Author Archives: farfalle1

Spring Wildflower Walk

21 Saturday May 2011

Posted by in Flowers, Hiking in Italy, Italian flowers, Photographs, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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It was a beautiful spring day, not too hot, not too cool, when four of us set out to have a walk and a picnic.  We left from La Crocetta, the apex of the pass over the mountain on which the Captain and I live, and walked to Montallegro, the pilgrim church about which I’ve written in the past.  We didn’t set out to have a wildflower walk, but that’s what we ended up having.

For some of the flowers we were too early:


and for some we were too late:


but for oh so many we were there at just the right moment.

Here’s something I learned from this expedition: I am hopeless at identifying wildflowers.  I have two books on the subject, both related to flowers in this area, and I still find it almost impossible.

How I wish this blog had ‘smellovision’ so you could smell the sweet acacia:


These, by the way, are a culinary treat when fried up in a batter.  Yum.

And I wish I could attach sound to this so you would hear the wind sighing through the trees.  It sounded exactly like a Fellini movie (I’m thinking Amarcord, I guess, which I recommend you see if you haven’t already).

Here is a web album of the gorgeous flowers we found along the path.  I identified the ones I was able to, but most of them remain a mystery.  If you’d care to help identify, please, feel free!  I’d be grateful.

If you’d like a quick video of the trail from La Crocetta to MontAllegro, you can ride along here  on a February outing with mountain biker ‘guru63byric.’

Web album of wildflower walk:

Wildflower Walk from La Crocetta to Montallegro

Lizards Here and There

16 Monday May 2011

Posted by in Animals in Italy, Animals in the U.S., Arizona, Uncategorized

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Here in Italy we live with the sweetest and shyest little lizards, called ‘lucertole‘ (prounounced loo-chair’-toe-lay).  In fact, I just took one from our interior stairs and released him outside.  They look like this:


Of course in America everything must be Bigger – including the lizards.  These fellows, called chuckwallas, live in the rock pile outside our house in Arizona. They are absent in the winter, sleeping in their stony nests, but in the spring they come out to bask in the sun and engage in other typical spring behavior.


A poor photo, but the only one that shows rusty back patch


In all fairness, we see plenty of smaller lizards in Arizona, as well, most of them a dull brown and moving so fast it is impossible to get a photograph.  And, according to Wikipedia, most of the lizards are cousins to one another and share many traits. Like the lucertole, the chuckwallas are very shy and don’t let us get close with a camera.

The chuckwalla’s tail looks like we should be able to count the rings on it to determine his age, but I don’t think that’s true.  It also looks like it should unscrew and come off; it probably does come off, though we’ve never seen that.  The little lucertole frequently do lose their tails  It’s part of a defense mechanism when they are attacked by predators.  They can sharply contract a muscle which detaches the tail without loss of blood.  The predator thinks the still twitching tail is the animal; the lucertola stays very still until the predator has left with the tail.  The tail stops twitching after a time, but by then the rest of the lucertola has run away.  Every summer we have a whole sub-family of lucertole living around the house that are nick-named Stumpy.  Their tails do grow back, but never completely, which tends to leave them with an unfinished look.

There’s something about seeing a lizard, so prehistoric, timeless and ancient in appearance, that makes us feel humble, and maybe even a little smaller than the animals we are watching.

Giro d’Italia – What’s all the Fuss?

09 Monday May 2011

Posted by in Italian festas, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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What we’ve been regarding as an A-#1 headache this week turns out to be a bicycle race with an impressive pedigree.   As Wikipedia succinctly puts it:

The origins of the Giro are similar to those of the Tour de France, a competition between two newspapers: La Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere della Sera. La Gazzetta wished to boost its circulation by holding a professional road race based upon the Tour de France and similar to the Corriere della Sera-organized car rally. On August 7th, 1908 the newspaper’s founder Eugenio Camillo Costamagna, director Armando Cougnet and its editor Tullio Morgagni announced the inaugural Giro d’Italia to be held in 1909. 

On May 13th, 1909 at 02:53 am 127 riders started the first Giro d’Italia from Loreto Place in Milan. The race was split into eight stages covering 2448 kilometres, 49 riders finished with Italian Luigi Ganna winning the inaugural event having won three individual stages and the General Classification. Ganna received 5325 Lira as a winner’s prize with all riders in the classification receiving 300 lira (at the time the Giro’s director received 150 lira a month salary).

Luigi Ganna

The race has continued, with interruptions for wars, ever since and has, like so many sporting events, become ever bigger and more commercialized. Wikipedia gives an exhaustive account of the race, its various elements and many of its winners here.  Two of the three cyclists with the most wins (5) are Italians Alfredo Bindi and Fausto Coppi.

Alfredo Bindi

Fausto Coppi


Belgian Eddie Merckx also won five races.

Eddy Merckx

The Giro d’Italia is one of the three jewels in the crown of the overseeing agency,  the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale).  The other two are the Tour de France (est. 1903) and the Vuelta a Espana (est. 1935).  These three races comprise the Grand Tour of professional bike-racing.  (The UCI season consists of twenty-seven races held world-wide over a ten-month period.) Until 1960 The Italian race began and ended in Milano, the home of the Gazetto dello Sport; since then the city of departure has varied annually.  For a while the finish city also changed, but since 1990 it has, again, been Milano.  Since 1965 there have been nine starts outside Italy, and in 2012 the race will begin in Denmark.

So it’s a very big deal that the Giro is not only passing through Rapallo, but actually stopping here overnight, and then passing through again tomorrow on a route from Genova Quarto to Livorno.  Most of the downtown of Rapallo was closed to traffic in the afternoon and will be again tomorrow. 

And this is where the A#1 headache comes in.  We’ve been unable to find any definitive announcement of which roads are closed during which hours. The Captain had an errand in Sestri Levante, about forty minutes to the south on the coast road, the Via Aurelia.  When he went into town this morning he asked a policeman if he’d be able to get through and out of town mid-afternoon.  “No Problem!” was the reply.  Unfortunately when he set out he found the road was closed, so he couldn’t go.  The Aurelia was also closed where it enters town, as was the other road that connects Santa Margherita and Rapallo.  Bleachers have been erected, and no doubt there’s been no end of festivities, speech-making and shirt-presenting. But anyone who wants to get anywhere that involves traversing Rapallo is pretty much out of luck.  And because so many streets have been closed and cleared of all parked vehicles, there is no where to park even a scooter.  It is, to say the least, inconvenient.  BUT, it is a very big deal, kind of like having the Super Bowl or the World Series or the World Cup in your home stadium.  So we shouldn’t complain… well, maybe just a little.

This edition of the Giro has been described as one of the most difficult in many years.  In honor of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s Unification the route encompasses the whole boot:


Note there is even a jog to Sicily, where the cyclists will bike up Mount Etna.  The entire route covers 3,524.5 km (2190 miles) in 21 stages, which range individually in distance from 12.7 km. to 244 km.  The normal day appears to be in the neighborhood of 200 km.  I can’t imagine.  Twenty-three teams left Torino on the 7th of May, and presumably all twenty-three will finish in Milano on May 29.

Not only can I not imagine pedaling two hundred plus km in one day, I can’t imagine the kind of planning that has to go into carrying off an event that involves so many people moving over such a great distance over so many days.  As disorganized as Italy sometimes seems, it takes logistical genius to carry off this race, road closures, grand-stands, publicity and all.

So we wish them well, and, to be honest, we wish them well on their way.  It’s great they came to Rapallo, and it will be great to be able to drive out of town again.

For some lovely photos of Stages One and Two of the race, click here.

Addendum:  It’s a terribly dangerous sport.  Five to ten racers die in race-related accidents every decade, according to Wikipedia.  Sadly, the list of names grew by one yesterday when Belgium’s Wouter Weylandt died of a skull fracture coming down the hill into Chiavari.  There is an account of the incident here.  So, no – there was no merriment in Rapallo last night and the podium ceremony was cancelled.  I suppose these young men know the risks when they undertake the sport, but surely each of them believes a deadly accident could never happen to him.  It’s seems such a terrible waste of a young life.  Expatriate joins all the others who are greatly saddened by this death, and whose hearts go out to the victim’s family.

Citizen Salamone

04 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by in Italian bureaucracy, Italian habits and customs, Italy, Law and order, Uncategorized

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Meet Italy’s newest citizen, The Captain, aka Louis Philip Salamone.


The procedure, I can’t call it a ‘ceremony,’ took place in the office of the head of the Ufficio Stato Civile, Dotoressa De Filippi this morning and was more casual than solemn (I would have liked a bit more ceremony, myself). Nonetheless, for us it was the culmination of several years of work and waiting, and we were both thrilled with the outcome and moved by the Captain’s new status.

At first we were afraid we were headed for a problem, one which has reared its ugly head in past administrative wrestling matches.  Whenever one gets a document, carta d’identita, permesso di sogiorno, etc.,  one must put place of birth on a form.  By place of birth Italian bureaucracy means town or city.  The Captain’s U.S. passport lists place of birth as ‘Wisconsin.’  This led to no end of trouble early in our stay here, but for some reason the good Dotoressa merely shook her head and commenced redoing the various declarations (they had to be further altered to correct the Captain’s misspelled middle name).  Then began the ritual ‘signing of the many forms,’ which occurred no fewer than four times.


Somewhere in the midst of the signing the Captain took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the Laws of Italy.  There was  no hand on heart, no holy book, no blood asked for or given, just a verbal promise to be a good citizen.

In the midst of all this the phone rang, and our proceedings were interrupted by a long discussion of what the caller’s daughter had to do to get her passport. 


It certainly detracted from the feeling that ours was a special moment, but we quickly got over it.  Then the Dotoressa read a lengthy declaration to the effect that the President of the Republic had accepted the Captain as a citizen and showed us the Presidential decree, a photocopy of which was given to us later.


A quick handshake, and the deed was done.

I thought my Captain looked so handsome in his suit – it’s perhaps only the second time he’s worn it in the ten years we’ve been here.  I wish I could fit into clothes I had ten years ago!  He did not have a red, green and white tie, so he chose a green and white tie which we decorated with a bit of red and white ribbon, a not entirely unItalian thing to do. 

Today was the end of a long road that we began in 2005.  The quest began in the office of the very knowledgable and always helpful Anna Maria Saiano, the head of the Genova branch of the U.S. Consulate.  She led us to Signore Bevilacqua (Mr. Drinkwater!) who sent us to Dotoressa De Filippi in Rapallo.  She was disinclined to give the quantity of help we needed, so we returned to Sig. Bevilacqua in Genova, and he got things going for us.

There are many ways to become a citizen, one of the most common being ‘lineage.’  We had assumed this would be our route as both the Captain’s parents were Sicilian, one by birth, one by blood.  However, because the Captain’s father became an American citizen before the Captain’s birth, in effect renouncing his Italian citizenship, it became more complex.  We would have to go back to the grandparents, born in Sicily not all that long after the unification of the country.  Two world wars have had their way with that island – the odds of finding all the requisite birth certificates were low. 

We resorted to a ‘naturalized’ Citizenship, possible after five years of residence if either of the parents were born in Italy.  There are  other routes to citizenship, which you can read about here.  Gathering all the requisite data took some time, but was not especially difficult: 1) the application 2) Marca di Bollo (stamp) for E14.62  3) Income tax returns for three years  4) Father’s birth certificate  5) Captain’s birth certificate  6) FBI certificate / arrest record (done through fingerprints taken in Genova and sent to the US) 7) our marriage certificate 8) residency certificate proving length of residence in Italy  9) Permesso di Sogiorno  10) notarized copy of passport.  All documents in English required  certified translation, which we were able to procure from an office in nearby Chiavari.  The Captain did the translation himself; the certifying administrator didn’t speak English.

What the Captain didn’t have to do, which aspiring U.S. citizens must, is learn a lot of history and take a difficult test.  I’m happy to tell you that the Captain has read the history of Italy many times over, because it interests him, and I’m sure he could pass tests in both language and history.  But isn’t it interesting that in the U.S. there is a test to prove you are worthy, and in Italy it is simply a question of having the correct papers and forms?  Bureaucracy!  Having watched Craig Ferguson’s (The Late Late Show) citizenship swearing-in on TV I was surprised there was not a bit more pomp and circumstance, and at least an upraised hand when giving the oath. 

Once we filed the application and all the attendant paperwork we simply had to wait.  The State had  two years (actually seven hundred thirty days) in which to process the application and render a decision; they didn’t go too many weeks over.  News of our success reached us when we were in the U.S., and a visit to Dottoressa De Filippi was the first order of business when we got back to Rapallo. We were surprised to learn that the Captain was the twenty-seventh new citizen she had processed already this year.

So it was an exciting and momentous morning for us.  The Captain pursued citizenship for several reasons.  In a way it closes a circle that was opened when his father left Sicily for Ellis Island in 1921.  It makes life here much less complicated: no need to be traipsing off to Genova every few years for permission to remain.  Mostly it just gives official confirmation to something the Captain has known all his life: he is Italian.

All that remained for us was a quick celebratory lunch at the delightful Trattoria del Sole across from the petrol stations on Via Mamelli where we took advantage of the daily special: penne with funghi; fried achiuge (sardine-like fish), carrots, potatoes, wine, water and coffee, all for the princely sum of E 8 each (Ligurians have the reputation of being tightfisted with their money – who are we to go against type?).


We hadn’t eaten here before, though the place has been beckoning to the Captain for some time, and were charmed to find examples of the owner’s art and crafts on the walls.

So came to a close a festive (for us) and memorable morning. Viva Italia!

On the Deck

26 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by in Building, Construction, Home maintenance and repair, Uncategorized

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We should know from restoring our old house in Rapallo that no fix-it-up job is simple.  Unexpected complications always attend a home improvement project.  Our small deck in Arizona was no exception.

I’ve been lobbying for deck replacement for a couple of years.  The old deck was made of pressure-treated boards; they had cupped and splintered in the intense summer heat here, and it was a hazard to walk on them in bare feet.  We knew we wanted to replace the wood with composite boards when the time came; a sale of the Home Depot brand gave us the impetus to get started. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the ugly old and sparkling new:

The first adventure was getting the boards home.  We needed 24 of them.  They are 12 feet long, a bit floppy, heavy, and, it turns out, very slippery.  Because of the weight we had to transport them atop my ancient car in two loads.  As I turned the next-to-the-last corner to get home the whole load slid off the front of the car and skittered across the road.  Fortunately there was no traffic, and even more fortunately two kindly knights stopped and helped me secure the boards for the short end of the journey.  Unfortunately some of the boards got pretty scratched up as they moved across the pebbly road.

Removing the old decking was relatively easy; removing the three large joists that supported the old deck was more difficult.


Our friend John, who is ‘in’ construction, agreed that the outer supports of the deck were in sufficiently good condition to keep.  The old joists were spaced 32″ apart; the new decking required joists 16″ apart, so we went back to Home Depot and got seven pieces of pressure-treated joist wood.  We had not anticipated having to replace all the joists.  Nor had we anticipated having to patch and fill where the old joists met the house, nor where there was a bit of rot in one of the main supports.


It all takes so much time!  And it was hot – 95 F the day we placed most of the joists.


But life in Italy has taught us the phrase ‘piano, piano.’  Just start the job, keep at it slowly and carefully and, as they also like to say in Rapallo, “Wallah!” – eventually your job is finished.

So it was with the deck, and we are thrilled with the result.  We are also utterly exhausted from the work, especially the Captain who had to do all the heavy parts of it.


A quick word about Home Depot: the people there could not be nicer.  We received tons of helpful advice, all of it spot on.  When we bought a couple of small power tools the salesman told us, “If they don’t work the way you want them to for your job, bring them back.”  Home Depot is enormous – it’s the size of a football arena, and contains everything you could ever need for home or garden.  We love our ‘Fai da Te’ stores in Italy, but they are wee in comparison.  It’s not that there’s not a lot of do-it-yourself in Italy – there’s a tremendous amount, much of it extremely creative and very beautiful.  But if you want cement you go to the cement store, if you want wood you go to the wood store, and if you want nails you go to the hardware store – it’s not all under one roof.  And in Italy there’s a lot of use made of old materials; not much goes to waste there.

Speaking of Italy, we’ll be heading home in the next week, so your Expatriate will be silent for a week or two…

The Future of MLB

18 Monday Apr 2011

Posted by in American habits and customs, Arizona, Sports, Uncategorized

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The Phoenix area is famously the site of much of baseball’s Spring Training.  Many teams, both Major and Minor, get the off-season kinks out in the Arizona sun, including the New York Yankees, the Cubs and White Sox of Chicago, the Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies… the list goes on and on, and if you’re interested in that list you can see it here.  The excitement is over for this year; the teams have left to take up the ardors of regular season play.

But wait!  It turns out professional baseball players aren’t the only ones who take advantage of this climate to get in some Spring training.  High school and college teams from all over the Northern part of the country come to the Gene Autry Park in Mesa to take part in a series of warm-up games, some of which count in their regular season of play.  There are two baseball fields in the park as well as other fields and amenities including a building with rest rooms and a concession stand.  Can’t have a baseball game without a hot dog close by.

The Captain stumbled on a college game one day when he went to the Park to while away a little time.  He saw Middlebury College playing Oberlin.  We were so excited!  Our friends Kate,  John, Charles and Angus live in Middlebury – it made them seem so close.  The Captain spoke to some of the fans, hoping to find a friend in common with our friends, but of course the stands were filled mostly with parents and girlfriends of the Middlebury players.

And that makes sense.  It turns out it is the parents who foot the bill for this spring break odyssey.  They hold fund-raisers during the year, but I have to imagine that mostly they just pay.  It would take a lot of bake sales to underwrite an eastern baseball team’s stay in the southwest.

I met the Captain a couple of days later to watch some ball.  That morning  featured two high school teams from Colorado.  It also, evidently, featured a most interesting pitcher, Chris by name.

He was so interesting that he was being followed around by a bunch of scouts.  No, not college scouts, as we initially thought; major league scouts.  Huh?  Don’t young baseball players go through the college system before turning pro, or is that just football?  I’m not enough of a sports-meister to know.

Here they all are, timing Chris’s pitches.  What makes him so interesting, evidently, is the fact that he can throw a ball at about 91 miles per hour.  The professional pitchers are in the 94-97 mph range, according to one of the scouts I spoke to.

A couple of days later I returned alone because the team from my beloved Williams College was scheduled to play.  Sure enough, there they were in all their understated glory.  (I grew up in Williamstown and later attended the College as part of the first experiment in co-education – that was an experience.)  It felt really great to be able to holler, “Go Ephs!” again – words that haven’t passed my lips in years (Williams teams are always ‘The Ephs’ after the founder of the college, Ephraim Williams). I was not the only fan present.

Williams College enjoys a fine reputation as a center of undergraduate learning; it is, perhaps, less lauded for its baseball teams.  How amusing it was to hear such sideline chatter as, “Jason, you have a really discerning eye!”  An unsuccessful batter returning to the bench looked more like someone worrying over a perplexing physics problem than a pissed-off athlete.  And perhaps he was.  Even though the scouts weren’t there to see the left-handed pitcher Steve, below, Williams was still enjoying a good week; they had already won 11 of their 13 games.

Pitching has always looked extremely uncomfortable to me – doesn’t it look like his arm is glued on backwards?

The future of Major League Baseball might be more Chris and less Steve, but the games in Mesa were all good fun. It’s such a pleasure to watch a good baseball game on a hot dusty day in a small park with just a few other fans.

The Strangest Dinner

12 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by in Desserts, English food, Food, Uncategorized

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It’s Sniven’s fault. It was he who encouraged us to come to Gold Canyon, and he who put the Captain back in touch with Captain Harris after many years.  Sniven makes an almost-annual visit to the Southwest, and being a democratic fellow he divides his time; one year he stays in what he amusingly calls ‘The Harris Hovel,’ and the next he stays with us.  Once he took a year off and it completely confused all of us to the point that we didn’t know where he should stay.  During his visits the five of us are very likely to gather for the evening meal and a catch-up of the day’s activities.  Also, perhaps, some gin. Not the game.

This year one of the evening conversations turned to the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical tales set during the Napoleonic Wars, written by Patrick O’Brian.  The three gentlemen around our table had all enjoyed reading the books enormously, and began to reminisce about various elements.  “What on earth,” asked Sniven, “is Soused Hog’s Face?” referring to a dish that appears in Master and Commander. Research ensued, and the assembled group decided that nothing would do but that we would try it.

Unfortunately an actual hog’s face, while readily available, was nothing either of the principal cooks wished to tackle (what to do with the teeth?).  But the Captain found an acceptable recipe which called for ‘pork,’ and he took on the job.  It turns out there is more onion than anything else in this gelled dish.  It also turns out it is absolutely delicious, and is perfect for a hot summer meal.

(An interesting post-script: we served leftover Face to Italian friends a couple of days later.  Marguerita said, “But we make exactly this dish in Bari, but without the onions.”)


The discussion then turned to amusing English dessert nomenclature, specifically Boiled Baby and Spotted Dick.  Both, it turns out, are puddings, and neither difficult to make.  We opted for Spotted Dick on the theory that it was somehow funnier, and I volunteered to make it.  It is served under a ‘lashing’ of custard, not shown here, but happily consumed at our meal.


Sniven wasn’t done with us, though.  Years ago his adored Granny from Nova Scotia used to make him some kind of milky, custardy dried cod dish.  (She served it with dulse, which the kindly Sniven inflicted on us (I mean ‘brought to us’) several years ago; we went without this year.)  Mrs. Harris, of whom I’ve spoken in other posts, is an amazing cook and has an encyclopedic knowledge of food, food history and food preparations.  She took on the chef-detective task of replicating a food memory from long ago.  I’m not a great fan of  baccala, the Italian name for dried salted cod;  in fact I hate it, so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy Granny’s dish.  I could not have been more wrong, which simply proves the theory that the addition of cream and butter makes anything divine.


So that was our Very Strange Dinner:  first course: Cod in the style of Granny; second course: Soused Hog’s Face à la Maturin and Aubrey, served with a nondescript salad; dessert: Spotted Dick.

Somehow it all worked.  It brought to mind those enormous menus we read about from the 17th century and 18th centuries, where the meal would begin with fish, travel through foul to meat, and end with some extraordinarily complex dessert, all washed down by barrels of ale (if you want some fine examples, dip into the Diary of Samuel Pepys).

It was, to be sure, about the strangest dinner any of has eaten, at least in its joining of disparate components.  The pity is that Sniven has taken himself back to the shores of Maryland where he resides with beautiful Judith, and we are unlikely to be doing much more experimenting with odd menus in the next little while.

You can find the recipe for the Cod here, the Soused Hog’s Face here, and the Spotted Dick here.

Smarter than me

02 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by in Photographs, Uncategorized

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The Captain is an alchemist!  He has turned his motorcycle into several other things, including a beautiful new camera for me.  The only problem is that it is far smarter than I am.  I read the book, take some pictures, and then forget everything I’ve learned.  But it’s lots of fun, very interesting and will, I hope, lead eventually to better photographs here.  I’ve had no complaints about the Canon point-and-shoot I’ve been using for several years; but the new camera does a great deal more.  Or it will once I learn how to ask it to!

Here are a few shots I took using a fast shutter speed.  Stay tuned for more excitement in the weeks ahead.

Golf Course Bunny prepares for Easter

Silly Season for the doves

Grass. Obviously.

Tattered Glory

Crossing Kings Ranch Road - quickly

Laura's pup

The Captain, bemused, reads

 

So Sorry!

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by in American habits and customs, Customs, Italian habits and customs, Italian women, Uncategorized

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Photo courtesy of dreamstime.com

The other day I followed a woman out of Costco, each of us pushing our heavily laden carts.  She moved away from the door and paused; I walked past her with my cart.  After I was past she said to me, “Oh, I’m sorry!”  It took me a full beat to figure out what she was talking about; evidently she felt by stopping she had somehow put herself in my way.  She hadn’t.  And she certainly didn’t owe me an apology.

This incident was preceded by no fewer than three other women apologizing for passing nearby in the aisles of the store.  What is it with American women? When did we become so apologetic for taking up a little space? For existing? It’s driving me nuts!  Women, answer this question honestly:  If you’re walking down the street and a person bumps into you, do you immediately say, “I’m sorry?”

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen so much in Italy!  Granted, if an Italian of either gender bumps into you, or you into him, there will follow a two-minute scusi-fest.  But space is always shared in Italy, be it on the narrow roads or in the narrow shopping aisles.  Simply being in close proximity to another is not a misdemeanor. I’ve never had the feeling that my Italian women friends feel they must apologize if they’re taking up a patch of ground that someone else might wish to occupy.  Perhaps it’s simply that Americans have a much larger sense of ‘personal space’ than do Italians.  There’s more space in the U.S. for everything, so perhaps we Americans create larger ‘me-mine’ zones than do residents of more crowded countries.

I first noticed this apology trend about 10 years ago.  Three women friends and I took a vacation together in California.  We made a pact at the very start of the holiday that whoever said, “I’m sorry” would put a quarter in the kitty.  It worked pretty well, and I think we all finished the holiday feeling we were a much less ‘sorry’ bunch.  And how rich the kitty was! Maybe that experience overly sensitized me.

It’s just that I hate to hear women apologizing when they have no reason to. And yes, it seems to be only women – certainly not men, and rarely young people.  And it seems to be happening more and more here in America.

Ladies – Stop It!  You have every right to be exactly where you are.    Please, if you catch yourself apologizing for passing close to someone else or when someone else bumps into you,  put a quarter in a kitty and save up for a treat for yourself (I hope a very small treat).