Mamma Mia

Where i live in Silicon Valley, is very reminiscent of Tuscany and i can almost smell the virgin olive oil poured over fresh pasta.  I have less time to cook here than i do when i'm in Firenze.  I love going to the Mercado Centrale daily and getting wonderful stuff to cook.  Fresh pasta from Laura, who always know exactly how to cut the sheets of pasta and Nicoletta, who has the best dark chocolate slabs in the entire world.   Pancetta, salcicca, fresh  Bufalo mozarella.  Veggies from the Bangladeshi, who always want me to come to their houses for Biryani.  A four year old Bangladeshi girl rapidly speaking to me in Italian is one of my blissful memories.  When my plane lands in Firenze, i feel exactly as I do when the plane lands in Calcutta.....i feel that i've come home.  Where i live is reminiscent of Tuscany but not Tuscany.  A good likeness but a likeness is not the original.  There are six billion people in the world but likenesses of those we love are never good enough, are they?


i miss Positano today.....i miss Positano often.  Must be all the staring I did there from the balcony of my apartment.....looking out to the Mediterranean.  one night a very impressive yacht came and they had a party on board.  i really wanted to don my LBD and go and dance!  i wonder what it is about Positano that I miss.....i had to climb 163 steps to get to my apartment three times a day and it was not fun to do that with groceries.  neither was it fun to drive on the Amalfi coast.  but seeing my daughter jump from the boat to swim in the Mediterranean on the way to Capri will remain an all time peak moment of my life.  the water was so emerald.  


i thought that i was going to write about living in Connecticut today but i'm now sure how i got to Italy.  i started with the thought about the time i lived in a boat in Greenwich, Ct for 2 months....i was 22 then.  i was thinking about Stamford, Ct, where i lived--that was when i learnt how to drive on the I-95. had my first accident on High Ridge Road,  took the train to Manhattan to study French at the Alliance Francaise, had no money, no work permit, sold Avon, stared at 'Tavern on the Green' and promised myself that one day i'd have enough money to come and have dinner there, stood in line for half price tickets to Broadway shows, spend hours at NYC bookstores, skated in Rockefeller Center, pressed my nose against the glass windows of Bergdorf Goodman wondering who bought earrings for $525,000......i remember Mrs. Dvorak, who is probably dead, who gave me Coffee Cake when i brought her her Avon stuff, my Greek friend, with sumptuous hair, i remember my Avon route, it was like doing a paper route, and cooking, endless meals for no one in particular but just to experiment and create, Strawberry Hill, going to Westport and standing at the edge of Long Island Sound, getting fresh orange roughy early in the morning to be cooked with mustard and turmeric.....where are those happy days they seem so hard to find?  what ever happend to our love i wish i understood?  an Abba song....SOS.......that was then, this is now.....


so when you are near me darling, can't you hear me darling?  SOS