Giggling in the Dark

My mind doesn’t always move in a straight line, so bear with me for a few paragraphs here.

As some of you may have guessed, I’ve been going to some Kino Unter den Sternen (cinema under the stars) nights lately. Vienna summers being what they are (i.e. colder than San Francisco and rainy as hell), the weather hasn’t permitted it every night, but so far this year I’ve seen The Damned, In a Lonely Place, In the Heat of the Night and just the other night, Goldfinger.

Okay, I’ve seen Goldfinger about a million times, but I had the night off, and I thought, ‘It’s spectacular, gotta be nice on a big screen, and really, how many warm nights do we have left this summer?’

Of course, I laffed my ass off at stuff I’d never noticed, and I got caught up in the sheer velocity of the sequences all over again. Halfway through my second large cold beer, I had what appeared to be a thought. Goldfinger should be a key text for me. The whole thing is besotted with gadgets—the laser, the super Aston Martin, the junkyard auto compactor, etc. It’s pure techno-filia, drenched with the belief that fancy machines will save your ass. (Or kill it.) But @t the end, Bond himself cannot defuse the Bomb—he’s baffled, and he even panics a bit. It’s a marvelous joke, because in the end, one realizes that even though the superspy likes all this hi-end junk, he’s actually pretty lo-tech. Bond is all fast fists and Martinis. Like me.

No. What I mean is I really identify with this teetering between techno-filia and techno-phobia. I love my computer. I just don’t understand it.

Anyway, this beer-battered epiphany of mine wasn’t the best thing that happened that night.

During the climactic Fort Knox sequence of the film, as everything is accelerating and it’s all pretty ridiculous but you don’t care because it’s so fun, I noticed two teenage girls sitting behind me. They were giggling in the dark, and talking non-stop, apparently about the movie. They were tickled pink. Maybe it was the first time they’d seen Goldfinger. Or any James Bond besides Daniel Craig. Or any film older than Lord of the Rings.

After the movie, I saw them spill out onto the path that leads to the street. They were still giggling as they ran over to pick up the schedule for the rest of this film festival. Then they scampered, chasing each other out, altogether in a tizzy about this crazy, corny, really ancient movie they just saw, yeah!

How great to witness such teen gaga discovery, such a rush of thrill and spritzing enthusiasm!

I smiled to myself. My daughters will have moments like this, years from now. Giggly discoveries with each other or with friends. By that time, I won’t be hanging out with them as much as I do now, so maybe I won’t see them capering around exactly like this. That’s okay. But it’s sweet to think they may laugh and hoot at stuff which I’m too over to care about, at things I’ve long taken for granted.

Youth isn’t always wasted on the young. When you’re fifteen, everything’s an adventure, especially if you’re out with your friends. At fifteen, there are so many things left to discover. When you see Goldfinger for the first time, it seems like the most outrageous artifact of a prehistoric time. You can’t even believe someone actually made such a zany film. Without CGI!

Dear reader, please do not cynically judge me. I do not miss that joy of discovery. I experience that joy every time I Google. It’s just nice to catch a glimpse of things to come for Adinah and V.

It makes me happy.

If I had a Hammer

I’ve been watching too many movies.

I’ve been eating too much salt. I’ve been writing too little. I’ve not been practicing yoga. I’ve been preaching to the converted.

I want a cold beer. I want to be better at conflict resolution. I want to be less sarcastic with my kids. I want another good HP Lovecraft book. I want a decent plate of nachos. I want a date with my wife.

I need to see that eye doctor (but I can’t!) I need to straighten out some business affairs, and pay the dentist bill. I need to make a memory box and start a Life Book for V. Jesus Christ, I need a break. I need to interrupt less and listen more.

I wish I had more hair on my head. I wish I had a stronger chin and actual eyebrows. I wish I had more money. I’d love it if I had more friends of my own (but friendships require time and care.) I wish I could read an uplifting newspaper article about politics and the economy in the USA. I wish I could vaporize Al Quaeda, the Taliban and the drug cartels in my beloved Mexico. I wish I had Kung Fu superpowers.

But today I’ve got to teach my class. I’ve got to pick up my kids at 3, then pick up the new closet shelves at the carpenter’s shop. I gotta read that paragraph that Anette wrote for Harvard. I gotta get a line on you.

I’ve got to tell them, ‘I love you.’

La Palma, Porto Paulo, Sicily

Back to Sicily, Part 2

After discovering three jellyfish in the first twenty feet of my first walk on this beach, I passed through the Twelve Stages of vacation recovery. Denial: “This isn’t happening to us!” Disbelief: “I can’t believe we’re stuck for two weeks on a beautiful beach full of quasi-lethal invertebrates!” Evasion: “How long can I keep this news from my wife?”

V. is too young to understand the exquisite discomfort of a jellyfish kiss, so I didn’t bother explaining the off-purple blobs on the sand to her. I just steered her away, and she burbled along happily enough.

When Adinah woke up, I didn’t have the heart to tell her. I was afraid she would be afraid to go in the water. I was afraid to go in the water. I was even more afraid Anette would immediately insist that we pack up and go searching for another beach in Sicily. And after our missed flight, lost luggage and that €120 cab ride, moving to another spot just sounded like a lot of damn work.

But when I got her to myself, I told my gal about the jellyfish, which the Italians call ‘medusa.’ She said, ‘Then let’s just go to another campsite.’ I said, ‘Let’s just go to the beach and see how it goes.’

A few hours later, after chocolate cornettos and cappuccino, we strode bravely out onto the beach—a lovely stretch of sand, a long, shallow shelf with sand bars so kids can walk way way out, not too many people…in other words, perfect.

I screwed up my courage and told my oldest daughter there might be medusa. Adinah didn’t care, she said—she was ready to jump in the ocean. We asked the people on the beach: one burnt brown German couple said they’d been here two weeks and had only seen a couple of jellyfish. And despite all the splats in the sand I’d seen earlier in the day, I could only find one blob there now. So I showed it to V. I thought, ‘She has to know about them so she won’t pick one up.’ V. never wants to swim in the ocean anyway, and I was afraid that now she’s just have one more reason to stay out of the drink. Instead, she got a stick and tried to poke the thing. Jellyfish really do look like little piles of marmalade.

This was not the first time I realized that, as a parent, you have to be careful you don’t give your kid all of your own fears. They usually don’t need them.

Still, on that first day, Adinah walked into the waves slowly. Anette waded in a few inches at a time. I screamed ‘Banzai!’ and threw myself into the water faux-hysterically. V. laughed at me, then declined to get wet at all.

We stayed there for twelve days. By the end of it, V. was splashing around and swimming as fearlessly as the rest of us.

One day, a whole army of medusa did invade our beach. As soon as we saw them, Adinah said, “Let’s go get a net!’ We spent the rest of that morning hunting jellyfish. They really are beautiful little creatures….

our place in the sun

Back to Sicily

One of the themes of our return to the beaches of the Corleone family was facing our fears. Or put another way, we learned that when life gives you jellyfish, make jellyfish salad.

We started off on the wrong foot. Packed and prepared early, got to the airport with plenty of time to make our flight to Rome, only to be told we were a day late. I hadn't looked at our itinerary very carefully.

After some tears and fears ("The airline won't refund, the campsite has surely given our trailer away, and every hotel on every beach within five hundred miles has got to be sold out!"), we convinced the nice butch lady at AlItalia to help us. She got us on a flight the next day.

The next day started out well enough. The other employees of AlItalia honored our quasi-legitimate rebooking, and we made it from Vienna to Rome, then on to Palermo. Then: 'Oops, sorry, one of your bags was put on a later flight to Palermo. Or maybe it was Milan.'

Eventually our other backpack arrived. But we had missed the last bus to our destination, a tiny village two hours away from Palermo. Anette talked a taxi driver into taking us to Menfi for 100 Euro. By the time we arrived some ninety minutes later, this fee had been adjusted for inflation to 120 Euro. I didn't mind the fare hike so much because I was busy looking around our camping village. It was dark already, but I didn't see or smell any trace of ocean anywhere nearby. Anette had booked it online. Had we committed two weeks to a hot little shack two kilometers from the sea?

No. A nice young man showed us to a roomy trailer with a refrigerator and a stove. We got the kids into bed, drank one large, very cold Morretti apiece, then Anette crawled under the covers, too. The campground seemed peaceful but strangely empty. It was a beautiful, cool summer night. I took a walk...and a hundred meters down a paved path, I stumbled into the Mediterranean.

Everything seemed peachy until the next morning. V woke up early, so I took her down to the beach.

Jellyfish everywhere. And not the cute, zoologically-interesting ones, but the ones that make you go "OWWWW!! Something is burning through my upper thigh!"

My vacation flashed before my eyes.

Gone Fishin' (in Sicily)

(barring Internet access on the beach, Euro Like Me will return in two weeks!)