I’m psyched. I’ll soon get to hear Hackney Diamonds, the new album that most reviews say is the best Rolling Stones album in 40 years. I don’t usually listen to the music of my youth, but the Stones have a special place in my heart—I learned how to play electric guitar by listening to, and deconstructing, Keith Richards’ riffs on Exile on Main Street. Really, who could be a better teacher?
Thinking about these…I won’t call them father figures, but older brother and cousin figures has made me reflect on my long term friendships and leaving the country where most of my long term friends live. And also how we stay in touch. Back when, before email, Messages, and texts, we would have written letters, punctuated by the occasional expensive phone call. Now I zap a text across the world, and try to remember that they’re six to nine hours behind the time here. And every so often I bother them with a FaceTime session, where I get to walk around with my phone and show them what we’re up to. And then there’s the “so-shall,” as my Italian friends here call social media.
There is a difference between my Italian and American friends and family, especially beyond certain age (the young on both continents are adept at using phone apps to stay in touch). Americans of a certain age tend to be better at using their computers and phones to communicate, while with older Italians until recently were out of sight, out of mind. But I’ll keep this post to the people I’ve left behind.
One of the more interesting things is that the friends I’ve stayed in touch with the most are people I shared a crowded newsroom with back in the ’80s and ’90s. As one of them said replying to a FaceBook post, “You work with people for years and then you get old and suddenly realize that they are part of your group of lifelong friends.” The author is Victoria Slind-Flor (right), who was our San Francisco bureau chief. Ok, our bureau, period, in that city. She and I used to spend hours on the phone talking about just about everything. The last time I saw her I bumped into her serendipitously at the Ferry Building in San Francisco when I played hooky from a conference there. We sat on a bench overlooking the bay chatting and drinking coffee.
I was talking about writing this post with The Spartan Woman, and she noted that we see more old friends here than we did back in New York. Hmm…does being in Umbria have anything to do with it? Maybe it’s because our friends are habitual travelers, being or having been journalists and teachers. And once you’re in this country, you’re never really far from anywhere else because Italy is blessed with tons of rail and air connections.
Besides, we like to show off this part of Italy. It’s a nice break from tourist Italy, being mostly rural, hilly, and with fewer than 900,000 people in the entire region. It definitely was a good break for my ex-comrade Fred and his wife Mary. They’d buzzed around Puglia, attending a days-long party there, and then spent time exploring Sicily. But nothing prepared them for this place, which is sort of like Vermont but Italian. We look out at a river valley, some hills and mountains dotted with farmhouses and castles, and a big lake down the hill from us. As we drove around and walked up to a mountaintop, I kept hearing Fred say “wow.” That alone is almost worth the bureaucratic hassle it can be to live here.
Someone we see more regularly is Doug, or Monsieur Chasse as we used to call him, translating his last name instead of, impossibly, his first. Poor Doug was smitten by the place some years ago when he took a month-long language course. And after years of planning and driving real estate agents crazy (he’s choosy) he found his bit of paradise. It’s a house perched on a hill overlooking the Valle Umbra, with incredible sunsets as part of the deal. The house needed TLC, and after seven months of to-the-walls renovation, it’s quite the place to hang out in.
Who else? Two other former coworkers from that same place, Kris and Joanie. Both have visited and/or stayed with us. Do you sense a theme here? Our newsroom was an often crazy place, with an eccentric but brilliant cast of characters, and I can name a lot of people from there who have become lifelong friends. More than school, more than the old neighborhood, etc. There’s something about working on deadline with a bunch of like minded people—we used to joke that we could be a soap opera called “One Life to Give.”
/Rant: In fact, newsrooms up until the interweb days were pretty much like that in one way or another. It’s only when the Web forced wrenching change in how news is delivered that it changed. In came the consultants and data analysts and marketing experts who seem to have made a ton of money but have little to show for their efforts except turning those fertile beehives into what now resemble the dull precincts of insurance companies. I think the more eccentric personalities now somehow give off a signal that says “don’t hire me!” And we’re poorer for it.
Now instead of stories and scoops, there are clicks and content delivery systems. In my last days as a productive member of society, I’d sit in meetings with our marketing person turned content chief, and my deputy and I would zap messages with all the meaningless bizspeak buzzwords that the nonjournalists spouted. After awhile it got boring and sad.
/Rant over. We’ve gotten two of the gang of four over. Now we’ll try to get all of us together at the same time. And we’ll have our boss, who we called Mother, along too. Perugia hosts this bitchin’ journalism festival every spring, which is always a good excuse for a lot of friends to come, not to mention to get a trip on the expense account or as a tax deduction. Next year in Umbria?
Image up top: National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
(Not) A Year (Not) in tuscany 