In a way, this is a ghost story.
But there is nothing spooky about it.
My pop passed at Christmas.
Photo: Chris Wallace
He was 90 years old.
And for much of the second half of his life, he fantasized about Italy.
This was during a semi-private audience with his holiness at Castello Gandolfo,il papas summer residence.
Photo: Chris Wallace
And never shut up about it.
But toward the end of my dads life, I noticed that he never dreamed of going somewhere new.
I thought it was in food and cooking that we had found our common language.
Photo: Chris Wallace
But now I wonder whether it wasnt in fantasy.
Nor do I really go as myself.
(Certainly not as the me with student loan debts and herniated discs.)
Photo: Chris Wallace
I go as the travel version of myself.
A suite for thinking and pacing.
How would I be different if not for his influence?
Photo: Chris Wallace
How to either nurture that or outgrow it as best suits me?
Be patient, my son, the Pope told my dad in 1953.
At least according to my dad.
Photo: Chris Wallace
If you are here a month, you will know nothing of Rome.
But if you are here for a lifetime, you will begin to know something of the Eternal City.
Like life, I guess.
Photo: Chris Wallace
In hog heaven, as he wouldve said.
So I ordered his favorite roasted pig.
On a bright clear morning, walking through the Forum, I could hear my dad squealing with joy.
Photo: Chris Wallace
Have a negroni, have two, etc.
And so I did, to the constant narration by and conversation with my dad.
Which of course he was, in a way.
I thought about a monogrammed journal from Pineider.
None of which seemed exactly right.
So I went and bought some pope socks from Gammarelli, and figured hed approve.
Which went about as you might expect for an utterly wrecked middle-aged man in grief and riddled with jetlag.
As Barbara was leading me on a meditation into myself to comfort my inner child, I lost it.
For hours and days afterward I lost it some more.
And it was heaven.
I felt lighter than air.
Epiphanic, four days before Epiphany.
Nothing, however, was as high in my dads personal pantheon as opera.
And no one close to the supreme Maria Callas.
Just one of the endless peculiarities that made up my dad.
One of the too-bizarre-for-fiction quirks.
Causing my eyes to roll out of my head.
Representatives of a world gone quiet, maybe.
Cant stop thinking about how many of those faces, and their voices, we have within us thatareus.
But maybe thats just my dad talking.
