Living with the Past: Cobblestone

A typical narrow street in old Piacenza, Italy. Some random thoughts:

Who cleans up? Cigarette butts, oil stains... It used to be horse droppings and human waste. In Piacenza I saw a tag-team approach where a man wielding a twig-broom (the old) would be followed by a mini-streetsweeping machine (the new).

Compromise: The street can barely accommodate cars - and yet you will encounter city buses! (Small buses, but still...) There is no place to park. The sidewalk is too narrow to feel safe and wouldn't accommodate a wheelchair. In practice, people overflow the sidewalks or ignore them and walk down the middle of the street.

No asphalt, no concrete. Instead we have quarried setts for the roadway, granite slabs for the sidewalk. Built by craftsmen for human use.

A theory is making the rounds among urban planners to give streets back to pedestrians much in the manner as they exist here, where the car is the lower priority and has to make its way, politely, among the crowds. This theory, in the USA at least, is still in the crackpot category.

The trouble with words

It's always bugged me that the truck bringing concrete to your construction site is called a "cement truck." Yet if you call it a "concrete truck," people will look puzzled and say, "You mean somebody built a truck out of concrete?"

"Cement truck" means, in the popular mind, the truck that delivers concrete. We can't change it.

So I have the same queasy feeling when I use the word "cobblestone" to describe a variety of pavings, some of actual round cobbles and some of flat quarried stone. You even see brick paving described as cobblestone. You can't fight the consensus. I'll try to be as accurate as possible, but I try to be a writer who speaks in the popular language. We'll see how it works out.

In the previous post, I managed to avoid describing Piazza Cavalli as having cobblestone, but I used "cobblestone" in the title because it is part of a thread on that subject. Language, like living with the past, is an ongoing battle. Sometimes, so as not to break up the flow of a sentence with a parenthesis or a footnote, I'll have to call a paving stone a cobblestone. I'm sorry, I know it's like dropping a cigarette butt in the middle of somebody's beautiful craftsmanship. I ask your tolerance.

Living with the Past: Cobblestone

I'm not much of a world traveler, but I've been to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. It's ugly. A disaster. It has all the charm of an empty parking lot. It was created by destroying a marvelous old neighborhood and paving it over with concrete. Then it became the site of a massacre of unarmed civilians.

The goal of the Chinese government was to create the world's largest urban square. In this they succeeded. Unfortunately, the design was inspired by Stalinist Russia, which, as choice-of-models goes, is like hosting a banquet inspired by the Donner Party.

Tiananmen needs everything: benches, fountains, trees, statues. They could start by ripping out the concrete. Such a contrast with something the Italians have known for centuries. On the left is a small section of an open urban square in Piacenza that embraces the past and feels welcoming, comfortable to the eye. And it all starts with what's under your feet.

Living with the Past: Cobblestone

The narrow cobblestone streets were designed for horses, not Fiats. The lovely intersecting arches of stones, endlessly repeating, are the work of hands, strong backs, bent knees.

The price of such beauty is compromise. They are noisy to drive on and laborious to repair. They are not amenable to underground utilities. They are bumpy for bicycles.

Do Italian children play hopscotch? How do they draw the lines?

Even the name is a compromise, at least in the English language. A "cobble" is a round stone created by water or ice. Most streets are now paved with flat quarried stones called "setts."

Living with the Past

That tower isn't leaning. It's a distortion caused by the camera lens. The point is, in Siena we see a 700-year-old city center and a brand new construction crane. How do they blend the old and the new?

We live better than kings. If you take a tour of a medieval castle, you realize that even poor people in the USA have a plusher home than the kings in their cold stony rooms. We have glass windows, indoor plumbing, electric lights. We have blue jeans and comfortable underwear. We have duct tape. Life is good.

While improving our standard of living, we tend to destroy the places we love. In Italy, they have had more practice - a couple thousand years - in striking a balance between improvements and preservation. While not perfect, they offer some lessons.

I'm no expert, but I'd like to use this blog to think out loud about how we can come to terms with the past, starting with the Italian example: How they show respect. How they preserve, and how sometimes they fake it. How they find balance. How they sometimes fail.

Mostly I'll use photos and try to keep my comments brief. Here, over the rooftops of old Piacenza, is the new Italy:

Blues Festival, Piacenza, Italy

Here I am at the Leaning Sign of Piacenza.

In a way, it was like going to summer camp: You travel away from home. At first you're a little scared. People welcome you. You make new friends. You see the world from a different point of view. You learn new skills. You come back a better person.

One thing I learned was how to make people want to read my book. It came to me during my first radio interview when the host, a man named Luca, asked me to explain the title. Here is what I said:

In the USA, each state has a different license plate. In the state of Idaho, every car, every truck, every motorcycle has a license plate with a message at the bottom saying “Famous Potatoes.” I always thought it was a funny idea: something so common, so ordinary, so down-to-earth as a potato could be famous. In my novel I write about people who are like potatoes - they’re the little people - the carpenter, the waitress, the truck driver, the prostitute - they live a hard life. They’re invisible. They have to be hard to survive. But if you dig them up, if you warm them, you can make them soft and sometimes you can make them sweet. That’s what I’m searching for in my writing: that softness, that sweetness in people who are living hard lives.

It seemed like a good answer, so I repeated it for the rest of my tour to about a dozen audiences. And each time after I spoke, people would go over to the book sale table and buy copies of Le Famose Patate. I wish I'd figured this out 30 years ago, when the book was first published.

Here are some more things I would say to the audience:

Another meaning of the title is that a potato lives underground, and in the USA, when you are hiding from the police, when you are living outside the law, it is said that you are living “underground.” The hero of Famous Potatoes is in a bar in St. Louis, Missouri on the Mississippi River when he gets in an argument with a stranger. During the argument the man is stabbed, and he dies. Everybody runs out of the bar and disappears along the river. It turns out that the dead man is a policeman. Our hero didn’t do it, but he can’t prove it, so he runs away - he lives underground - like a potato.

Another meaning of underground became apparent after the book was published. It was called an “underground novel” because it was popular among people who don’t respond to book reviews or advertising, people who passed it hand to hand and spread the news by word of mouth.

I sometimes feel like a potato myself. I’m a little writer. I’ve never been able to make a living from my books and have always worked with my hands.

Then, if somebody asked if the book was true, if it was based on my actual life, I would add:

People assume that everything in the novel is true, and I guess I should take it as a compliment that the writing was so believable. But not all of of the disasters and humiliations that happen to the hero are true, so it’s a little unnerving when a stranger comes up to me with sadness in her eyes, and she gives me a big hug, and she says “I’m so sorry about your testicles.”

Unlikely endings

Every Friday, Barb and I spend the day in San Francisco caring for Ravi, our grandchild. He has now been on the planet for all of 21 months, and it is a better place since he's joined us. This most recent Friday, we walked with Ravi down Irving Street to the Arizmendi Bakery on 9th Avenue, where we bought bread. Ravi asked for a choppachip cookie with no hot sauce, and I bought one. He loves chocolate chips, hates hot sauce (which the bakery man promised, sincerely, never to put on his cookies). Later we went around Hippie Hill to the children's playground in Golden Gate Park. We spoke to a giant bearded man who had a Dutch accent and was following a tow-headed boy around. The Dutchman said, "I can't wait to be a grandparent. Your job is to spoil the child and have all the fun." There is a carousel, which we always ride. On this day, Ravi rode on the ostrich with us - probably the tallest animal on the carousel - while the big machine played the song "Tijuana Taxi" and then, I think, "Cherry Blossom Pink and Apple Blossom White." Nearby, a mother rode on a carousel pony, bobbing up and down while chatting on a cell phone.

Saturday Barb and I took our two dogs for a long walk in the La Honda watershed, a lovely climb among forest and meadow with views to the ocean. And sometimes, fog. It's a splendid spot that always refreshes our spirits. Walking back down, we stopped to remove stick-me-tights from the coat of our small dog and discussed what would happen if one or both of us should die right now. We're both over 60. Sometimes you have to talk about these things. Back home, I spent the afternoon catching up on the bookkeeping for Barb's business. She's a therapist (and miracle-worker, in my opinion, bringing light to the lives of hundreds of children); my job is to keep the payroll running and the bills paid and the supplies ordered. In the evening we watched a dvd movie, a ritual in which Barb and I and the two dogs all snuggle up with a blanket on a loveseat. This night, we watched Last Chance Harvey with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, a story that moved me to tears - the theme of putting your art aside (jazz piano, in this case) to earn a living strikes home with me.

Sunday Barb took a long walk with dogs and a friend while I answered e-mail from friends I made in Italy. I made some repairs to our drip irrigation system. Barb cooked my favorite dinner (which I sheepishly confess is hamburger - the way she prepares them, it is no ordinary burger but a gourmet delight) and roasted vegetables: red peppers, beets, and portobello mushrooms. After dinner I washed dishes while Barb gave our small dog a bath. Then we watched another dvd movie on the loveseat with dogs: Ballet Shoes, which is kinda sentimental and imposes an unlikely happy ending. But then, we need a few unlikely happy endings imposed on our lives.

Sunday night in bed, as I’m dropping asleep, Barb rolls over and says, “Happy anniversary.”

“Holy shit," I say. Then: “Have you been thinking of it all day?”

“No. Only once. Then like you I forgot about it.”

It’s our fortieth.