Happy New Year! December into January has been busier than expected — all good, unquestionably interesting, but busy! Something had to give, and what wound up giving was the time and brain space I needed to write a new essay in time for the new year. Looking on the bright side (an activity near the top of my long resolutions list), this allows me to share an essay from a few years ago about two of my favorite things — traveling and writing. I hope you enjoy it. I plan to be back with a new, piping-hot-and-fresh-out-of-the-oven essay next month!
The origins of the Bird Bet are murky at best. My husband established the terms, no doubt certain he'd never have to pay up. This turned out to be a good call on his part. While each member of my family — myself, my husband, and our boys — has claimed to win the Bird Bet more than once, no one ever has the proof. And you can’t win if you don’t have the proof.
The premise of the Bird Bet was simple. It still is. Anyone who actually touches, or is touched by, a bird gets a wildly large sum of money. I’m pretty sure it began as the princely sum of $5.00. Inflation has notched it up a bit, although the amount claimed by anyone claiming to have won the Bird Bet tends to vary with the size of the bird and the nature of what allegedly transpired.
The Bird Bet began on a family trip. Perhaps my husband saw it as a way to illustrate the improbability of the situation ever happening. Perhaps he saw it as a way to get our boys to expend their vast amounts of boy energy until they (the boys, not the birds) collapsed from exhaustion so we (the parents, not the boys) could some quiet time. Or perhaps, as my older son swears, he did it so our family could enjoy a nice picnic lunch free from fear on a park bench in Paris. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the origins, whatever the motivation, the Bird Bet became part of our family lore. The possibility of untold riches chipped away at any hesitation our boys might have felt about exploring the world, sending them hurtling into flocks in gardens, parks, and fields, wherever we happened to be.
It’s been years since my husband made the Bird Bet. It’s also been years since he and I have traveled. Not nearly as many years since the bet began, but Covid years are like dog years, so it feels that long. But now, one of the squares on my calendar contains more than just a date. It contains a destination. Italy.
Out of practice, I prepare in ways ranging from ridiculous to sublime.
Ridiculous. I embark on a thirty-day streak studying Italian on the Duolingo language app, multitasking on my stationary bike in a state of sweaty oblivion as I master essential travel phrases like “The apple is in the sugar.” La mela è nello zuccherro.
Marginally less ridiculous. I rummage through dusty shelves and dustier boxes until I find my trusty Italian phrase book. This phrase book is older than my older child. Far older than the ageless, mustachioed gondolier on the cover. So old it you won’t find the words “cellphone” or “internet” in its pages.
Sublime. I read In Other Words (In Altra Parole), Jhumpa Lahiri’s memoir of moving from America to Rome to read and write exclusively in Italian. It’s a bilingual translation, the Italian and the English facing one another, verso and recto, matching phrase for phrase. I read the English silently, but I read the Italian in a whisper, my eyes darting back and forth as I link a word in one language with what I believe is its companion in the other.
Roughly halfway through, in a chapter entitled “Impossibility” (“L’Impossibilità”), Lahiri writes about realizing that, no matter how hard she tries, she continues to exist on Italian’s accessible surface while the true life of the language lies underneath. The gap between the two is unbridgeable, but this gap is where she finds her creative impulse. “In the face of everything that seems to me unattainable,” she writes, “I marvel. Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.”
Before I even get on the plane for Rome, I resign myself to the reality that I’ll never explore the landscape of a foreign language the way Lahiri has. My biggest takeaway after hours “doing the Duolingo” is the hope I’ll find an actual apple sitting in some sugar somewhere on the streets of Rome so I can use what I’ve learned. Beyond that, I stumble through Italian in search of basic vocabulary. On the off chance I do trip over the right word, my primitive sentences remain stuck in the present tense. But Lahiri’s words reorient me like a compass, pointing me back to the reason why I travel – to marvel.
There was a time, as an expat living in Singapore, when I wrote travel essays. I wrote to demystify places on Earth that, for some, might seem as far as the stars. To make unfamiliar places feel familiar. In the last few years, back “home” in a place I know too well, I’ve delighted in writing essays that do the opposite – defamiliarizing the familiar, turning the prosaic into prose. I’ve been thinking of the two as completely different exercises, but Lahiri reminds me that the wonder of travel lies in both the recto and the verso. In throwing myself into the unfamiliar until it feels knowable, while embracing the leisure to marvel at the known until it feels strange. In coming upon an apple sitting in sugar and trying to understand why. In pausing to consider how a pigeon can be so much more than just a bird.
Doing this in a place far from home, especially a place where you don’t speak the language, can be messy. Disorienting, even. After all, when you fling yourself into a flock of birds, it’s impossible to focus on anything beyond the fact that you’re in the midst of a flock of birds. And, on the miraculous chance that one happens to touch you, you’ll never have the proof. In that moment, proof will be the last thing on your mind. You’ll never win the Bird Bet. But when you’ve been touched by a bird, you know it.
In Italy, the apple is in the sugar. In Italia, la mela è nello zuccherro.
In Italy, the birds are in the square. In Italia, gli uccelli sono in piazza.
I can’t wait to hurtle into their midst.
Those of you who’ve read a certain earlier essay might be thinking — didn’t she win the Bird Bet in Helsinki? I did. I know I did. The only problem is, I don’t have the proof. And you can’t win if you don’t have the proof.
Those of you who’ve read this earlier essay or this one might also be thinking — does she have a thing for birds? I suppose I do.
My family would conveniently be looking the other way, Tim. Or they'd ask why I decided to attack the bird....
Amusing!