A Day in the Life
A Day in the Life: a second person account of a first person experience.
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When I was in high school and excelling in photography classes I was put in charge of editing the annual big slideshow called A Day in the Life. Photo-geeks were sent out on one chosen day to document the day in the life of a Warren High student. In sifting through thousand of slides of people eating, waking up (miraculously coiffed), showering coyly, chatting on the phone before departing for classes, driving their hip rides (for it was only sassy car slides that were chosen), sitting in class and pretending to look studious, swinging at a blurry baseball or dancing out on the town (allegedly after completing all homework assignments), one thing because abundantly clear to me: a day in the life in a ridiculous thing to try and capture. Life cannot be reduced down to one photo that encompasses all the woven events, nor can numerous slices of time be mimicked by hundreds of photos presented as though time were actually moving throughout the day. Below is my attempt to mock, recreate, and imitate the something that cannot be defined or adequately captured: a day you might experience in Roman life on via San Francesca a Ripa, Trastevere.
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The sound of seagulls crying parts the violet air. All night long they cruise high over Rome, swinging their heads from side to side trying to spot tasty refuse, and in the early morning hours when the trash cans are left open and overflowing, they find it. You lift your head to try to discern what time it is, but the light is unreadable. It could be midnight, it could be eight in the morning. The buildings that rise up all around block any direct connection with the sun, so that days are spent in approximation. Since the only clock in your apartment is the one you brought with you from home, you hit the backlight button to illuminate the unearthly blue numbers to find that it is only 6 am. The clouds begin to shift to a peachy pink and the color evolves to truly orange as you gaze down the long, long narrow hallway that connects your bedroom to the medieval side of the apartment.
Now that your mind is awake, your bladder cries out. You pull back the filmy red sheer panel that drapes over your giant four-poster bed that had to be sawed in half the fit up the stairwell of your five-storey apartment. Under your feet, cool terra cotta tiles creak with their loose mortar and chipped corners. Now you must choose: do you walk some 65 feet all the way down to the other end of the apartment to where the baby is sleeping, ascend two slippery marble steps to perch on the throne in a bathroom that smells alternately of sewer grease and acrid cigarette smoke rising from the apartment below, or do you simply step right outside your bedroom door and scrape open the service bathroom door (turn around before you actually enter and then back yourself onto the throne, not unlike opening a tiny coat closet and attempting to sit on a five gallon bucket). This comical thought makes you laugh, and have to pee all the more urgently.
While you are deciding on your throne options you fill a small pan with water from the tap to boil tea. The stovetop clicks loudly as the ignition catches, hissing a blue flame that far extends outside the pan’s edge. After opting for balancing on the marble-staired throne, you return to find that the pan handle has begun to warp. Loud banging can be heard issuing forth from the gangwalk that spans from the upstairs neighbor’s garret to his hovel. All night long Samuel Beckett (as you like to call him because he bears an uncanny resemblance—in an Italian, rheumy, schizo kind of way) has been loudly traversing the gangwalk, shouting to no one in particular about nothing of importance in the most bellicose and belligerent of tones. This, you have learned, is a very ordinary Italian attribute. Across the street, the loud crash of glass doesn’t concern you. Italians evidently like to recycle at odd hours, the reclaimation trucks sometimes arriving three times a day on the two’s: two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and two after the hour whenever they damn well feel like it. You have begun tto love them for their simple insouciance.
As the other members of the house start to stir, the day begins to wake as well. Children start to cry in your building as well as buildings down the street. In your building alone, there are six children, each with a unique pitch to their anguished wails. The childrens’ passaginas are lined up like wheeled soldiers at the foot of the winding marble staircase. Each time you leave you must roll them all out until you reach your child’s stroller, then wheel them all back in reverse order.
You hear storeowners roll up their metal sheeting on shop doors, sounding like successive train wrecks in fast motion, steel and glass and banging that sounds certain to end in a body count. This happens from 5 or 6 in the morning all day long until until 2 am. Only from 2am until 5 can you count on some semblance of quiet, and that discounts the wandering yelling revelers, wailing sirens, and continual crash of restaurant clatter and clean up.
You open the peeling shutters on your window not to find a rolling Tuscan landscape with cypresses brushing the sapphire sky, farmhouses with smokestacks puffing, and mist on the arms of the silvery-grey olive trees but something more surreal: church bells pealing at incongruous hours all day long, rutted streets composed of four inch basalt ingots which have anywhere from ½ to 1 inch gaps between them, rooftop gardens spilling greenery over stone corbels, cigarette butts piled in heaps by the men bearing rush brooms who walk in front of the street sweeper, the smell of bread baking, coffee burning, piss drying, laundry soap dissolving, the sound of cars honking, mist hangin around damp corners of the damp buildings, Vespas droning and whining, children calling out, men yelling (rarely ever does a woman’s raised voice meet your ears up here), and the general cacophony of life in what has been deemed Europe’s loudest city.
You decide to do a walk-about “early” today. The shower is continually hot and reliable, forgivable even for that one errant spray that always gets you right in the eye or wets your hair on days you’d rather not wash it. The towels are bleached into white submission, crackly form being air-dried, and efficient. The sink you brush your teeth over could wash twin babies side by side comfortably. The mirror is hung too high (like every picture and mirror in your apartment) and the lamp only has one bulb. In its light you always look candlelit and stunning. You are grateful. You retrieve your clothes from the wobbly standina where they have been airdrying after an inexplicable two hour cycle in the front loading washer. They are badly wrinkled and crunchy, and you put them on with some difficulty. After a while they mellow to the warmth of your body and relax, much like you will do after you finally eat some breakfast!
Since the Italians don’t believe in breakfast, you cut the acid threatening your stomach with thick-cut bread that you have toasted under the electric broiler in the oven. You slather it with lovely butter and peach preserves which wobble in the sunlight, now miraculously slanting through the tall kitchen windows. Your tea is satisfyingly dark, and leaves deep shadows ringed onto the walls of the cup you sip it from. After collecting your medieval-looking key from its perch on the cupboard, you exit your apartment, not bothering to throw the bolt on the door because the holes don’t meet up anymore on the warped surface.
The elevator (or alligator as your toddler calls it) is summoned and begins it laborious clanking up the shaft. (If you’re lucky, Samuel Beckett will have just returned from his bender last night and the lift will be waiting right above you.) After opening the outerdoor, loudly creaking in the two inner doors, stepping in and turning around (echoes of the coat closet here) and then letting the outer door slam while you are crashing closed the two inner doors (there IS no other way to do this) you begin your halting descent down five floors. Luckily the lift is made of glass so you can focus somewhere in each stairwell, and not on how laboriously slow you are descending. Once, your husband chose to walk down while you rode and you watched as he looped around you again and again, finally arriving at the bottom a full half minute before you did.
The doors of your apartment building open to reveal a jasmine vine, stretched across the portal, 50 or 60 Vespas lined up like sleeping bugs, wet basalt ingots lining the street, and trash tumbleweeds rolling by. Depending on what day it is, it will either smell like wet leaves rotting, fresh bread baking, sewer gasses, strong coffee or vanilla.
At the end of the block you arrive at a crosswalk which does not ensure your safety, and wait for the man to turn green in the signpost. As the stoplight turns red and you step off the pavement, several cars will run the light. Several Vespas will screech to a halt inches away from you, their drivers swearing at you for interrupting their noisy journey. In order to cross the street without being mowed down you must turn and GLARE (not look, not glance, not stare, but GLARE) at oncoming traffic; the people glare back, clutch the steering wheels of their belching, coughing beasts, and continue to inch their way toward your ankles. You are only marginally safer if you cross with 1) a child in a stroller, which they will usually slow down for 2) and very old, stooped woman who somehow commands respect 3) priests, nuns, or other clergy who will surely send them straight to hell if hit.
Now your day can go one of two ways: 1. You are exhausted from the sheer exertion of getting yourself up, showered, dressed, and fed in a foreign land where nothing tastes the same, everything and everyone intrudes into your sense of personal space, and where there is little hope of making a real human connection with someone due to your profound lack of Italian language skills, or 2. You are INVIGORATED and you decide to explore, with some trepidation, the numerous clothing shops, bakeries, cafes, restaurants, pet stores, jewelry shops, alimentari, rosticcerie, paneria, churches, dilapidated buildings, game stops, pizzerias, latterias, cinemas, pasticcerias, gelaterias, and leather shops that are at your disposal.
You decide.
Buongiorno Principessa! Good morning Princess! Welcome to Rome.
----
When I was in high school and excelling in photography classes I was put in charge of editing the annual big slideshow called A Day in the Life. Photo-geeks were sent out on one chosen day to document the day in the life of a Warren High student. In sifting through thousand of slides of people eating, waking up (miraculously coiffed), showering coyly, chatting on the phone before departing for classes, driving their hip rides (for it was only sassy car slides that were chosen), sitting in class and pretending to look studious, swinging at a blurry baseball or dancing out on the town (allegedly after completing all homework assignments), one thing because abundantly clear to me: a day in the life in a ridiculous thing to try and capture. Life cannot be reduced down to one photo that encompasses all the woven events, nor can numerous slices of time be mimicked by hundreds of photos presented as though time were actually moving throughout the day. Below is my attempt to mock, recreate, and imitate the something that cannot be defined or adequately captured: a day you might experience in Roman life on via San Francesca a Ripa, Trastevere.
-----
The sound of seagulls crying parts the violet air. All night long they cruise high over Rome, swinging their heads from side to side trying to spot tasty refuse, and in the early morning hours when the trash cans are left open and overflowing, they find it. You lift your head to try to discern what time it is, but the light is unreadable. It could be midnight, it could be eight in the morning. The buildings that rise up all around block any direct connection with the sun, so that days are spent in approximation. Since the only clock in your apartment is the one you brought with you from home, you hit the backlight button to illuminate the unearthly blue numbers to find that it is only 6 am. The clouds begin to shift to a peachy pink and the color evolves to truly orange as you gaze down the long, long narrow hallway that connects your bedroom to the medieval side of the apartment.
Now that your mind is awake, your bladder cries out. You pull back the filmy red sheer panel that drapes over your giant four-poster bed that had to be sawed in half the fit up the stairwell of your five-storey apartment. Under your feet, cool terra cotta tiles creak with their loose mortar and chipped corners. Now you must choose: do you walk some 65 feet all the way down to the other end of the apartment to where the baby is sleeping, ascend two slippery marble steps to perch on the throne in a bathroom that smells alternately of sewer grease and acrid cigarette smoke rising from the apartment below, or do you simply step right outside your bedroom door and scrape open the service bathroom door (turn around before you actually enter and then back yourself onto the throne, not unlike opening a tiny coat closet and attempting to sit on a five gallon bucket). This comical thought makes you laugh, and have to pee all the more urgently.
While you are deciding on your throne options you fill a small pan with water from the tap to boil tea. The stovetop clicks loudly as the ignition catches, hissing a blue flame that far extends outside the pan’s edge. After opting for balancing on the marble-staired throne, you return to find that the pan handle has begun to warp. Loud banging can be heard issuing forth from the gangwalk that spans from the upstairs neighbor’s garret to his hovel. All night long Samuel Beckett (as you like to call him because he bears an uncanny resemblance—in an Italian, rheumy, schizo kind of way) has been loudly traversing the gangwalk, shouting to no one in particular about nothing of importance in the most bellicose and belligerent of tones. This, you have learned, is a very ordinary Italian attribute. Across the street, the loud crash of glass doesn’t concern you. Italians evidently like to recycle at odd hours, the reclaimation trucks sometimes arriving three times a day on the two’s: two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and two after the hour whenever they damn well feel like it. You have begun tto love them for their simple insouciance.
As the other members of the house start to stir, the day begins to wake as well. Children start to cry in your building as well as buildings down the street. In your building alone, there are six children, each with a unique pitch to their anguished wails. The childrens’ passaginas are lined up like wheeled soldiers at the foot of the winding marble staircase. Each time you leave you must roll them all out until you reach your child’s stroller, then wheel them all back in reverse order.
You hear storeowners roll up their metal sheeting on shop doors, sounding like successive train wrecks in fast motion, steel and glass and banging that sounds certain to end in a body count. This happens from 5 or 6 in the morning all day long until until 2 am. Only from 2am until 5 can you count on some semblance of quiet, and that discounts the wandering yelling revelers, wailing sirens, and continual crash of restaurant clatter and clean up.
You open the peeling shutters on your window not to find a rolling Tuscan landscape with cypresses brushing the sapphire sky, farmhouses with smokestacks puffing, and mist on the arms of the silvery-grey olive trees but something more surreal: church bells pealing at incongruous hours all day long, rutted streets composed of four inch basalt ingots which have anywhere from ½ to 1 inch gaps between them, rooftop gardens spilling greenery over stone corbels, cigarette butts piled in heaps by the men bearing rush brooms who walk in front of the street sweeper, the smell of bread baking, coffee burning, piss drying, laundry soap dissolving, the sound of cars honking, mist hangin around damp corners of the damp buildings, Vespas droning and whining, children calling out, men yelling (rarely ever does a woman’s raised voice meet your ears up here), and the general cacophony of life in what has been deemed Europe’s loudest city.
You decide to do a walk-about “early” today. The shower is continually hot and reliable, forgivable even for that one errant spray that always gets you right in the eye or wets your hair on days you’d rather not wash it. The towels are bleached into white submission, crackly form being air-dried, and efficient. The sink you brush your teeth over could wash twin babies side by side comfortably. The mirror is hung too high (like every picture and mirror in your apartment) and the lamp only has one bulb. In its light you always look candlelit and stunning. You are grateful. You retrieve your clothes from the wobbly standina where they have been airdrying after an inexplicable two hour cycle in the front loading washer. They are badly wrinkled and crunchy, and you put them on with some difficulty. After a while they mellow to the warmth of your body and relax, much like you will do after you finally eat some breakfast!
Since the Italians don’t believe in breakfast, you cut the acid threatening your stomach with thick-cut bread that you have toasted under the electric broiler in the oven. You slather it with lovely butter and peach preserves which wobble in the sunlight, now miraculously slanting through the tall kitchen windows. Your tea is satisfyingly dark, and leaves deep shadows ringed onto the walls of the cup you sip it from. After collecting your medieval-looking key from its perch on the cupboard, you exit your apartment, not bothering to throw the bolt on the door because the holes don’t meet up anymore on the warped surface.
The elevator (or alligator as your toddler calls it) is summoned and begins it laborious clanking up the shaft. (If you’re lucky, Samuel Beckett will have just returned from his bender last night and the lift will be waiting right above you.) After opening the outerdoor, loudly creaking in the two inner doors, stepping in and turning around (echoes of the coat closet here) and then letting the outer door slam while you are crashing closed the two inner doors (there IS no other way to do this) you begin your halting descent down five floors. Luckily the lift is made of glass so you can focus somewhere in each stairwell, and not on how laboriously slow you are descending. Once, your husband chose to walk down while you rode and you watched as he looped around you again and again, finally arriving at the bottom a full half minute before you did.
The doors of your apartment building open to reveal a jasmine vine, stretched across the portal, 50 or 60 Vespas lined up like sleeping bugs, wet basalt ingots lining the street, and trash tumbleweeds rolling by. Depending on what day it is, it will either smell like wet leaves rotting, fresh bread baking, sewer gasses, strong coffee or vanilla.
At the end of the block you arrive at a crosswalk which does not ensure your safety, and wait for the man to turn green in the signpost. As the stoplight turns red and you step off the pavement, several cars will run the light. Several Vespas will screech to a halt inches away from you, their drivers swearing at you for interrupting their noisy journey. In order to cross the street without being mowed down you must turn and GLARE (not look, not glance, not stare, but GLARE) at oncoming traffic; the people glare back, clutch the steering wheels of their belching, coughing beasts, and continue to inch their way toward your ankles. You are only marginally safer if you cross with 1) a child in a stroller, which they will usually slow down for 2) and very old, stooped woman who somehow commands respect 3) priests, nuns, or other clergy who will surely send them straight to hell if hit.
Now your day can go one of two ways: 1. You are exhausted from the sheer exertion of getting yourself up, showered, dressed, and fed in a foreign land where nothing tastes the same, everything and everyone intrudes into your sense of personal space, and where there is little hope of making a real human connection with someone due to your profound lack of Italian language skills, or 2. You are INVIGORATED and you decide to explore, with some trepidation, the numerous clothing shops, bakeries, cafes, restaurants, pet stores, jewelry shops, alimentari, rosticcerie, paneria, churches, dilapidated buildings, game stops, pizzerias, latterias, cinemas, pasticcerias, gelaterias, and leather shops that are at your disposal.
You decide.
Buongiorno Principessa! Good morning Princess! Welcome to Rome.
posted by Tom Dowling and Lisa Dowling | 7:12 AM
4 Comments:
This is gorgeous Sea, thank you.
This beats the heck out of watching WHS cheerleaders preen and pretend to care about Geometry?
Keep going, two hours of your morning is not going to satisfy me!
Ashlea
I really enjoyed this, too.
I suppose, if this were an MFA workshop, I might say, "I really like your use of the word, 'invigorated.' But I'm not sure the characters are believable yet. Where is this going? I think the characters need more development. I think you need to take them to the laundromat or the grocery store or something."
Ha! Kidding, of course. Just trying to top Ash's comment.
Love the Dowling entries! Keep em coming.
I am already beat and you just left the Apt. I hope you get in some Napping.. Miss you..
Auntie Leigh Ann
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