Luca's Thanksgiving reflection

Hey - it's Joel. I thought Luca's blog entry about his experience with our family over Thanksgiving was worth posting here. Thanks to Luke for translating it. It's always interesting to see how what one considers "normal" is observed by someone new coming into that setting. Here it is:

Stuck to the grand highways or to the little crossroads in the middle of nowhere run hundreds of uninterrupted kilometers of fields of frost-dried corn, small farms, oceans of bushes and trees twisted by the wind, gas stations where the morning air is charged with the odor of fried ham and coffee, immense grain farms where tourists never pass and journalists arrive only every four years when there are elections, fast food signs that light up in the twilight like great metal flowers sprouted in the lawn, and then the up down,like wind waiting for a storm, of the small roads lost in the Midwest. Snow at the line of the time zone, on the border with Indiana. In front of the muzzle of the car another Interstate opens wide, the ribbon of the flux & reflux of American transportation. Gas, mechanics, hospitals, cinemas, drugstores flank the highway, ready to satisfy every urgency. When you penetrate into the heart of the States, the dizziness that you experience isn't physical - it's mental. As if moving away from the Atlantic East, from its cities and their sooty valleys that seem almost German or English, you cut yourself off forever from the last umbilical cord of Mother Europe. Because beyond the Ohio River, south of the Great Lakes, America truly begins, their America, the one that is hidden from the curiosity of the tourists behind the skyline of New York, the pomposity of Washington, the chic universities of Boston, and that no one, if not for some mistake, for work, or for folly, ever sees. My friend Luke had promised to bring me to celebrate Thanksgiving weekend with his family full of aunts & uncles, cousins, siblings, nephews and nieces, in a farm in the middle of the fields of Ohio, where he was born and grew up. "A true American experience, no?" So I found myself traveling on the day consecrated to the stuffed turkey and to giving thanks for what one has and what one dreams of getting or only keeping hold of, a kind of American secular Christmas. It's a tradition - and the tradition, which we Europeans sometimes feels as a weight, in American constitutes something gained. To have a tradition means possessing a past, and to possess a past mean to feel one's back covered. The newly arrived are soon conquered by the atmosphere. It's like a bath of humanity, my voyage in the American Midwest, happy and amazed by the human warmth of a family that takes me in and make me feel at home in the turn of one afternoon, to feel at home in the middle of a long voyage, in a place I would never have imageind to be, provoking in me an unbroken sensation of calm and happiness. I sit down at the table of the Thanksgiving feast which begins at four o'clock in an afternoon already dark, in an atmosfere of noisy celebration, among stuffed chickens, sweet potatoes, jams, baked corn, pancakes, pumpkin cakes. I speak in a low voice, taking the hands of those near me at the table, short of lines of a small prayer, which has an effect which is spontaneous, or simply true, even in a relativist like me, accustomed to definite provincial outlooks more petty, a religiosity much more hypocritical, little worlds perfectly poisoned. The day after, I help to carry in pieces of wood for the stove, and then to load some bales of hay that a middle-aged type came to take away in a paneled wagon towed by an old sedan, telling a story of how he had to take them somewhere before leaving for a long trip, to Alabama it seemed to me. The small farm of Luke's father is cultivated entirely with organic methods using old plows handed down from past generations, and produces practicaclly everything that one can have need of, including fresh cow's milk that I accepted willingly when it was offered me, and I believe to be the first pure milk that I'd drunk since I was four years old without mixing it with anything. I don't know why I've always thought I didn't like milk. I must marvel, and learn. On the other hand, this is the holiday of Thanksgiving, and as as the journalist Beppe Severgnini wrote once, "We in Italy never give thanks; if we are satisfied we limit ourselves to not complaining." Across the long bridge of the holiday it will be time to return to work or to study, in a society that wants only winners. On the return trip, while the roads of the Midwest that carry me back to Chicago enter into a curtain of clouds just above the flatness of the fields, I ask myself if I will be capable of rendering, of explaining, the density of humanity of this piece of travel. Probably not. Of some things most precious, when taken down on a sheet of paper or on the screen of a computer, nothing remains. But some images remain, like photos. The common families, with their faces composed and few words to exchange, that celebrate their Thanskgiving meal at Eleni's, the only restaurant open on a highway of Indiana, among incongrous decorations, hurried waitresses and two television sets turned to Fox that speak of the terrorists who set bombs in the hotels of Mumbai. The old lady from the small chocolate factory of West Liberty, Ohio, who makes everyone taste their intrepid new speciality, chocolate-covered bacon. The sticker stuck on the bumper of an SUV that makes me sigh in relief: "God bless everyone, no exceptions." The Amish of a young age, with their black suits and hats, in a side room of a Super-WalMart, all in line to play a videogame. And the image of the American roads in front of me, those that like perhaps no other roads seem to give the impression of a great migration to new lands, no matter where you're going, of miles lost or abandoned, of throwing the past behind you and, maybe, starting over from the beginning.- Luca di Ciaccio, Nov 30 2008