From time to time, I'd like to post scenes from my memoir, Left of the Dial. The book will be published in 2009, either with a traditional publisher, or self-published. The section below hints that mental health is a worldwide priority.
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Italy, spring 2002. The tour bus rolled down a road through olive trees with silvered leaves. My mother sat next to me wearing a pink, crinkled cotton outfit, and the huge quartz rock on her ring finger that she bought at an open-air market on the island of Capri. She told me, "I enjoy you much more now than I ever have."
Aunt Rose was on the other side of the aisle, talking with Frankie: a Jersey guy who wore shirts with three buttons undone and gold chains, just like the character in the song "Seaside Tony" by Seven Minds.
I was out of the hospital ten years, and worked as a public service librarian in Brooklyn, where I moved to be closer to the City I love. Romeo, the unlikely tour guide, disclosed: "There are not many homeless in Italy, but a lot of those who are, have mental illnesses. A cousin of mine is ‘protected' by the family. After military service, my cousin came back changed. He has no girlfriend and likes agriculture, so he works the land and is quite content. No TV, no girlfriends. The family protects him. They do not talk about him, they keep him protected."
A free woman, I wondered about the cousin. I've joined the Italian American Writers Association, and their motto is, "Only silence is shame." Slowly, slowly-I've come to toss around in my head the idea of writing about my recovery. I'd picked up the poetry calendar in the kiosk of Coliseum Books and found out about IAWA's poetry readings on the second Saturday of each month at the Cornelia Street Café, in the West Village.
Hastily I scrawled down memories and fragments and began reading them at the open mic. The first time I attended, I was so anxious I fled as soon as the event was over. A guy told me, "I liked what you read," and I said, "Thank you," and dove out the door. On the newsletter left on the tables in the cabaret room, I read with interest about a memoir-writing workshop at the Calandra Institute, and pocketed the information, not sure I'd join.
We were headed toward the Tuscan hills, where we would dine in a converted farmhouse that was now a restaurant. Always the mountains. The brown rouge like suede skin the color of my Rouge Suede lipstick, the smear of the earth and the sex and the ultimate expression of a land and its lovers. I was newly in love with Italy, the country of my ancestors, those dark people I used to be embarrassed to look like.
On this trip, I saw I've inherited their elegant spirit: their passion for life, and their compassion. I turned a leaf, and was humble before my task: I believed God had a plan for my life, and it was to publish my memoir, even if right at that moment the words were a tentative scrawl, barely spoken on my lips.
