We enter the world without cash or possessions and leave that way too. Thus
the only store of anything that truly we own is attention. Our early memories
of resistance are refusals to give our attention to what others says is
important. We learn that sometimes this is a bad thing to do, but sometimes
there’s a sense of power in “I just refused to listen.”
The opening of Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner” often comes to mind when I
write. We all have tales to tell but people build fortress walls around their
spending of attention, guard their right to splurge on phone games or “time
wasting.” We assert our identity by investing attention where we choose. And
we are bombarded by a siege army of folk who want some.
This then, by way of apology. My claim on your attention this week is not due
to hubris—I don’t think there’s any great reason to pay attention to me or to
my thoughts—but because I passed through scenes that interested me, and the
trawl of memory captured the following.
One more preliminary thought: I’m wearing one of my father’s sweaters as I
write, finally at a computer again, because it’s cool for June in Portland and
we have scarcely passed a day in the past two weeks that did not reach forty
celcius. But I’m also wearing it because he developed an attitude to travel
from which I have been trying to learn, at once stoic and accentuating the
positive. What I read about human memory functions suggests that we are set up
to recall what went wrong so that we may learn to avoid repeating errors.
Certainly that’s what my brain strives for. And yet people around me act as if
this were not what matters, my father in particular. He decided that the only
real treasure was memory and one has to work to collect good ones. Like art,
most memories disappear. What remains are those one finds interesting for some
reason; good and bad may not be the right categories, but who wants to read or
talk about pain or discomfort?
As the song says, “Accentuate the positive."
So let’s begin with a chance encounter; those stories usually engage. It was
not (how postitive is that for an opening) for want of trying that we ate
mediocre food in a city famous of Pecorino and pasta and all things right and
wonderful. We knew we would only have a few hours in the city so we took
advice, and then we took a taxi from the airport to the top recommendation,
which the web assured was open. The restaurant was closed. We walked, now
relying on those maps telling you whose cousins gave this restaurant got 4.1
our of 5.0 We expended considerable effort to land at a place that served
mediocre food. This happens when traveling more than when at home, but it’s a
fact of life.
The bottle of wine arrived first, an undistinguished but absolutely drinkable
Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. I was pleased. While waiting for the food I
remembered the joke recounted by our friend in Haifo, “Man asks a passing
waiter, ‘Does the person who took our order still work here?’”
There was no hurry, but breakfast had been in the wee hours and it was now two.
How long does it take to heat up a meatball? My attention was directed by
something like a telephoto lens, landing first on a third storey staircase
which led up to a very old doorway that had been bricked in, and then my eyes
came down to the three inch long very straight cut on a young woman’s cheek.
What was the tale behind that?
When I’d seen something similar in Tel Aviv—in this case a bruised cheek—I'd
asked. “Fell off a scooter.” Electric scooters and bikes were the bane of
pedestrianism in that city. Most riders were sensible, but loons scooted
through at ridiculous speed.
I glanced at the table beside us and tried to guess the relationship between a
man who was older than me and a woman who was younger than our two daughters.
The relationship seemed neither familial nor intimate. He was clearly the one
paying; she seemed to have local knowledge, but no command of Italian. When the
bill came he put his reading glasses over the top of his regular ones, nodded,
paid. They were silent, as if they did not know what would happen next.
I did. Not normally one for striking up conversations with neighboring
tables, I was feeling expansive. I read somewhere that the Queen asks people
if they have come far, so I tried that line.
“Have you come far?”
“ Australia.” Since the people at the table one over resembled academics at a
conference, I took a wild stab.
“ Here for a conference?”
“Had enough of those.”
Despite being at a loose end, he was not encouraging. I pressed on.
“Are you in academia?”
“Nah, politics.”
My hearing is poor and he was five feet away, so I missed some of what he
said, but the conversation warmed up when he asked what we wanted to see. I
said we hadn’t decided. He gushed about the frescos in the Villa Farnesina.
“Raphaels. It’s close by. They’ve just finished clearning them. Marvelous.
Worth the trip just to see them.”
I said that’s what we’d do. L. was listening at this point. I asked if he
made art himself. “Nah. But I collect…” Here I missed, first time around,
what it was that he collected. With the kind of encouraging noises we who hear
badly practice, I reached the understanding that it was probably Empire
furniture, about which he was happy to talk.
“Do you buy at auctions?”
“Some. “There’s not a lot of it about, and the problem with collecting is
that after a while there’s no room to put stuff.”
I agreed. “I collect swords.”
A distant relative of ours collects matchboxes. On that subject he his happy
to talk, but none other. The case here seemed similar. We eturned to the
subject of frescos, about which I know very little; Raphael is not one of my
“guys.”
And then the conversation took an unexpected turn. I asked what kind of
politics he’d been in.
“Labour. Like your U.K. Labour party.”
I rummaged in my brain’s storage locker, trying to recall anything about the
Australian Labour party. I remembered they’d had a long run in power and that
one of the prime ministers had a name I could nearly bring to mind. Stalling,
I tried, an anodyne equivalent of “have you come far.”
“You were in power quite a while?"
He said, “Yes, I followed [inaudible].”
Me, “I’m sorry, I missed that.”
Him, “I was prime minister after [inaudible again]. Paul Keating.”
“You were the Prime Minister?”
“Yes."
“I ‘m sorry, I know so little about Australian politics."
“Met Clinton, all those rogues… at conferences.”
Our food arrived. He rose to go. We all said, “Nice meeting you.” It was.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about Paul Keating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Keating ;
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Keating>
