The My Bar New

Hey Siri, what’s the Italian word for bubbles?

It’s not a word one would expect to need. Life is unpredictable.

I’ve enjoyed this morning’s bike ride more than usual, perhaps because it’s the last one. I’ve been in Pesaro for the past week, staying with my daughter, her husband and kids. We ride bikes to the beach, we ride bikes to bars and restaurants, at the end of the day we ride home, tired, full, sometimes a tiny bit drunk, and happy.  It’s a pleasant stay. Natural beauty, good food, long sleeps. One of these years maybe I’ll learn to stay for two weeks. 

Biking can be fraught. I look forward to it, but it poses risk. 

Pesaro calls itself a city of bicycles. There are lots of bikes paths. Picture a two-lane road with a clearly demarcated center line. Your lane is not quite a meter wide. On one side of you is the curb, which drops six inches to the street, along which by 10:00 a.m. are greedily acquired parking spaces, making it a six inch drop into a parked car. Stay in your lane. Don’t sweat the edge. But it’s there. The edge. On the other side of the bike path are shrubs and bushes and trees.  Stay in your lane. Don’t sweat the trees.  But they’re there.

Through the morning, traffic picks up. There are bike path slow-downs, everyone in preswim wear, everyone wearing fashionable sunglasses, moms and dads pulling babies in baby trailers, moms and dads with toddlers in seats mounted on the bicycles’ handlebars.  Said toddlers in helmets.  All this traffic is the most normal thing.  Accidents happen.  I haven’t seen one, but I was in one two years ago and wound up in the emergency room for eight hours.  Fraught. 

Mornings I leave the apartment a little after 5:30 and ride the town. I’ve been coming here for 48 years and have learned enough of the terrain that I wander back roads and front roads and look for coffee bars that open at 6:00 a.m.  A couple days ago I revisited a bar I discovered years ago. The Internet was just being born.  They had wireless service; I had students. Across the street from this bar is my mother-in-law’s favorite church. As chance would have it, when I ducked in for a look, a tiny priest and a tall deacon, way down front, were two shadows trudging out from the inner sanctum. They began to say mass.  It was delivered over a sound system that amplfied muffled  prayers whose echo rose to the heavens. Besides me, there were half a dozen faithful there.  I found a euro in my pocket when the plate came up the aisle.  When communion began, I left. 

Bubbles. Plural feminine noun, Bolle. Singular, bolla.  Non volevo fare scoppiare la tua bolla. I didn’t want to pop your bubble.      

It took quite a bit of work to form that sentence. My Italian is good enough I can cobble together sentences and make myself understood. To communicate you need nouns and verbs. It’s what attaches to them that poses a challenge. Bubbles/bolle  contains a few characteristics of the language that stand in the way of being fluent. Chief among them gender. I encountered gender when I tried to learn French. Now here it is in Italian. It’s a characteristic of grammar that ensures I sound like a baby or an adult foreigner. The feminine noun needs a feminine adjective. Then, worse, in some cases, a feminine article. I hate to pop the your bubble.  

But, about the bubbles. The bolle.

Early morning a few years ago, having ridden the bike path a mile or two down the road, on one of my beach walks I saw old men wading slowly in the sea, looking down into the water. They were carrying a stick. I said buon giorno and stood beside one guy. From the water, less than an inch deep, came bubbles. He was fishing for razor clams, canneli  (plural masculine). I’ve eaten them many times. They have a clammy taste and texture. Their shells are tubes. They taste like the clams we eat by the hundred, which out of their shell are the size of a lady’s pinky fingernail. A cannelo, on the other hand, is a two-inch long tube. He and a few other old men were fishing them, drawing them out of the sand. I admired the pre-culinary art, the way I did when I saw men diving for clams at the beach where we swim. They wear a mesh bag tied around their waist into which the little clamlings are stored.   

This morning no bubbles. No old men but me.

Italy is a country for old men. They fish, they have coffee in their bars, they yell at each other in their dialect. The older I get, the more I love it. I can feel quite at home here. 

I m writing this in the my bar new down by the sea, trying to make sense of it all.

Ready to go home, where the talking is easy. Until the my return…