THE NEW ABNORMAL NORMAL
Early this morning, the San Francisco Bay was empty of its usual nautical traffic. No sailboats glided across choppy waters. One tugboat chugged behind a Costco barge. A foghorn barreled out a low E-minor sounding like a tenor warming up. The Bay glimmered like a millpond calling for ducks instead of whales. Seagulls flew overhead and cried among puffy clouds in a blue sky void of airplanes. Two trucks hot-rodded across the Golden Gate Bridge like Ferraris. There was no bumper-to-bumper traffic congesting the Robin Williams rainbow tunnel that leads to Sausalito. From our living room window, I was looking at our New Abnormal Normal.
Last night at midnight, San Francisco and the Bay Area went into lockdown to try to prevent the contagion of the COVID-19 virus that has already sickened 185,200 people over six continents and killed almost 7,500 (as of today). Mayor London Breed was the first to lock down an American city and I admire her courage. In many ways, she is mirroring Italy’s decision of two weeks ago, and I hope other American mayors take note. At the very least, here in San Francisco, we now have three weeks ahead of “shelter at home” and online schooling. As I forced my kids to crack open their computers, I thought it was time I opened mine.
I am relieved to be finally quarantined at home. At last, we are following the wise safety measures of my adopted, second home of Italy – and, in turn, offering our solidarity to Italians and others already quarantined. As I write this, 30,000 Italians have tested positive with COVID-19, and 2,500 Italians have died from it. In Bergamo, the coffins are filling up closed churches. Funerals are against the law. People are dying alone, without a ceremonial send-off, allowing for no emotional closure to the shutting of a casket.
To watch a country be reduced to its knees, crippled in the medical trenches as its citizens disappear daily, has been crushing for my Italian husband and for all Italians living outside their country. I am heartbroken for them. It hurts not to be in your own country while it is enduring a national tragedy. Never do you feel more helpless and frustrated.
I wish I could comfort Italians as they comforted me after September 11th. Although this pandemic is rapidly spreading throughout the world, I have been watching it closely as it attacks Italy since it is a country I hold close to my heart, where I lived for ten years and will always consider home base. I also have the honor to represent Italy here in San Francisco through my husband’s job. Never have I felt more proud to be married to an Italian. Only earlier this week, after a week of quarantine at home, has the curve finally started to flatten in Italy. But the battle is nowhere near over.
When the Twin Towers were violently knocked down in 2001, I happened to be visiting my parents in their mid-town apartment in Manhattan, even though, at the time, I was living and working in Rome. I watched the second tower fall down in real-time from our television, fifty blocks away from the World Trade Center. I waited anxiously for my brother to walk home safely from his downtown job. I immediately called my boyfriend’s parents (now my inlaws) to reassure them in Rome that I was okay in Manhattan. We were concerned about my husband (then boyfriend) who was en route to New York and in the air when the towers were struck. (His plane eventually turned around mid-flight and took him back to Italy.) It was an attack on America, and, in its aftermath, Italy let me mourn and healed me.
Despite the horror of the New York terrorist attack, I was comforted to be in my own city when it happened, with my family, and to offer condolences in person to my own people immediately. I could join the mile-long lines of those donating blood. I could touch the photographs and signs posted for those missing, names that would later be engraved in the victims’ memorial wall. I could grasp the hands of my parents and my brother, and know, see and feel that they were alive. I could move back to Rome knowing that I had been there when my country fell down, and had been given the strength by my people to move forward.
In Rome, where I returned a couple of weeks later, I was embraced by the comfort and warmth of Italians who welcomed me back into their lives. They set the table, cooked for me, let me cry and mourn. They propped me up with their vitality when I slouched with sadness. Because that’s what Italians do. They show us to be resilient even in the worst war-like moments. I wish now that we, as Americans, could offer that same comfort to all those in Italy affected by this monstrous virus.
Over the past month, I have watched my husband ache for his people. He has thrown out his back from the stress of what we are witnessing from afar and all that he is trying to do on a local level for his nationals. We grow pale as we watch the rising death toll of his motherland, numbers ticking across a regional map like election results. We dry each other’s tears as we watch trapped Italians sing their daily flash mobs at 6pm to fight the boredom and unite the nation. On Friday, they sang the national anthem. On Saturday, they sang “Azzurro.” Yesterday, they sang “Il Cielo e’ Sempre Piu’ Blu.” At noon, everyone gathers on balconies and applauds the doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers dealing with the urgency, care and fear of the pandemic’s patients.
We all have our own local horror stories of Italians who live, work and raise their families here in San Francisco — yet feel displaced as they witness their country’s wounds widen. We have friends here who are self-quarantined (after having recently traveled to Italy) at the very same time that they are losing loved ones to the virus in Italy. Many of them will not be able to return to Italy any time soon for a funeral. Italian friends in the restaurant business have been forced to shut down and consider closing their restaurants for good. We support them by ordering take-out deliveries. I was heartened to learn today that our friends at Italian Homemade are sold out of homemade tortellini.
While many Americans ran to Costco this past week to stock up their pantries, I insisted upon an order from Italfoods, a wholesale warehouse that imports Italian products. Our kitchen looks like Testaccio’s market: I aspired to create a Culinary Castle of a fortress that would make my husband feel as if we are at home in Italy. We are chockful of Italian tuna (Rio Mare), pomodori pelati di Mutti, shrink-wrapped Parmigiano, rolls of Finocchiona that resemble barbells, and a prosciutto slab the size of my thigh. Lavazza coffee has replaced Peet’s espresso. And, next to De Cecco lasagna strips and Rummo spaghetti, I have penne rigate – never (I have learned) penne lisce, mi raccomando.
I’m cooking more than ever, hungry for elaborate, comforting meals that soothe the soul more than the stomach. I have labored over ragu’ sauce, perfected a crostata, switched out the Napa Zinfandels for Italian Barolos and Chiantis, and replaced peanut butter with Nutella. Anything to make my husband feel that, despite not being at home in Rome, he will feel close to Italy.
Daily, we watch the extremely creative and often hilarious videos that only Italians in their resilient, humorous ways know how to create. Here are two of my favorites:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9wy-_jlRmT/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9vMZLahrrf/
I feel grateful that I am in America at the moment — yet my parents are currently in Florida and my brother is in New York. I don’t know when I’ll next see them. Italy has always been our happy place to escape to in the summer, and I don’t know when we’ll next get there. But I know we will one day. And, once there, I plan to slobber my Italian family and friends with kisses and hugs, hoping that fist-pumps, waves, and elbow nudges will be gestures of The Past.
At mass this past Sunday (which I watched live-streamed on YouTube with my dog), the wonderful Jesuit priest, Greg Bonfiglio, shared the beautiful words of Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky:
“Every hand that we don't shake must become a phone call that we place. Every embrace that we avoid must become a verbal expression of warmth and concern. Every inch and every foot that we physically place between ourselves and another must become a thought as to how we might be of help to that other, should the need arise.”
Many of us may be feeling displaced and alone during these frightening, lonely times. But, the truth is we are not warring against each other. We are battling the same ugly monster. Together.
I may be biased in aching for Italians in all that they are enduring right now. But it is simply because I’ll never forget how they helped me when I was depressed about my country’s demise. And how their resilience gives me hope for a better world one day.
Sing a song of quarantine solidarity from your backyard or balcony in San Francisco tonight — for all of our respective family and friends in Italy. If not tonight, then tomorrow. We’re in this together. For a while.
