Tracey (exclamation point, question mark, et cetera)

Anyone who knows me certainly knows my sister.  She is a story I love to tell.  When she had Spencer it was the tale of poop journals that I told at the faculty room lunch table.  I complained about how each member of my family was schooled and instructed in the proper way to fill out the “Intake/Outtake Journal”.  As if my sister believed changing diapers was now something that you needed a degree in to do it properly.  She would take our harassment for our compliance to the doctrine, never wavering in or succumbing to the idea that it all might be a little excessive.

“But, people have been having babies for millenniums!”  I once said.

She gave me the look when her eyes get big and her face goes serious and you know she is going to share an absolute, undeniable truth. 

“It will be very helpful if there is ever a problem, Rebecca!”  I nodded giving her the shake of the head that said ‘I will fill this stupid thing out but you better believe that I am going to be weaving tales of you as a new mom from hell to anyone who will listen on Monday.’ 

I suppose during those years I also used the stories of her for every dictator, border skirmish, major world war as an analogy for my kids to understand.  I suppose I did stop short of comparing her to Hitler.

“She might be bad,” I would say to a room full of 10^th graders, “but she is no Hitler.”  Tracey would always wonder why students seemed to know her so well, when she happened to go to a play or a dance recital with me.  I couldn’t help but grin, you know that grin that told her exactly what I did.

“Rebecca!”  She would respond quickly with a half smile, actually truly loving the idea of being the personality that history was woven around.

So I would take the material and record diligently every bowel movement color and consistency.  I know gross and I am sure you get the picture, but my sister has fastidious rules she lives by or she is what I like to say a little picture person.

Mike said, after hearing the theory, “Calling someone a little picture person sounds a little negative!”  But I insist it is not, and must claim it is just a theory made after Tracey’s and John’s trip number one to Italy in February of my first year in Italy and reinforced two weeks later on Amy and my White Week trip to Istanbul to visit Julie, a friend of Amy’s from home who was on a Fulbright teaching exchange.  These two experiences started us on an essential rule of travel.

I am a big picture person. In fact, I am the worst of the big picture persona and as my sister MUST say when I am not around to hear, “the problem is that Rebecca has never had her lesson learned”.  I have to agree that things seem to work out for me. Mostly because I always seem to have a village of people around me that are willing to help me with the details that I so often over look due to my core belief that things will naturally just work themselves out.  I have to admit it must be infuriating, especially when you consider that in my life, things have tended to actually work out, though I am not so sure how ‘naturally’ it has been.  I mean I was robbed once in Amsterdam and everything that proved I was Rebecca A. Utter vanished from underneath my chair at dinner. And after two of the most terrifying days of my life, I realized that even complete strangers are often willing to help a very terrified woman in need.  But I am a radical example of a big picture person. Amy, is much more moderate and balanced.

So it was February.  My sister wanted to bring her new boyfriend to Italy, a place where she had just discovered relatively cheap flights and a free place to stay.  I would have to say, I highly recommend Italy for a romantic trip. However, Milan!? In February!?  And not even Milan, I was living in Opera, a suburb of Milan.  A suburb, that on the best public transportation day took about an hour to get to the city center, and on the worst, three. So, I know some of you have visions of some small cute Italian town.  Stop!  Opera is full of 7 story apartment buildings which were certainly built in the 1960’s with no piazza, no fountain nor church to speak of and lets just say piazzas, fountains, and churches are what make cute Italian towns cute.  Then you have to add that they are coming to visit me in February, only six months after I have moved to Italy.   Big picture Rebecca was lucky she could find her way to work let alone the grocery store.

So I soon learned in that week of entertaining or perhaps I should say angering my sister, that it might be helpful to know that big picture people can of course visit little picture people all they want, but it is good advice to consider for the happiness of all involved that little picture people should perhaps avoid staying with Big Picture people altogether.  I suppose unless of course they are willing to bring their own toilet paper, which my sister actually did on this last trip to Italy. 

Tracey:  Well you don't know if there will be a store open when we get there!

Rebecca: (speechless)

 

Who are we kidding we all know examples of both.  Little picture people have their eyes on the details and nothing is ever missed. Yet if for some reason a detail is overlooked, it is immediately catalogued and noted and added to their comment card rolodex of suggestions that resides in their tidy brains specifically under the category: for next time.  Visiting a little picture person often feels like visiting a resort. There will undoubtedly be towels folded on your bed, an itinerary typed of fun things in which to look forward, perhaps even with a quote on the bottom from Napoleon saying, “Plans are nothing, planning is everything.”  Little picture people often remember what soda you drink, what wine you like and have it sitting in their fridge and wine rack. They might not even drink coffee themselves, but they will surely have a maker on the odd chance a coffee drinker comes to dine.

If you are visiting a big picture person the only true guarantee you can count on is that you will have a place to stay and a smile/hug will greet you at the door and that might even be flexible.  When one of my former students came to stay overnight, I somehow missed the fact she was bringing 2 friends instead of just one.  Instant flexibility and someone willing to sleep on the couch made the situation not a situation at all.  But their favorite soda in the fridge?  I think not.   Another example, when Amy’s brother and his friend Mike came to visit her in San Francisco, she had only one extra towel for them to use.  So they shared. Alternating who got the dry towel first, each day.  Normal early twenty something host behavior, but we are now pushing our mid thirties and things have hardly changed.  When her brother returned last year with his wife and two kids, Ames borrowed towels from Jenn Kopervos (little picture person extraordinaire) who gave us enough American flag kitten towels to allow John and Stephanie and the kids to have a dry towel everyday!

Most recently, my parents came to visit and as they landed in Milan they heard things like, “Oh, I need to change the sheets on my bed, I thought we could walk to the store and pick out dinner (there is nothing in the house), um and here is a map of the city.  Oh, crap I forgot to buy you metro tickets, do you want me to explain how to get them? No? You really want to walk? Ok, we will get them tomorrow? Or you can try to figure it out? No, you want to just wander? Ok, love you, see you at 6pm.”

Such conversations are infuriating to little picture people who rightly believe if they manage their time wisely and create the correct route, they can conquer a city, in record speed seeing what it does and does not have to offer in the glimpses of major monuments, museums and restaurants.  For me, I have found that 3 years hasn’t seemed like enough time to gently nudge a city and the continent to share its secrets with me and I am sure as a result I have missed so much. I am not saying I haven’t been one to schedule rampant site seeing adventures of major cultural and historic sites, which are well known and talked about in the guidebooks, because I certainly have.  Times when the only option at the end of the day is to give your ‘feet a treat’ by soaking the very smelly appendages in a tub of hot water.  But even then, in the middle of the checklists and guidebooks, I feel like my approach may be very different. I find my mouth opens, my pace slackens and I become almost reverent.  This pace, I have surely inherited from my father, which if you don’t believe me, just try to go on a shopping or museum trip with him, time lingers on forever.  I wonder if he too, finds himself longing for silence.  For I find myself wishing there were no tourist or tour guides and it was just the place and I, so that I can focus on envisioning a past, a painter at the moment of creation, at the moment of the decision.  After those hours of must see things, I find my eyes scan and I literally try to hear the voice of the city. 

My favorite memories of the last three years were not planned or scheduled and for most part would certainly not show up on any guidebook.  The memory of sitting in the ruins of Athens looking up at the acropolis as I listened to Amy’s pen scratch the paper she shaded. Things like finding a vintage market dress in Bologna with Sonja.  Happening upon Boccelli’s night performance in St. Marco’s square, skinny dipping in the Mediterranean Sea because there was neither a fan nor air conditioning in our Corniglia room and it was decided we would have to be drunk to get any sleep, only to realize that we needed to be drunk and also cooled by the sea. The walk to Oia when Amy, Annie and Katie told me it was okay to hike in my bathing suit bottoms only to admit later, they never actually would have done it  themselves. Cooper, in Amalfi, as the raindrops drizzled and he decided to use his umbrella to twirl like a flag thrower of Tuscany instead of protecting his head.  

Mike and Amy convincing an Italian girl to name her cat “Joe” as we tasted wine on her family’s estate near Piacenza.  Countless memories that I could repeat and recount and even as I plan to say goodbye to at least ASM, which may unfortunately and undoubtedly mean I will also end up saying goodbye to Italy, I don’t feel a rush to pick up the pace. Instead, it is the opposite, it’s as if, I want to stare at the sea longer, sip my cappuccinos slower, extend dinner with friends to four hours instead of three. 

Perhaps it is the big picture quality of me, perhaps I somehow have learned to believe that life is lived in the present and no matter how much I plan or don’t plan, life will certainly take you wherever it does.  Or maybe it’s really that I have stopped trying to be someone I am not and have also stopped expecting people to be like me.

So two weeks ago, my sister planned one hell of a trip through Italy and though my friends here harassed me over the fact that I offered little to no guidance in the planning, I just shrugged my shoulders because I knew. 

I knew my sister would plan one hell of a trip to Italy and

you know what?

SHE DID!