Week Two - In-class Calisthenics

I didn't expect to fully realize Italy, its crepe paper air and the impression of steep walkways, the way words hang like pearls slung against each other, or the coffee like the skin of a statue roughed against my lips only in that moment. It should have been, I thought, Juno 1949 etched into the Colosseum. It should have been the two year old boy skipping past my daily cappuccino, waving a balloon animal over his head. It should have been the bus driver angling his job down into the pavement, or American passing salami skewers around me in the lobby of Hotel Clitunno, or lining our English up in front of a classroom full of future tour guides and bartenders. It should have been one of those human moments, grainy beneath my fingernails, ragged and pinned to each other. The boy because he is my own little brother, barefoot on the front June lawn, thousands of miles across the ocean, a plastic sword in his fist. Juno, who is us, sixty years ago, seeing the same patched stone, only with one less carving.

But I never thought of the R's rolled down narrow alleyways or rain clouds dipped into valleys every day of the afternoon or a tour guide lining Italy with English. I thought of my grandmother--step-grandmother, my aunt would correct--with flour on her hands in a yellow tiled kitchen, every cabinet thrown open and wind whipping in the one, small Brooklyn window. It's of her, the way she peppered her stories with "ya know?" and her nails drummed against your shoulder, it's how she nicknamed all of her friends after pastries. It's that Italian Christmas she tried to cook right after marrying my grandfather and the bits of cheese that slung down the pavement when he threw the lasagna out of that one window, demanding pork.