Making a Home

By Larry & Arlene on May 13, 2016 in Blog | 13 comments

Making a Home: Hello dear readers.  It’s been a long while since I have shared my thoughts with you.  Thank goodness Larry is still feeling inspired to write and keeping the blog going.  I really can’t say why I lost my writing mojo other than we have a very active life here now and writing takes a lot of time and mind space – both of which are in less supply these days. My weeks are now filled with Pilates classes, a Stitch & Bitch group, Italian lessons from my ever-patient teacher and friend, plus Larry and I are in our 5th week of a 9-session cooking class with a chef.  We have also joined a group called Universitá della Terza Etá (University of the Third Age) that hosts very high-quality lectures on art, history and architecture, trips within Italy with qualified experts, and all manner of classes in the arts and crafts for mature adults (through which we are taking our cooking classes).  As with most things here in Ascoli the costs are amazingly low as this is a non-profit enterprise, possibly subsidized.  For example, we are paying the same for our nine four-hour-each cooking classes, taught by a local chef, as I paid for one four-hour cooking class through the Culinary Institute in San Diego – and we get to eat what we cook.. The addition of some more American expats has really enriched our lives as well.  They are all very interesting people and we have much in common – i.e. we love Italy, specifically Ascoli, are curious, independent and crazy enough to pull up roots and live in a foreign country.  We love and enjoy our Italian friends but communication with those who do not speak any English (fortunately many speak or understand some English) remains a challenge for me but Larry’s Italian is progressing rapidly.  Mom always hinted that I could be a bit lazy and stubborn, and the truth is, with the English speakers it is just easier.  “Total immersion language learning” is not as automatic as we are lead to believe, especially since every Italian community has their own dialect. I can write Italian, am pretty good at reading, and am proficient...

ITALY IS GOOD FOR ME We are grateful to those of you who have kindly offered comments and encouragement on our Blog effort.  It seems the Blog may be stimulating thinking by others on what a post-working life might be for them. Much of what I have attempted to communicate has been reflections on our unfolding lives in Italy. I haven’t set out to explicitly say very much about changes to the person I may be in process of becoming.  That is simply because I have to believe it is something about which there would be little interest.  Additionally, I’m still trying to figure out what is happening while I’m standing right in the middle of the process. And then the other day, a reoccurring awareness came into sharper focus for me. It seemed we might have begun to grasp there had been changes to the process of how we went about decision making. In doing some minor tasks, I realized I was reacting and behaving in a manner that was different than how I might have responded in the past. Yes of course, if we are paying attention to what is going on around us, we probably react by adjusting our response to what we feel is appropriate in that particular situation.  But the point that came to me was the yardstick I now seemed to be using in gauging ‘appropriate,’ had been realigned. A more fundamental change seems to have been going on. In the event what we are now sensing might be helpful, I thought I would pass along a few thoughts and further-ranging speculations. Clearly, retirement brings changes. There are obviously any number of factors involved. In retiring, the daily demands of the job are no longer the driving force behind many of our actions.  For some, contemplating a change that significant can be very intimidating. That is particularly true if the primary criteria you use to define yourself is your job. Starting early to begin thinking those implications through can be a very productive and probably important process. Those of you who have read previous Blog comments of mine have probably picked up on my increasing sensitivity to the idea of being more open...

 A NEW STATE OF MIND  We made a decision to create a new lifestyle in a different place hoping the process would generate new experiences.  This is just one more admission on our part to having a low threshold for boredom and finding new experiences invigorating.  An interesting aspect of new experiences seems to be, it tends to create a new state of mind. By deliberate choice, we came to live in the historic center of a provincial capital town, ‘off the beaten path’ in central Italy.  We chose to live in the older center of a town that has had the fortunate, good sense to consciously preserve the medieval character of the area. An impression that has grown on us is the level of respect the people of Ascoli have for themselves through respect for their cultural heritage.  The path along which the people of Ascoli have travelled through time is for them an immediate, visceral experience in their daily lives. What greets us on a daily basis here in Ascoli Piceno is very different from the American southern California that had previously been home. There is no question preserving the medieval character of Ascoli is an asset to promote tourism.  But the people of Ascoli have long been committed to preserving their cultural heritage well before mass tourism became a reality. It seems that tourism is drawn to experience Italy because of the respect these people have for their long heritage rather than sites like Ascoli being ‘manufactured’ to promote tourism.  This is not ‘theme-park-kitsch.’ This is the real thing far beyond what promotors could have manufactured and in a lot better taste. But Ascoli is also a place in touch with modern technology.  The already ample street lighting in Ascoli Piceno is in the final stages of being replaced by highly energy-efficient LED elements being installed in the existing, medieval appearing street lighting lanterns. Fiber-optic communication infrastructure is also in process of installation while preserving the historic character of the pavement. Beginning to feel at home in a cultural environment different than your own does not happen overnight. I don’t think either one of us would try and pretend we are at that point just yet. ...

NEW YEAR’S PERSPECTIVE 2016

By Larry & Arlene on Jan 10, 2016 in Blog | 9 comments

NEW YEAR’S PERSPECTIVE 2016 I am spending a post-Christmas and New Years afternoon in our comfortable Italian apartment reflecting on the year that has just passed. This my third attempt at a synopsis of recollections and impressions at the year’s end since we arrived in Ascoli Piceno two and a half ago years ago. On a day in late June 2013, we stepped out of a hired van with a driver that brought us from Rome’s Fiumicino airport to the start of a new life in Ascoli Piceno. On arrival in Ascoli, the sights had a vaguely familiar look. But that slight sense of familiarity was based on a remote, two-dimensional, visual-only impression derived from hours spent absorbing Google Earth images. And now we were standing in a mid-afternoon light rain in the three-dimensional reality of Ascoli Piceno. Neither one of us had ever set foot on the ground in Ascoli before that moment. On that drizzly June day, we arrived in the historic center of a town in the middle of Italy where we had chosen to live. We had left the country in which we were born and had spent our lives being intimately involved with family, friends and demanding careers. Moving to Italy had been no impetuous decision. We had thought long and hard about it. There had been a whole host of issues to be resolved. But as each issue was tackled, it seemed to strengthen our resolve that together, we were doing something important. At this juncture, a reasonable question to ask is how we are now feeling about this major change. As time has gone on, we are becoming increasingly comfortable here in Ascoli. So we still feel convinced this is the right thing for us to be doing. We also have an awareness that this experience seems to be changing us. As a result, I find myself wondering how comfortable it would be for me to now return to live in the country I came from. Seeking new experiences was a major factor in motivating us to becoming Expatriates. For the first year or so in Ascoli, we were very engaged in the settling-in process. Not that there isn’t more progress yet...

2015 Holiday Season in Ascoli

By Larry & Arlene on Dec 23, 2015 in Blog | 2 comments

Our third American Thanksgiving in Italy was really great. There were eight of us, the new Americans in town (Marie & Chris) and their visiting niece (Anne), our friend Jo, our real-estate person, Cinzia V., and her daughter (Arianna). It was the first American Thanksgiving experience for Cinzia and Arianna. It is always so fun to see an Italian’s reaction to a whole roasted turkey and to the fact we put everything on the table at once instead of in Italian courses.  I initially placed my order for a 15 lb. turkey from a different place this year.  I arrived Monday morning for pick up and they bring out Godzilla turkey that looked like 22 lb. or more.  My regular butcher saved me with a next-day delivery of exactly what I wanted, while totally unaware that I had attempted to cheat on him.  This is the first year I found sweet potatoes and we used IKEA’s lingonberry compote as a proxy for cranberry sauce. So, finally, all my traditional dishes were represented on my Italian Thanksgiving table.  What would we do without IKEA?? Cinzia V. was so overwhelmed with it all that she invited us and Marie and Chris (also her clients) to her house for Christmas Day, and the invitation still stands. So this will be our third Christmas Day in Ascoli and each at a different Italian home. I have to keep saying third because it is hard to believe we have been here that long. We spend every Christmas Eve at Grace’s home for a fabulous seafood feast with friends. The invitations are out for our annual New Years Eve potluck party with music by our talented friend, Serafino, and the inevitable dancing. There will be some traditional foods like lentils with sausage (for luck and money), grapes (for prudence in what you do with that luck and money) and honey (for a sweet new year). However, in case you were wondering, we will not be wearing red underwear (fertility) or throwing furniture or clothes out the window (out with the old). We have enjoyed over 25 straight days of sun here in Ascoli. The temperatures at night now are near freezing, days in high 40s or...

LEARNING TO LIVE WITH THE BUREAUACRACY  We are now almost two and a half years into the process of acclimating ourselves into this fascinating place. We are still in a phase of transition that is beginning to feel comfortable with the familiar but also realizing we have along way to go before we are true Ascolani. There is still the language issue and more on that in a moment. But I’m encouraged, I feel I’m better anticipating habitual reactions of Italians and a little less likely to be going against the grain. Our Ascolani friends proudly observe the L’ Marche’ Region is situated in the middle of Italy. We now understand a declaration the Ascolani make. They have some of the favorable traits of their more business-like, northern countrymen while also maintaining the deeper family centered values of the south. Although the modern world is certainly in evidence here, it is moderated by a value system that emphasizes family and deeper interpersonal relationships are a priority around which the pace of life is coordinated. Here in Italy, one comes to respect that the long progress of time moves slowly. It requires a higher degree of patience by those of us who came from a more frantic pace of life. But we are immigrants so we have the impertinence to dare to ask if processes in Italy could benefit by operating with a little bit more efficiency. As desirable as that goal may appear to be for us, change does not come quickly in Italy. Italians have culturally had a lot of experience with solutions that turned out to be worse than the original problem. They are by nature skeptical of authority on any level and display an intense avoidance of regimentation in any form. I have also come to understand the expression of frustration with Italians who appear to have become indifferent to inefficient processes and mind numbing bureaucratic impediments. Italy is mired in duplicated, overlapping and competing bureaucracies that appear true to stereotype in being more concerned about preservation of prerogatives than necessarily consolidating to find more productive approaches. Certainly, Italy is not unique in this problem. It seems the nature of many governments and most bureaucracies validates...

HOW SCARED ARE WE? A short time ago we returned from a wonderful trip into the Julian Alps of Slovenia. But first, we started with a few days overlooking the water at the head of the Adriatic Sea at Trieste. To break up the return to Ascoli Piceno, we also spent a few days in Padua. Padua is another of those places in Italy where the contemporary world is interwoven with a very long imprint of human history. Amid contemporary buildings are Roman ruins and a number of churches dating from the Renaissance.   It is also the seat of one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Europe. Galileo lectured there. A highlight of the visit to Padua was to see the Scrovegni Chapel to experience first hand the frescoes of Giotto di Bondone. The entire interior of the structure became Giotto’s canvas. Giotto is recognized in the history of western art as marking the transition into a more naturalistic style of depiction breaking with the long dominance of the Byzantine tradition. Giotto executed these incredible frescoes between 1303 and 1305. Reflecting an age of relatively low literacy, Giotto’s Scrovegni frescoes pictorially tell the biblical story from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the terror of the Last Judgment. Reflecting on Giotto’s Last Judgment, and the interpretations on that theme of later artists, brings inevitable comparisons such as the 1534 – 1541 work of Michelangelo Buonarroti in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The art of Giotto reflects the prevailing view of an afterlife in the dogma of the western Catholic Church. Reinforcing this doctrinal concept of judgment, damnation and punishment further is the monumental literary work of Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, begun in 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death. This work not only forged the foundation for the Italian national language it added further weight to a belief in an afterlife and impending judgment. As the Christian faith transitioned from a persecuted sect to assuming a role underwriting the power of the State after 313, an issue for believers became inevitable, ‘if we are no longer under persecution and we are in God’s special favor, why do we still suffer from wars, pestilence,...

STARTING OVER One of the unexpected pleasures in writing this Blog is to have received responses from people we had not previously met. And then to add to the pleasure of the experience, there have been a few newly made acquaintances that then included Ascoli Piceno on an Italian visit itinerary. After you have exchanged Email correspondence with people and begun to have a sense for each other, it is very satisfying to finally meet face-to-face. Many of the people who have been corresponding with us are approaching retirement. Several who are following the Blog have said they are looking at what we have done and wonder if this is something they might also consider doing. And a few people contemplating an Expatriate life have posed the question, ‘what does it take to start over?’ We have heard some version of that expression enough times that we found ourselves asking if we had felt we had been starting over? Of course how we individually feel and interpret events is deeply rooted in our own unique temperaments and personal histories. Initially, in considering trying the Expatriate life, we gradually explored different ideas and then rejected many along the way. I’m not sure we ever thought about a ‘label’ for what we were in the process of doing. But I have to say in considering life as Expatriates, I don’t recall having it come into our minds that we were starting over. Naturally, there are a lot of semantic issues in play here. My own quirky makeup conjures up for me an image imbedded in the expression, starting over, as wanting to go back to attempt to redo an essentially similar, familiar experience. The term conjures up in my mind a desire to not stray too far beyond an already established ‘comfort zone.’ Let’s be up front about an inevitable process we all face. The experience of aging is not something that tends to generate a great deal of optimism. Someone said, “Aging is not for the faint of heart.” The further along in life we go, the more we are exposed to some very close and personal, existential realities. That includes the loss of others close to us and we...

ON QUANTIFYING DELUSIONS Over the years I spent in the corporate world, competition in a market-based economy demanded that managing capital costs and production efficiency became essential for survival. In response to this incentive, an impressive array of digital mechanisms was developed for identifying, tracking and analyzing the market centered effectiveness of what was going on. In contemporary economic affairs, it can be difficult to escape injecting emotional factors that can distort ‘efficient’ decision-making. To reduce that vulnerability, the black-and-white world of mathematics has become a dominant analytic tool. One reason mathematics is so useful is there is an inherent, internal consistency generally uncontaminated by peripheral, emotionally-laden issues not recognized to be germane to the matter at hand. Let me say at the outset I am, even in retirement, addicted to Excel software generated bookkeeping spreadsheets. After years of having to formulate, defend and manage a corporate departmental annual budget, I couldn’t have survived professionally without relying on my ever-at-my-elbow spreadsheets. Even now in retirement, ensuring we have means to be financially independent requires we carefully manage the remaining resources we accumulated during our working lives. As a result, I still regularly use mathematically based, digital tools to help manage our economic affairs. However, an inherent vulnerability in using some tools is the risk the process itself can become an end rather than a means. Once we become captured by the notion that a digitized, internally logical system is automatically the ‘truth of a situation’ we can become dominated by it. Because some factor may be more readily quantifiable, we might easily miss the deeper significance of other more subjective decision components. There is apparently an inherent risk involved in a search for ‘analytical efficiency’ that might diminish a broader perspective. Living as retired Expatriates in Central Italy is instilling some new insights and adding strength to perceptions we already had. Over the past two years, the deliciously slow pace of retirement has allowed self-indulgence in taking time to think. As a result, I’m becoming concerned that insufficient attention is being paid to more subtle and subjective aspects of simply living. Fundamentally, I am coming to believe there is risk in placing too much emphasis on the readily quantifiable...

LA GIUSTA DIMENSIONE At my present level of acquiring a very modest capability in the Italian language, my translations into English are still something of an approximation. La giusta dimensione, by my loose linguistic reckoning, I take to suggest that something has ‘just the right size.’ This concept is being factored into my current stage of development in attempting to fathom how the Italian language reveals something about the Italian Soul. I think I am finding a parallel with the Italian concept I wrote about earlier – Quanta Basta – Just Enough. These phrases are relevant for us because they help convey our assessment of the place we now call home. In contrast, I have a sense as a native born American the culture that nurtured me tends to think more in terms of superlatives. Perhaps it is the domination of a very competitively oriented marketplace in America that instinctively believes “Bigger is Better!” Even the fast food industry encourages Americans to ‘super size’ everything. Soon we will be coming up on the second anniversary of arriving and beginning to settle into Ascoli Piceno in the Marche Region of Central Italy. Some mechanism we acknowledge we don’t yet completely understand determined how our instincts lead us to choose to settle into the historic central district in this Italian Provincial Capital town. By some very fortunate chain of events, we seemed to have opened ourselves up to being more trusting of our instincts and feelings in guiding the all important decision on where we were going to settle in becoming expatriates. However we came to it, the decision to settle in the center of Ascoli Piceno has turned out to be absolutely correct for us. An early post on this Blog commented on the unique physical layout of Ascoli. Two rivers, on a relatively flat valley floor in eastern, central Italy, form the setting of this remarkable place. The rivers each delineate the north and south boundaries of central Ascoli. They then they join at the eastern boundary of central Ascoli as a continuation of the River Tronto. The river then meanders its way flowing eastward toward the not very distant Adriatic Sea. These deep river gorges define a formidable,...