On the evenings when I do school pickup, I get Perry first and we take the backroads through the woods and over the river, curving by the lake, darting, snub-nosed, into the path of incoming headlights just before the flats (scuttling, cursing, back) and when Perry isn’t reminding me to take deep breaths and reprimanding me for my many damnits, he’s asking about astrophysics and the afterlife. 

Why have only two people been to the moon? 

Well, one reason is that it’s really difficult to land on the moon, because there’s no gravity, so a spaceship can’t just put on the breaks like I do.

What’s gravity? (I used to know but I forget.)

It’s what keeps us in earth and not in space. 

There’s no gravity in space? 

Mostly, no. Except for black holes. 

What’s a black hole? 

A gigantic vacuum hose of pressure created by a dying star. 

What makes a star die? 

All stars die.

ALL STARS DIE?

Yes?

EVEN THE SUN?? 

Eventually. 

WHEN? 

Like, a hundred million years from now? 

So we’ll all be dead then. 

I’d assume so.

Well, you know what will happen first?

What?

I will go to the moon.

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I still think of myself as a mother rapidly acclimating to a breathless and transitory reality. Two, then three small children, a city life hastily upended for distant suburbs, precarious childcare, the lurking threat of another lockdown. Indeed Brady and I have been parents in this new life for longer than we were parents in the old one; there is nothing temporary or recent about any of it. And yet because it began as temporary, as hasty, ham and egged, I continue to think of it as such. In my home office, I still use an old kitchen table in place of a desk, a ladderback chair in place of a desk chair, and the many pictures and postcards and an old plan of the house are all nailed carelessly with little gold nails. A blown up photograph of Brady and I on our wedding day, Brady dipping me backwards into a field of blurry goldenrod has been moved from wall to wall to wall, and now rests upon the floor. The photograph is all right – all those wildflowers, and the pelty green of the fields beyond, and my medieval braid, Brady’s soft grey suit and wide-rimmed glasses; it’s the frame I dislike; the frame that catches my eye whereever I hang it. I have never, in all these years, remembered or bothered to order a better one.

{I come unusually alive in my antipathy towards certain styles of objects. Plastic medicine bottle caps, the tube of toothpaste left lying on the sink, wide picture frames.}

It’s that point in autumn when the dusk comes on hurriedly and inexorably, leaving me mid-meeting, scrambling awkwardly for lamp plugs and knobs. There is never acknowledgement of the enveloping darkness, either out of courtesy or – more likely – because the person on the other side of the screen has me half-hidden under documents, or is turning on their lights while I turn on mine, neither of us noticing the other’s recalibrations.

I perform some apologetic version of this illumination and continue to scrupulously avoid more than glancing, occasional eye contact with the person on the screen; so fastidious am I in this avoidance of intermediated eye contact that my eyes inevitably stray to documents on the monitor, or the photograph of Ottelie at three days old, or the dreaded wide picture frame.

There is a new war to contend with, and a new mass shooting, the old manichean hegemony of late stage capitalism, board targets, corporate palaver, etc. The person on the screen is penumbral, unshaven, wearing the same college sweatshirt they were in the previous day, and the day before. They are not sleeping well, or at all.

“How’s it going” I ask. A sincere question transfigured through repetition into a string of sound, a spare prisencolinensinainciusol, nonsense sounds I rush or arch or pingpong. 

The replies — fine, okay, not too bad — have become sound, too, but the tones are indicative.

The attention I pay to tone borders on exacting; one can get away with saying nearly anything to me provided it is said lightly. 

How’s it going?

Fine.

When the fine is strained, I make efforts to concentrate, to minimize documents, to look at the edges of the face instead of the fiddle leaf fig, which reaches now nearly to the top of the picture window, the stadium pennants, football pointing east, baseball pointing west, like rotated fangs, the titles of the books stacked horizontally in the center of the cavernous shelving unit.

The fine is strained almost always.

My responses are hackneyed, uttered out of turn, and echo statements made moments earlier. Bumbling attempts at rapprochement, are met, as could have been anticipated, with skepticism that, uncarefully managed, will double back into old suspicions and frustration, gaining edge and volume as I bobblehead along. That I continue on as grievance interlocutor is likely less a matter of hidden results and more of habit, or no better options. 

The other day, during a particularly dreary and overlong call, I observed, surreptitiously, the other faces in their uniform boxes. It was impossible to tell whether most of them were truly staring at the speaker, who sat alone in a large conference room, or had just fixed their gaze in the right direction. What if I reached out and pulled one – nose first, then glasses, then a tug of the ears – through the screen, as Naomi Watts’ character in The Ring had pinched the fly from the snowy TV. 

Important to note, too late in this silly piece of writing: The children are real; the people on the screens are real; it is my own interactions with, relations to them that have are intermediated, muffled.

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So mom. So —

…Yes?

When we die, we go to heaven, right?

…  That’s what lots of people believe. 

What’s believe? 

To know something is true without being able to prove it.

What do YOU believe? 

I don’t know. Some people believe that when we die, we are reborn as someone else. I kind of like that idea. 

I like that idea too. Who do you think was reborn as me? 

Well, Grandpa Pete really loved to fish, just like you do. Though he also liked to tell tall tales, just like Irv. 

What’s a tall tale? 

It’s when you take something that did happen, and you make it bigger – more dramatic, or sillier, whackier – so it’s more memorable.

Let me get this straight. When Irving says that he found the biggest leaf on the nature walk, when he literally did not go on the nature walk, is that a tall tale, or a lie? 

That’s … borrowing. 

 Can I tell my friends that Grandpa Pete was reincarnated as me?

You can tell them that that is what you believe.

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One Monday evening before the clocks change, I fly to Florence to attend the wedding of an old college friend. I’d arranged everything at the very last minute, and travel alone and somewhat circuitously, leaving Boston just before midnight on a Monday and arriving in Florence some eighteen hours later. None of this is interesting – route talk; cardinal sin! – except that the combination of spontaneity and vanished hours whiled in the great anonymous bustle of Heathrow, of departing and arriving in darkness, of utter anonymity – render me slightly and not unenjoyably delirious.

I’m in Florence for thirty six hours.

The morning of the wedding, I wake just before eight to dove grey daylight and dress for the warmth that has not yet arrived, in sleeveless, smocked cotton with Archizoom squiggles in green and butter yellow and aubergine. My hotel is in a neighborhood that is half residential and half furniture and kitchenware shops, with Monte Morello purring up against my left. The apartments are simple row houses of sand-colored stucco. Most have multiple rows of flowers and herbs in terracotta pots on their small balconies: hibiscus, rosemary, egaltine rose.

 I had forgotten the characteristics of Italian cities that had so charmed me more than a dozen years earlier – the ubiquitous mopeds and vacuum bag grocery carts, the diminutive scale of the automobiles and sprinter vans, the penchant for ten to fifteen year-old American pop songs. Lattes served in clear, tempered glass cups. At a pasticeria not far from the hotel, I order one of these and a faggotino — chocolate wrapped in laminate — and half-read Idlewild and half-watch the small white dog sitting alert on a red leatherette bistro chair while her owner leafs noisily through the sports section of La Nazione. A randomly selected pasticeria but the laminate is professional and the woman behind the bakery counter and the man behind the lotto seem to know everyone (apart from me) who comes in. 

 I finish my pastry and walk for a while behind an older gentleman in a pale blue undershirt and blousing khaki trousers, listening to the flick flick of the wheels of his checkered grocery cart and wishing I didn’t have such a fierce, American craving for a 20 oz cup of to-go coffee.

The undershirt is made not of cotton but of a fine, thin wool. 

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The other day Irving, with studious casualness, tells us that his friend M doesn’t like him.

Why?

Because she thinks I’m fake.

Brady and I look at eachother.

You are many things, but fake isn’t one of them, I say.

What’s her problem, asks Perry.

Irv sighs. It is the sigh of pleasure. The pleasure of an incipient hoodwink.

“The problem is the car.”

“The car?”

“The problem is the girl in the car.”

M, the girl in the car, doesn’t want fake boy riding shot gun.

‘Tell her you’re a real boy. A real boy!” I say.

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At an outdoor market, I buy peaches – white and donut – and two persimmons. “più dolce di quest’anno,” the vendor says, approvingly, of the white peaches. The sweetest of this year. She is alarmed by my rejection of a plastic bag; she makes vivid bursting gestures with her hands and wraps each piece of fruit carefully in tissue paper before handing it to me. 

Out of eyeshot, I eat a white peach. The juice floods my chin; I’m sticky and vaguely ashamed but continue to take rapid bites until only the pit remains. This I hold in my fist, for I have no pockets. It is like getting my nose back, eating that peach, and there is no point in eating another. 

I have another five hours to spend as I like; not enough time (I tell myself) to make any significant cultural effort. I have a vague idea of going to the leather school to buy gifts and perhaps a woven crossbody purse for myself. A woven crossbody purse! (But I can recall, sharply, the one my mother had bought for my sister years early: the simplicity of the strap, the demure size, the deep concord grape color.)

The carabinieri who clustered along the roundabout dividing the looser, mixed-use north from the dense old city center wear: aviators, pale blue polo shirts with red embroidery, slim navy trousers with red piping, tucked insouciantly into black leather motorcycle boots, knee-high. I don’t not take a photograph, but just now, I find a few on this tumblr. You’re welcome?

The homes in the old city have old brass mail slots on their glossy green and red doors, and cunning pocket shutters whose lowers cant out at 60 degree angles. I walk past a trumpet shop and violin shop and an adjacent workshop, where a partially finished, unstained violin lay alone on a high desk. I walk past a shop selling only oil paintings of songbirds. I get a second latte in a cafe playing “I got a feeling” and “Friday Night.” 

The leather school I’ve chosen is just a shop selling bags and belts and wallets in vegetal, thick leather, indistinguishable from the many such shops that crowded the city center. I go instead to a museum next door. 

The museum is a double bill of mausoleums built, like much of Florence, for the Medici family. Though the odds of stumbling unawares into arrestingly lifelike statuary and blinged out tombs are no doubt in my favor, I am nonetheless stunned to emerge from a lower level of ornate and ugly reliqueries into a small pass-through whose broad-chested occupant is being devoured by a serpent. Michelangelo has not finished the serpent, but the man is in grievous pain; anyone could see that. Another flight of stairs leads into the sacristy, a hushed chapel of whitewashed stone where two Medici dukes lie in somber, symmetrical state.

The history of the sacristy’s construction is this:

Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and his cousin, Pope Leo X hire a young Michelangelo to design the chapel, which is also meant to house the tombs of four Medicis: Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, plus the Duke of Urbino (also named Lorenzo) and the Duke of Nemours (also named Guiliano). Michelangelo plans to build the sepulchers into the walls, one per each wall. He completes the statues of Day and Night, Dawn and Dusk. And then: Pope Clement is sacked. The Florentine people take their cue from the Romans and attempt to oust the younger Medici duke. Michelangelo sides with the people, who ultimately lose. In return for his life, the sculptor agrees to resume the chapel.

He carves the Duke of Medici and the second tomb. He oversees completion of the Duke of Nemours. Before the third sepulchre is constructed, he absconds to Rome. Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother get a basic sarcophagus with three semi-random sculptures. The fourth wall remains blank. Nearly thirty years will pass before Cosimo Medici decides, the hell with it; it’s time for the chapel to come together. A project begun in earnest ends embittered.

In the moment, I pick up on none of this. I am transfixed by the way the the light slides over the marble limbs, illuminating the faint divots of pectoral and breast, the fleshy bit I always have to mind when photographed in sleeveless dresses, of shoulder and bicep and languid thigh and toes flexed against rock. An alcove past Day holds a large, crucifix-topped dodecahedron. Most smiths stuck with orbs, but Michelangelo was insistent: a sixty-sided polyhedron is divine.

It is disorientating to pass from the sober, oysterly perfection of the sacristy into the chapel of the princes – like going from Khaite to Versace: here the marble runs to greens and ocean blue, inlaid with glinting maroon porphyry; the veins spider and bloom, the grandest of the free-standing sarcophagi, illustrated in lapis, jade, endless gold, hulks under a vast candelabra. The coffered domed ceiling – floridly, sumptuously frescoed, is designed to dazzle. The walls are paneled, carved; the princes super-sized. It is, to my mind, hideous (but no one could say it isn’t ambitious). 

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A few hours later I am high above the city, exploring the grounds of a palazzo where, in short order, my friend is to be married. The hillside below is tufted in olive groves and plum trees and terracotta roof tiles. I follow a winding gravel path past the back grounds of the palazzo, past the highest tower, dense with wisteria, until I am stopped by a tall green gate, locked, and an apiary beyond. A blue post-it note affixed to one of the rails warns of sleeping bees. The sky is beginning to pink . A dark beetle-like figure made its way towards the terrace where a piano had been rolled out; a woman in a long red dress approaches the figure and detaches an upright bass.

The world feels very close. I hadn’t realized how closed off I’d thought I was from it. Before children, I had treasured each far flung vacation, but been daunted, nearly undone by the logistics and potential for missed exercise, the minor technical inconveniences – by the anxiety over whether my companion/s would think it had been worth it (for the trips were always my idea).

It is encouraging to realize I’ve become someone who can ham and egg international travel arrangements just as she does everything else, who can wait in crowds and lines and crouches and plastic chairs, in discomfort that isn’t really all that uncomfortable, for it is only my own.

I bring the children wristwatches, rubber with slide-out mechanics.

What are watches for?

To keep time.

Why do we keep time?

So we know where we are?

Don’t you mean when?