About Greed, Part 2

Part 2.  If you have missed Part 1, here’s the link: About Greed 

Italy, February 2019

“I mean, you see who I am,” Manuela said. “I don’t need much; a dinner out with my family every now and then, and I am happy.” My mom and I had just visited Manuela’s little grocery shop, an alimentari, as it’s called in Italian. Her store is one of my mom’s favorites, just a few minutes from my parents’ house, near the lake. A little girl who had walked into the shop with her mother to buy bread hugged Manuela, who moved by the sign of affection started to cry. 

On top of fresh produce impossible to find in the bigger and chaotic chain supermarkets, fragrant bread, local cheese, and all the essentials for the household, Manuela has the best candied ginger, sweet but not completely covered in sugar, soft with a crunch, the perfect spicy treat. And that’s what my mom and I were there to buy. My mother had been talking about the shop for a while, and I had finally been able to go with her and meet Manuela. It was our last day in Italy.

Unfortunately, due to the extreme capitalism of our society, the absurd amount of taxes she has to pay, and the seemingly endless obstacles of  Italian bureaucracy, Manuela will be closing her shop at the end of June. And she is heartbroken. 

She didn’t take the decision lightly. Manuela loves her job and her customers, but in order to spend time with her kids, and not at work 13 hours a day with too little a return, she had to make a choice.

It was her genuine contentment with life that taught me a lesson, that made me meditate on my own relationship with life, with money, and with happiness. She is the inspiration behind this story, a difficult one for me to write.

*** 

I am on flight DL0157 from Turin to Los Angeles via Paris. Ben, Catherine, and I have been in Italy for three weeks with my family. And like every time we visit, when I leave Italy I go back to Los Angeles inspired and with a list of good intentions such as: “I must go back to my roots, to what’s really important,” or “I need much less than I have, why can’t I just be happy?” But by the time I park my car at Whole Foods, the day after returning home, I am either experiencing a sense of guilt for having more than my parents and family ever had, or I get so obsessed with needing more, that I lose touch with reality, just like that, barely a day after getting off the plane. 

It’s an emotional labyrinth from which I seem unable to escape, two extremes that feed each other leaving me in the middle without a real step towards change. A few weeks ago, I published a story titled “About Greed” that has much in common with this one. In the first, I come to the realization that I have a problem; in this one, I come into contact with the solution. By writing about the problem I feel accountable. And accountability by writing is the solution. 

“When I had less,” I said to Cei, one of my two therapists, who I visited in London during our European stay, “I was more serene and, in a way, I felt as if I had more.” I wasn’t referring exclusively to money, but also to time, to serenity and contentment, to food, to the quality of my life. 

Are you starting to understand why this essay was difficult to write? 

Let me give you something more.  

Several friends of mine periodically go on retreats where, for two weeks and a lot money, they give up their phones and reconnect with themselves; they heal their wounds, they recharge, reset.

Before I left for Europe, I asked Diane, my other therapist, to direct me to one of those retreats. I needed to understand why I was unhappy, why I couldn’t make peace with not having a career, and why my eating disorder was still afflicting my life. “I need help, I need a break,” I told her. “Maybe far away from society for a while I can make some progress.”

One of the reasons why this essay was difficult to write is my fear of sounding like a privileged woman with privileged problems. But as I went deeper into the story, I was finally able to acknowledge that pain is never privileged. I know that my life is blessed; I know that I have a loving husband, an amazing and healthy daughter, and bounty. But pain is suffering, and suffering hurts with a dollar or with millions.  

Here’s another piece of the puzzle: 

 While in Europe, Ben and I spent a few days in Pilaz, a small village in the Italian Alps where I vacationed for almost twenty years, since the summer of 1982, when I was six months old. Pilaz was my grandmother’s favorite place, and every time that I visit Italy, today, I make a point of going there for at least a day or two, to keep in touch with old friends of hers, to keep traditions alive, and to breathe the fresh, pure mountain air that reminds me of my childhood. 

This time around, Ben and I left Catherine with my parents and headed north by ourselves, an hour and a half from Avigliana, my hometown, where my parents still live. For two days, we stayed at my friend Laura’s lovely Airbnb, the perfect mountain retreat — all wood, stones, warmed by the beauty of the past, and by the deep aroma of Italian coffee, butter cookies, and fresh cheese.  

“People pay thousands of dollars to experience what life is in Pilaz,” I said to Ben one day, as we returned from the barn, where my friends had just started to milk their cows. 

 A few minutes earlier, I had stepped into said barn and I had taken a deep breath: “profumo di puzza,” I had thought — which translated into English roughly means “perfume of bad smell”. That’s how I used to call the smell of cows; I loved it when I was a child, and I still do. For it reminds me of home, of a simple life, and of my grandparents. 

It was 5:00 pm; it was cold, and the sky a rare shade of deep blue, lapis lazuli powder, that kind you only come across in altitude, or in a Renaissance painting. When I said that to Ben, I was neither judging my friends that go on retreats (as I said earlier, I had myself asked my therapist to refer me to one), nor feeling superior to my Italian friends who raise cows or work in a grocery shop; I was desperately trying to help myself. 

Now, can you understand why I had so many doubts about writing this essay?

Over tea and scones, at The Orangery, in Hyde Park, Cei responded to my observation of life when I had less: “It’s very interesting, and it doesn’t surprise me.” She had, in fact, read a study on the eating habits of British people during and after the Second World War, after which researchers had come to the conclusion that the population was much healthier during the war compared to the years years that followed the conflict. 

With the bounty brought by peace, people began to follow an unbalanced diet, as in they began to eat too much, and not the right food.

The NFS (now known as the Family Food Survey) is the longest-running continuous survey of household food consumption and expenditure in the world. It was originally set up in 1940 by the then Ministry of Food to monitor the adequacy of the diet of urban ‘working class’  households in wartime, but it was extended in 1950 to become representative of  households in wartime, throughout Great Britain. It provides a wealth of information that has made a major contribution to the study of the changing patterns of household food consumption.

Source: www.nutrition.org.uk

During the Second World War, the British government introduced food rationing to make sure that everyone received their fair share of the limited food that was available Food rationing started in 1940 and finally ended in 1954. A system of food rationing to ensure fair distribution of available food. To ensure good health, the amounts of available foods to cover people’s nutrient needs were calculated by scientists and statisticians. The wartime food shortages forced people to adopt new eating patterns. Most people ate less meat, fat, egg s and sugar than they had eaten before, but people who had previously consumed a poor diet were able to increase their intake of protein and vitamins because they received the same ration as everybody else. Thus, many people consumed a better diet during wartime food rationing than before the war years and this had a marked effect on health outcomes; infant mortality rates declined, and the average age at which people died from natural causes increased.

Source: www.nutrition.or.uk

I asked myself whether, like the British people after the war, I had began to follow an unbalanced life as a result of my sudden access to bounty, unknown until then, when I married Ben.

On my last day in Italy I went on a walk with my mom to run the last errands before returning home. I had to buy local pastries, a gift for Ben, bread, and candied ginger at Manuela’s shop, the negozietto, as my mom calls it. The streets were covered in snow — not a cloud in the sky, only thin lines of smoke coming out of every chimney. My hometown looked beautiful, and I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time.

I wasn’t planning on writing about the same old intentions that I forget after 11 hours on a plane. But also I wasn’t planning on finding, in Manuela, a disarming inspiration. 

***

 

Los Angeles, February 11th, 2019

I am lying in bed awake; it’s 5:00 AM on a Monday morning. It’s been four days since we have returned home, and because of jet-lag I still wake up at dawn.

I am thinking about the evening I gave birth to Catherine, on December 16th of 2017. I am thinking of Dr. Finkie, who delivered her, and his face is blurred in my memory. 

“How can it be?” I say to myself, disappointed. 

Ben is still sleeping; I breathe silently; I am afraid he can hear the chatter in my head. I don’t want to wake him. 

Dr. Finkie was such an important part of giving birth, so important that I wrote an essay about him; now his face has lost definition, his voice…I don’t remember the sound of his voice. I had promised myself I would remember everything about that day without the need to read my journals. 

Is this what happens with good intentions, too? Do they become blurred in our memory like Dr. Finkie’s face, and our voice reciting them only a whisper? Is this the reason why every time I come back from Italy I forget my intentions by the time I walk into Whole Foods? Are we bound to keep forgetting and therefore constantly needing reminding? My experience seems to suggest we are, and that’s why I wrote this difficult story, because I must remember the life lessons I am being taught along the way, my intentions, and hopefully the face of the doctor who brought my child to life. 

 

Coming up, Hygge, life pre-Leonard Cohen, and more…