Hello Old Friend

Rome and New York share this in common: everyone wants to come for a visit. We have had a flurry of visitors from the United States these past few weeks. Some travelled alone and made good use of our guest room, while others were with family and just came by for lunch, a coffee, or met up with us in the city. My sister managed a 10-day visit before starting a new job, and we planned a beach getaway, but more on that in my next post. This time I want to write about one of my mother’s oldest and dearest friends from college.

My mother has often said that friendships formed in childhood and adolescence have a special kind of staying power, and her theory is that it is a time in life when intimate, secret thoughts are easily shared, and formative experiences together provide memories that last a lifetime. In the case of Irma, their experiences at Barnard College in New York City

Maureen and Irma
at a Barnard Reunion

went beyond their undergraduate education, because both continued to be very involved in the college and Irma’s career was in the administration. My mother’s older sister Helen was the Director of Admissions for most of her career, and so all three spent a great deal of time together on and off campus.

Irma played another important role in our family’s history. When my mother travelled to Europe for the first time in 1955 to assist a family with childcare

Maureen wore white gloves and a corsage in 1955

during their summer vacation, Irma provided her with family contacts in Rome, since she had a month to explore Italy on her own. Once she got to her pensione, she set out to find a place for a haircut. She wrote about this in her memoir, and even jotted “hair” in her travel diary which she still has.

The travel diary includes my father's name on June 9th

Irma’s aunt sent her son, Virgilio, to pick her up on his motorcycle and bring her over for dinner, and my mother described her time with Irma’s family in those early days as “the perfect beginning of a lifetime love of Italy.” After a few days visiting Naples, Capri, Amalfi and Sorrento, it was back to Rome.

This is how we often told the short story of how my mother met my father:

They met at the top of the Spanish Steps, in Piazza Trinita’ de’ Monti, and he invited her for dinner and then took her on his Lambretta to hear the crickets in a forest of pine trees. She was scared that she was in the middle of nowhere with a stranger but it all turned out okay.

That version persisted in family lore until after my father’s death, as my mother began working on a memoir, with original letters they had written to each other, and with letters she had written to her sister and mother. This rich archive had been unopened for decades. As we worked our way through our collective memory of important family history, I wrote a poem about their first meeting which said, in part:
    It starts out as a storybook romance.
    My parents,
    they met for the first time
    in the summer of 1955,
    at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome.
    There's a little piazza up there, Trinita' dei Monti,
    that looks down on the tumbling expanse of travertine steps
    and ends in the Bernini marble boat of a fountain;
    her pensione was nearby, so the group gathered there
    before going off to dinner somewhere.
    And even though he never told me this,
    I know (somehow) he must have really been smitten
    (was it her short dark hair, or the way she slightly tilted her head 
    back when she laughed in the photograph I have of her from that           summer?)
    because he invited her for a ride on his Lambretta
    (she swung her feet to one side and held on to his waist)
    to go listen to the crickets in the pine woods on the outskirts of 
    the city.
    She always said she was terrified,
    but in the end that's just what they did.

It turns out that my father told our friend Gabriele the story, and he remembers clearly that he took her along the Appia Antica to the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. If you look up images of this place you will see the ruins of a large round tower surrounded by an expanse of green fields. In her memoir, she recalled my father explaining, once they stopped driving along the Appia Antica, that it was one of his favorite spots in Rome.

“I come her alone often because it is so quiet and you can clearly hear the crickets.”
Hear the crickets? I thought. I’m a goner. No identification, no money (both carefully locked in the safe at my pensione), no one who would miss me because no one in the world knew where I was.

“Crickets?” I asked in a small somewhat terrified whisper.

“Rome is famous for its crickets. Here, let’s walk farther from the road so we don’t hear the traffic noise.”

We walked 50 meters into the field, stood silently for a few minutes until Silvio finally said, “Isn’t that an amazing sound, right here in a Roman field just on the outskirts of a huge city? Just think how the ancients must have felt hearing this music.”

He turned to lead the way back to the road and I thought I must have been dreaming. I wasn’t raped, or savaged or abandoned. We’d just been listening to the crickets and we drove back into the city without a word. The next day I discovered that Silvio had left a picture book, “Visioni di Roma,” at the pensione for me. Inside was a short note explaining that in case my camera didn’t do justice to the city he wanted me to have happy memories of Rome. I thought it was a sweet gesture, tucked it away at the bottom of my suitcase and promptly forgot about it and about him. Who could have guessed that our lives would be forever entangled! 

On the next page, she recounts the version of the meeting that was sent in a letter to her sister Helen:

I met Sergio’s friend Sandro. He brought Silvio and two other couples and we all went out for a short while. Then Silvio took me to dinner and for a moonlight drive along the Via Appia Antica. It was most romantic with a full moon and the ruins. He is very sweet and even came by today and brought me a book.

Later in the memoir, after sharing an important letter from my father, my mother got to the heart of the matter:

Memory plays tricks. It is selective, personal and often untruthful. Now, sorting out my emotions so many years later is difficult and dangerous. But I do know that I read his words over and over, perhaps hundreds of times…I wondered how Silvio could know me so well.

People often write about Alzheimer’s as a disease that “steals memories” but I don't think that's an accurate characterization. What I am noticing is it is certainly not a linear process of remembering less and less. My friend Anne Basting started an organization, Time Slips, that helps communities of elders with dementia to develop their imagination through storytelling without pressure to recall details of personal memories. In my experience, our brains, regardless of disease, are constantly processing our past experiences, rearranging the sense we make of them, especially when something happens to trigger a response, like a familiar image, or a visit with a friend. So it was when Irma and my mother spent a day together, reading portions of her memoir aloud to each other, laughing, sharing stories and enjoying each other’s company as they had so often in the past. They even figured out that Irma’s cousin Virgilio was not responsible for the fateful encounter with Silvio, that Sandro was a friend of someone my mother knew who taught at Princeton, and had brought Silvio along because he spoke good English.

My mother’s professor at Teachers College, Larry Cremin, used to say that history is the imaginative reconstruction of the past. I know the story of how my parents met and fell in love is still evolving. Now that we live in Rome, we can (and will) drive out along the Appia Antica to the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, perhaps even on a moonlit night, to hear crickets.