WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE between writing and music? Writing takes and music gives.

Writing is like an old-fashioned bloodletting, I think. Writers spill their blood all over the pages. This is why writers need to take breaks. One can only spill so much per day. If you give too much, you will feel dry and tired. Squeezed like a lemon. It takes a while to recover until you are ready to give again. Good writers take time to restore their energy. Many take long walks to mull things over in their minds. Then they return to the keyboard to bleed some more, to squeeze out more juice.

Music is the opposite. If you perform for people, the energy that you give off returns. This is why bands can tour for months. The music actually gives musicians energy. The songs only get better.

When I was a teenager I knew this. I had just acquired a bass guitar, which was an instrument that fit perfectly for me and my hands. The complex chords of the guitar were almost painful to construct, and the drums were a chaotic landscape of cymbals and tom-toms, but the bass was heavy. I loved to reach for a low F, at the very end of the neck. It felt as if I was reaching into the watery depths to hit that dark note, which didn’t resound as much as it throbbed and vibrated.

At that time, I would play along with a live album by James Brown that had been recorded at the Apollo Theatre in New York in June 1967. At that time, his music was changing from its earlier classic soul style to the funk of his later records. There was one stretch where James Brown led the band through a medley of tunes before breaking into one of his better known songs of the times, “Cold Sweat.” I thought it was the best name for the song, because by that time in the jam, I really would be sweating. There was something otherworldly, almost religious about those rhythms. The way the sweat ran into my eyes.  I couldn’t imagine how his band felt on stage on that hot summer night, dressed in their matching suits, swinging through those endless songs.

Sometimes I would even play past midnight. Yet no matter how much I sweat, no matter how hot I got, or how much my fingers hurt, I never felt drained or tired after letting James Brown guide me. Instead I felt even more energized. When “Cold Sweat” finished at last, I was ready to run. My shirt was drenched, but I felt a humid thunderstorm of adrenaline break out all over. I was dripping. This music, soul music, could do that. It might be the deepest spiritual experience I have had to date, and I’ve been to every kind of church, and spent times in cloisters and ashrams.

These days I write mostly, which means I bleed. This is my profession, and my musician friends mostly prefer to see me this way. Besides, they are real musicians. I asked guitarist Andre Maaker if he wanted to be in a band, but he was already booked, and then I asked Silver Sepp if he would be our drummer, but I think he had to fly off to Uzbekistan or Israel for a concert.

“Aren’t you a writer?” one of my musician friends chided me. I am. I bleed the blood, I squeeze the juice. Yet I still have a bass guitar. It’s an acoustic fretless one that I bought on impulse. It makes the deepest, most wonderful sounds. Whenever I tire of what writing takes out of me, I pick up my bass guitar and play, because music never takes, music always gives back.

An Estonian-language version of this column appears in the summer 2018 issue of the magazine Hingele Pai.

ON MONDAY, I DROVE DOWN TO OBINITSA to clean out the outhouse, a special treat. This is a bio-kompost, a composting toilet — Finnish made, with a white and blue cross on it, and a black plastic chimney puncturing the wood roof.

In the back, a small, transparent rubber hose dives down into the grass for filtering out liquids. It’s almost impossible to see but magnificent to watch in action. At the base of the composting toilet, there is a small door. This is unlatched for the removal of rich black soil, for over the course of the seasons, all that was left behind here has been turned to premium muld.

I shoveled out the compost and placed it around the base of the fragrant apple trees, at last in bloom with white flowers. I have heard that it helps.

The apple orchard. I had nearly forgotten it. Just as I had forgotten about so many other things down here. The well. The mattresses on the second floor. The ladder up. The grill idling on the terrace. The windows, the swing, and the writing desk. That lovely sea-like view and the unusual silence. At one point, we had thought of building a larger house, and there were conversations with local businessmen at dimly lit pubs who wanted to sell us high-quality logs.

In the end, we kept the same structure, but adorned it with new wallpaper, and painted the floors. I spent a few summer nights sleeping in the barn, and painting all day. I came to know every rough groove in those floors. I stained the floors in the sleeping barn too. Somehow, I had forgotten it all.

Inside the outhouse, the frame I put in place roughly a decade ago is still standing, built of young saplings, now all hard and gray. Around this, a team of real builders constructed the outhouse, joking to each other about the job I had tried to do. I remember how I had gone to my friend’s outhouse, just down the road, and studied its structure, observing how effortlessly the beams interlocked. It looked so easy. Just some wood and a few nails here. “Lebo,” as the Estonians say. “Piece of cake.”

Yet it was never very lebo. Just a few yards from the outhouse is the smoke sauna that I never used. Not once. It just sat there solemnly, with that black witches cauldron at its center, the true purpose of which I never understood until I observed how a neighbor had washed his child in a wooden bucket with steaming water drawn from the metal bowl. For them, this was natural. The child Seto thought nothing of bathing in a dark sauna in an old bucket.

I gave up on the idea of describing any of this to people back in New York.

After I finished emptying the composting toilet, I removed some dirt from around the barn doors so that they would open more easily, and then I finished painting a few shelves for the kitchen. So much labor went into the dream of a house in the country. It’s a dream shared by many in this country. Like most great projects, though, some come suddenly to life, propelled by some unseen force, and others never seem to materialize fully.

The whole of the country is dotted with such abandoned efforts: factories that never came to be. Unfinished hotels. A broken, disregarded storefront. Sometimes having the money, vision, and even energy is just not enough. You need that extra cosmic push.

When I was done with the work, I locked up the house, but not before giving the place another look over. This was the fruit of a decade’s worth of energy. Was it all misplaced? Or had it been worth it for me, just for the experience?

I glanced at the two corner shelves I built for Orthodox icons. Ikooninulkad. Most Seto houses have one, but this one has two. They are decorated with colorful textiles that I bought from a street vendor in Crete and a piece of the monastery of Saint Irene from the same island. I used to have a beautiful icon of Saint Peter that I would carry around with me, too.

Somewhere here, a few years ago, it fell out of my pocket and I lost it.

IT WAS JUST A FEW YEARS AGO that a young father went to the store to buy a trampoline. A trampoline! That wonderful round thing that stands in the corner of almost every Estonian yard. I got a big box from the store, went home, and started to put the new attraction together. The neighbor just stared and smiled – fathers and their silly challenges! It’s true the trampoline fell apart a few times, but finally it was ready. The exciting assembly process attracted not only our own children, but the neighbors too.

And this was my first lesson – when you buy a trampoline, it doesn’t just belong to your children, but all the children within a certain radius.

Unfortunately, not all of the children were good ones. One of the visitors to our new trampoline was an 11-year-old boy from a troubled family. Later I heard that his mother was struggling with alcoholism and his father was in jail. Already at age 11, the young man smoked. Which meant that there was a rather unwelcome guest in our yard who would use our family trampoline, smoking and jumping at the same time. He enjoyed it, but our daughters were terrified. I went outside and told the character that it wasn’t his trampoline and he had to leave. The young man thought otherwise. He decided to show off his English language skills instead.

“Fak ju, asshoo!” was his response. 

I laughed and answered back: “I can see that you already know a little English and are a very intelligent boy. Maybe one day you could be the foreign minister of Estonia!”

The boy didn’t know what to say, but finally he left. Later, I heard about two local boys who had robbed an ice cream stand. I couldn’t help but think that he was one of them.

My second lesson – someone always starts crying.

Most trampolines have nets that keep the children from falling, but they still get hurt anyway, because there are usually four or five of them on there at the same time. When the bigger kids jump higher and the smaller ones topple, someone always starts crying. We of course had a firm rule that only two or three could jump at a time, but older kids like to grab attention by doing tricks, which invites even more attention from other kids in the neighborhood, who don’t follow our rules. Then someone is already crying again. Sadly, this someone is usually six-year-old Maria Petrone, for whom this is still her trampoline, the one her father bought and put together.

For Estonian children though, no one actually owns trampolines. They are as universal as playgrounds.

It’s very easy to understand why Estonian children love trampolines, but at the same time life has shown that even while trampolines give children plenty of joy, they can cause problems and dangerous situations too.

A few years ago, I sent my nephew in New Jersey a trampoline for his birthday. The boy was very grateful and happy, but my brother started to worry. What would happen if something happened to one of his kids on the trampoline? Would his insurance cover it? How interesting, I thought, that the Estonians I know never seemed to worry about it.

This post first appeared in Estonian on the Parim Aeg family blog.

WE LIVE IN VILJANDI,  a small town in the south of Estonia. Certainly, you have heard of this place. We means me, Justin, a writer or journalist, and daughter Anna, who is 10 years old and goes to school, at the moment attending the fourth grade.

–  “Why do you live in Viljandi?” People ask. “The capital is bigger, greater, richer, better!”

Maybe so, but children in Viljandi enjoy a lot of freedom. They go to school on their own in the morning, return home the same way, and then head onward to some after-school activity. They go on foot to sports and activities all over town. This is the luxury of living in a small town. Cars and trams aren’t necessary. This is how their weeks are booked.

Is our daughter a drummer or a guitarist?

When the school year began in the fall, I told Anna that she had to pick a musical instrument to study. Actually, she started to take violin lessons in the first grade when we lived in New York, but didn’t continue. There were so many options now. I offered her the stereotypical “girl” instruments. Would she like to play the flute? Clarinet? Piano maybe? Or the violin again? No, no, no! Then I found out that the Viljandi Hobby School was offering both guitar and drum lessons. She had to decide on one of these.

Honestly, I thought that drums would be a cooler choice. I play guitar and bass guitar and I know how complicated it can be. Drums are not easy, but it seemed like a better fit for Anna. Yet she had to try. That was the first step. She was put in a group with two other girls. Often people think that it’s better if the boys are with the boys and the girls learn alongside other girls. Anna didn’t notice this at all though, because to her the drums were far more important. She enjoyed playing right away and only speaks highly of her teacher Kevin Lilleleht. When I was a child, it was my greatest wish to play the drums! Ringo Starr was my favorite.

I remember how I begged by parents to take me to his concert. It was August 1989. We were standing in line at the concert when someone asked my mother and father:

– “You wanted to introduce your son to the music of our youth, eh?” And my parents answered “No, he dragged us here to hear Ringo play. It was him not us!” they said.

Do parents fulfill their own childhood dreams vicariously through their children?

I also remember how I begged my mother to buy me a drum kit, but it didn’t happen. Too noisy! The neighbors would definitely complain! Sad. But when Anna started to play, I decided that if she really wanted, I would buy her a kit. Let the neighbors enjoy the music! Now Anna comes home from drum lessons and even has homework. She has to listen to songs by the Beatles, Doors, and Green Day.

– “It’s so hard to tell which songs are the Beatles and which ones are the Doors,” she complains.

Recently there was an exam in the hobby school. The teacher played the students songs and they had to say who the artists were.

– “I thought that ‘Hey Jude’ was the Doors, but I was wrong!”

She really likes Green Day. Now, when she showers, one can hear her singing “Basket Case.” Smash Mouth is another favorite, because Smash Mouth’s song “All Star” was in Shrek. She has even learned how to play this song. She has such funny questions:

– “Is Green Day’s singer Billie Joe Armstrong related to that astronaut, Neil Armstrong?”

– “I’m not sure,” I replied.

– “What does Billie Joe Armstrong look like today?”

We decided to search for him on Google. Apparently he looks the same as he always has. Nothing has changed.

– “He’s only a few years older than me,” I told Anna. Anna looked me over.

– “Actually,” she said, “he looks a lot younger than you, Daddy.”

This post first appeared in Estonian on the Parim Aeg family blog.

ON THE ROAD between Sõmerpalu and Sangaste, I stopped my car and got out to take in the view. No matter how many times I travel this stretch of highway, the effect is the same, especially in spring. I love the grassy hills that roll like seas, the trim green forest line, the air that’s so fresh it hurts to breathe it, the farm buildings clumped together here and there, each one forming a perfect minimalist island. This is the Estonian aesthetic razed into the landscape: pure, sparse, spread out. It reminds me of that famous Arvo Pärt quote, “In art, everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.”

This point came up recently in conversation at a cafe with a newer arrived foreigner who wanted to know about the origins of the peculiar local names “Tiit” and “Priit.” “Tiit,” I told him, probably comes from the German name ‘Dietrich.’ Maybe one of the Order knights was named Dietrich, you know, in the 13th century? The Estonians probably called this knight ‘Tiidrik.’ Then they shortened that to ‘Tiit.’ It’s the same with Friedrich. Friedrich, Priidik, Priit. The Estonians are practical people. They only need one syllable.”

Practical yes, but that’s only part of it. Rather, Estonians value the beauty of efficiency. In trying to describe the national aesthetic to outsiders I have often relied on the metaphor of the Japanese zen rock garden, where rocks are carefully selected and arranged in order. It’s an assembly where every component serves a purpose, and any part that does not complement or support that specific purpose detracts from it. It idealizes restraint. Simplicity. Less is more. Everything is possible, but everything is not necessary. This is their philosophy. It governs all. It’s why people won’t return your letters if there was no overwhelming reason to. It’s why people won’t go to the same store twice in the same day if they can help it. It’s just too much. The ideal Estonian day would hum along with tones of minimalist perfection ringing out like one of Arvo Pärt’s compositions.

As clean and tidy as the Estonian countryside itself.

How strange then that this fondness for less is more hasn’t carried over into the commercial culture. For if the nature of the land and its people is one of restraint, of austerity, of less is more, the world of commerce has embraced the exact opposite. In the supermarkets of this country, more is simply more, and you must have more and more of it. Every holiday centers on total excess. Come Saint John’s Day, not only are the bonfire piles stacked high with wood, but the shopping carts are full of products and packaging.

Who knows how many plastic tubs full of fatty kebab meat, or how many cans of lukewarm amber beer, pass through the intestines of the Estonian nation on these feast days of gluttony. I imagine mountains of pork, lakes of alcohol, or swamps of greasy salads. When it’s all over, the cans and plastic containers and utensils are tossed away, removed to somewhere out of sight.

Yet just because it’s out of sight does not mean that it’s out of existence. It just goes somewhere else in Estonia. So that even if you stop on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere to marvel at the countryside, you may be rankled when an empty bag of potato chips happens to float by in the wind. Which is what happened on the road between Sõmerpalu and Sangaste.

I chased the bag down and picked it up, and put it in my car to throw out later. There was already a ton of trash in there anyway. An empty plastic bag of popcorn, a plastic container of nuts. There was even an empty bag of olives. Then I looked at the scenery of the Estonian countryside again, breathed in that wonderful air, so heavy on the lungs, and understood better why I enjoyed it all so much. The land was natural, ordered, and (mostly) spotless. It was uncluttered and ascetic. Everything that my life wasn’t.

IT’S WEDNESDAY NIGHT in Greenport and a storm is about to hit. Deserted streets, dusted in snow, most of the shops shuttered. This is the winter off-season out here. The most vibrant signs of life are the strings of Christmas lights that rustle in the wind.

In the summer, Greenport is crowded over with tourists. All the restaurants are open, the boutiques bustle, the ferry horn honks. There’s no parking and city people roller blade down the street on new skates. Yet I prefer Greenport, and other summer spots like it, in winter. I like it cold and vacant because then I can savor its true character. Any summer destination is best experienced in the cold season, when there are only locals around.

On Front Street, Aldo Maoirana is closing up. He runs his cafe out of an old wooden building with a cream-colored facade. Here Aldo sells homemade biscotti and roasts his own coffee, filling the streets with a stinging white smoke. The floors of Aldo’s are true maritime Greenport distressed wood, and fishermen come in here daily, but the walls are a Mediterranean red, and Aldo plays Italian folk music for his clients. This is where the New World meets the old. Out beyond Greenport‘s piers, it’s just ocean and ocean.

All the way back to Europe.

The man himself has a mop of curly white hair and sports a dark turtleneck. He is known all over by his first name alone. His staff are often newer arrivals to Greenport from Central America — dark-haired Salvadorans, Guatemalans — whose happiness is contagious. “I’m more used to speaking Spanish and English now than I am French and Italian,” Aldo says and shrugs. Aldo was born in Sicily, raised in France. So why is he out here at the tip of this island, in what feels like the middle of nowhere, in deep winter?

“But this is the best time to be here!” he insists.

WE PULLED INTO the village at about noon on the afternoon of the 24th of February. It was a clear, brisk day and the sun spotlit the piazzas and ancient churches of the settlement on the periphery of Bari with a pale orange glow.

Bari is a seaport city on the Adriatic known best perhaps as the final resting place of Saint Nicholas, whose bones lie in a crypt in a basilica by the sea’s gray waters. It has about as many inhabitants as Tallinn, yet even in a country like Italy, which is devoured by insatiable tourists year round, it’s still somehow out of the way, a mystery obscured from view.

Ringing Bari are a series of provincial communities with names like Toritto, Grumo, Sannicandro, and Adelfia. This is almond, grape, and olive country. In the past, most of the people of this area, which is engulfed by green plantations of flowering olive groves, were involved in or influenced by agriculture. The soil here is black, red, and pungent and divided by stone walls into uneven patches, giving the area the appearance of one lush and fragrant country garden.

In the village of Toritto, I came upon a group of older men standing outside a church and asked them for directions to the local cemetery. “I am from America,” I explained in Italian, “but my roots are from here.” The tallest of the men, a blue-eyed, cheerful soul named Gianni, tipped his flat cap to us and got in our car, just like that, to show us the way. He gave directions, though not in Italian, but in the curious Barese dialect, a delicious mix of French and Greek. This is the language my grandfather spoke as a child, a tongue that is utterly alien to me and for which I hold no key.

The cemetery happened to be closed, this being the Mezzogiorno, where even cemetery gates are locked at lunch time, so we returned later that day to study the stacks of interments. This soil may be suitable for olives, but not people. Everyone here is buried above ground. The markers for Giovanna and Lazzaro, the siblings of my great grandmother Maria, were found almost immediately, in one of the older vaults. As long as we searched though we could not find the markers for their parents — the grandparents of my grandfather — Angela and Francesco.

I knew these people on sight, as their images hang on the wall of my parents’ house in New York. The old man with the gray hair and mustache. The old woman with the dark hair and sad face. She had taught her daughter Maria how to cook, and Maria had taught my mother how to cook. My mother had taught me.

In the cemetery office, I asked for help in locating their graves. Two locals, both with the dark hair and olive eyes of the ancient Greek settlers of the region, passed dilapidated books bearing the names of Toritto’s dead citizens between them. In Tallinn, people were dancing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of independence. We were sitting in a dusty office, thinking of our own past.

Anna, our 10-year-old daughter, also wanted to find Angela and Francesco. She had been a brave traveler in this land of her roots, and even tried to explain to her somewhat bewildered Italian relatives how her friends like to collect deer antler sheds in the forests of Estonia for fun.

At last, I glanced a familiar name in the old book. It was our Angela, who had departed this life on the 15th of January 1922. But where was our Angela buried, we inquired from the men? “Well, she is no longer buried,” one frowned. “Her remains were transferred to the ossuary.”

“What ossuary?” I asked.

He stood and grabbed a large flashlight. “Here, come with me.”

Beneath one of the chapels in the cemetery, he shone a light through a grate, outlining piles of bones and dust. Because of limited space in the cemetery at times, they removed all the old burials and deposited them into a common dark mass grave. The ossuary! I gaped at the skulls and femurs.

This is what had become of Angela, and what became of her husband Francesco. This is what had become of our flesh and blood. This is what had become of the past. A whole century had since passed and the names had survived, the dates, old photographs, and some memories.

Yet all that was left behind was this.

“It’s just so sad,” Anna said to me as we exited the cemetery, “that there’s no marker for them.”

I took a long look at the olive groves surrounding the cemetery, flowering even in winter, and let out a sigh. “That’s just how life is,” I said. “When you’re gone, you’re gone. There’s nothing else left.”

A compilation of posts I made about our recent visit to Puglia and southern Italy.

February 21

It’s sort of unnerving to be dropped into a whole city of people who more or less resemble you. I don’t fully trust my fellow Italians, if they can be called that, but I also don’t fully trust myself. In that sense, we get along perfectly. The street here in the center hosts a bevy of interesting shops for furniture restoration, textiles, tiny supermarkets with all the necessary goods. People leave their clothes out to dry on the balconies, and don’t bother to take them in if it rains. You can hear children giving lip back to their parents through the doorways — Italian children are not Estonian children, and silence is never golden. The religious scenes and displays stir something very deep in me, the dim lighting, the heavenly color schemes, the vague fertility references, the texture and smell of the old brown wood. I grew up far and away from here, yet I feel as if some part of my mind is constructed of these materials, that if my mind were physically accessible, upon entry you would encounter a glowing candelabra and some impressive crucifixes. I feel the same way about the boxes and bags of pasta, the orecchiette and gnocchi.

Somewhere hidden away in my soul is a grotto brimming with greasy tins of olive oil and cured meats and a little old man with a white cap who looks like Danny DeVito who asks me if that’s all. Tutta? 

February 22

Some notes, for personal use. 1) Apparently my great grandfather was an anarchist, at least in his youth. 2) The local dialect is a mix of French and Greek. 3) The few Italian words I learned as a child were dialect words — ‘avast’ is barese, not Italian. In Italian ‘avast’ is ‘basta.’ 4) Everything really closes in the afternoon. It does. Everything. Even the little supermarket run by Danny DeVito across the street. 5) How vegetarians can survive in this culture is beyond me. I am sure they exist, but when every other meal comes with prosciutto, a lapse is unavoidable. There are some head shops and biomarkets in Bari though. 6) When Italians are silent on trains, I don’t get the sense that they are at peace, but rather they are sullenly stewing over something and will erupt into an emotional outburst at some perceived grievance or displeasure.

February 23

More notes from Puglia: 1) This is a society that places food and digestion above everything else. Whereas in other countries, eating is something that takes place during or between shifts at work, in southern Italy, work is organized around eating. Eating is so important that shops shut down in the middle of the day, so that people can have a proper time to unwind, eat, and digest. This deeply resonates with me, and seems like the healthier, more human way to live, even though I have not lived that life myself, having scarfed down many lunches and dinners while working at the same time; 2) Puglia, the heel of the Italian “boot,” is merely one peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean. We think of Italy as being a center, the center of Catholicism, or the Roman Empire, but in actuality, it’s rather isolated, and water-borne conquerors from Venice, or Greece, or Turkey, or Normandy have captured its palaces and centers of administration. The seas around Puglia connect this place to others, rather than separate it. 3) Across Italy, one still encounters suspicion around the South, as a place of backwardness, corruption, and crime. It reminds me a bit of how Long Islanders would regard Manhattan in the Eighties. People would say they were “going to the city,” and it would be implied that they might not come back. I haven’t encountered anything like that, insulated as I am from local culture, in my travels in Southern Italy. Instead, I am told all of the local criminals have made their way to Milano, where the real money is.

February 23, continued.

An exhausting stroll in Barivecchia at 9.30 pm yields droves of Italians, who are still eating. After breakfast, after lunch, after dinner, they could still go for some more panzarotti, or a pizza. And I am one of them. I have devoured two hunks of mozzarella di bufala today, each one richer and more pungent than the other, with the creamy salt milk oozing everywhere, and then another dish of deep baked eggplant parmigiana all red and black and impenetrable … Then the three espressos. What is going on with me? Bari feels like home. All of these big avenues and black coats and gray scarves. All of the long shadows, the long faces, the scattered lovers embracing in the piles of strewn garbage, and the stink of discarded tuna fermenting in the bins. Graffiti, graffiti. The roar of the Vespa. In Monopoli, an herbalist accosted me on the street corner because I snapped a photo of her shop. “I deserve some privacy!” she said, and I responded that it was for my friend in the US, another herbalist. “We just don’t have these kinds of shops there,” I said. Soon after she was bowing to me and smiling. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It was just a misunderstanding.” The men of Monopoli clumped together in the parks under the palm trees while the Italian tricolore fluttered above in the February chill. Blue skies, wispy timeless clouds. Do they really have so much more to say, day after day?

February 24

1918 was a watershed year. Two of our daughters’ great great grandfathers played a role in the Estonian War of Independence. One of them, Martin Laanemaa, fought for the Estonian side (and received property afterwards in Pärnumaa, from the nascent Estonian state), and another, Aleksander Dujev, later Estonianized to “Tulev,” was mobilized in his hometown of Nolinsk, on the periphery of Mari-El, and fought with the army of General Nikolai Yudenich. My understanding is that he was captured and sent out to fight again in an Estonian uniform (I need to revisit the stories, which Epp has collected). But given his service to both the Whites and the Estonians, he could never return to Bolshevik Russia. 1918 was also the start of the great flu epidemic, which ravaged many families. By 1920, my great grandmother Erma Riedel had died of it, as had two of my great grandmother Genevieve Carroll’s sisters — Lucy and Madeleine. It may be the case that Giovanna Panza, the first wife of my great grandfather Domenico Abbatecola, also died of this, and she is buried here not far from where I sit. According to this emergency passport application I found for my great uncle Vincenzo Abbatecola (“Uncle Vinny”), he lived in Toritto, a nearby village, from about 1913 to 1922. We will go there today.

February 25

Good morning from Montrone. In 1884, my great grandfather Domenico Abbatecola was born here to Vincenzo Abbatecola and Lucrezia Iacobellis, whose portrait still hangs on the wall in our dining room on Long Island. Yesterday, we went to Toritto, which is where my great grandmother Maria was born. We pulled into town, and I was directed to the cemetery by an older man named Gianni Casamasima. He just got in the car and showed us the way. Whatever came out of his mouth was not Italian, it was the local dialect. Trying to understand dialect is like being sprayed with aural confetti. And yet it’s somehow more accessible than standard Italian, which sounds a bit stiff and rigid to my ears. The sound of the local dialect is softer, the ‘s’ has more of a ‘sh’ sound, and the tempo has a gentler, easier rise and fall, whereas standard Italian can sound impatient from the second the person says, “Pronto!” I wish I knew dialect, or Italian for that matter, but I have been informed that dialect is ‘molto difficile.’ In Italian, “It’s cold” is “Fa freddo” but in dialect, it’s ‘Fasce fridd” … To think, this was the native tongue of people just a generation or two removed from me. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. Language is a gift. It provides your mind with alternative ways of intuiting. If you have the opportunity to learn a new one, do it. This also goes for my Estonian friends, who speak the ‘kirjakeel,’ the official language, but no longer know the dialects of their families.

February 26

Vietri sul Mare, along the Mar Tirreno, the Tyrhennian Sea. Here opens up the Amalfi coastline, popular among tourists. Some part of me finds tourism in Italy off-putting, though I can’t say why. Yes, it is a beautiful country, and yes, its inhabitants are eager to please (and be paid for it) and yes, it is rich with history, and yes, it was once the center of a great civilization, but also, it is home to superstitious peasants who grow and cook their own food. Whenever someone displays a fine, highly priced and rated wine, I secretly think that the wine in my cousin’s basement probably tastes better. Of course, I love to explore Italy, and also Greece and Spain and France, so who I am I to judge? It is also a distinctly Latin country, the Latin country upon which all others are modeled or copied. Those church bells that ring are the same ones that chime over the Spanish missions of the Pacific West Coast. Yet, in America, somehow Spaniards and Portuguese are thought of as being “Latino,” and Italians are thought of as being the generic “White.” Marco Rubio is “Latino,” Chris Cuomo is “White.” The term “Latino” may hint at admixture with the indigenous peoples of Central and South America and Africans as well, yet the truth is many southern Italians have some deep African ancestry, and no wonder, it’s right across the sea. That’s another issue. The Middle East, Africa, feel very close here. It is Northern Europe that is distant and remote. To get to the Middle East, you have to get on a boat. To get to Northern Europe, you have to traverse vast mountain chains. My deep bias against Northern Europe is that it remains pagan, particularly Estonia, with its reliance on witches, healers, and astrologers. Still the Latin or Roman church also feels a bit ersatz compared to the more ancient Byzantine ceremonies. Most of the churches in southern Italy retained the Byzantine rite, and in fact, when they were brought, begrudgingly, under the control of Rome, it created a fissure between the various Christian centers, and was responsible in part for the Great Schism which never healed. In Pompeii, however, one is reminded of our own gluttonous and orgiastic pagan past, one which the church tried to eradicate with sin and penitence, but was, as the iniquitous deeds of Sr. Silvio Berlusconi attest, unable to wipe clean from the Italian character to this day.

February 26, continued.

I WAS LOOKING for an espresso. Christmas morning in Reykjavik, just a few years ago. Pale yellow light over the corrugated roofs of the city, wintry gusts of snowflakes in the face. Festive lights blinked from windows but the temperature was minus something and there were no other souls about.

Our daughter Anna was with me, then about eight years old. We hiked up to the Hallgrimskirkja and posed with the statue of Leifur Eriksson. Then we came down one of the long side streets until we found a cafe that was open. The windows were fogged up, and it seemed like each opening of its door produced a puff of warm white welcoming steam. The place was packed. Standing room only with holiday revelers in new jackets and scarves. I pushed my way up to the bar and ordered an espresso and a hot chocolate.

The barista was a white-haired man with light blue eyes and a tight round Frank Sinatra face. Instead of making my espresso or Anna’s hot chocolate though, he just stared at me. He stared and stared, and then smiled a bit.

Then the old man spoke spoke. “Buon giorno, signore.”

The words startled me. “Giorno,” I answered back.

He nodded and winked at me. ” Ha! I knew you were one of us,” he said in Italian. “With that face!”

I reached up and touched my nose.

“Daddy, what language is that man speaking?” Anna tugged at my sleeve.

“Italian,” I answered, still a bit dumbfounded.

“Wait. He’s Italian? But what’s he doing here in Iceland? And how do you understand him?”

“Oh, Anna,” I said rubbing my brow. “Italians like us are just everywhere.”

It’s true. In every deserted corner of this world you will find a good-humored Italian man with an espresso machine. For me, these generous gentlemen are the equivalent of those famous Estonian Houses that anyone can find scattered from London to New York to Sydney. After he served us our espresso and hot chocolate, the Reykjavik barista took a break from his Christmas duties to sit with us for a while in the cafe and just chat. Even though my Italian is crude, he was so happy that I could understand him.

“I just have to speak it sometimes,” he said. “Living up here,” he glanced out the foggy window. “I just have to!”

“But how did you get here?” I asked Sinatra.

He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, you know exactly how I got here. A woman!”

It really made me smile. I understood him too well. And there is something about the language that is so soothing. I enjoy the popping cadence of it, its flavor, its emotion, more so than English sometimes. In Estonia, I listen to the radio broadcasts from Rome while I boil pots of casarecce pasta, though Anna prefers linguini. I don’t understand it all, but I do find it comforting. It speaks to some hidden part of the self, real or imagined. I am a closeted Italian, I think. I may have ancestors from half a dozen countries, but never has an Irishman recognized me on the street and thrust a pint of Guinness into my hands. Yet walk into a cafe in Reykjavik on Christmas morning, and I will be recognized. Nothing left to do but sit with “my fellow Italians” and hear their long stories out.

This identity became more precious to me living in Estonia. As I watched with some horror as my first-born daughter and her mother picked apart a container of sült one evening long ago, I felt I needed a cultural balance to all of the gingerbread, blood sausage, leelo singing, and saunas in our lives. To bring them into my tribe. They may now be the only Estonian children who will willingly consume blocks of Pecorino Romano cheese or who know what limoncello is. A few years ago, I even traveled to Bari, on the Adriatic coast, to meet with relatives. Cousin Vincenzo! Cousin Lorenzo! Santina, Gianfranco, Pamela, Michele, Antonella and Lello! And so many others.

My mother and father came along, as did Marta, our eldest daughter. I taught her how to cross herself in the Basilica of Saint Nicholas and how to eat her bread with olive oil with a dash of salt and pepper. I did all of these things without ever thinking, and yet she had to learn them for the first time from watching her father.

It’s not much to pass on, I thought as I crossed myself, but it’s still something.

I KEEP RUNNING this scene through my head and trying to make sense of it. There we were in a locker room in an American high school. It must have been the last year or the second to last year, and we were changing our clothes when I noticed an older man in a black jumpsuit with a camera. He walked into the locker room, surveyed the scene, and began to take photos. The flash of the camera caught my eye, and then there was another flash. I decided to confront this strange individual, whose body language was stiff and clumsy, as if he too was baffled by his appearance and odd behavior.

“What are you doing here?” I asked the old man.

“I’m looking for the swimming pool,” he responded.

“The swimming pool?” I was too perplexed to even ask any other questions. “Well, it’s not in here. I’ll show you where it is.”

I walked the old man out the door of the locker room and pointed him in the right direction. Before he left, he thanked me for showing him the way. The man walked down the hall, turned a corner and vanished for all time.

Back in the locker room, Cariati,who was a week younger than me, and just as eccentric, as any sane person who spends most of their lives in a public institution will one way or another become, asked me what that was about.

“He said he was looking for a swimming pool,” I shrugged.

“Swimming pool?” Cariati recoiled. His dark hair was in his eyes and he had that typical rabid dog expression on his face. “That old man took photos of us in our boxer shorts! And he claimed he was looking for a swimming pool? Don’t you get it, Petrone?”

I shook my head. I still didn’t get it.

“Oh, you are so stupid Petrone,” Cariati made as if to smack me. “He’s probably a pervert who’s into young guys! We have to go tell Ms. Leuca.”

Ms. Leuca eyed us with some suspicion. Who was she to believe Mr. Petrone and Mr. Cariati, two young fools who spent most of their time pretending their tennis rackets were electric guitars and singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“But Ms. Leuca,” Cariati pleaded with her. “We’re not joking this time. Some pervert has pictures of me, Petrone, and Jimmy Grasso in our boxer shorts.”

Ms. Leuca sighed and pressed her fingers to her brow, as if she couldn’t wait until Mr. Cariati and Mr. Petrone would graduate and she would be done with their oddball stories and antics. “Okay, Cariati, I guess I could tell the athletic director about it,” she said. That was the final word on the matter. Neither of us heard anything about it ever again. As far as I know, there are blurry Polaroids out there circulating of me in the Nineties in my boxers.

I don’t recall much more about that story, other than running into Cariati a few months later in a convenience store and reflecting on the incident of the old man. “If we had been girls,” Cariati whispered to me, “this would have been in the local newspaper and the school would have been locked down!”

He took more umbrage at the idea that some man had photographed him without his permission and could be, in some basement somewhere, deriving pleasure from it. I on the other hand couldn’t even understand how someone would risk their livelihood to take some images of some out-of-shape, under-aged men in a sweaty high school gym locker room.

Never before had I felt sexualized in any way. The idea that I too could be subjected to the same kinds of bizarre behavior that women had to manage on a daily basis was beyond my comprehension. Since the idea of being victimized that way was foreign to me, I also could not think of myself as a victim. It was just an incident, as I saw it, a happenstance, a weird thing that happened to which I paid little if no attention. I’m only recalling it now because I am awash in news about the trials and transgressions of others. It occurs to me at these times how limited men’s discourse about themselves actually is. We simply do not talk about our experiences, the things that happened to us, or how we felt about it. Our common media landscape consists of fitness and lifestyle magazines informing us about how to get the perfect body or the perfect tie. Victimhood is not an acknowledged part of the male identity.

To this day, I do not feel victimized by that day. Instead I am still a teenager, scratching my head, wondering if that old man ever found the swimming pool, and if he did, why he needed so badly to take photos of us to get there.