Damien Galeone

I head into the living room at 6:20 pm. I take up the rocking chair. I warm up with some Phillies pregame. At 6:40 pm my dad comes in and takes up the armchair on my right. The game begins.

My schedule when visiting home is pretty open, but there are a few scheduled events. Dinner is at 5:30 every day, the house is more or less empty of young people by 8 am, and I am expected to be in the living room for each Phillies game.

I am fine with each of these rules – especially the game. Nobody else in the house enjoys baseball besides my dad and I, so game time is more or less quiet time. Each game time I arrive at my rocking chair like the at-heart octogenarian I am. I have my water and pretzels. My dad has a water and whatever kind of chocolate he found on his way in.

Baseball is one of the few visual media my dad and I can watch together without ending up in prison. His taste and mine has deviated greatly since I was four months old. My dad likes Korean pop dramas and I like Columbo. It was never going to work. But with baseball, we become the commentators nobody can hear. A thing for which I am enormously grateful.  

We discuss actors, movies, books, lakes in Geneva, the good points and failings of each player. And hoagies. And when it’s over, we mosey on with the rest of our day.  

After a five-day roadtrip, I return to the rocking chair. It’s quiet. We’re both a little under the weather. Then I get a lot under the weather. He adjourns to the kitchen, which is right next to the living room separated by a window with two shutters. Our banter continues, but it’s louder.

‘Hey, nice play!’

‘Are there any pretzels in there?!’

Two days later. I am watching the game. Schwarber is up to bat. The count is 2–2. The crowd goes quiet. The sound of a clap comes from the kitchen. The pitcher throws a ball. 3–2. A kitchen table rattling under a hand slap. Schwarber strikes out. The next inning, Realmuto is down in the count 0–2 when a cheer comes from the kitchen. Three seconds later, Realmuto hits a homer into the upper deck.   

It’s not a crystal ball he’s got; it’s a TV that’s three seconds ahead of mine. While this wouldn’t have an effect on me in general – I don’t care if Junwoo kisses Jiwoo under the eucalyptus tree before he meets Jiho near the enchanted forest of Gly-ho. But the excitement and enjoyment underlying baseball is sort of predicated on not knowing what is going to happen until it does. When you have the human spoiler alert watching the game twenty feet away, it sort of gives it away.

I let him know about this and the struggle becomes clear instantly. You see, my dad can’t keep a secret. He thinks he can, he says he can, but he cannot. This goes hand-in-hand with my dad’s movie-watching habits. He will directly give away a movie ending – in the middle of a movie. ‘No, it’s not him, it’s his sister who’s the killer.’ At the very least, he’ll let you know he knows something. ‘Just watch this. This is a great scene.’ If he picks up a throw pillow, someone is about to get eviscerated onscreen.

So to tell him not to give away the next play is a tough ask.

That evening, Bryce Harper is up and the bases are loaded. Harper’s got a 2–2 count. The pitcher starts his windup. A groan from the kitchen. It’s quickly followed by a strangled cheer. Harper strikes out. An inning later, the third baseman for the other team grounds to second. As the second baseman fields the ball, I hear my dad say ‘Oh fucking God-yay!’ The second baseman throws the ball into the stands.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yeah.’

Despite these attempts to silence his radar, it’s too hard for him. The game for me becomes a series of grunts, yells, table slaps, cheers, claps, and hurrahs. I find an old pair of bombardier headphones and affix them to my ears. This seems to do the trick. Then I remove them and it’s still quiet. I head to the shuttered window and watch my dad bite his tongue to avoid broadcasting his disappointment in the last batter of the inning.

The fix comes when we put masks on. We talk through them and look like two guys playing birds in a movie. He pulls down his mask to take a bite of a popsicle. I fit a few pretzels under my mask.

‘I knew he was going to strike out.’

‘Yeah. What a jerk.’  

We the people are clearly animals. This isn’t a dig or a comment on society. I mean, people just act like different animals. I once spent ten hours working in pairs with a guy on a course and at the end of it I could say without hesitation that he was a squirrel. He was on a steady diet of caffeine and so his head and upper body twisted and observed in jerky, frenetic movements. He also had a seemingly unending supply of snacks, which he pulled from pockets and bags and his hat. He was a squirrel.

Some might say this denotes one’s ‘spirit animal,’ but I am not sure I even buy into this. I think we are just animals. And surely as happened with you, I one day sat down and asked myself: What animal am I?  

I used to watch my cat lying around the flat, moving from warm spot to warm spot, following the sun as it arced through the sky. I had more time on my hands back then. After some hours, the cat would get up, yawn, stretch, and then go eat. Eventually it would poop. And then start the whole thing over again. Sometimes the cat avoided the world for hours or even days by hiding in some cozy spot. I needed no further evidence: I am a cat.

Now, this isn’t something you go bragging about or slapping on your resume. You don’t sit across from an interviewer and say ‘Sorry Mr. Jackson, working on a team doesn’t really suit me, because, well, I am a cat.’ No. But as time went on, I came to terms with the fact. I even enjoyed it. I don’t like drama or loud noises. When I drink too much, I get quiet and smiley and sometimes I lick the back of my hands and clean my hair. Yes, I thought, cat.

It’s lunchtime. I take my eyes off of the computer screen that seems to rule my waking hours and I stumble through the closet la aqua that separates my quarters from the rest of the household. I open the door. I have no idea what to expect.

Visiting home used to be something of a predictable affair. It was me, my mom, my dad, my sister, and her two kids, who were starting lives of their own. During the day I’d be home more or less alone. My mom worked all day and my dad worked in the dental office whose waiting room I now sleep in. He’d come in for lunch and, depending on the day, be done early or later in the afternoon. In any event, it was usually a predictable month.

Things have changed. Mornings and dinnertime have become variable based on the simple fact that my sister had a kiddo. This child is best described as a mix between Elmo and Nero. Moments of undeniable charm and unimaginable cuteness are punctuated by moments of terror and tantrums that will only be complete when she’s wearing a toga and ejaculating her epithets from atop a hill of human skulls. But that’s dinner – good old fashioned American dinner.

Lunchtime is up in the air. It all depends on who’s sick.

I come back to Langhorne each August for a month of family time. Langhorne has my family, food that offers a more robust attack on my colon, and a quiet suburban life. We are a small town tucked into the woods – like every other town in Pennsylvania. We are surrounded by trees, small animals, ticks, and cicadas.

The night I arrived, my sister showed me some pictures from our driveway’s security camera. We are visited nightly by a menagerie of quick moving animals. We get a squirrel and a rabbit. But there are also deer and a fox. A long-tailed little guy running across our porch and towards, no doubt, my dad’s car, which at all times puts off a scent of Tastycakes – a delicacy my dad allows in the car on the way home from any errand.

“There was a bear,” my sister tells me.

“What?”

I have always harbored a secret desire to witness civilization go back to the animals. We took it from them and I can’t imagine it’s something they have let go of quite yet. They probably view us and our cars and lawnmowers and our political choices and wonder what the hell it is we’ve done to the precious environment.

I take three walks a day while I visit home. Considering my raised level of calories, walks help keep me out of a motorized scooter. They are also a way to observe the town and keep me from committing patricide or matricide or any-other-family-icide you’d care to name.

Also, I want to see that bear.

He’s a black bear. I have named him Kevin (for obvious reasons). Once I told my sister and mother that I wish to see this bear, they scoffed and told me he had been relocated.

“They relocated Kevin?”

“Who’s Kevin?”

“Never mind.”

For the first two days, my walks are not fruitful. I see some dogs and birds and neighbors. Everyone says hi and I am confused at first. But aside from small woodland animals and a hairy mailman, there are no other animals. Definitely no bears.

But then, as I passed a tiny patch of woods on the road that would bring me to our street, I noticed movement. Kevin? I thought. No. but it was two deer. One adult, the other young. They were sitting at the edge of the woods and eating some guy’s lawn. I slowed. They looked at me with massive and seemingly trusting eyes, a round, deep black nose popped on the edge of their snouts that would make Rudolf jealous (in the beginning of his song). They chewed grass and did nothing.

I walked away.  

Yesterday, after working out, my sister informed me that I should take a walk to a shower and then use it. I told her I would shower after my walk.

“Cool. Don’t walk near any of our neighbors.”

“Fair enough.”

Maybe, I surmised, if I smell like one of them, Kevin will make himself known. At the same patch of woods, another movement came. The deer again. This time they were much closer, just a few yards away. I stopped. There she was – the adult, Patty (obvious reasons); she was about six or seven feet from me. Flo was not with her now. Patty came even a little closer so that I could take two steps and pet her side if I wanted to try. But something told me not to.

When confronted with an animal I normally don’t see on a daily basis – a deer, a nutria, a beaver, a horse, a cow – I am always amazed by the size and the, well, realness of them. Animals are always larger and more intimidating than you’d think they are. This is probably because when animals (even docile ones) are on TV or movies, they are there as a joke. Or maybe they are anthropomorphized: a talking spider, a pig who herds sheep, an indecipherable duck who wears only the top half of a sailor’s uniform. Media has not prepared us to deal with animals in the quasi-wild.

This is a deer, a symbol of mild euphemism and softness, metaphorically depicting speed, inaction, or a eunuch; a walking pile of steak. And yet, the muscles rippling in its side, its strong legs, its surprising size, all tell me that if I stepped out of line, this animal could knock me into the weekend. I did not touch Patty. She looked at me, sniffed at my shoe and, evidently agreeing with my sister’s assessment of my post-workout aroma, took off across the street.

I spend the night marveled by my experience. Right there – nature! I then remember that on another visit home way back in the 1990s, I walked across the street from my friend Eddie’s house and saw, standing right on our porch, a buck. A huge buck with lots of points on its antlers. Even drunk I knew to avoid this guy. He was less gregarious than Patty and took two giant leaps and was in the woods across the street.

But then it dawned on me: I am king of the deer. This realization was something of a surprise as I had always figured I was Lord of the Hermit Crabs. But you cannot argue with nature.

On my walk this morning I saw Flo and Patty. They were crossing the street to another patch of woods. A driver was coming up the road and I waved with two arms to warn him. He slowed down and let our buddies pass. I smiled in wonder as he drove past me, hoping to engage him in a shared ‘can you believe that?’ moment. But he didn’t smile back. He looked at his watch and made an annoyed face.   

And he’s right. Nothing happened. It wasn’t interesting for him. I’m telling you a (non-)story about a (non-)run-in with a deer. Not Kevin the bear or Terry the bobcat or even Samantha the hawk.

I come home and try to figure out why I’m writing this. Oh, I’m sure there’s something about the circle of life and blah blah blah. But in the end, what I want to say is that if civilization does go back to the animals, then Flo and Patty can have my room. And, if they occasionally had Kevin over for mojitos, that wouldn’t break my heart either.  

It’s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I’m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks – the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes me feel about ten-years-old.

I have slipped into my family’s summer routine. There is camp and work and little trips. I do my part to help out and otherwise stay out of the way. My family and I get along great – until we don’t. Fortunately, I have a room of my own. So, when the fam stresses me out, I can go to this room and, hypothetically, lie facedown into a pillow and scream curse words until I fall asleep. This works well and not only because I am usually awakened by my mother calling me into whatever meal is appropriate to that time of day.  

I have slipped into my own routine here. I get up early, write, walk, work out, drink coffee, eat Grape Nuts, sprint to the toilet. In the unbearably hot Langhorne afternoons, I retreat to my cooled room for work and reading. When I have control of the living room TV, it is playing a show in which a bad British person is murdered by other bad British people and some other less bad British people try to figure out who did what and why.

It seems that everyone around here is doing their part to help me feel at home. They are too loud and they invade your privacy. A man broke the sacrosanct bubble of quietude at a bank’s ATM vestibule by shouting complaints into his phone while standing two feet behind me. It made for a disconcerting transaction on my part. In the Czech Republic, that man may seriously have been arrested. A woman at the next table in a diner yesterday overheard our conversation and commented – at length – in a personal way that didn’t relate to what we’d said at all. Despite enough free tables to run a speed dating night, minutes later a man and woman sat directly next to us on the other side and proceeded to have the loudest conversation in the history of the world.

These things stressed me out, proving with surprise that I have a little more of the Czechs in me than I thought possible. But I crunched my toes and prayed for a car to drive through the window. Instead, we paid our check a few minutes later and I was home on my pillow until Mom woke me up for third lunch.

Whenever I go to Italy, I have pictures in my head of what it’s going to consist of: warm, sun, pasta, and pizza so good that it could take the place of a meaningful relationship.

The problem is, I forget about the little frustrating things that Italy means too. Things move slowly at times, time is a rumor, and public transport schedules run on astrological forecasting. In restaurants, food moves faster than drinks. Waiters are usually pleasant but seem to need a lot of breaks in between tasks. They can be seen at a table breathing deeply in between the aperitivo and the first plate rounds.

Sure, the Italian lifestyle is known for being slowed down and easy. But if you are, hypothetically, a stressed-out type, a guy who loves nothing more than making schedules and then sticking to them, well, the la dolce vita can be a bit of a strain.

I spend the first day in Italy trying to make sense of the waiters’ strategy. So far, it seems to very attentively get us through the door and get a drink in front of us. Then, they bring us a little snack to keep us there (which works really well. Catching flies/honey). Then they disappear for a while as we try to divine liquid from the bottom of the glass and trying to catch the eye of a person wearing a uniform. Any uniform. It’s as though he wants us to want him. I would be annoyed if it weren’t so effective.

I know it’s my issue. Relaxation and I are like fourth cousins. I never see him and only on the rare occasions when I do am I reminded of how much I love him. It takes a while for me to unwind, even in Italy, where the very atmosphere tells you that you might as well chill out because nothing is going to happen very quickly anyway. Nevertheless, I move and think like I have things to do. When, in reality, my To Do list consist of these things: wake up, drink, eat, walk over there, find more food, maybe get tipsy, sleep.

It’s when I give myself over to la dolce vita that I will find some joy. It takes a while. I walk too fast and up hills, too. Burke is annoyed with my inability to chill. I look up bus schedules and metro stops. I am keenly aware of how long it takes me to get from one place to another. We walk up a huge hill to a city square and I do it like the Bataan Death March.

But then, something clicks on the third day. We drink beers at lunch and then head back to our apartment to sleep for a few hours. When I wake up, I walk to the local store for some supplies. No, I mosey. Yes, mosey. And then, I mosey back. We take our time. If we don’t do things, then it’s OK. We have a drink at a local pizzeria and order two pizzas to go. By the time they arrive, I have forgotten that I had ordered pizzas to begin with.

I slip into this wonderful state of mind and bliss for the remainder of our time in Genoa. So, about four more days. Four days of shrugging off bus schedules. Four days of not planning dinner. Four days of drinking in the afternoon and then taking a guilt-free nap. Four days of no email or work.

When I wake up in a mild panic on Sunday, I know the game is up. We have a train to catch and then another train. Tomorrow night we have a flight. Even if I enjoy myself to the fullest in Bergamo (today’s destination), I know that la dolce vita for me is a thing of the past. I clean our kitchen and check for things hiding in the bathroom. We walk out the door, my legs forcing me to move more slowly than usual when running for a bus. What I wouldn’t give for an aperitivo right now.

Milan Central Station is a madhouse. If you have been to a train station in an Italian city, you know this is redundant. The status quo of a train station in Italy is madhouse. We get on the train, miraculously find a couple of seats. We sit. In 1 hour and fifty-three minutes, we’ll be in Genoa. We sit. A Polish family sits across from us – man, woman, child curl up on two seats. We all do the obligatory nod. We sit.

Since I was a kid, I have loved trains. Not in a Sheldon Cooper way – I don’t know train numbers or which train rode the Chicago–New York line in 1976. But I have always loved being on a train. I took a train downtown for high school. It’s the chugging forward, the quiet persistence of a train. It moves quickly at times, other times it just ekes around a corner towards its destination. Nevertheless, it moves, it gets you there. It’s mostly quiet and mostly boring. Perfect.

As much as there’s a distinctly pleasant feeling when a train is moving, there’s a distinctly unsettling feeling when a train isn’t moving. Trains are large pieces of metal. And when one is sitting still when it should (according to the schedule) be moving, you feel that it will never move again.

Such is the situation in Milan (where we still sit). 2:23 becomes 2:33 and then 2:43 and I would have made more progress towards Genoa if I had gotten out and walked to the end of the platform. People mosey on and off the train. This tells me (an avidly obsessive time and schedule keeper, a bad thing to be when it comes to Italian transportation) that we are not moving anytime soon.

At 3:02 our train lurches a little to the right and makes a slow crawl out of the station. I heave out a sigh of relief. This relief lasted until we arrived at the next town, where we sat for another thirty or so minutes. Again, people mosey in and out of the train as if it’s the middle room of a pub. A pub I would make wealthy beyond their wildest dreams at this moment.

We are packing for a weeklong holiday. With a mild obsession for organization and an adoration of lists that borders on kink, packing has traditionally been one of my favorite activities. Then there’s the fact that packing is the act of preparing. Not just preparing, but preparing to go somewhere. I like those things. When I finish packing, I will close my bag. When I open the bag again, barring any unforeseen airport shenanigans, I will do so on a bed in a hotel in a place whose restaurants have a wholly different cuisine, whose language sports different idioms, and whose residents enjoy a completely different cultural-neighborly rivalry.

It was excitement embodied in a menial task.

But at some point, almost without me noticing, I got a bit older. This reality began rearing its head in my packing. Packing used to be straightforward: underwear, socks, pants. Now it’s my good underwear, compression socks, pants with elastic waistband. The number of creams, medicines both preventive and reactive, and things which provide comfort is rising with each year. As if Italy doesn’t have medication that can counteract the effects of a headache or an upset stomach. In effect, I try to bring my home with me abroad.

Today, as I pack, creams and digestants are the least of my problem. What I have noticed is that the pants I am planning on bringing with me are nearly perfect. They are light, cool, perfect for walking. The waistband is elastic and therefore flexible to the whimsical approach I plan on taking towards gelato and anything that includes the word ‘crema’. But the pockets are short and don’t provide the protection one wants when touring a city. And since while traveling my pockets must also house a passport, this doesn’t bode well. These are the pants I am bringing. But this pocket is problematic. I sit down and consider my options.

In 1991 two German hikers in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy came across something extraordinary and disturbing: a dead body. They reported it immediately. Due to storms, authorities couldn’t get back to the body for a few days. But when they did, they realized the body was not a tourist or a mountain climber come to a bad accident. In fact, the body was about 5,000 years old.

It was Burke’s birthday. She is blurm-bling-years-old and so a day of enjoyment was called for to celebrate this inauspicious number and event. The idea was: zoo, cake, burger, cake, air conditioning.

The pluses with a summer birthday are clear. Your range of activity is way open. You can drink outside, go outside, walk outside, play outside. When you’re an October birthday like me, your range of places to drink are limited to: a pub.

As far as I am concerned, the problem with a summer birthday is the heat. But this doesn’t seem to be a problem for the summer-born people. Those people born in summer seem A-okay with the sun activities. They enjoy the feeling of baking shoulders and prefer their beverages to be consumed in the al fresco. The summer people are like human charging ports, a day in the sun energizes them and allows them to glow warmly and happily. They are psychopaths.  

I am an autumn-born person. My idea of fun is avoiding the sun at all costs. I drink my beverages indoors and with a wall or even a few walls between me and the orb of discomfort. Most of my shots are quietly dedicated to the fact that I live in a place which the sun avoids for six months of the year. I get a charge from the shade.   

But it is not my birthday, it is Burke’s. And she has decided on the zoo.

It should be mentioned that I am for this plan in theory. I like walking, animals, and beer and hotdogs. All of these things can be found or done at the zoo. But in practice, and as an autumn-born, what I really want is to hide in my coolish flat for this hot day and watch movies. Maybe we could just let me hang out at home, eat, drink, and watch 30 Rock while animals pass by the flat and watch me. I would be OK with this. Nevertheless, when it’s your partner’s birthday, pitching these fanciful (read: stupid) ideas are not an option. Also not an option is going along with the plan and being miserable. You have to sell it. You have to be into it. I shower. I practice my smile. I remember there will be beer and elephants and my smile becomes genuine.

My barber is a little late today. I sit on the couch amid a few Vietnamese ladies and prop my arm up on the cushion. Upon being made to wait due to someone else’s lateness, my first instinct is usually anger. But I have been concerned recently at my inability to be present. Or at the very least, to lose myself in thoughts as opposed to Reddit. Recently, therefore, I have decided to actively attempt to use my phone less. And unfortunately, once I did that I found there was nothing to keep me from this horror show called ‘thinking’.

Now, I sit quietly and watch the mall people go by. When they prove distressingly real, I let my mind wander. Burke and I have decided to play hooky this afternoon and are going to a restaurant for some beers and pizza. At this moment, the world is my oyster and it will come on bread with mozzarella. But after three months of daily busyness to the point of exhaustion, an afternoon hidden in the garden of some off-the-beaten-track restaurant is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I am irritated with myself for wasting May and June this year. This is one of my favorite times of year – we are no longer teaching but only testing and doing other work. This year, however, I have bitten off more than I can gobble and the time has passed in a blur of stress and short fuses. It was in an attempt to rein that in that we came up with our hooky day.

Paní July – my barber – is still not here. Though I don’t know her well, she must have a medical condition which results in her believing that I am 21 years old. As a result, she cuts my hair as one would someone who is hip to modern trendiography™. She leaves my hair longer on top – as Burke has assured me is the fashion. And while I was disconcerted at first, the number of compliments I got from my 21-year-old students seem to support Burke’s thesis and Paní July’s follicular tactics. The one time I asked Ms. July if she could cut my hair on top a wee bit shorter, she replied, in a somewhat startling but not altogether unpleasant way, ‘No.’

For this reason, I cannot forego haircuts lest I begin resembling Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein in 1995. So while I usually let my hair go for two months, Paní July has convinced me that I should come every month. So here I am for the third time in three months like some Prima Donna. So I’ll get twelve haircuts a year instead of six. I’m trying to reckon with the extra time push. It’s a 100% uptick in time. Let’s say each haircut is 30 minutes, I will now spend six hours a year getting a haircut. I marvel a little at that – how the small things add up. And then there’s how the small things add up over the course of your life, not in hours, but in how many more times of an activity or a object your life amounts to. I make the mistake of doing math in my head. Let’s say I have 35 years left on Planet X (bringing me to a lucky, if irritable 85 years old) at twelve haircuts a year, including this one, that brings me up to 425 haircuts left in my whole life.