Harleys, Swagger, and Nuns

It’s Sunday morning, sunny and hot. ‘The heat has arrived’ as they say here. The bricks haven’t started radiating heat yet, but it’s pretty roasty if you leave the shade, and even the shade is getting less comfortable. There’s a Papal mass today, I opted to not sit in the sun for 4 hours waiting and then attending Mass, but I did take a peek around 9 to see the mass of people excitedly waiting to see his Holiness. There’s a lot of people in leather at the moment – there’s a Harley Davidson convention here this week, and they’ve brought their bikes to mass to have them blessed by the Pope. It’s funny to see all these hulking dudes in leather and cowboy hats and their wives in tight jeans sporting American flags on shirts, shoes, and bandanas walking alongside the chic Italians and through St. Peter’s. They’re not all American by any means, but America means Harley Davidson and jeans and open roads. (Fr. tells us that when Italians come to Spokane they don’t understand why we would ever come to Italy; they rent a red sports car and just drive on the interstate and think they’re in heaven. Throw in a visit to Wal-Mart and they’re over the moon). I have laughed a couple times watching a whining, modest little Euro Vespa barely keeping ahead of a pack of roaring, blazing Harleys. The Vespa can maneuver better through the little streets, but the Harleys win the swagger competition by a long shot.

Speaking of swagger, Fr. keeps surprising us. Turns out he worked as a Calvin Klein model for a while in high school. He ‘did runway work’ and explained how to traverse a catwalk (he was certainly enjoying his rapt audience). He modeled a snowsuit for Calvin Klein, apparently, before their models became mostly naked. You think you know a Jesuit… This past week or so a Marquette student died in Florence. Fr. got some emails about it, and his maxim still holds true: every American student who dies in Italy was legally drunk. Every single one. This incident has been enough to reignite his student safety repertoire of information and stories. He tells us texting while driving is actually more dangerous than driving drunk because when you are drunk you still have a connection between your reflexes and the road; drunks see the red light and still react, albeit slowly. Texting means that all your reflexes are focused on the phone and means that you don’t react at all to the red light. Fr. sees foreign countries much like phones – we have no built up acquaintance with things like 15 meter cliffs without barriers, (which are common in Europe) and we have no habitual reactions to fall back on. The kid from Marquette probably felt like he was balancing along a curb instead of along a cliff until too late. Thus Fr. gets frustrated with Gonzaga and other Universities who 1. sponsor drinking, especially in foreign countries 2. skim over or cover up the drunken stupidity of the deceased. That sounds harsh, but Gonzaga does both of those things consistently. They’re starting to clean up the foreign exchange programs, but it’s a slow process and a lot of money and rich people are involved. And as for the dead students, the cause of their death goes largely unmentioned instead of becoming a lesson to the living. Needless to say, Fr. has low tolerance for these things. Some political things he will keep his head down, but not on student safety. Yesterday afternoon I got to go work with the Missionaries of Charity to help prepare dinner for the poor people we see every day. With broken English and a few words in Italian I successfully received jobs like chopping strawberries, drying dishes, and carrying some boxes. If I could speak Italian like the other volunteers I would be more useful, but I did my best. Their house is austere, but the food is good and the plastic tumblers and mixing bowls are bright colors. Nothing goes to waste, and everyone works like they don’t have a minute to lose. They had a hearty dinner prepared, served, and cleaned up for 39 men in 3 hours; I was impressed. It was so pure and clean and honest – even after 3 hours I left with a sense that the rich, chubby tourists with cute little kids and makeupped and gold-crusted visitors taking pictures had missed something important in a very complicated and messy tangle of the outside world. I don’t know if I will get a chance to return since we only have a week left, but I’m glad to have had the chance to see their kitchen.