Finish

This is the last post for my Imhotep Construction Company blog.


Thanks to all of you who have visited--it was definitely my pleasure to communicate with you!

I will continue posting on my other blog sites--see you there--and visit my new site: 

tommymorganstern.blogspot.com.

...

Amethyst Earth

Remember the overnight bus ride.

Your palm had a double life line--
I never saw anything like that.




The jewelry shop had lots of pretty things
But the best was the amethyst earth.

...

Movin On

 Temecula Freeway View

Temecula Gas Prices, 8/22/11

We were looking for a different place to live.


Temecula, where we live now, is a new town designed for working-class people with kids. Lots of schools, little league teams and like that--not bad, but not us.

 Front Street, Old Temecula

Maybe back to San Diego?


Driving down I-15 is not a pleasant experience and there is no other way to go. Sometimes fourteen lanes of traffic all jammed with daily commuters--no, this is not a good way for human beings to live.


We visited some addresses of the apartments we could afford in the city. Disaster zones!


Other places? 


Rents so high two adults working full time at good jobs could barely cover the expense and the insane commuting is expected--it's part (or most!) of your southern California experience.


We have looked at all the coastal towns from San Diego to San Francisco. Nothing.


So we are going to leave the sunny southland for a while.

Temecula Morning

Lets go live where it's cool, foggy and rains.


It is time.

Beach Path, Trinidad, CA

...

46. Pilgrimage End

 "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy."


I never went back to Italy or Il Poggio and have never communicated with Thielo or his sister except to acknowledge their letter and express my feelings about our loss-- their mother, my friend. 

Elisabetta was my strong connecting link with that phase of my life and I believe to try to continue or pursue that life would amount to the grasping some wise Buddhists caution us against.

 I have never been able to work with clay again somewhat to my regret. The essential space, materials, kiln, time--these things have never come together in my life again. (Though I am not finished with life in this body yet by any means.) Papier mache is my current substitute for clay. It's temporary (just like everything else) and cheap--flour, water and recycled cardboard and newspaper with magazine illustrations for color.

Well then, what does a pilgrim do when the pilgrimage is done?


This particular American pilgrim went to Russia, found a teaching job at a university, met his mate, returned to America and waited until it was possible to marry her, and as a married man needing an income  has worked as a substitute teacher in California until the unpleasant children disgusted him away from teaching, worked as a sales clerk until the huge retail store closed down, worked the twelve-hour night shift in a bunny suit in a factory clean room until the heat and noise became unbearable, learned the copy and shipping business until he asked for a month off for a spiritual retreat and the company decided to give him a permanent spiritual retreat and has tried without much success to be an artist and writer.

But the hidden pilgrim inside continues to live and even thrive! 

Good for him and Good for you! 

TW

.....

45. A Name

The name my parents gave me, Thomas, suits me to a "T" (for Thomas, of course!).


Thomas Jefferson comes to mind--Thomas the Doubter, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Tom, Tom the Piper's son and Tommy the Drummer!




I was named after Tommy Morgan--an old German piano player friend of my father--and I like that.


I like that Morgan means "morning" in German.

There is something about names and the sound of them that sometimes seems awfully meaningful important. 

The very sound of them. 


"Aum"-- THE sound to so many people. Vajra guru Padmasambhava--such a power name. Jesus Christ--name of a name--as they say. YHVH. Jehovah. El. There is something about a name.

In my life "Elisabeth" is a name that seems important to me personally.


Elisabeth-- my mother's middle name-- I was with her when I was born and I was with her when she died. 

Elisabeth English, the young woman I was so crazy about that died in that tragic plane wreck in Hawaii so many years ago. 


And Elisabetta Studer at Il Poggio, Italy.


Sitting on her stool by the table-high cooking fireplace at the dark end of the big kitchen behind the big wooden work table which was like a magnet to all of us--guests and workers. Usually smiling. Seldom talking except when it was necessary. Just being herself. Moving slowly, methodically--getting everything done beautifully without the slightest fuss.


I waved goodbye to her and the rest of the staff when I rode my bike away to continue my pilgrimage to Holy Mountain--now many years ago--and when I left Europe I took a northern route through Germany and never returned to Il Poggio.


Back then I intended to go back and work on more ceramics some day but first I wanted to see my parents and stay a while in California.


But one day, just a few weeks after my return to California, a letter came from Elisabetta's son Thielo--Elisabetta was dead.


Such a shock.


She was such a presence I could hardly believe that she was gone.


When I was working on the clay at Il Poggio I sometimes imagined that I was preserving some words for the future--like on the burned clay tablets discovered at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro--so I incised a classic Zen remark on some clay tablets and fired them for future generations: "Before illumination--cutting wood, carrying water. After illumination--cutting wood, carrying water."

In his letter, Thielo had used these words to describe his mother. 

Yes.

Years after the events I have been telling about in Italy, I was driving in Plumas County, California--driving the windy highway through the beautiful mountains and enjoying the scenery--when I had the feeling that I was missing something--that I should stop and look around--so I pulled over to the side of the highway, got out and walked down the road a way.


Almost covered by bushes and leaves to the side of the highway there was a small, faded sign: "Former Location of Elisabethville".

Wasn't it?

...

44. Woman in Black

The Medici family had built another huge mansion on a hilltop about 200 yards from Il Poggio.

This mansion was not as large as Il Poggio but was a good sized stone chalet.

A dark-haired woman of about my age lived alone in this mansion whom I met several times walking in the fields, Sometimes she visited Elisabetta as a neighbor.

Married to a very wealthy Italian who was never around, she spoke English with a British accent was obviously well educated. She was always dressed entirely in black and on cold days wore a theatrical long black cape which made her look kind of spooky when she was out "on the moors".
She invited me to visit her to view the house and it was quite an interesting old place. As a nice historic touch, the old Medici family crest--an arrangement of balls in bas relief  like the Olympic Games circles, decorated the main dining-room mantelpiece.

She was  obsessed with death--her own --and had purchased a nice grave site  in a cemetery she could see from an upper floor window of her grand house.


"My life is over." She told me several times--and obviously believed it though she was in good health and, as I said, was about my age--and I personally never believed MY life was over--and in fact I have lived several lives since then!


But she had definitely decided that she, mournful soul, WAS the woman in black.

...

43. Another Winter

I got to remembering another winter I had spent at Il Poggio-- and this was the winter there was a frost in these Tuscan hills that sadly killed groves of old olive trees.

It was new year's eve but I had gone to bed early as was my habit in those days.


The bed and breakfast hotel rooms were full of paying guests so Elisabetta had moved me into the drying room of the ceramica. That evening she was firing some pieces in her big walk-in gas kiln.


Of course there was a new year celebration party in the main dining room, but I planned to sleep through.


A little after midnight some tipsy part-goers erupted into the room where I was sleeping to wish me a happy new year. I had made my bed up very comfortably near the ceiling on top of some wide drying shelves.

The guests had expected to find me me freezing in some dank cellar and instead found me in the snuggest, warmest situation in the whole medieval stone place.

...

42. Winter Quarters

During this visit, I spent the winter months at Il Poggio enjoying the friendly people, the healthy outdoor work, the excellent food and a warm little private room across a tiny lane paved in broken pottery from the main buildings.

Pete had restored this little room for his own use before he moved to Switzerland with Dora and he had built in some unusual and creative touches of his own.

He had set some colored wine bottles into one of the the stone walls which provided some beautiful colored lighting when the sun shone through them and he had cantilevered some flat stones into an opposite wall to provide a few steps up to the nest-like sleeping loft he had built.

He had also made a large central fireplace which was very welcome because the winter nights were cold--though it was very seldom cold enough for a frost in this part of sunny Tuscany.  

This little stone living-room was adjacent to other simple rooms used for storage and other maintenance work and the whole were covered with the heavy antique thick pink clay tiles I have described before. 

Was this not a perfectly snug place for an artistic, romantic sort of pilgrim with poetry in his soul like me to winter in?

...

41. Talking Pilgrimage

When the week-end yoga session arrived, I was there and ready to learn and talk.

I had learned a little about hatha yoga in Honolulu some years before and was practicing a few of Yogananda Paramahamsa's yoga ideas during my pilgrimage--in fact, what little I knew of pilgrimage was influenced by the sanyasin ideas of the yogis I had read about--so I guess I was OK for the evening talk.

The Italians were very interested in the presentation of the two German yoga teachers and we all practiced asanas and breathing techniques all afternoon and most of the evening. We ate a nicely prepared vegetarian dinner and then,after a question-and-answer period by the Germans, I was asked to talk


Which I did.


My voice is naturally sort of soft and soothing so most of the listeners--who were tired out from the day's activities--seemed to me to kind of drift away into revery--or maybe dreamland--but I spun my yarns anyway for about half an hour and then we all went off to the beds provided and I, at least, slept very soundly.


The next morning Wolfgang met me in the hallway and congratulated me on a very interesting talk. I said that it seemed to me that most of the participants simply went to sleep, but he assured me that that was not the case--that they enjoyed my stories very much.


Then he handed me a can full of money. "We are taking up a collection." he said. 


"Oh?" I said, "How much should I put in?"


"As much as you want!" he laughed, "It's for you!"


That little can-full of money--Deutschmarks, Lire, French and Swiss franks-- carried me through Turkey, to Holy Mountain in Greece and back to Germany months later!

...

  .

40. Yogis

I was living at Il Poggio when my birthday arrived and Elisabetta took me to one of her friend's houses to hear a talk about yoga by a couple of young German men who were fluent in Italian and English as a birthday present.

Wolfgang and his younger brother Gunter were good men and very knowledgeable about yoga. They were followers of Swami Rama, the founder of the international Himalayan Yoga Institute, and headed a branch of that yoga school in Ahrensburg, Germany.

Their talk was mainly about the benefits of yoga--mentally and physically--and they demonstrated a few of the asanas and breathing techniques. The Italians at the meeting were quite interested it seemed to me--and several of them wanted to have a more in-depth experience and suggested a week-end seminar.


The German yogis arranged a sleep-over meeting weekend and invited me to attend--they suggested I could give a short evening talk in English about my pilgrimage experiences. It was clear that all persons of a certain class in Italy spoke several languages anyway --English being one of them--so my talk, even in a foreign language, might be of some interest.

...

39. Party Me

Personally, I enjoyed Pete's party to the max.


I didn't have to do anything--I was just another guest--except that I was neither so young, so beautiful nor so rich as the other guests.

I fit in as well as I could and enjoyed the idea that I was a part of a scene that I had only watched  before in movies.


The women were charming. They seemed to like speaking English to a real American (like me!) and with my pilgrim's whiskers, long hair and hard-time traveler's outfit I must have been at least a conversation piece.


The men were mostly either young and beautiful and rich or slightly older, beautiful enough and very, very rich.


Leather jackets and silk scarves were in for the men and bare arms and shoulders were the costumes of the women--and the whole thing was really too much fun!


For directing traffic at the improvised parking-lot, Pete even had one of his skier buddies dressed as a professional  parking-lot attendant down to the smart black cap and little leather change pouch they must carry in Rome or Napoli--though I personally have never had a Lamborghini to turn over to any parking lot attendant anywhere!

There was plenty of the appropriate delicious foods and mandatory superb wines free for all!

Truly a world-class molto wunderbar magnifique fiesta!

...

38. Pete's Party

Pete had been working on digging out the catacomb-like cellars beneath the main building of Il Poggio for months.

His goal was to make the space useful again--but it was soggy, hard work.

I offered to help dig and carry out the mud and soil of ages, but he wanted to do it all himself and, like I said,  he was a very creative and imaginative person.

When he had finished his digging work, he built a bar and turned some stone and brick  alcoves into candle-lit roomlets with comfortable lounge seating. But he wouldn't let anyone enter the cavelike rooms to see what he was doing!


He was saving it all up as a surprise  for one grand party!


Pete had more  jet-set friends than you can imagine since he had worked for some years as a very popular young bartender in Interlaken, Switzerland and he invited all his international friends down for his grand  party. 

When the expensive sport  cars started arriving on the evening of his party it was clear that this was going to be the event of the year! Everyone young. Everyone beautiful. Everyone rich. La Dulce Vita come alive!

Pete had created--all by himself-- what to him was the perfect nightclub setting for his one-night bash and it was grand!.
.

...

37. Fame

This one-man show at Il Poggio was my third in this lifetime one-man show.

The first was at Gima's Gallery in the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu many, many years ago--an exhibition of oil paintings in a sort of abstract mode I developed during my years as an undergraduate. I grandly thought of the style as "abstract expressionism" and considered myself to be a contender. I didn't sell anything.

The second show was outdoors--no gallery--on the beach near Marmaris, Turkey where I found temporary work one summer at a beach camp for German tourists in "caravans".  I made paintings in house paint on scrap boards--abstract subjects again and Mexican colorful. I sold everything I painted cheap so I could have some traveling money.

This one-man show at Il Poggio was a huge success though I didn't sell anything. Everyone who came to the opening--all Elisabetta's friends--liked my ceramics and the things my friends had created--but nothing sold.

But by this time I had decided that I didn't need any money at all to travel as a pilgrim. In fact, I had discovered that it was more interesting to give any money I had away from day to day so I would start each day fresh without any money at all.

And I never begged for money either. It just seemed that anything I needed would come to me anyway--I still  don't know how it happened, and looking back at those pilgrim days many years ago it does seem rather impossible--but there it is.

...

36.One-man Show

I made several visits to Il Poggio over a period of four or five years--an always welcome part-time unpaid worker-- and I eventually accumulated enough finished pottery objects  to have a one-man show in Elisabetta's gallery.

I thought it would be more interesting to have some artwork made by the other artists at Il Poggio, so my show was not a strictly one-man affair.


One of the young German woman potters also did clever needlework--decorating old blue jeans and shirts which I thought was very interesting--so I asked her to show some of her creations along with mine.


Elisabetta's sister Dora did some very unusual animal decorations on-ceramic  plates and large salad bowls--so I asked her to show some of her work too.


Occasionally Elisabetta would make suggestions to me about the exhibition and about what to include and the show shaped up into a nice eclectic selection of work, but she left me pretty much alone to do what I wanted.


There was no stress or pressure at all in the preparation and I was quite oblivious to the passage of time at Il Poggio--doing my usual chores and adding to the show pieces as I wanted.


One afternoon Elisabetta asked me to carry some trays of sandwiches and fresh fruit out to the gallery and I was happy to comply.


"Who are these things for?" I asked her.


"For the opening of your show this evening. I have invited some of my friends which I think would like to see your exhibition."


Of course she had told me the date of my show, but I had so completely lost track of calendar time that I didn't even know that my big evening had arrived!

...

Vacation

Hi Fans!

I'm gonna take a short vacation.

See ya back at your favorite computer monitor in a week or so...!

Fun to you!   

Tomasito

35. Granite Porch

Pete was doing some work on his cottage and--just like him--there was an impossible but fun task which he had decided to accomplish.

He had come by a BIG slab of dressed granite somewhere--it was about three by five feet square and about four inches thick. It was a BIG, solid, heavy slab of granite!

He had decided that it would be fine as his back porch floor--you would step out of his back door-- which was about six feet over the ground level--onto this slab and then down some regular wooden stairs to the back yard. 

When I arrived he had already built four sturdy pillars to support the slab so the porch floor, resting on these pillars, would be just a little over shoulder height to a person standing on the ground. When the slab was in place he himself would carpenter in some wooden stairs and add a handrail. Perfect!

But--how to lift this mighty slab up over the pillars and into place at the door--remember this is a small Swiss village--not a California ranch-style suburb with lifting machines and contract laborers easily available.

Solution: wait until you get six friends visiting at the same time and they can lift the slab into place by brute force.

Pete was especially  happy to have me visit because I was his sixth man. The rest of his crew were strong looking skier friends who had just skied over the mountains from Interlaken where he had been a very popular bartender. 

I didn't think it would be possible, but we did it! No smashed fingers no hernias--by golly we just did it!

Pete got his solid granite back porch!

...

 

34.Old Switzerland

After walking about the village for a while, talking to a few of the residents and visiting the chapel, Pete said he would like me to meet some REAL Swiss folks--an old couple who lived about a half hour's walk further down the valley.

This elderly pair lived year-round in this most isolated part of the country. They owned a few cows and grew their own food as much as possible. They had lived in this valley their entire lives 
and lived almost as the Swiss people did before the  modern world encroached so thoroughly with railroads, highways, tourist resorts and ski lifts.

We left our bicycles in the village and walked the little-used path on down the valley for a half hour until we came to a green meadow pasture, unfenced, of course, with deep lush grass sprinkled with pretty wild flowers-- and at the foot of the pasture a postcard view alpine cottage where Pete's friends lived.

We walked up to the low doorway and Pete knocked lightly.

An old man dressed in what looked to be coarse but soft  hand-made clothing and hand knitted sweater answered the door and welcomed us in with a delighted smile. His wife rose from a cozy-looking hand-made chair to offer her hand and to turn off their television set.

To my great surprise--they were watching Dallas when we came in!

...

33. Swiss Shangri-La

After an hours ride on the paved highway, Pete and I turned off at a dirt path leading into a side canyon. We walked our bicycles along the fairly level path.

The surrounding jagged mountains and forest were as beautiful and pristine as you could want in this picturesque country and before long we arrived at an antique village of perhaps ten cottages and a chapel of the typically Swiss alpine construction.

Perhaps forty men, women and children presently lived in this village but they were not the original residents.  Since it was not on the highway and only reachable by footpath, the village had been abandoned for years but had been bought entire lately by a small religious community.

These current residents were some folks who had decided to band together and live apart from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. 

And they had found what seemed to me to be a perfect refuge.


There was no sign on the highway that the community was here. No visitors or tourists were encouraged or expected.

They made no attempt to recruit new residents and they had no propaganda publications  extolling their unusual village or way of life. 

They were just here. 

They were friendly and welcoming to me, I think,  because I came with Pete, who spoke Swiss-Deutsch, knew everybody and was, it seemed, everybody's friend.

I felt very fortunate to visit this modern Swiss Shangri-La

...

32. Cherry Thief

In the meantime, Pete the Welshman had married Dora the Artist sister of Elisabetta and they invited me to visit them in Switzerland.

At the time I was pretty furry--with a full beard and longish hair--sort of a hippy-looking chap--so I expected some sort of border problems crossing from Italy into Switzerland, but I told the customs officer I was visiting friends and mentioned their names and the village they had given me directions to--the officer waved me and my bike through and wished me a pleasant stay in Switzerland.


Pete was such a fun person to be around. Everything he did was done with maximum energy and enthusiasm--he was one of three young men I was lucky to meet in this lifetime: Nordic Norm in Lassen County California, Brian Callahan in Sonoma County, California and Pete at Il Poggio and now in Switzerland.


When I found the cottage of Dora and Pete, Pete immediately took off from whatever he was doing and took me for a spin by bicycle further into the mountains to see a religious community he thought I should visit.


Pete had a classic antique bicycle he had found and restored and was immensely proud of--especially its real leather covered narrow seat. I stripped my own funky German old-man-going-to-buy-bread bicycle of its bags and bottles and we took off.


It was a beautiful Swiss day and everything was fine.


Pete slalomed back and forth across the empty paved road with his usual joie de vivre which was so contagious--I started swooping with him.


There was a house at a sharp curve in the road and there was a cherry tree in its garden loaded with fruit hanging out over the road. I grabbed one cherry as I swooped under and around the tree.


"I thought pilgrims were not supposed to steal!" Pete cheerfully reprimanded me when we paused--and remember this is Switzerland. one of the very few places in this world where the inhabitants do not steal anything.

...

31.A Death

While I was at Il Poggio there was a death in my family.

Bro Joe, that good guy, found out where I was (which took some detective work) and telephoned that Dad (Andy Wold) had died at home of a brain aneurism in Ventura, California. This was the only phone call I got during the long pilgrimage.


Dad had been feeling weak and had some painful back trouble before I left but both he and my mother, Lorene, seemed healthy enough to last some time--at least until I had finished this pilgrimage and had returned to the USA.

Dad had always been very good to me. 

After Joe called I walked to the little church in San Vicenzo a Torre and sat for a while thinking about everything. 

There is really nothing like the death of a parent to set one thinking as you either know or will find out some day.


In a way I was sorry I was not there to help out and in another way I was glad I had missed all the emotion and sadness of my grieving family the my parent's friends.


I was a long way away from Ventura, there was nothing I could do and I would continue my slow pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in Greece in the spring.

...

30. Old Mill Stream

One of the things I liked best about Il Poggio was that it was a  place with a lot of  history.

What is old to an American just can't be as old as the old things here in Italy and I really liked that fact.

For example I was scouting out the neighborhood and followed a path behind the Il Poggio buildings and into the countryside. A couple of hundred yards along this woodsy path I came to a babbling brook issuing from a cavern in a hill.

I went into the darkish cavern and discovered that it was  made with mostly collapsed old brick arches with a floor of dressed stones--and buried in the sandy clay bed of the stream was a big millstone--which weighed, I guess, several hundred pounds.

What the heck--this hillside must be part of an old dam. And this millstone must at one time have been part of a regular mill--a flour mill maybe before this country was all turned  into vineyards.

When I asked Elisabetta about it she said that Il Poggio had at one time been a monastery and the monks had dammed the stream in the valley to produce water power for a mill!

This was all long ago. The mill had been ruined for years--maybe hundreds of years--and all that was left was the partially collapsed cavern and the half buried old millstones.

Lovers sometimes made the cavern a romantic  trysting place these days. She said if you looked you could see places where candles had burned on long summer nights down by the old mill stream.

....

29. Wall Falls

In the time I am writing about, Germany was divided into two sectors--east (the DDR soviet side) and west. As an American citizen  I was welcome to come and go in the western sector, but not the east. The east was closed to Americans.


Before I came to Il Poggio I had been visiting friends in west Germany--in the province of Hesse--and  I was riding with Siggy (Siegfried) one evening and asked him when he thought the wall separating the east and the west would come down. He said: "Not in my lifetime"--and that seemed to be the general opinion in west Germany.


I was on the road a few months pilgrimming before I got to Il Poggio and I had been at Il Poggio a short while when three East German young people in an old car arrived on their way to Rome.


Their car was jammed with stuff and they were a happy and carefree lot it seemed to me.


They told us this story: they were sitting in their apartment one evening when some friends stopped by and said that the guards at the wall separating east and west Germany were letting everyone pass through--no questions asked--no passports needed.


So these intrepid three--two girls and one young man--tossed everything they thought they might need into their old car and crossed to the forbidden west--and here they were.


I don't know how they found about Il Poggio but they stayed a couple of days and left for Rome.


I was so impressed I made a Wall sculpture with little figures climbing ladders and so forth and standing on a wall with the dates of the opening of east Germany and incised some kind of remark about freedom in English, German and Italian. I would have done it in French too but my French is too bad. 


After Elisabetta fired the sculpture, I placed it on a pedestal in the Il Poggio garden.


...

28.Portrait Ceramics

In the ceramics studio at LIl Poggio there were some small circular metal platforms which you could turn when you were working on a pot or vase and I discovered that they were perfect for building a ceramic portrait head on.

I know now that these devices are called banding wheels on sculpture stands. They spin and make it easy to look at the totality of anything in clay you are working on--like a full-sized portrait head, for example. 


That's what I started using them for and it was good fun.

I got people to sit for me while I made portrait heads of them in clay.


The biggest problem, of course, was that the heads had to be hollow so they wouldn't explode in the kiln but I licked this problem by making a kind of honeycomb structure beneath the final head.

Another problem was controlling the drying of the portrait--if it was not done carefully, the clay would crack. 


I learned to do this by judiciously keeping the head covered with a plastic bag except for short periods of time when I was in the studio to monitor the drying process.


These things took a longish time to make so I only finished about six in the several months I stayed at Il Poggio--some only bisque fired and some of them color glazed fired.


Tilo, Elisabetta's grown son, posed for me so I had the opportunity of making a life-sized portrait of him--a sensitive, handsome young man with lots of long wavy hair which I enjoyed making by layering thinner slabs of clay. This portrait was bisque-fired but not colored since it was effective as a work of art as plain reddish stoneware.

I found later, after I had left Il Poggio, that stoneware masks and portrait heads were made here in Tuscany long, long ago--so I was following, without knowing it, a very old tradition.

...

.

27. Jesus

I got right back into the ceramica and clay work too.

Since I was on a pilgrimage to some Christian Holy Places and had been using the old Greek Jesus Prayer mantra as  I rode my bike, (Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas) I thought I would make some little crucifixes out of clay.


This turned into a very interesting project for me and I made a lot of them--all about eight inches tall and four inches across at the widest spot. I rolled out the cross pieces and notched them and put them together like pieces of wood and then I made little Jesus figures--they were fun to do with Hebrew noses and kind of skinny but athletic builds.


I made tiny clay nails and used them to stick the figure on the soft clay cross and at first this seemed a good solution to an artistic problem--but then it seemed not so nice.


True this was just clay and I was just an artist--but it still didn't seem exactly right to me to be "crucifying " this little clay Jesus.


Something else.


At the time Pope John Paul the Second was the man in the Catholic Church and he carried a symbolic cross that was sort of droopy  and sad looking. Well, that's OK for HIM, but I didn't feel so weepy about the whole thing, so I started by straightening the cross bar of the cross--no droop--and then I even started turning it UP like a smile.  Well, why not?

But after making twenty or thirty of these things, I started to leave the cross out of the "crucifix" entirely and started to make the Jesus figure raise his arms into a dancing man. I turned the famous crown of thorns into a crown of flowers and his famous loin-cloth into a flowery dancing costume--more like a Krishna than a Jesus, maybe..

Oh, it was good fun and absolutely unique and suited my happy feelings exactly.


When these figures were glazed with color (some totally black or deep blue) and fired they were as good as I can do. 

I was pleased and Elisabetta said I could have a one-man show in her gallery whenever I wanted to. Hooray!

...

26.Roof Tiles

There was always plenty of interesting work for me to do at Il Poggio.


First Elisabetta had me paint numbers on the doors of her guest rooms with colorful animal cartoons as a part of the number. That was fun and luckily I had brought some tubes of acrylic paint and brushes with me in my little yellow wagon.


She said some of her guests had told her that there were scurrying noises coming from the ceiling in one of her upstairs rooms and she thought some squirrels had decided to move in so she asked me to help a couple of her regular workmen to solve the problem by removing the false ceiling from the room and opening it to its original height--which was about fourteen feet high.


She said that one of the previous owners had thought to modernize the room by putting in a regular eight foot ceiling, but she actually preferred the old original--open to the very pretty old pink fired clay tiles of the roof overhead.


There was some other work which also needed to be done to the tile roof, so we climbed up and removed and cleaned some of the original tiles.


The Italian workmen demonstrated for me the ancient method of making the tiles. They were formed from a thick sheet of clay being laid on the artisan's muscular thigh, then dried and fired.


These were the original tiles used by the workers hired by the Medici family in the original construction and some of the tiles had five or six inches of moss growing on them. We had to scrape off some of the moss to see if they were sound and so forth, but the workmen tried not to move too much of the moss because it takes so long to grow--it has their respect.

(We never found any trace of squirrels.)

...

25.Return

I was a little bit lost--which was not so unusual for me--when I approached San Vicenzo a Torre and Il Poggio by bicycle.


I had followed the road signs from Florence and that I was close to my destination was pretty clear to me--but it was getting dark--it had been raining and was about to rain again--it was getting colder--and darker--by the minute, and I was exhausted tired.


My bike was loaded to the max and I was even pulling a little yellow plastic two-wheeled trailer with tools and bedding and stuff and I was more than ready to pause and stay for a while with my old friends.


I pushed my gear less bike--walking beside it--up a long, dark hill--thinking that maybe Il Poggio was at the top--but it wasn't. 

I was so disappointed and frustrated I almost cried, but I rode back down the way I had come and found a little grocery and wine store still open at a crossroads. I asked the shop man if he knew of Elisabetta or Il Poggio and he said yes, she had just been in for something and Il Poggio was only a few kilometers down one of the crossroads--not the one I had was on! 


I thanked him and rode the last bit feeling very much better.


I soon recognized the tree-lined dirt lane leading from the highway to Il Poggio and pushed my bike the last hundred uphill yards.


Oh my! Elisabetta was so happy to see me.


She put a lot of warm food on the big wooden kitchen table for me with a handy bottle of wine and called some of the guests to join in a home-coming celebration for the pilgrim--me!


I talked for quite a while-- telling pilgrim yarns to the cozy gathering--until we were all sleepy--then Elisabetta showed me to one of the nice upstairs tourist bedrooms where she said I could stay--and continue our old work-for-food and-lodging program.


Wonderful.

...

24. Pilgrimage Time

I returned to Il Poggio a couple of years later. 

This time I did have a goal and a purpose--though rather ill-defined by normal goal and purpose standards, I guess. 

I was on my way by bicycle and slowly on a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain, Greece, where I wanted to visit the old monasteries and perhaps learn a bit about the use and manufacture of their sacred icons. 

Winter was coming on and I hoped to spend the cold months at Il Poggio and leave for Greece in the spring. I was coming from Santiago, Spain, where I had completed a pilgrimage for an old German woman from Bavaria, who had asked me to do it for her, and I wanted to complete a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in Greece for a Greek Orthodox woman in California who had asked me to do it for her, so I was no longer a wandering traveler, but A PURPOSEFUL PILGRIM, though I must admit I  I knew very little about being a pilgrim of any sort--purposeful or not--since pilgrimage was not a part of the religious life of my family or friends. So I was inventing my own pilgrimage style as I went.

Elisabetta expected me to show up sometime, though because of my oddball traveling style, she did not know exactly when, but she DID more or less expect me. I didn't know myself when I would be at Il Poggio, but since it had been cold and rainy, I hoped it would be soon.

...

23. Free and Easy

At the time of my life I am writing about I was in a sort of free-fall state of being.

I was in Europe for the first time in my life with no particular ambition or reason to be anywhere or do anything.


I had been a US Navy sailor, rock 'n roll musician and a university professor--divorced twice with my  best latest good lady friend killed in an airplane accident. I had been around the world with a backpack and that is how and where I found myself.


And I was really enjoying my work and stay at Il Poggio. 

I liked Elisabetta. She was different--a "boss" I could both like and respect. She was low-key but got things done. I think she was a few years older than me with a lifetime of European hotel management in a classy Italian/Swiss Lago Majori hotel, and she had bought and restored Il Poggio to be, like I said, her work of art.

Still, I was on the loose--free and easy--and after three or four months I was ready to move on.


So I left--backpacking toward the east with no particular goal--but I also kept in touch by mail.

...

22. Coke Bottle

Elisabetta was first and foremost an artist and Il Poggio was her creation.

She lived in her work of art--like an installation artist might live in a gallery demonstration--and she was always improving and experimenting with her magnum opus. 

All of the staff were her helpers and assistants--she directed the work like a sculptor or fresco artist might have a gang of assistants to do the grunt work--and for a while I was one of her staff.

There was a very good unused stone building near the main buildings and while I was there Elisabetta decided to turn it into an art gallery. I think it was some kind of farm storage building when it was first built god knows how many centuries ago--one big room was two stories high and the rest had been divided at some later time  into separate floors--floored (or ceilinged), as I mentioned, with wood from WWII ammunition crates from the USA. But the whole thing needed work. It was almost empty so not much junk had to be removed but it needed a lot of cleaning--and that was to be my job.

Our garden tools were stored in part of the building and there was a nice dry area for firewood storage. It was cool and darkish and a very nice place for me to work--I could easily visualize a great art gallery there and that is what I was going to help create.

Some of the floor was tiled and some bricked and I found one place where there was a big dressed stone block set into the tiles--I thought it looked like the first step of a stone staircase down, so I got Elisabetta's permission to spend some time digging out some of the dirt in the direction I thought a staircase to a cellar might be located--and, sure enough, there was a filled-in staircase there with stone steps going into a subterranean passage--all filled in with dirt. Aha! Maybe a treasure trove awaited me!

Removing said dirt turned out to be quite a chore and the filled-in cellar room turned out to be almost empty--but in the far corner of what had been the cellar floor I found a Coca-cola bottle of the old green glass kind. I think it had probably been left there by the workmen who filled in the cellar just after the armies had been through during the Battle of Il Poggio.

Elisabetta placed it proudly in her trophy case beside the other antique bottle I had dug up outside the main building.

...

21.Archaeological Dig

 

When I was a high school lad in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we Bulldogs (Go Bulldogs!) owned a ruined Indian pueblo on the west bank of the Rio Grande a few miles outside of town. There was enough interest in the science of archaeology for the school to hire a teacher and conduct one class and I was one of the lucky students in that class.

It was fun to learn about the way to dig old stuff up and think about the culture which had produced the artifact. We took a field trip or two to our Indian pueblo and I even helped find some bone needles buried with the remains of a body beneath the floor of one of the little rooms we excavated--just like Indiana Jones though he came years later!

So when I was at Il Poggio I was wondering if the Old people had left anything under the grass for me to find. 

I was walking up to the main building one day with a spade in my hand after doing some gardening  and just for fun I took a couple of shovelfuls of dirt out below the bank of the access road. 

Holy Cow! There was a cool tiny glass bottle--very old--at the bottom of the hole!

That is the ONLY hole I dug and it was only a foot or two deep. 

I know you don't believe this story but its true.

I gave the bottle to Elisabetta and she displayed it with some other prized objects in a glass-fronted case in the dining room.

 

...

20. Florence Alone

I thought it would be interesting to see the famous city of Florence by myself so early one morning I took the local bus from San Vicenzo a Torre into the old City of Flowers.

The day was a Sunday--my "day off" at Il Poggio and it was high summertime--what I didn't know was that Florence would be jam-pack-sardine  crowded with tourists and Italians. 

To me, awfully, miserably crowded after my free and easy, quiet and spacious life at Il Poggio. 

The city was interesting. The cathedral--huge--awesome construction and the other famous chapels and buildings--more than interesting--but horribly  crowded.

I happened to walk by the famous Uffizi gallery--the place that contains Michelangelo's David and some other totally famous pieces of sculpture--but the crowds packing the entrance and the price of admission was really too much for a country boy like me so I took a pass and I think you might as well too since you can see copies here and there or look at the nice, quiet picture books in your local library without getting elbowed by the sweating crowds.

Maybe it would be better on a cold, rainy winter day.

I got tired and discouraged early in the afternoon but couldn't find my way back to the San Vicenzo a Torre bus stop so I asked a black-robed priest for directions. To my absolute astonishment he gave me a tongue-lashing like I have seldom ever had.

My Italian was not good but I caught his drift very clearly. He despised tourists--especially English-speaking tourists who could barely speak a word of correct Italian--and ME in particular!

We should all GO back to wherever we came from, or to Hades, and STAY there!

I guess what shocked me most was that he was a priest. In fact that is why I asked him--because I thought he might give me a more polite answer perhaps  than one of his harassed countrymen--and maybe he did.

But instead of searching for the bus stop any more or asking anybody else for directions, I just hiked back to Il Poggio. I was used to walking. 

Walking always did me good.

...