Times Like These

A whole lotta lovin' going on here within the last 24 hours - good news for me, my fiance found a job and ......

Feels Like Home- West Meets East

You just know it when it happens. Like an pair of worn jeans, it just feels good...

Today is the 3.5 month anniversary of my fiance's relocation from Hawaii to Boston. (I know what you are asking ... it's for l-o-v-e, as he says.)

An ongoing discussion is 'adjustments' -- to each other, to East Coast living (weather, pace of life, local idiocyncracies, accents, directions, locations, job seeking) to pets. He seems to have just flowed naturally into it. Of course, having an easy disposition and great outlook on life sweetens any adjustments.

I think you reach a point at any relocation where you just KNOW when it feels like home. Funny how that happens. You just know.

Stay in love and it will decide everything

Nothing is more practical
than finding God, that is,
than falling in love.
In a quite absolute, final way,
what you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed
in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes youwith joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
~Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

We Are Who We Are

Pride and Passion - a program from PBS - wonderfully nostalgic (to me anyway) that could have been taking a page/write a book about my family. The Italian traditions (holidays with relatives bursting out of the rooms of the house along with the gastronomic overabundance of carbo-rich foods and pastries) and familial roles (momma nona rules, aunts, uncles, cousins) but also the shared sentiments of both my grandparents and parents about being the 'immigrant family' - thus, the lowest in the societal order. I'm the 'American with an Italian ancestry' that was described in this piece. My grandparents were the 'Italian-Americans', and my parents were the 'American-Italians', first generation U. S. born. Both were eager to improve the world of their children and were willing to endure, sometimes with denegration, ridicule for their seemingly foreign ways. But their strong family bonds and vibrant culture sustained them. And that survivorship was passed to the newer generations.

Even though their reason for leaving their homeland was the sense of new opportunity, the risks they faced still seem daunting to me. The North End of Boston in the '60s is the closest I will get to understanding my parents' lives growing up as immigrant children in the early part of this century. My mom's family shared a three-bedroom flat with 10 siblings and one bathroom on Snowhill Street - directly across from the Copps Hill Burial Ground, where my cousins and I played tag. My dad was one of 7 boys in a three-bedroom flat on Prince Street. I couldn't stand 10 years of sharing a room with one sister.

But, the desire to understand these older times is one of the reasons I enjoy the small Italian towns. One day I hope to venture on my own to Avellino, to walk the streets of my ancestors, to whet this passion for connecting, understanding, immersion.

Passion

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair


DON'T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

PhotoHunt: Road

Finish line of the Falmouth Road Race - an annual road race which has morphed into an annual family tradition on an August weekend at the Cape. Family participants have numbered from 2 to 7, from 18 to 60 years of age. This weekend rivals only the 4th of July celebrations for summer family celebrations.

It's great fun -

Oneness - Thought to carry this weekend

The moment I first heard of love
I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.
I wondered, could it be that the lover
and the beloved are two?
No, they have always been one.
It is I who have been seeing double.
-Rumi