Nostalgico

We left California on Tuesday and arrived here in Italy the next morning. Sometimes these long flights don't seem so onerous, but the Milan-Amsterdam leg this time, on a venerable 747, felt like it went on forever. I think the main reason was that the plane's movie technology was pretty dated--bad sound, too-dark screen--and the selection wasn't that great, either.

Movies have become my favorite way to avoid thinking about being trapped in a metal can, breathing the same air as hundreds of other people, for ten or twelve hours at a time. On this flight I instead found myself mostly reading a novel that I felt compelled to finish but found, in places, incredibly annoying (The Nix by Nathan Hill), while worrying about Boeing's corporate ethics and the clots that I could sense were forming in the deep tissues of my immobilized legs.

But enough whining about the aggravations of air travel, one of the world's most overworked topics. We survived our time in the air, got to Fidenza on Wednesday afternoon, found everything in good order, had a quick nap, and then met Pam and Romano at a bar on the piazza for a drink and some free pizza. The evening air was warm enough to sit outside with a jacket, and the town arrayed around us was just as charming and unself-conscious as it was when we left six months ago.

Nevertheless, I was feeling a panicky kind of homesickness for California--for my many friends there, my chamber music groups, my water aerobics and zumba classes, the clothes in my closet, all the details of an existence already tidily, satisfyingly structured, and conducted in a language in which I can effortlessly say exactly what I mean in just about every situation. 

Fidenza is wonderful, Italy is wonderful, but here I'm facing the slow, hard work of building a life for myself, one that includes chamber music and exercise and friends, all those things that make me happy. And I have to do it in Italian, a language I speak like a mental defective and can barely understand when it's spoken by anyone more fluent than I. I feel like someone who's studied the violin for half a century and now suddenly finds herself having to perform on an oboe.  

The fact that I'd had about three hours sleep in the previous 24 hours no doubt contributed to the hopelessness I felt about all this. But it was a pleasant kind of hopelessness, softened by the wine and the weather and the pleasure of being with our dear friends again. This isn't such a bad place to be homesick in.