First Words and Secret Codes

Genova, photo by Maryl Smith

My son was born in 1984 and the first word he learned from life in Cincinnati, Ohio was "owl."  Not the bird kind. The ATM.  In the mid-eighties, Central Trust (now PNC) created a marketing campaign to encourage customers to use a brand new technology with 24-hour access to their cash. They named their automatic teller machines the OWL and plastered locations all over town with their easily recognizable logo.  I didn't realize how often we were stopping by the money machine until one day my two year-old picked up on the obvious after I told him he couldn't have a toy truck in the window because we didn't have the money.  "OWL, Mommy, OWL," he said with a big smile, sure he'd solved all our problems.

Wow.  Usually parents are proud when kids learn something new all by themselves, but a quarter of a century after the fact, I'm still embarrassed about what came out of my babe's mouth and what it told me about who we were back then. 

I remember the first word I learned all by myself in Italian.

"Passione."

A few months after I started to date Michele, I enrolled at School Amici because his family didn't speak any English.  I was falling in love.  We talked about going home together.  Word got around quickly that I was the director's girlfriend and during the break other students would approach me about their "passione" for Italy.  "L'aria," they'd say with a dreamy look in their eyes .  "There's just something different about it."

I heard the word so often, "passione" naturally worked its way into homework assignments and dinner conversations, usually as a joke.  But I never interchanged the English word even if I was speaking English, because I could see in the speakers' eyes that the Italian version was a different beast, one that had nothing to do with sex and could not be directly translated no matter how much the two words sounded alike.

A couple years after we were married, I decided to spend two months in Siena working on my language skills at Dante Alighieri.  Different school.  Different country.  But there they were again, foreigners who looked a lot like me, usually middle-aged, almost always female, talking about their "passione."  Women from Germany.  Women from South Africa.  Women from Japan.  They'd flown half-way across the world to connect with a piece of their soul.

But my personal knowledge of the word remained purely intellectual. While I could use "passione" correctly in a sentence, it was something I'd never experienced about a place.  Italy was a pretty country, of course.  The food was tasty.  Lots of nice churches and old stuff.  "But I like lots of countries," I'd explain whenever this new group brought it up.  I was a cynic, secretly sure that these women were really just lonely and sad and depressed, desperately searching for a reason to feel.   "Passione must be the code word for a fling," is what I really thought, one last romance far from the tedious responsibilities of wherever they called home.

This year, ten years after I started to study the Italian language, I spent three weeks driving around the Riviera with my twenty-nine year-old daughter.  We had a blast.  One of the highlights happened on my last day when I overhead the desk clerk at the hotel explain to another member of the staff that the woman in Room 112 (me!) was American, but "lei parla italiano."

This time something had changed.  This time, I didn't want to get on the plane.  The morning after, when I put on a pot of coffee in my own kitchen, the same brand of coffee I always buy in Cincinnati, it tasted like sand.  I missed that faint, subtle scent in the early evening air that reminds you of nutmeg.   I went grocery shopping without make-up and when nobody sent the produce manager to the back in search of a more perfectly ripe melon, I was disappointed.  It was wrong, wrong, all wrong.

Three months later, it still is.  Italy apparently, with its great and infinite patience, has slowly whittled away at my defenses until I finally found my "passione."  It took me ten years, but I broke the code and now that's where I want to be, in a country where the first word you learn is about what you long for in your heart as opposed to efficient access to your cash..