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, did Raqmu, now called by its classical Greek name Petra, reemerge into history.

Today, Petra has become a mecca of sorts for tourists, amateur archaeologists, and lovers of all things ancient. Camel caravans are out of fashion these days, so getting to the old city is a bit easier than it once was. The most convenient access is aboard an airconditioned JETT tour bus from the Jordanian capital of Amman. The 150-mile drive south on the King’s Highway (Jordanian Highway 35) parallels the eastern lip of the Great Rift Valley through a landscape that is arid, rocky desert completely devoid of plant

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An Arab man wearing a kaffiyeh head covering lopes his Arab horse down the Bab-sa-Siq on his way to the inner city.

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life one moment, and manicured fields of wheat and vegetables, olive groves, and date palm orchards the next. The four-hour bus ride ends at Wadi Musa, the nearest modern town to Petra, where visitors can find lodging and food. Petra’s visitor center and the Babas-Siq — the entrance road to the inner city — are just a short walk from downtown.

Especially in the mornings, the half-milelong Bab-as-Siq is a cacophony of sound, color, and motion. Strings of heavily laden camels, overflowing donkey carts, and roughlooking men clad in kaffiyehs and flowing robes riding Arab horses hurry toward the old city on one side of the divided path.

Knots of Arab women and young girls dressed in traditional white hijabs and black gowns stroll the other side, chattering loudly to each other as they go. Only the local Arab vendors shouting offers for cold drinks and hand-carved trinkets from shaded roadside stalls, take any notice of pale faces and western clothing heading in the same direction.

Where Bab-as-Siq ends, al Siq (the Shaft), Raqmu’s original entrance begins. Just four yards wide in places but with sheer vertical walls rising 230 feet above the path, this constricted, 500-foot-long cleft in the sandstone massif is not a place for the claustrophobic. Al Siq terminates at Petra's most famous monument, Al Khazneh, Arabic for “The Treasury.” Archaeologists think the structure, 80 feet wide and 130 feet tall, was probably the first century mausoleum of a Nabatean king. Its ornate façade — like the facades of many of the city’s largest and most important buildings — was hand-carved from a solid cliff-face of pink sandstone. Of the 800 or so “royal tombs” discovered in Petra, Al Khazneh is the largest and most elaborately decorated. Local Bedouins, who mistakenly believed that an Egyptian pharaoh’s treasure was hidden somewhere inside, supplied the name. In the

1989 movie blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Al Khazneh was the final resting place of the fabled Holy Grail, the cup of Jesus.

Once past Al Khazneh, the narrow jaws of al Siq open into a wide valley, and the archaeological splendors of ancient Raqmu clutter the landscape and line the canyon walls as far as the eye can see. The largest single structure here is the “Great Temple,” an 81,000-square-foot complex with colonnaded streets, sculpture gardens, and a 600-seat theater-like structure, all thought to be Petra’s ancient religious center. Not far away is Qasr al-Bint Fir’aun, the “Castle of the Pharaoh's Daughter.” Petra’s best preserved free-standing structure, it most likely served as a domicile for Dushara, a principal Nabataean deity. Overlooking what must have once been “downtown” Raqmu are the Royal Tombs, large burial chambers with ornate facades, hewn from solid rock in the sandstone hillsides above the city. There are literally hundreds of other structures to explore in Petra’s main ruins, but most of the principal sites lie along 2.5 miles of pathway between Al Khazneh, and Petra’s second most visited structure, Ad Deir.

Better known as The Monastery, Ad Deir, is about a one-and-a-half-hour’s walk from Al Khazneh. A massive façade sculpted from the face of a sandstone mountain sometime in the first century A.D., the structure is 150 feet wide and 160 feet high and is second only to Al Khazneh in jawdropping splendor. Local Bedouins assumed the structure was used for religious purposes (thus the name), but no one really knows its original function. From where it leaves the main path, the Ad Deir trail ascends a steep side canyon via 900 stone steps carved into the bedrock. There are vendors aplenty along the route who will cheer you on during the climb up, and sell you the world coming

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A late afternoon camel ride past the Royal Tombs in the center of Petra.

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down, but the hike is worth the effort even if the cost in sweat and stamina is exacting.

Most Petra visitors choose to explore on foot, but camels, donkeys, and horse-drawn carriages are available for hire. According to rangers at the visitor center, most tourists end up walking at least five miles a day exploring just the main canyon, and they strongly suggest donning a hat and carrying lots of water. I made two major mistakes when I explored the old city; I neglected to grab a free map (printed in English) of the ruins at the visitor center, and once inside, I totally lost track of the time. Without a map I often found myself completely lost in the maze of rubble and side canyons and I couldn’t read the trail signs because they were written in

Arabic. When I finally arrived at Ad Dier in late afternoon, I suddenly realized that I would never reach my hotel in Wadi Musa before sunset, and navigating the complex network of trails in Petra in total darkness would be impossible. Exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and sunburned, I set off in what I hoped was the right direction for Bab-al-siq, wondering who the unlucky Arab would be that found my scorpion stung body the following morning. Somewhere near the Great Temple, however, a camel jockey on his way home took pity and let me climb aboard for a ride back to the hotel. It cost me $20 but it was well worth the price.

The busy half-mile-long Bab-as-Siq is the entrance road to Petra and consists of two lanes divided by a stone barrier. Horses, camels, donkey carts, and carriages stay to the left, while pedestrians keep to the right.

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Transcription of a TV Interview: A Conversation with God (Editor’s Note: Below is the transcript of a recorded TV interview with God, taken from the hard drive of a once-prominent investigative reporter. The interview was declared bogus and never aired. Nonetheless, the reporter turned crusader against organized religion, although with little impact at changing core beliefs of the faithful.

He financed his journeys after becoming independently wealthy from a sports bet, despite the fact that his financial adviser had cautioned against placing a substantial percentage of his retirement assets on something so risky. This electronic copy of the transcript was found years after his death. Present, before the camera, is the reporter. In the control room is the program’s director, whose voice is heard over a PA intercom.)

Director He asked specifically to talk to you.

Reporter Did he give any indication of why he selected me?

Director None.

Reporter O.K. But, come on, how do we know this is legit? I mean really, God? Director I know this is a stretch, but when we got the email from him – 14

Reporter (Interrupting) Email from God?! Ah, come on.

Director I know. Crazy, hah? But in the email, he suggested we check out its point of origin and we simply could not find one – as he had indicated we would not be able to.

Reporter That’s it? That’s why we think it was an email from God? You’re kidding me, right?

Director I know, a stretch. But he said any doubts we’d have would be gone when he showed up on the stage with you, “out of thin air.”

Reporter O.K. God is going to come down and talk to me. So, do I get to ask the questions?

Director Dunno.

Reporter All right. If so, first off, I gotta know: who will win this year’s World Series?

Director I wouldn’t think he considers this something frivolous. I wouldn’t ask that one.

Reporter O.K. So again he is coming when?

Director According to my clock on the wall here, wow, actually . . . in five, four, three, two, one, go.

There is a blinding flash of light, billows of white smoke and a figure, nattily dressed in a business suit, walks from the smoke to a position opposite the reporter.

God (With a hand on the reporter’s shoulder, gently turning him ninety degrees) It will be a better angle if neither one of us has his back to the camera.

Reporter (Visibly shaken, his voice trembling) Wow. Talk about challenging my lack of faith. But hey, you could have fooled me in that suit.

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God Nice, isn’t it? But I guess you can’t go wrong with Armani.

Reporter Thank you for letting me go on with the small talk, but look at these hands, I’m still trembling.

(Holds out his shaking hands) God No worries, my son. I can understand no one really expecting something like this.

Reporter (His voice still trembling a bit) Respectfully, how should I refer to you, sir?

God Sire, Lord, any of those appellations your ancestors gave me. They’re all O.K. Reporter O.K., Lord . . . you may call me – God (Interrupting) I know who you are.

Reporter Yes, of course. You are after all . . . all-knowing.

God Thank you for that vote of confidence.

Reporter Sorry. I know you don’t need me to credential you, but . . .

God Oh, take it easy. I’m just pulling your leg.

Reporter Ah, right. O.K. Pulling my leg. Phew. So, obviously you’re here because there is something so important you need to say that you felt you had to deliver it in person . . . so to speak. I mean I’m not sure about the person thing . . . when you’re talking about, well . . . God. God Get a grip, son. This is not about format; it’s about substance.

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Reporter Sorry, sire. I’m not sure how to proceed. Normally, I’m the one who decides the course of the discourse, but in your case . . .

God Yes? Reporter Well, let’s just say the microphone is yours. What is it you’d like to discuss?

God Pornography.

Reporter Pornography?

God Yes. Reporter You’ve come all this way to discuss pornography? I almost want to see some I.D. God I’m thinking that entrance should settle the I.D. issue.

Reporter Well, admittedly, that was scary. So, pornography it is.

God Well, let’s just say, I’m using pornography as a metaphor for a larger issue.

Reporter Which is?

God People having the chutzpah to interpret me. To somehow preach that they have some kind of direct communication with me, when, come on, let’s face it, has anyone, anywhere, ever provided any evidence to that effect?

Reporter O.K., but I’m still not seeing the pornography connection.

God Well, then allow me to explain.

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Reporter I’m all ears.

God Let me begin with a question. How would you define pornography?

Reporter I’m thinking this is some kind of trick question. And I’m bound to get it wrong.

God No trick question. In general, what is society’s definition of pornography?

Reporter O.K, ah, the depiction of people engaged in any of a number of sex acts.

God Yes. Including, of course, the customary act of lovemaking.

Reporter Yes. God So, lovemaking? Pornography? Do you see a contradiction in terms?

Reporter O.K. Now that you mention it.

God I create, then grant to you, the ability to make love, associate with that ability a sensual feeling that is – trust me on this – the only heavenly sensation that I’ve permitted you to experience in this earthly existence, and you decide it is something . . . dirty? Even I am confused by that one.

Reporter You, confused? Now that’s scary.

God Who determines something like that? Priests, ministers, rabbis, mullahs, moralists of one stripe or another. How dare they defile the most beautiful thing I have created for you? And call it dirty, no less.

Reporter Well, you know, it is something we are taught from a very early age. And, we are pretty much threatened with eternal damnation if we allow ourselves to consider this sort of act as anything but . . . pornographic.

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God Exactly! Eternal damnation? There they go again: interpreting me without any justification.

Reporter You know, we are almost led to believe that if it feels that good, it must be bad.

God Wrong again. How do they draw these conclusions? I provide a heavenly sensation.

I even tie it to the way you reproduce yourselves and, it is considered a vile act?

Reporter Not vile if you do it within a marriage, with someone you love.

God Oh, come on. I’ve seen the movies. Even when a couple in love is making love, the audience is squirming.

Reporter Yeah, I see. We really can’t separate the circumstance from the act, which we have had driven into our heads is sinful.

God Excuse me. Sinful? Moi. I am the arbiter of what is sinful, no?

Reporter Touché, Lord. But you are really upsetting my apple cart here.

God You starting to understand why I asked for this interview?

Reporter Yeah. But I’m not sure how well received this will be.

God Excuse me, once again. God. Me. Remember?

Reporter (Nodding his head) You know, yeah, I think I get it.

God Think?

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Reporter Know . . . know I get it. But understand, I need to wipe out a lifetime of information to the contrary.

God It’s why I had to do this. And understand, I’m just using the love/pornography conundrum as an example of all the wrong information and conclusions being put out there by people who claim to speak for me. It’s just the most graphic example.

There are so many others. Bloody wars in my name, humans determining who makes it into heaven, who becomes a saint, building temples of gold to impress me.

Gold to impress me? Hey, I created the stuff. But lovemaking as pornography?

That was just the last straw for me.

Reporter You know, finally, I see what you mean.

God Good. Now here is the hard part for you.

Reporter Hard part? For me? Uh oh.

God Once I leave, and you air this segment, people will not believe I’m me. They will think you people have used some kind of special effects or whatever. So, I will need you to be very forceful in defense of this conversation. So, I’m making you my emissary for getting this word out.

Reporter Whoa, if they don’t believe you’re you, everyone will think I’m nuts.

God That’s why your director and the guy working the video camera were allowed to see and hear this as well.

Reporter Gee, thanks.

God Don’t you understand the concept of “chosen one”?

Reporter Well, we’ve seen what has happened to those guys in the past, now haven’t we?

God I’ll protect you. But I just can’t do it out in the open.

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Reporter Thanks . . . I guess.

God looks at him sternly Reporter O.K. O.K. God Thank you. Besides, if you do come to a bad end, understand I will make a special place for you in a better place.

Reporter There you go, scaring me again.

God Oh, come on. Just a little God humor. Faith, my son, faith.

Reporter (Letting out a big sigh) O.K., we done here? Is there anything else you’d like to add?

God Yes. Reporter And? God Angels.

Reporter Angels?

God In six.

Reporter Angels . . . in six?

God Yes. Reporter Oh. Angels in six? Oh! Angels in six! You’re not kidding?

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God Do I look like I’m kidding?

Reporter No . . .

There is a flash of light, white smoke and God disappears into it.

Reporter (To Director) Did he look like he was kidding? Did he? . . .

Marissa, West Meadow Beach, New York Photo by Rose Margaret Cigna

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No Matter What Else I’ve Done . . .

My Legacy as a Car Engine Chef Bill Scheller

I still get the phone call now and then, or maybe an email, from radio stations as far away as Australia.

The question is always the same: “Are you the guy who cooks on his car engine?”

Well, yes and no. I did, and I don’t, not anymore. But the queries are my own fault, because, along with another wise guy, I wrote the book.

The book was Manifold Destiny: The

One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your

Car Engine! It appeared in three editions between 1989 and 2008 and was just what the title said it was. For reasons I’ll explain later, it will be the last thing anyone on Earth ever hears of me.

It started in Montreal. My friend Chris Maynard and I had just returned from a long canoe trip in northern Ontario and had food – other than lakeside fried pickerel – on the brain. Pulling into the city, we headed straight for our favorite Montreal eatery,

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Schwartz’s on Boulevard St-Laurent.

Schwartz’s specialty is smoked brisket, ideally ordered “medium,” which means with a good helping of fat left on, and you can get it in a sandwich, on a platter next to a stack of sliced rye bread, or to go. Figuring we’d never make it home on our sandwiches alone, we bought a pound to wolf down along the way.

We hadn’t gotten to the border when Chris said, “You know, the brisket is a hell of a lot better when it’s warm. Remember those stories in men’s magazines, back in the Fifties, about truckers heating food on their engines? Why don’t we . . .”

Why don’t we, indeed. We got off the interstate in Vermont and bought a loaf of rye and a roll of aluminum foil. Out in the supermarket parking lot, we wrapped the brisket in the foil, lifted the hood of Chris’s VW Rabbit, and poked around to find a hot spot where the package wouldn’t fall off.

Then we drove fifty miles to a rest stop, hauled out the warm brisket, and made a round of sandwiches.

Mag for people with money That, we figured, was that.

But that, we should have known, is seldom that. A couple of years later, I got a call from an editor at The Robb Report, a magazine for people with a lot more money than you or me. They specialize in stories about how to spend it, and about cars and boats that cost way more than your house.

Somehow they had heard that I had been part of a team that competed in the first running of the One Lap of America rally, and were wondering if I’d be interested in driving the Robb Report entry in the upcoming 1988 event and writing about it. I couldn’t drive the One Lap alone, of course, since it involved completing an 8,000-mile circuit of the United States in one week. I needed a co-driver, and the story needed a photographer. Chris Maynard loved to drive, and he earned his living with his cameras. So there was the Robb team.

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We were on our way to the magazine’s office when Chris said to me, “Remember the time we heated the Schwartz’s brisket on the Rabbit engine? Why don’t we take it a step further and actually cook stuff on the motor? We can tell the people at Robb that it’ll be a part of the story –- “One Lap team eats along the way without stopping at fast food joints.”

They didn’t throw us out “Chris,” I said, “The people who read this magazine are not the car engine cooking type. You bring that up, and they’ll throw us out of the office..”

Chris brought it up. And they didn’t throw us out. Don’t play it up too much, the editor said, but sure, put it in the piece.

The magazine flew us out to Detroit, where we were set up with our ride – a stretch Lincoln Town Car with a big V-8. It wasn’t the usual six-figure Robb iron, but was just the thing to live in on the road for a week. We had a couple of days until the rally started, so we stocked up on ingredients and headed to the home of a friend of Chris’s who wrote for the Detroit Free Press.

He lent us his kitchen, where we put together a week’s worth of entrees – boneless chicken breasts, veal cutlets, pork tenderloin medallions, ham steak – all stuff that would cook well on the Lincoln’s exhaust manifold and other hot spots, all nicely seasoned with oil, garlic, herbs, and sprinklings of white wine. We froze it all overnight in our hotel’s kitchen, packed it in a cooler, and set off from the starting line at Detroit’s Renaissance Center.

We didn’t come close to winning the rally, which involved precision time-speeddistance events separated by long, coffee-andDylan-tapes-fueled rides. As I recall, we came in somewhere in the middle of sixty or seventy teams. But we were mildly famous even before we left Detroit. The Free Press guy whose kitchen we used had told a colleague on the paper’s lifestyle page what

we were up to, and she interviewed us, got a few of our recipes, and made us the section’s lead story on the day the rally started. We were newspaper celebrities in Detroit.

What’s the half-life of that sort of notoriety?

Longer than we thought, as it turned out.

A couple of weeks after we got home – me to Massachusetts’ North Shore, Chris to Manhattan – I got a call from Alan Richman at People magazine. An editor at People had seen the Free Press story and told Richman to see if he could locate the guys who cook on car engines and write a story on them.

Next thing we knew, Richman and photographer Peter Serling were at my house – as was Chris – for a day’s ride up the coast, all the while cooking boned game hens and chicken thighs with oyster stuffing on the manifold of a rented Chrysler New Yorker.

The piece ran in People, along with a shot of me and Chris, heads under the hood, looking like two nuts who cook on car engines.

Call from a publisher Now the thing had taken on a life of its own. Hardly a month had gone by when I got a call from the publisher at Villard Books, a Random House imprint. Could we do a cookbook? Instructions, recipes, the works? And make it funny? Since Chris and I had spent our lives in professions whose motto is “Sure – when do you want it?” the game was on.

Our idea was to make the book not only a collection of recipes that actually worked, but also a send-up of American culinary culture – and culture in general – in that penultimate year of the Yuppie Decade, 1988.

We organized the recipes, each one of which we tested on various cars, according to regions of the United States (later editions included world recipes). And we wrote a lengthy introduction that explained not only our own discovery of car engine cooking, but a history of culinary locomotion that included Huns who heated meat by sitting on it while

they rode horseback, and Napoleon’s onboard carriage stove.

And then we got into the recipes: Hyundai Halibut. Blackened Roadfish.

Donner Pass Red Flannel Hash. Lead-foot Stuffed Cabbage. Chicken Breast Lido (Iaccoca). Each regional section and each recipe had its own goofy introduction, in which we blathered on about everything from Ralph Nader (“Safe-at-Any-Speed Stuffed Eggplant,” a Middle-eastern dish that, “Like the Corvair, if you handle it right, you don’t have to turn it over,” to our having observed, on a Silicon Valley roadway, a BMW with a crystal hanging from the rearview mirror – “the very spirit of modern California, the perfect combination of mammon and mystery, the Bavarian and the Aquarian . . . emblematic of the California approach to food as well. The idea is to take expensive, high-quality ingredients, and combine them in such a way as to make people burble over how imaginative and creative you are.”

We commented that “fusion” cookery “combines ingredients and techniques from countries that used to know enough to stay the hell away from each other, unless one of them was in urgent need of rubber or silk or tea.”

And the Northeast? “New England is where American cookery was born,” we wrote, before opining that “its simplicity and hearty wholesomeness” had descended into a blandness that “parallels that of the native English stock, who originally must have been an interesting and adventuresome lot despite their wacky religion, but who have long since settled back to clip coupons while wearing high-water pants with whales embroidered on them.”

The publisher titled our book Manifold Destiny, and it hit the stands in the spring of ’89. The PR people at Villard did quite a job, landing us lots of radio interviews – the kind where the host hasn’t read the book, and asks dumb questions about roadkill –

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and even a fair amount of TV exposure. I forget which edition it followed, but we even had a spot on “Today,” where we stood in front of a car outside the show’s studio at Rockefeller Center and fed Katie Couric our “Eggs-on Cheese Pie” that we had cooked somewhere else.

Our crowning television escapade was an appearance on a German variety show. We were whisked away to Dortmund, where we cruised around town with the mayor, cooking shrimp on the engine of a vintage Caddy driven by its owner, a German Elvis impersonator. Then we drove into an indoor arena, where the host sampled the shrimp before a live audience. This all involved four days of rehearsals, and a lot of beer.

I even landed a spot on “To Tell the Truth,” then in its umpteenth iteration but still counting Kitty Carlisle among its panelists. For anyone not up on their antique game shows, the idea was to appear with two other characters, both of whom pretended to be me. We were all introduced as the coauthor of the book and scored points by getting panelists to make the wrong guesses as to who was telling the truth. I went home with the smallest purse, because I failed miserably at trying to pass as one of the phonies. When Kitty asked how I’d make sushi, and I answered, “Leave it in the trunk on a cool night,” they all figured me for the kind of smartass who’d write the book.

The book sold fairly well, but there was one big problem that kept it from hitting the best seller lists. People who might be inclined to cook on their car engines weren’t likely to get the jokes, and people who got the jokes weren’t exactly the engine-cooking demographic. With a nod to India’s Tata company’s purchase of Jaguar, we titled an Indian recipe “Jewel in the Crown Shrimp Curry, or, Ta-ta to All That,” and we suggested that readers play Albinoni’s Adagio while preparing abalone on their Cadillac Allante. Any yuks we got from that sort of

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thing probably came from people who can’t check their oil. And guys running to grab the aluminum foil were, ten to one, lifting their ball caps and scratching their heads.

Skewer a popular diet We did well enough, though, for Villard to ask for a sequel, food-centered but not necessarily involving cars. We came up with the perfect foil to the depredations of the food police, who were then hitting full stride in their attack on good eats. I had wanted to skewer the then-popular Diet for a Small Planet by titling our book Diet for a Large Person, but someone at Villard was probably pals with the Small Planet publisher, and my idea got nixed. We wound up with The Bad for You Cookbook, a compilation of old family recipes, our own creations, and stuff cribbed from cookbooks written back when “You’re too thin” was still part of the American conversation. We collected it all in chapters with titles such as “The Gospel of Heavy Cream,” “If It Can Be Poached, It Can Be Fried,” and “Ethnic Heavyweights.” Where else would anyone find deep-fried sweet potato balls, fruit dumplings with crème anglaise, chicken pudding, or pork cake? Actually, most of the recipes were for dishes that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in Eisenhower’s day, but were sure to get an “Eww” from a salad ‘n’ water ‘90s luncher.

Our publisher didn’t help by running a banner “Bye-Bye Health Food! Hello, Heart Disease!” on the back cover, but we did get a lot of exposure. Our TV apex was when, after spending all night whipping up a few of our most outrageous dishes in my mother’s kitchen in Paterson, New Jersey, we lugged them over to Manhattan for an appearance on CBS This Morning. Chris was about to chow down on a big slice of lard cake when sylphlike co-host Paula Zahn said, “You’re going to put that in your mouth?” I was afraid I was going to have to kick Chris, who I was sure had a rejoinder bubbling up out of

his irreverent brain that would have triggered the network’s seven-second delay. But he was a good boy that day.

Bad for You has faded into gimmickbook limbo. Chris Maynard left this world – the poorer, in the realms of wisdom, wisecracks, and photography – nearly ten years ago. And what about that leap at immortality I mentioned earlier? That was courtesy of the Library of America, which publishes not only the heavy hitters of our national canon, but the occasional themed volume – collected writings on baseball, the sea, New York, L.A. … and food. Some

years ago, when the late Molly O’Neill was gathering material for American Food Writing, she asked me and Chris if she could include the opening chapter of Manifold Destiny. Of course, we said, We’d be honored. And we were – not just in type, but in the paper it appears on. Library of America books are printed on stock guaranteed to last five hundred years.

And that, unless electrons can be sieved through devices yet unknown, is how long Chris and I will last.

Photo ©Peter Serling Chris Maynard (left) and Bill Scheller admire the ample cooking surface on the engine of an '88 Chrysler New Yorker., as it appeared in the July 11, 1988 issue of People magazine.

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Street Photography Long Island

Photo by Kasia Staniaszek

Photo by Michael Giovanniello

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The Heart In The Storm

By Jay Jacobs In the distance beyond the front porch the storm looms.

A massive wall of lowering thunderheads filled with dark menace, it stretches across the horizon as far as the eye can see, an elemental mountain of water, air, fire and chaos in the sky threatening to strip the world bare.

The first wave of gale force winds advance, unseen linebackers flattening the grassy field in straight line formation, closing in fast on the dubious defense of post, rail, and rickety old slat board.

Mighty oak trees bend like saplings under the unrelenting maelstrom, sizzling white hot electricity cracks the sky, thunder explodes with deafening fury, torrential rain falls in drenching wind-blown blasts, the raging mad god Tempest run amok.

Under the flimsy shelter of the shingle roof we watch in hypnotic fascination, mice gazing at the cobra about to strike.

Curiously, the squall abruptly falters.

One final gust of wind, a dying gasp as the few last raindrops wet the edge of the old wooden porch, and the storm disappears as suddenly as it arrived.

With the lifting of the gray veil, brilliant shafts of golden sunlight alight upon the earth to coax the rising mist home to the blue firmament.

I am sitting in Grandma’s lap, she in her rocking chair.

In the calm after storm I hear the chair creak, a comforting, familiar sound amid the pleasant patter of friendly droplets falling from the rooftop.

Rocking gently, humming softly, she holds me now as throughout the storm.

I am in her care, safe and secure, and nothing can harm me.

With arms of barely two years I hug her, a declaration of dependence, and love for my mother's mother, my Grandma.

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Four Poems

By Samantha Marie

Artwork by Sharafina binti Teh Sharifuddin 30

They don’t say boo i don’t like horror movies. the suspense a consistent, frightening lack of control i hold my sweatshirt just under my eyes so i can cover them when the music dulls and the theater quietly waits for the jump-scare you feel like a horror movie but there’s no foreseeable plot line no predictable ending i'm scared of that old antecedent pain. the one that leaked nightmares through my head and whispered that “maybe he wouldn’t have left if you were smaller you know” what if the butterflies are merely moths and the spark is just the lighter i’m supposed to use in the dark basement of this moment to reveal the monster i’m so afraid of: someone who could love me truly, deeply, happily love me i don’t think i’m undeserving i just don’t know if i believe you it’s easy to believe in the bad guys, in the boogeyman and the demons who camp out under the bed waiting for my leg to slip out of the covers at night you look right at me, almost through you smile and trace your fingers down my arm is that the music dulling the air is soft, but is it quiet? i have no sweatshirt on to cover my eyes when is the fucking jump-scare already?

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change: careers clothes color of nail polish future. fearful fresh fumbling me. mazy misplaced meek messy moving on like a storm carries the boat in the direction it pleases and not where the captain has begged of the sails.

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Moving on lots of candles pictures necklaces i needed more than breath at the time perfume bottles stuffed animals and small decorative boxes i collected like dust poetry books my varsity plaques and the first rose a boy ever gave me, dried, and taped upside-down on my mirror to preserve the petals i’m boxing it all up and we’re leaving it feels like i’m ripping seams from my skin the memories of my childhood bedroom rolling down the pores of my cheeks each inch of my room, every moment i’ve collected i didn’t know i was writing a letter to the little girl who sat in this bed and dreamed of leaving i have to sign it now with love and a goodbye.

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Modern love hold me just a bit longer… please? i need something to distract me when you don’t answer those moments i sit and stare at too much blue blue like the walls around my bed you held me in and nothing gray for hours, days gray like the area i've apparently tripped into i wait by my virtual mailbox for your love letters a few letters only really easy silly little words you toss me while i pick flowers from my brain and press them into glass Cutting my fingers in my despairing patience.

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Corso Cusani, the main street in Solopaca

Return to Campania Story & Photos by Bill Scheller

That brief stopover to see my Italian relatives during a Washington Post circuit of Italy’s coast was the first of several trips to the paese of my ancestors. The best of these visits was in 2005, in the company of my mother. It meant so much to her to spend ten days in the town her maternal grandparents had left to come to America, just over a century before.

The silvery green leaves of the olive trees glistened in the torchlight.

It was a little after four in the morning, well before dawn in late September, and I was walking the narrow road leading out of Tocco Caudio, in the Italian province of Campania. Walking? It was more of a

cadenced stride, with the cadence provided by the recitation of the rosary over a portable loudspeaker, and accelerated between each decade of ten Hail Marys by lilting marches, played by a brass band pacing along behind me. In back of the band, on a platform shouldered by four of Tocco’s faithful, life-

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size statues of Saints Cosmas and Damian were making their way to a hilltop chapel four miles distant. The rest of us, torches in hand, were seeing them on their way.

I happened to be escorting Cosmas and Damian, on this moonless, torchlit night, because I was staying only a few miles away, in the town of Solopaca, home of my Italian maternal ancestors. Finding the way to one’s ancestral paese is unusual enough, for an American a hundred years removed from the great southern Italian diaspora. What is even less likely is to be able to enjoy the hospitality of relatives whose familial connections are entirely clear. But this was just my good fortune: I was staying at the home of the son of my grandmother’s first cousin. And I had an even closer relative along: I was traveling with my mother, who well remembered the émigrés of a century ago.

I remember one of them myself. My great-grandmother, born Rosa Di Bernardo, left Solopaca when she married Bernardo Iannucci in 1902, and never returned. But she lived to be 101 years old, and kept in touch with her family by mail. She was a fixture of my New Jersey boyhood, in her little house lit by gas lamps where my greatgrandfather had run his shoe-repair business.

And she was a fixture in the minds of her relatives in Solopaca, and later with their children: nearly everyone there over a certain age knew who “Nonna Rosa” was, even if they had never seen her.

So it had been no problem to introduce ourselves, on visits to Italy -- first my uncle, then my mother and grandmother, and finally me, the one with the German-Swiss name, when I first showed up sixteen years ago. I had been to Solopaca once since, but this time was different -- not only because I had brought my mother, but because I had timed the ten-day visit to coincide with the vendemmia , the late September harvest of the wine grapes.

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My cousin Nicola, a reserved man with the wry, realistic outlook of the Mezzogiorno and a regular job in an office, tends the vineyards that have been in the family for generations. His wife, Sonja, works with the grapes as well. Sonja is from Slovenia, on the other side of the Adriatic, but her warm good sense and deft hand in the kitchen qualify her as an honorary Italian (that’s not fair; I’m sure Slovenians have those virtues -- and they learn excellent English, besides). Their teenage daughter, Maria Diletta -- called Madi -- helps too. Madi, quietly demure in her limited English, is voluble enough in her fast Solopaghese , the local dialect, to qualify as a real Jersey girl if she ever decides to head our way.

Harvest time is a bustling span of two or three weeks for them, with constant running back and forth between their house on Solopaca’s main street, the nearby vineyards, and the cantina , the cooperative where the grapes are made into wines bearing the label Solopaca D.O.C. (Denominazione di Origine Controllata , the government guarantee of origin). To counter the bother of being a guest at a busy time, I had offered to help with the vendemmia . My mother, Alice (Alfonsina Marchitti, by birth) , wasn’t disposed to pick grapes, but did a fine job of exploring the narrow streets and poking into the little shops of Solopaca.

Trundling down corso Cusani with a bag of sweet, fennel-flavored sausage, she looked every bit like someone whose grandmother, Nonna Rosa, had never left the place. And, as it turned out, she had brought along a very valuable inheritance from Nonna Rosa: she could make herself perfectly understood in Solopaghese . With my CDs, dictionary and an online guide to verb conjugations, I had learned a fair bit of Italian. But when it came to dinner-table conversation, the joke was that I sounded like a professor from somewhere up north. Mom, though with less

Statues of saints Cosmas and Damian, carried in the September procession in Tocco Caudio

of a vocabulary, sounded like someone from Solopaca.

Solopaca, with a population of about 4,000, lies against a hillside between the great limestone massif of Mt. Taburno and the trickling River Calore. It’s an hour and a half drive from Naples, and only half an hour from the regional capital of Benevento, but suburbanization is a stranger to this part of the world. Where elsewhere there might be a built-up commuter corridor, in Campania the towns are as crisply defined as if they had medieval walls around them. Except on the steep, sere mountains, the countryside is all grapes and olives.

Beyond Naples and Sorrento, Campania is not tourist Italy. There is plenty of Campanian sun, but no one has written a book about seasons spent under it. When I visit my half-homeland, I’m happy that my

ancestors didn’t come from a part of Italy now overrun with outsiders. Inland Campania goes about its business, more or less oblivious to tourists. Nowhere along corso Cusani, Solopaca’s main street, are there shops stuffed with souvenirs. Instead, all on small ground-floor premises in a tight neat row of stone and stucco houses, there are the jeweler, the florist, the pharmacy, and the bookshop; the tobacconist, the clothier, the café where men in sport jackets argue good-naturedly about politics and soccer; and the dealer in motorbikes.

And the baker. On the morning when I set my alarm for two o’clock to drive into the mountains for the procession, I woke to the smell of wood smoke. It wasn’t cold enough for fireplaces, so I was puzzled -- until I remembered the baker, two doors down. He bakes his wonderful loaves in wood-fired ovens, and he was up earlier than me.

Why had I gotten up so early myself?

On the day before, we had driven across Mt. Taburno, through thick woods and past grazing flocks of sheep, into the skein of small towns beyond. At lunch near Tocco Nuovo, we had learned about the procession in honor of Cosmas and Damian. I knew little about the brothers, martyred by Diocletian, and I usually go to church only on Easter. But there was something alluringly atavistic about walking in torchlight, up and down hills, past sleeping villas. Saints are saints, I know, but this was like being part of something pre-Christian, a ceremony in the nighttime honoring minor local deities.

My mother hadn’t been at all tempted to get up at such an hour. I returned later than I had expected, because once the saints had been tucked in for another year I had to retrace, again on foot, the route to my car -this time in daylight, which revealed that the procession had skirted the stark promontory where the ruined quarter of Tocco stands. I took time to explore the old town, which was abandoned after a 1983 earthquake and left

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to wandering goats. When I got back to Solopaca, via the dicey mountain roads, Sonja archly handed Mom a rolling pin.

Even boys in their fifties shouldn’t make their mothers worry.

Besides, it was almost time to go to work.

The harvest of grapes in the campagna, the countryside around Solopaca, begins during that time each late September when the bunches hang plump and full on the vines, and the growers determine that their sugar content -- the basis for fermentation -- is at its peak. Each day Nicola and Sonja, Madi if school was out, and a few other relatives and helpers would drive the short distance to the vineyard selected for that day’s harvest.

Armed with spring-loaded clippers like I use at home to prune shrubs, I joined them to fan out among the rows of vines, working row by row. It might be a day for cutting only Malvasia, or Trebbiano, or Lambrusco. We clipped the grapes where they hung from the vines, and the big pyramidal bunches felt good as they dropped heavily into my cradling left hand.

With each clip, we tossed the grapes into plastic boxes, like milk cartons but without lattice sides, which we would leave along the rows between the trunks of the vines. Once or twice each hour, Nicola drove his small tractor that just fit within the narrow lanes between the vines, and his helper, a muscular young man named Carmine, loaded and stacked the boxes on a platform behind the tractor. At day’s end, we dumped all of the boxes into the big orange carello , a wagon that tilts hydraulically like a dump truck, and Nicola towed it behind the tractor to the cantina .

Lunch in the vineyards of Solopaca, even with the boss around, is nothing like the grab and gulp workday lunches of North America. At about one, Sonja spread a tablecloth across the hood of her Fiat, and made ten-inch-long sandwiches of prosciutto

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and mozzarella on the chewy, crusty bread from the wood-fired ovens. There might be batter-fried pumpkin blossoms from the previous night’s dinner, and figs and white peaches from trees that grow near the entrance to the vineyard. We sat on the ground and ate our sandwiches, and drank Nicola’s homemade wine -- a full-bodied white that I decided was best served at the temperature of a September day in Campania.

We got up after a long hour, and went back to work. No one who paused for ten minutes with a salad and a bottle of water would have accomplished any more than we did.

Over the course of a vendemmia , Nicola will harvest 16,000 to 26,000 kilos of grapes. This was not so good a year -- too much rain, Nicola told me -- but to anyone who didn’t know better, watching the long line of tractors and carelli backed up along the side of the road waiting to deliver grapes to the cantina , each day’s haul would seem like a bumper crop.

While Nicola waited to have his load of plump Lambruscos weighed and tested for sugar content, before dumping them into a hopper where a worm gear would feed them to the big fermentation silos, I talked with Massimo DiCarlo, president of the Solopaca cantina . “We have 630 members in the cooperative, and these are our busiest two weeks,” he told me. A well-spoken man, with the air of a progressive politician in a mid-sized city, he has served twice as president since 1983. “Before the cantina was established in 1971, the growers mostly produced their own wine [many, including Nicola, still make a supply for home consumption]. Here, we make twelve varieties -- our Rosso Superiore is aged for a minimum of three years. We design our labels, we offer seminars to the growers -everything down to selecting the best Sardinian corks.”

All of this recent vertical integration, though, has a long history behind it. “Wine has been made in this region for more than 2,000 years,” boasted Mr. DiCarlo. “The poet Horace was traveling from Brindisi to Naples, and he stopped at an inn here and tasted our wine. He wrote about how good it was.” The cantina president motioned toward a window in the big, paneled room where we sat, surrounded by shelves of bottles. “Out there in that grove of trees are the ruins of an old Roman tavern. Who knows? It may well be the osteria that Horace visited.”

Horace, a connoisseur of wine and member of a race that loved clever innovation, would have marveled at the four pumps standing in front of the cantina ’s retail shop. They looked like gasoline pumps, with thick rubber hoses and numbers that clocked quantity and price. But they were wine pumps, and anyone could tote their own demijohn up to one of the nozzles and have the attendant fill ‘er up. At eighty Euro cents a liter, regular was a luscious, fullbodied steal. Premium went for one Euro forty.

I put my clippers aside one day, and drove with my mother to Benevento.

Benevento is a city bewitched. Like Salem, Massachusetts, it plays up a spooky past, but without Salem’s nasty overtones of trials and executions. Benevento’s witches, which some sources trace back to worship of the goddess Diana, were a self-proclaimed lot, rather than an innocent collection of persecuted crones. They allegedly met beneath a walnut tree near the banks of the River Sabato throughout the Middle Ages.

“Under the water and under the wind / Under the walnut of Benevento” was their summons to gather from near and far.

Traveling more prosaically in a rented VW, my mother and I made our own pilgrimage to the biggest city (population roughly 70,000) in our part of Campania.

The vendemmia, grape harvest time in the Solopaca vineyard of Nicola Franco (left)

The witches are remembered today in the figure of the strega -- witch -- on the label of the eponymous herbal liqueur made here.

The walnut tree, which we had read somewhere still survived down by the river, was naturally first on our Benevento agenda.

But we were disappointed. While we were circling Benevento’s splendidly preserved first-century Arch of Trajan, examining relief carvings depicting the emperor’s triumphs, we struck up a conversation with one of the locals, a geography teacher proud of his English.

“There are no witches,” he told us, not too much to our surprise. “There is no tree. It hasn’t been there for five hundred years.”

So instead we finished paying our respects to Trajan, visited a Roman theater as old as the arch, and wandered the twisting back alleys of downtown Benevento. Here, tucked in amidst snug little townhouses, attorneys’ offices, and the damp echoing courtyards of decaying palazzi, we found a trattoria called Locanda delle Streghe -roughly, the Witches’ Inn. Yes, it was a touristy name -- but how touristy could it be, in a city where there didn’t seem to be any tourists? We even ordered the “witches’ soup.” It was good. And it had walnuts in it.

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On another day, my mother and I drove the six or seven kilometers across the valley of the Calore to Guardia Sanframondi, the town my grandfather’s family came from.

Guardia -- the name comes from a 12thcentury Norman watchtower that looms above the highest part of town -- is only a bit larger than Solopaca, but it’s livelier, with more shops and cafés. There was portable commerce, too. As we walked along the main street, we heard a voice over a loudspeaker calling, “The onions have arrived.” The onions had arrived via a small truck, which crawled from one block to another, stopping for women who would walk off with bunches of the hard, paperyskinned autumn cipolli .

While we sat on a bench watching the onion transactions, we noticed that the drab postwar building across the street was the town hall. We must have both gotten the idea at the same time: why not go in and check the birth records? Mom made herself clear enough -- even in Guardia, they understand Solopaghese -- and we waited while a clerk unshelved a dusty volume and began to run his finger along the entries, done in a beautiful cursive, of birth records more than a hundred and thirty years old.

And there they were, two babies born not long after Garibaldi had driven the Bourbons from southern Italy: my greatgrandparents, Raffaele Marchitti (1867) and Alfonsina Cenicola (1870), who would find their way to Paterson, New Jersey, and whose son would marry a woman whose roots were in Solopaca. “Cenicola, that’s my name,” said the clerk. And there was a greater coincidence: we looked at Alfonsina’s entry, and realized that this day, September 22, was her birthday.

On the day my other great-grandmother, Nonna Rosa, left Solopaca never to return, she went to say goodbye to her father in the church where he was working. Pasquale DiBernardo was an artist, and religious

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paintings were his stock-in-trade. One evening, we went with Nicola and Sonja to a little chapel on a side street, where, we had been told, several of his paintings survived.

We had to get a priest from one of the other churches in town to open the chapel, which was seldom used; the holy water fonts seemed to have been dry for a very long time.

A fresco on the ceiling, and a painting on the marble altar, showed the same device -- a cross, with crossed arms before it. One arm was bare, the other in a brown sleeve, and both hands bore the stigmata, the wounds of the crucifixion. The bare arm was of course that of Christ, but I suspected that the arm cloaked in Franciscan brown was that of the saint Padre Pio. Padre Pio, much venerated in this part of Italy, bore the stigmata. But if the arm was his, the painting could not have been done by my great-great-grandfather, who worked before Pio’s day. Perhaps the arm represents someone else with the stigmata. Perhaps Pasquale diBernardo’s work adorns some other Solopaca church.

And perhaps it was a far more distant relation of mine who painted the fresco of Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John the Evangelist, in the style of Giotto, on the 14thcentury rear wall of the musty chapel.

Nobody in the family paints today. But we all cook, and one of the delights of my visits to Solopaca has been to discredit the popular modern belief that Italians in Italy don’t eat like Italians in America. The recipes that Sonja learned from Nicola’s mother are the same ones I grew up with in New Jersey. Over olive cuttings on the grill in Nicola and Sonja’s courtyard, my mother charred red peppers to skin and dress with garlic and olive oil. Beneath the rough red tiles that sheltered a corner of the courtyard, by trees bearing lemons and persimmons, we heaped our antipasto plates with slices of prosciutto and sopressata , with sheep’s milk cheese, and with little globes of fresh mozzarella. There were cavatelli , tightly

rolled fingers of pasta; spaghetti carbonara , brasciole , and grilled sweet sausage; and the silky potato croquettes that Nicola’s sister Concetta brought along with minestrone thick with the short tubes of macaroni called ditalini . With it all we drained bottles of Solopaca DOC and Nicola’s homemade wine as well -- Nicola DOC. After dinner, the grappa and Strega went around. “A friend of mine made this,” Nicola told me one night when he brought out a bottle of grappa insidiously devoid of labels. “No one wants to drink it. If you can get down a glass, I’ll give it to you. Regalo -- a gift.”

I got down a shot -- it must have been a hundred and thirty proof -- and then another.

Not quickly, with bravado, but with a slow savoring of the simple heat and clarity of the stuff. Like the roasting red peppers, or the

fat black bunches of grapes, like a white fig in the morning, or torchlight reflected on a saint’s painted robes, the fire in the grappa was a simple declarative, a primary color of southern Italy.

But I passed on the regalo. I was sure they wouldn’t allow anything that flammable on the plane. And I think that same bottle will be there when I return.

(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of Traveler Overseas.

It is also available in paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon as part of a collection of travel articles by Bill Scheller, entitled In All Directions, published by Natural Traveler Books®.)

Wood Duck Photo by Janet Safris

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Baseball and Proust: Memories of Games Past We run into trouble when we start double-checking those memories on that cerebral cortex of the ether -- the internet . . .

By Kendric W. Taylor

Marcel Proust bit into a French pastry and all his childhood memories came rushing back. Probably not a baseball fan, for Proust, the crack of a bat against ball in spring signified nothing beyond annoyance, as he hated loud noises, but for my red-blooded American youth, that sound meant two immediate things: baseball, and cutting school for Opening Day. However, it turns out, unlike Proust, who seemed to have total recall, memories of those wonderful mileposts sometimes turn out not exactly as remembered, sort of an “Uncertain Remembrance of Things Past.” We all know memory takes on shades with age, and to delve into even more high-toned references, instead of retaining the sharpness of a Leonardo drawing, they become unfocused and misty like a Turner seascape. But they are no less cherished, not so much how accurate they are, but 42

because of what they represent, a happy time of shared discovery. We run into trouble when we start double-checking those memories on that cerebral cortex of the ether -- the internet -- and find that nostalgia doesn’t always stand up to the reality of fact checking.

It’s family custom for fathers to take their sons (and daughters) to their first major league game, and mine was no different. It was right after World War Two, and his newspaper had a field box at Yankee Stadium. This also entitled us to have lunch at the famous Stadium Club under the stands in the ballpark – probably the predecessor of today’s private suites and fancy in-stadium dining concessions. “We’ll put you right behind home plate,” the maître d’ said genially, and he did: a table where home plate would be in the huge panoramic photograph of the stadium behind it. There we sat with the left and right field stands stretching out on either side of us, while we dined on roast beef fit for Babe Ruth himself. It was amazing, and I hadn’t even seen the field yet. We finished, walked through a long tunnel toward daylight, and there in front of us as we emerged, the once-in-a-lifetime sight for every kid at their first game – that wondrous green expanse of a big league playing field. The rest of that day has faded from memory – too bad, as the Yankees that year had all their players back from the war, and that included Joe DiMaggio and all the great pre-war Yankee stars that were in the World Series seemingly every October.

My father once told me about his most memorable game: his father had owned a riding stable near Central Park, and being a tradition-clad Englishman, might have enjoyed cricket, but probably had no time for our national sport. My father hated the stable, but liked baseball, and often hiked himself over to the Polo Grounds, where the fabled NY Giants under John McGraw dominated the National League at the beginning of the 20th century. As such on that day, in September 1908, both he and McGraw watched as the Giant’s Fred Merkle commit a colossal base-running mistake that cost the Giant’s the game and the pennant, Quickly known as “Merkle’s Boner” (the word had a different connotation then), when, with the score tied in the ninth, Merkle, a 19-year-old, failed to touch second base on what should have been the game-winning hit, instead resulted in a force out at second and a tie game. The Cub’s won the next game and the pennant. Five baseball immortals were on hand that day, McGraw, and Christy Matheson for New York, Three-Finger Brown and no less than Tinker, Evers and Chance for the Cubs. The Giants also had a pitcher on their roster named Bull Durham. Quite a day.

For myself, my second big league game and first Opening Day was in April of 1947 (dates are important, as we shall see), when my friends and I made the journey down from our suburban homes to Polo Grounds (same name, newer ballpark). New York boasted of having three teams in those days: the Yankees, Giants, and over in Brooklyn, the Dodgers; our group of friends had adherents of each. Although in our early teens, we already considered ourselves Broadway regulars from our trips to Manhattan, sophisticated habitués of Hubert’s Flea circus and other venues in Times Square famous for luring in the innocent.

Our town had no baseball stars, except for the owner of a local bar who had pitched for the Chicago Cubs during the war. We did get to watch a self-proclaimed local hot prospect with the wonderful name of Babe Narr, who strutted around the grass outside our 8th grade class windows, exercising in a full New York Yankee

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pinstripe uniform he had somehow obtained from an open workout they had held.

We also had a Class D minor league team in the next town, playing in a small ballpark atop a hill leading up from the Boston Post Road. At the front of the hill was a weathered two-story mansion from the area’s glory days, nicknamed “Rosebud Manor,“ as it was thought to be a brothel. From the stands on a summer’s night, we wondered idly which of us might have the nerve to climb the long flight of wooden stairs leading up from the Post Road (where George Washington had once passed on his way to Boston), and knock on the weathered front door.

Memories of Giants and a Babe For years I had very firm memories of that day. The Polo Grounds was shaped like a horse shoe, with home plate at the closed end and the club house upstairs in dead center at the open end, a long, long 482 feet away. The foul lines were 259 feet in right and 279 in left, meaning a pull hitter could make a living hitting pop flies down the line for endless home runs (which a lifetime Giant hitter named Mel Ott did, riding them into the Hall of Fame).

The Giants also featured that year one of the original “phenoms,” Clint Hartung, the Hondo (TX) Hurricane. Just out of the Army, without having played a single major league game, it was a question of whether he would hit 50+ homeruns as a batter, or win 25 games as a pitcher (a player could never do both, it was said, even the mighty Babe Ruth. Never Happen). One image of the day stuck in my mind: the Giant center fielder making a magnificent throw from deep center to catch pitcher Schoolboy Rowe sliding into home. The Giants lost.

What really happened, I find, was that it wasn’t opening day, it was a Sunday a week later, so we never cut school. Schoolboy Rowe did pitch, but wasn’t thrown out at the plate, it was a guy named Jim Tabor. Clint Hartung played, but went 0-4, and the giants still lost. Hartung went on to obscurity; but I was there with my friends, and I still miss them.

Next year was a game with a scene that I couldn’t possibly forget: Babe Ruth in an expensive camel’s hair topcoat and matching peaked cap, standing near home plate, while his voice, sounding like his throat was filled with broken glass, echoed through massive Yankee Stadium. There were 58,339 fans there that day in 1947 were there because my girlfriend had a crush on Bob Feller, the great Hall of Fame pitcher for Cleveland. So she got her father to spring for a field box right next to the visitor’s dugout, and invited my great friend Doug and myself – Yankee fans -- to the game.

We had no idea the Babe would be there, but there he was, walking slowly toward the pitching mound, surrounded by dignitaries and Yankee greats, including a young catcher who called himself Larry Berra, and who got into the game later as pinch hitter. Ruth had recently undergone a terrible operation, the reason for that voice, and I watched him -- sitting almost exactly across from me next to the Yankee dugout -eating a hot dog and sipping a beer he kept under his seat. I felt so bad for him. It was a sad day, really. Moreover, it didn’t happen that way.

The game we went to was in April, Babe did appear, did make his brave speech, did have his hot dog and beer, and left around the 6th inning. Only it wasn’t Cleveland, Bob Feller didn’t pitch because it was the Washington Senators. Sid Hudson pitched

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for them, and the Yankees lost. It was confusion, because there were two occasions when Babe came back to Yankee Stadium for his final farewell. The second was when that iconic picture of him was taken, the old man leaning on his bat, thin and feeble in his pinstripes. It was Cleveland and Feller did pitch and lost. Obviously, my memory conflated both events, but again, I have memories of a lovely girl, and Doug and I stayed friends for the rest of his life.

He and I actually did get to a real opening day a year later at Yankee Stadium, and we actually cut school to do it; we sat high in the right field stands and Ted Williams hit a home run. Doug wore his Yankees baseball cap: teams hadn’t yet discovered large scale merchandising, selling items of every description to rake in the money. But Doug was ahead of his time, with the only Yankee cap in existence: dark blue with the white interlocking NY in front, which his mother had cut and sewed for him. It looked as real as the real thing, which you couldn’t buy anywhere. That was a Mom! At the stadium that day, we both took pictures of the action on the far away field on our primitive Brownie cameras, and for years afterward we had fun trying to identify various specks far below on the field: “Wait, is that bug DiMaggio, or Williams?” A few months later the Yankees held the above mentioned second “Day” for Babe, and he passed away shortly after.

‘The great man didn’t disappoint.’

One last vignette: in a show of solidarity a year-or-so later, our bi-partisan group of New York team fans all went together to the Polo Grounds for a Giant-Dodger double-header. We all wanted to see Jackie Robinson play, and the great man didn’t disappoint. My lasting memory was seeing him get four straight hits, and steal second four straight times. I’m not looking that one up on the internet or anyway, as this is exactly the way I want to remember him.

While the mind’s eye is usually an endless album of pictures, for some reason it’s hard to remember scenes with players from the past I had seen play. Ted Williams for some reason is the exception. I got to see him play a lot while at college in the late 50’s. ’ I would walk over to Fenway Park in the afternoon after class and sit in the right field bleachers. He was at the end of his career and still hitting over .300. Fenway still had the original bleachers, where we sat on long benches, not yet replaced with the modern individual seats. I’d loll in the sun, waiting for each Williams at-bat, listening to the conversations of students from the other schools discussing the best way to tan, between shouting at Jimmy Piersall playing center field, hoping to incite him to some madness. (I also remember the engineering students from MIT, who insisted on referring to their arms and legs as “pistons”).

And while I loved Williams, if only for his reluctant service in Korea, I remained a Yankee fan.

A few years ago, my then 11-year-old granddaughter came over after a camp outing at Yankee Stadium.

“Who’s Lou Gehrig,” she asked? He died of something, right?”

“Are you ready for a story,” I replied.

“Sure, Grandad.”

After explaining who Gehrig was, and how great a player he was, and what he represented, I explained that Gehrig getting married was big news, especially in the

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local newspaper, and in the same edition, many pages away in very small type, under “Births,” was the announcement of my arrival a week earlier at the local hospital.

Thus, with this connection, it was only logical that Lou was always my favorite player.

“I have the actual newspaper,” I told her. “Not a clipping, but the whole newspaper, if you want to see it.”

“Grandad, I never doubted you for a minute.”

Wall Art Photo by Chris Taylor

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The Winged Art of Janet Safris Communication

Western Kingbirds

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Aflight

Little Blue Heron Juvenile

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Harrier

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Afoot

Sora

Glossy Faced Ibis 50

Takeoff

Snowy Owl

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The Gift A Memoir

By Ginny Craven The giver receives the real gift – an emotional bequest, borne only of true, selfless service.

Some years ago, I took an extraordinary journey of heart that began when I volunteered for a Miami hospice organization. It was then that I met Marva Marshall.

Marva was an elegant person with an indomitable spirit whose deep, booming voice and Cheshire cat grin preceded her into every room. Her attitude belied the apparent circumstances of her life. She had a host of medical conditions – thrice weekly dialysis, degenerative heart disease among them – illnesses severe enough to be admitted to hospice, which presupposes a six-month life expectancy.

I visited her a couple of times a week in her apartment in Liberty City – a ramshackle little hovel with a rusted refrigerator and family photos of grandsons and nephews in their prison jumpsuits, not the nicest part of Miami to be sure. The first time I took my kids to meet Miss Marva, there was a drug bust right in front of us – guys plastered to the hoods of police cars. The sheer dichotomy of life experience was, well, black and white.

I would go just to chat or play a game of cards or to color (We both loved to color).

I brought her some vegetable plants for a little garden, food and sundries . . . Our very divergent lives began to meld on the most basic level.

In the summer of 2007, my family took an epic vacation lasting a full two months.

While away, I got a call from Miss Marva saying that she had been “kicked out of hospice.” By her estimation, she wasn’t dying fast enough for them. Great news to be sure, although her maintenance care most certainly deteriorated after that.

When I returned in late August, Marva was as spirited as ever, though she seemed more tired, a little more frail. She would walk with a walker just a few steps and be winded. Nonetheless, she rarely complained – even a little bit. Her granddaughter, Linda, had moved in with her over the summer – a quiet 18 year-old who was expecting a baby in November. Marva believed in caring for the child and wouldn’t have considered recommending an abortion; it was God’s will.

You begin to see the cycle of poverty and the seemingly endless ripples of a poor decision – only those bad choices have so much more impact in Marva’s world.

Linda’s father, Marva’s only son, had died sixteen years before from AIDS. Marva told me about getting the news of his death. She said that she ran from the house screaming. She just totally lost control. That’s not a hard one to understand. It created such a vivid picture for me. It still makes me feel as though I’m going to suffocate just to think about it.

Linda and her sister, Melissa, were Marva’s grandchildren. Melissa, a surly, angry teenager had had a baby at 13. After their father died, they bounced between reluctant family members; their mother was a crack addict and although she lived in Miami, the girls hadn’t seen her for years. Although Marva stepped in to take care of Linda, her failing health didn’t allow her to do much, but she was there – the eternal matriarch.

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While the fall wore on with my own cares and concerns, Marva’s constant optimism made me feel a little ashamed of my petty grumblings – kept me real. I tried to see her as often as I could, but life, in general, seemed to devour my time. After returning from one of my out of town trips, I called over to say, “Hello!” Rudolph, Marva’s partner, told me that she had been admitted to the hospital with a pain in her abdomen and would be operated on the next day. I went to see her and had only a moment before she was taken to surgery – our last real moment as it turned out. The doctors discovered that her entire abdomen was gangrenous, so she was returned to ICU on a ventilator. I spent the ensuing days in and out of intensive care with her, trying to advise her family on the appropriate path. This was no way to live – or die.

Rudolph had been Marva’s partner for 30+ years. He was completely devastated and clinging to a vain hope that she would get better. Because they were not legally married, he could not make any medical decisions for her. So, the hospital had to contact her three brothers to do that long-distance. Alvin, her eldest and closest brother who lived in Norfolk, called me to ask my opinion. He was dealing with his own private hell; his son had just undergone treatment and surgery for esophageal cancer. And, sweet Rudolph was in no condition to give advice, or really to comprehend the situation. As for me, I was just there, holding her hand, talking to her – knowing that she knew and appreciated my presence. My kids came with me on her birthday and we all sang to her, with the ventilator sighing mournfully in the background. We brought balloons.

I’ve often thought what a curious sight I was to the uneducated onlooker – how out-of-place as I stood at her bedside – me, the affluent white woman, she so poor and black. And, when I would walk hand-in-hand with Rudolph – again, two ends of the spectrum – he, with his dirty T-shirt and shy, toothless smile – and me, well Barbie.

But, those folks stuck on appearances simply didn’t know.

Miss Marva died on November 29th, just one day after her 60th birthday. We never got to celebrate our “decades” at Red Lobster (her favorite restaurant). I helped her brother Alvin to make the decision to take her off life support. She died that same night – just hours later, in fact – and I was the only one with her, holding her hand, knowing she knew . . . hoping she knew. Alvin put instant trust in me – strange, really, but so very fulfilling – to be needed, trusted and wanted – even more poignant given how miserable my own home life was at the time.

The week that followed was a somber one and a time really left to the family. I went to see her at the funeral home, pulling up to this caricature of a place, all pimped out with gaudy décor and personnel sporting lots of gold – both in their front teeth and around their necks and wrists. There she was – my Marva – all dolled up with a familiar (though much fancier) turban on her head, earrings and a funny quirky smile – not the broad toothy grin I was used to. Her eyes were closed, and she looked peaceful, almost smug in fact. It was good.

The funeral was really an experience. We went to a Baptist Church in the very heart of Overtown/Liberty City –not a great place to venture into, especially for someone like me – day or night. I pulled up in my perfect little minivan and alighted in my perfect little black suit, ruffles at the hem.

Rudolph and Alvin had asked that I speak at the funeral. Despite my endemic dislike for public speaking, I was uncharacteristically calm. The church was huge and

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I sat with the wife of the preacher – right up in front. There were lots of “Praise-theLords” and “Hallelujahs” and streams of preaching/singing/proselytizing. I was the only white person in a crowd of nearly 100 – a mostly tough-looking crowd.

I followed a deacon to the podium – an inspirational speaker/singer who had the crowd on their feet. Wonderful – a decidedly hard act to follow! Nonetheless, people reacted. Folks laughed . . . and I cried a bit, whether from nerves or sheer emotion it’s hard to say. But, I embraced the crowd, embraced their humanity and celebrated this remarkable little woman who was our common bond with my words:

My name is Ginny Craven. I began as Sister Marshall’s friend and, now, I guess I’m the Black Sheep of the family! I met Ms. Marva almost a year ago through my volunteer work with Odyssey Healthcare – a local hospice company. It was love at first sight for me, and I’d like to think it was the same for her. But, that is her special gift – making everyone feel important. I think that, if there is one thing about Marva that is truly remarkable, it is her spirit. I knew her when her health was already failing and she was always upbeat – always happy to see me and my kids. I think she inspired people that way. And, it is this same spirit that I will hold in my heart forever. While I am sad that she is no longer here with us, I am blessed to have known her and to now be a part of her world. As I once told her and have told Rudolph too, I’m like crabgrass; once I get started, it’s hard to get rid of me.

Near the end of the funeral, there was an interlude that, to me, was comic relief, although apparently, it was standard operating procedure for the rest of the audience.

Two members of the funeral home staff paraded up the aisles bearing all the flower arrangements that had been given by Marva’s friends and family. The two guys, who were properly attired in over-the-top shiny suits, strutted up and down before the congregation hawking their wares as though they were up for auction.

“And this lovely arrangement featuring chrysanthemums and daisies was given by Sista’ Marshall’s devoted brutha’ Alvin Walker.”

The congregation then paid final respects, filing by her open casket, some laying flowers on her still form. Linda held her newborn baby for a once-in-a-lifetime view of her great grandmother. And it was over . . . a physical life extinguished.

The service graveside was mercifully short. There was no filling of the grave, thank God. I’m not sure that I wanted to hear the sound of the clods of earth thudding on the casket lid. I said my good-byes graveside.

Now, more than a decade later, life has intervened, dulling the experience somewhat to be sure. But, this is something that will stay with me forever – a treasure so precious, a lesson so profound that it can never be erased. The giver receives the real gift – an emotional bequest, borne only of true, selfless service. Agendas are set aside; selfish motives are discarded; differences disappear into thin air. What remains is pure, distilled humanity – just people connected heart-to-heart, without prejudice or expectation, joined at the most basic level of eternal truth. This is the gift that I received from my friend, Marva.

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It is to be learned – This cleaving and this burning, But only by the one who Spends out himself again.

Hart Crane

NOTEBOOKS

By Tony Tedeschi

Caffé de Perugia: Mid-afternoon snack.

Bel paese cheese; warm, crusty slices of bread; ripest, sweetest black figs and a fine chianti. Sunny day, cloudless sky, light breeze. The highlight of this summer’s Northern Italian Jazz Festival for me was last night’s Armstrong/Holiday Classical Jazz Orchestra, 12 pieces performing dead-on versions of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday songs, fully deserving of the orchestra’s titling itself “Classical.” Chicago-based female vocalist Betty Blanchard’s amazing channeling of Holiday’s version of “All of Me” was matched by her fellow Chicagoan tenor saxophonist Jimmy Redfield’s beautifully rendered cover of the Lester Young solo. Just one of many gems. New Orleans native Jean-Paul Andre’s vocal of Satchmo’s “La Vie en Rose,” along with his doing double-duty on trumpet, ala “Loo-iss,” white handkerchief and all, was nothing short of Armstrongian. The jazz orchestrations – Look at those three. Extras in a Fellini movie? Especially the one on the left.

Fashionably dressed on this warmish Italian afternoon. All three sipping an Italian red, holding the wineglass stems with the delicacy of aristocrats.

Where was I? 55

The jazz orchestrations would have been fodder for my father in our battles over the supremacy of his music versus my allegiance to the new rock ‘n’ roll of my youth.

My music’s growing dominance of the radio airwaves had exiled my father to listening to old ’78 rpm records of his songs because his favorite radio networks had been taken over by fast-talking DJs, spinning just my rock ‘n’ roll. My father would lambaste me for my bands, who were now even filling the musical guest appearances on the TV variety shows, shaggy-haired groupings he felt should have remained consigned to the cellars or garages where they rehearsed. “Do you call that music?” Whatever I called it, his broken-record response was always that it couldn’t compare to the velvety sounds of tuxedo-clad musicians in big bands and their sophisticated artistry. “You can’t jump up and down and play anything good on those wood-plank guitars they swirl around and swat at.” OK, admittedly, now in my let’s just say later middle-aged years – Did that one on the left just sneak a smile at me? Is she only pretending to listen to her two companions?

I raise my glass to take another sip, hold it straight in front of me for just an instant, using it as a transparent shield through which to establish eye contact. For just an instant. Did she? For just that instant? She rejoins their conversation. Oh God, Nick, not again.

Back to the music review.

This year, I found the other performances formulaic: progressive trios – piano, bass, drums; or replace piano with guitar or vibes; maybe add a sax – not progressive.

What they were playing would pass muster as “progressive” maybe forty years ago.

Then the dissonant, atonal groups, each playing their own solo, all at the same time, within a performance that bore no resemblance to anything – I stop writing. It’s boring me. Once past the Classical Jazz Orchestra owning their genre’s history, the rest of it is the same shit as last year, disguised as innovative. The potential for drama here is a far more interesting dynamic. I raise my head slowly.

She is saying something to her two companions. One attempts to look over in my direction while trying not to make apparent what she is doing. She gives up and says something to the other two.

I need an elixir.

Where the hell is it? I rummage through my overstuffed backpack. Need a reminder of what not to. It’s all there in the first new notebook I bought right after I got the backpack. Squeezed in now, ancient history, somewhere down there in one of the innumerable pockets these packs contain to keep you from finding anything quickly. Giraffe on the cover for no good reason. Never been to Africa. Been to a lot of places, but never been to Africa. Here it is. Leaf through the pages to . . . here.

The page pasted in. Carefully typed, cut to size, then pasted in. Some need to preserve the words. Need to remind myself that I never learn. I take a breath. A deep breath. I lay the old notebook down on the table.

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This year’s festival even expanded the concept of jazz to include – Fuck it. I take up the old notebook, return to the pasted-in page and the memory of a conversation . . .

“My editor, the one who had published many of my travel articles, she kept trying to make me stop. Her recurring theme: ‘Why do you need to transform some observed reality into an alternative reality of your own making? I pay you good money to deal with reality.”

“She’s right, you know. That other prose you’re writing isn’t real. It didn’t happen.”

“That’s what they call fiction, mon docteur.”

“Of course. But you write about it like it’s what actually happened.”

“Fiction, doctor. Fiction.”

“But when you write it, it somehow seems real to you.”

“It is real to me, isn’t that why I’m here?”

He studies me a moment, as if my side has scored a point. He now needs a way forward.

“Tell me about it,” he parries, “the real versus the surreal. The . . . fiction.”

“It’s all in my notebooks.”

“Your self-analyses, then.”

“No, my fiction, dammit. My stories.”

“So, tell me about them.”

“Why don’t I just bring the notebooks. I’ll bring them, the notebooks.”

Instead of the notebooks, I condensed the most biting passages down to one page.

I just brought the one-page condensed version. I even gave it a title. “Stark Remarks from Disasters Past.” Purposely rhymed. Have a little fun with it. Fun fiction.

Siobhan: “I had only prayed that you had felt the same, Nicholas. Perhaps it was merely my pathetic need to have had you feel as I did. My belief that I could not have experienced such a connection if you had not as well.”

Aldina: “You’re a sweetheart, Nick. I have nothing but warm feelings for you, but we are from two different worlds. You could never live here, in my world; I could never live there, in yours.”

Gabby: “Who are they all? What is the meaning of all their lives? Tell me, have you ever written about me?” “No,” I answered, feebly. “Hah!” she blurted. “I don’t believe you.” “Nothing I’m happy with,” I said, again lamely.

Laura: “Let’s just say you gave me a year of joy, Nick, and leave it at that. Can’t you see what you did for me? I love you, Nick, but I’m trapped.”

Contemplative look. “I see,” he says.

“You see? What do you see?”

“It’s not about what I see.”

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“What am I supposed to see?”

“You know the rules. I ask the questions.”

I nod.

“So, what have you learned from all that?” “. . .”

Circumstance will be my salvation, this time, right? There are three of them. No way to section her off from the other two. She’ll leave with her two companions.

Back to my writing.

This year’s festival even expanded the concept of jazz to include more blues, even some hip-hop scat with a horn section. OK, so now we know that my father’s music is on life support, short term, even at the festivals that were created to preserve it. Did I save his old 78s? What the hell would I play them on? Where the hell are my old jazz LPs? Does my stereo receiver still work? Can I still buy vacuum tubes?

They’re starting to stir, draining their wine glasses. They get up. Two of them drop money on the table. The other two; not her. They do those two-cheek kisses. She sits back down. Still has a little wine left.

I continue writing, with my head down, but just up enough to see what she’s doing.

She lifts her glass, takes a sip, holds it in front of her for a second and tips it, almost imperceptibly, as feigning a salute. The wry smile again.

Oh, God! Deep breath.

Can I get it right this time? ...

Evening, Brooklyn Queens Expressway, New York City Photo by Tony Tedeschi

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The Voice in the Chorus While the musical had played to sold-out performances throughout its first week, the focus of critics, and members of the audience alike, was less and less on the lead singers than on the beautiful, bell-like tone coming from the thirteen-member, allfemale chorus. The chorus, typically a place where ingénues got their first taste of the Broadway stage, had become the principal draw in a musical with no-less-thancompelling star turns from the frontline performers.

But the near perfect, bell-like timbre emanating from within a chorus that seemed to enwrap this uniquely angelic sound in its communal strains, while at the same time allowing it to sing out in its ring-line tones, began to create a demand to understand its origin. The music director, while saying he would love to take credit for the beauty of the sound, insisted the voicing that was created by the chorus was not necessarily what he was going for when he auditioned potential members. He said he was simply following the guidance of the composers who wrote the choral parts to support the solos of the principal performers.

Nonetheless, to the growing annoyance of the play’s producers, the unique voicing of the chorus had become the musical’s trademark and a growing internet sensation.

Numerous unauthorized recordings of it surfaced on the social networking sites and YouTube, quickly going viral on a worldwide basis. Those postings, in turn, engendered a call for discovering the source of the voicing. Typical of cyber sensations the movement soon grew into a contest of near frenetic proportions as to who would unravel the mystery of the musical phenomenon. Suggestions ranged from complex mathematical interpretations to videos of drunken frat boys croaking through choral ranges from bass to falsetto, in lame, sometimes downright ludicrous, attempts to recreate the sound in their YouTube postings.

The ongoing attention was a tremendous boon to ticket sales, delighting the producers but viewed as a pyrrhic victory by the composers, who felt creatively slighted by people attending performances for the wrong reason. They determined to strip away the layers of mystery surrounding the unique sound and explain it once and for all.

First, they listened to the chorus, without any of the soloists, a good start because there it was, the bell-like tone. But when they tried to zero in on which performer, or combination of performers, was most likely the source of the sound, the search became problematic. Sometimes it sounded as if some melding of all the voices somehow managed to produce the beautiful timbre that at the same time appeared to be separate and apart from the choir-like sound of the full chorus. Other times it sounded as if it must be coming from an individual singer. In either case, the sound was always there.

Next they tried stripping away individual performers to see if that would expose a single singer responsible for the sound. But various combinations of singers managed

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to produce the sound. Others could not. But when the original combination that had produced the sound was reconstituted, the sound was gone, while reconstituting the grouping, which had failed initially, reproduced the sound when tried again.

Combinations were tried and retried, sometimes working, other times not. The production of the sound seemed to be a matter of random combinations of singers.

Word of this confounding situation went viral on the internet, until one theoretical physicist suggested that the sound was coming from some black hole in the cosmos or some quirk of quantum mechanics resulting from the chorus somehow, inexplicably, managing to “tap into the music of negative space.” Or, metaphysically, “the music of the spheres.”

But no matter how hard they looked, no matter how closely they listened, they could not see or hear her. The she, who sang the beautiful bell-like tones, was beyond their ability to capture her sight or sound. But I could see her, could hear her influence upon every note of every song in the Broadway musical, knew that while she would stand invisibly in the chorus, it would be her voice I would always hear. At the end of each night’s performance or afternoon matinee, I would watch her drop her light blue tunic to the floor and walk naked from the stage. The rhythm of her movement inspiring the next piece of art that would flow from my soul, which would invest itself in every note I would ever write. The breath I had caught would breathe life into my soul. That I would know what she knew: that I loved her.

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One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Henry Miller

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