The Gift

Giulio and Antonietta have made peace. After a week of torment Giulio came flying out of school one afternoon with the news that he and Antonietta were now friends, and the peace has held. Yesterday he sat at the kitchen table eating cookies with Nutella spread on top and talking about school.
"What did you do today, Giulio?"
"I played with the trucks."
"Was Filippo there?"
"Yes. And Antonietta and I are friends. I want to go to her house, Mommy."
"Did you play together at school today?'
"Yes." Then there is a pause as Giulio chews for a moment.
" Antonietta and I are friends, but me and Camilla no."
And so it goes. Giulio however doesn't seem the slightest bit unhappy that he and Camilla aren't friends, there is no yearning here! But seeing that Camilla lives across the street from us, and I actually know her mother, and that the times Camilla has come in our yard to play they have gotten along just fine, I'm hoping that this will pass. And knowing Giulio it will.
Eugenio has started running again. I knew me beating him by 10 minutes was too much for an ex-marathon runner to bear, and so at least twice a week we have started running together, including our second race two weeks ago, 11 kilometers of killer, muddy, hilly roads. He led in the beginning, I pulled up even towards the 6th kilometer and we ran together until the last 2 kilometers when I pulled ahead and beat him by 2 minutes. The race was characterized by the large groups of elderly walkers who did not take kindly to panting joggers trying to pass them on the narrow path that cut through woods and wound around a lake. I ran fearing for my ankles. There was the usual lavish "refreshment" afterwards, including tortellini in broth at 9:30 in the morning, and a box of cookies and a chocolate bar for every participant, no picture frames this time. This Sunday we have a 14 kilometer, so this may be the one where Eugenio beats me, I know it is simply a question of time.

Part of what helped my training so much was a visit from my in-laws Lucia and Antonio, which instead of being the customary 3 days lasted an entire week because Livia got sick and had to stay home from the nido. My in-laws, who are always at their best when someone is ill, stayed on to take care of her so Lorenzo and I wouldn't have to miss work. Having two people present who were handling all the cooking and most of the childcare left me with plenty of time for long runs around the neighborhood, breaks that were also necessary for my sanity. I like my in-laws, but we have very little in common. I come from a largish city in the US, they both come from small towns in Southern Italy, I enjoy food and like eating, they are obsessed with food and spend most of their waking hours planning, preparing, eating, or cleaning up meals. At 7:30 in the morning I would be in the kitchen preparing breakfast and Lucia would come in, say good morning and then ask me if I would prefer meatballs or steak for lunch. This would be before I'd had my morning coffee.
Antonio, in what was meant to be a purely loving and generous act brought us a whole prosciutto crudo. Prosciutto is ham, but in Italy you can get prosciutto cotto, which is closer to what we think of as ham in the US, and then there is prosciutto crudo, which is "raw", the meat has been smoked and aged but not cooked in an oven. Both are delicious. In my house we usually eat prosciutto at lunch, along with pasta as a kind of poor man's second course.
When you go to the supermarket or butchers to buy prosciutto they never have it ready, pre-sliced to be grabbed by the handful and dumped on the scale like they do at Kroger's. Instead they take from the shelf this whole prosciutto, put in on the slicer and carefully slice off pieces, laying them beautifully one by one on the paper sheet next to the slicer. They then weigh the amount, fold it up, put it in paper bag and hand it to you as a long flat package the size of a copy of "Newsweek." When I buy prosciutto I buy around 100 grams, which is around a quarter of a pound. As it only lasts about 2 or 3 days before getting a bit funky, I try not to buy any more than that or I will end up throwing it away before it is eaten. When my father came and lived with us for 3 months last year he had the staff at our supermarket in stitches because once when he ordered prosciutto he asked for 500 grams, or a little more than a pound, which seemed to the staff an enormous amount to buy at one time.

At any rate, here was Antonio with a 10 pound prosciutto for us to eat. Prosciutto crudo will keep for a long time if stored properly, but it has to be sliced correctly to get the slices at their correct thinness, and while I like prosciutto, I've never wanted one of my very own. For me, getting a quarter of a pound of the stuff three times a week was about as far as I wanted to go in my level of commitment. Now suddenly here was Antonio proudly displaying his ham and talking about how he would teach me how to slice it with the knife he would leave with us, and how we could store the ham in our storage area in the basement, it was nice and dry down there, wasn't it? I had images of myself staggering home after a long morning, hungry for lunch, getting to my apartment and then remembering that if I wanted any prosciutto I was going to have to go back down three flights of stairs and slice it myself with a knife. The thought alone made me feel tired. Then there was the question of the amount. My children (of course) won't eat prosciutto crudo, they only like cotto. That left Lorenzo and me the task of eating this thing every day, needing to consume it whether we wanted to or not before it was no longer edible. Lorenzo voiced his concern that perhaps a WHOLE prosciutto was too much for us to eat, a suggestion that was waved away, weren't your in-laws from America coming at Christmas Antonio asked. THEY would want to eat prosciutto, they would be so happy to be in Italy eating this wonderful ham, and we could also share it with our friends and neighbors......while I couldn't think of any friends who would fly over here to have a slice of ham, I realized that in the close vicinity of our apartment there are at least 3 or 4 people of a certain age who would certainly relish the chance to have some of this prosciutto. People who were born before or immediately after the Second World War have very particular ideas about what tastes good and what foods should be appreciated above all others. Our neighbor Piero would certainly love a few slices of this ham, as would Eugenio's dad who lives on the other side of the fence from us. Eugenio's dad drives up into the mountains to pick wild mushrooms, rather than buy the ones they sell in the store. They would taste this prosciutto and appreciate how it had been aged, would know that they were eating an excellent piece of meat, and they would be grateful to Antonio for letting them try some, even if their own fridges were stuffed with the same kinds of ham. But for Lorenzo and myself it was different. For Lorenzo slicing his own prosciutto is something he has little interest in doing, let alone storing it in his basement. Young men in Italy today may enjoy eating good food, but they don't necessarily want it sitting on top of their clothes dryer. As for me, well, I come from a place where the word "ham" always has the words "honey-baked" in front of it, I certainly didn't know what to do with this fatty leg of meat which I had only ever seen handled by the butcher when I buy cold cuts. In the end we convinced Antonio to leave us a plate of sliced prosciutto but to take the rest of it back to Rome with him, where he would certainly get much more pleasure out of it than we would. He was offended, and rightly so, no one likes their gifts to be refused. But now in the fridge sits that same plate of prosciutto, all but untouched since Antonio left it there. My excuse for not eating it is that he didn't slice it thin enough.