who put what where

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because i was teaching a workshop in ireland a few weeks ago,
so i took the girls to italy.

if that makes sense to you, bless your heart.

the first day, lee and i drank a bottle of wine with lunch
and we all fell asleep at 6pm in orvieto.
then we all woke up at midnight.

we looked at each other – wide awake now.
“who wants to go get gelato?” i said.
“reallly???” lydia said.

yes.

if lydia doesn’t remember, when she’s 80,
getting up in the middle of the night to go get gelato in our pj’s,
i’ll be shocked.

leanne, on the other hand, will never forget
sitting next to the illustrious rick steves
at a crappy cafe in lucca.

(why didn’t he tell us the pasta was lousy?)

in the car, and on particularly long rides, we offered liddy my ipod
to watch a movie on a couple times.

she declined.

she just wanted to look out the window.

it’s a better movie out there.

she says her favorite memory is of me stopping
in the middle of small tuscan country roads
to pick flowers for her.

red poppies
and purple and white and yellow and pink bursts.

i’d pick them and they’d wilt and die in the heat
of the car.

and then, yes, we’d talk about death.

some people believe they go nowhere, i said.
just into the ground,
which is somewhere actually…

and some people believe they go to heaven or hell
and that there’s this guy named jesus, and another guy
named god and there’s this ghost too – and they’re all kind
of the same, but different, and they kind of make all these decisions.
like that your entire life is planned out already.

liddy looked out the window at the poppies.

like that god makes people die for a reason, i say.
or like those poppies, i say.
some people think that god put those poppies
there for you to see.

where do you think people go when they die, i ask.

in the ground, she says.

—–

later, in lucca, we stay at a former villa from the silk trade.
they make their own olive oil and wine and honey there.
we stay in a room that’s over 300 years old
and drink the wine
and eat potatoes with fried rosemary
and liddy and i give leanne a pair of earrings
and watch the cows and wonder if one of them
is like ferdinand, who doesn’t like to fight.

then we start driving back down to rome,
so that leanne and liddy can leave and i can
fly onto dublin.

we stop in a little seaside town with black iron sand
and liddy and i jump in the sea.

leanne doesn’t because she doesn’t like the water.
once i asked her mom, a psychic, why.

she paused….

then:  grease, she said.

the movie? i asked.

no, the country, she said.

something about the aegean, she said.
she drowned.

—–

on our last night, we wash the black sand off our bodies
and go get gelato.  liddy gets cherry vanilla and i get ricotta with nutella.

we walk with our cones until all that’s left is a sticky napkin.

throw it away, i say to lydia, as she looks at her napkin.

where, she says.  i don’t see any garbage cans.

right there, i point behind her.

she turns around and drops the napkin into the bin.

hey, she says.  god put that garbage can there….just for me!

he sure did, i say.

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