A Plan…
The 3:00PM Driver Education Class on a Tuesday, towards the end of an overly warm September. Lesson No. 17 for me… 8 more to go!
a sun-filled day senza una nuvola in evidenza. Bright Blue skies. Birds tweeting, and are ignorant of having their voices consigned to an X elsewhere. A warm breeze blowing off the Mediterranean Sea to sweep the Lower Lunigiana and on up the valley of the Torrente Taverone to the fair city of Fivizzano. Leaves rolling across vacant streets & piazzas. All is quiet and peaceful. Inside the Autoscuola Fivizzanese, students are seated ready & waiting for Baldo. I am in my usual chair, BIC and Black Moleskin notebook, entrambi prontissimi. We are unknowingly on the verge of learning Baldo has been side-swiped by disappointment in between last Thursday’s class and this Tuesday’s. It’s 3:04PM. We know the procedure. In walks Baldo…
1) What, no bounce?
2a) He sits down at his desk, removes his glasses and tosses them onto the desk, rubs his eyes…
and from that point on our Autoscuola class is not going to be like the others before.
2b) Baldo hangs his head low in depression. He goes back to rubbing his eyes. Glasses are picked up off the desk. He fiddles with them. To make a point? Baldo adds a few deep sighs, spies the clock… it has moved only 3 minutes ahead… and then, begins to tell us what are his woes…
of the 8 students Baldo accompanied the hour and a half to Massa last Friday…
and may I just say? It is a shitty little town, Massa. Has the traffic of a city. Piena zeppa with oneway streets & alleyways. Too many cars compound the inconvenience of getting around the place. You want to blow out as fast as you can. So, I have never set foot upon Massa’s principal piazza nor toured the minute Centro Storico. I do believe any charm Massa might have had… nestled against some lumpy low hills at the foot of the majestic Apuane Mountains… and we are talking about any vestige wiped away before the First World War. Confirmed extinct today. Replaced with a medley of ugly apartment blocks with balconies pieni zeppi with drying clothes & mops & bikes, scraggly trees along lumpy sidewalks and interspersed with McDonald’s, IERCOOP’s and mega multi-level shopping centri around the town’s urban margins. Massa is also the bureaucratic… administrative… HQ for the province we live in, la Provincia di Massa-Carrara. Makes part of the Regione di Toscana. Not the part that looks like an advertisement for planting cypresses on a road winding up a hill. Nope. Marble quarries…
Too bad the capital wasn’t put in Carrara. It wasn’t, probably, because…
A) that would be too convenient to allow us, Lunigianesi, to make a shorter drive from back-of-beyond to marginal Versilia in around an hour…
and B) above Carrara is a cove of Anarchists!!! At the foot of marble quarries galore.
Anarchism? Yes, a straggler political & cultural phenomenon which was A Trend on either side of the First World War. Another vestige reduced now to a fringe location in the hills. I have heard the remaining Anarchist contingent gets along well, are productive, peaceful citizens. Perhaps, we have been given an erroneous impression on Anarchism? Maybe. Concomitantly, the place, called Colonnata, is noted for a type of lardo… or, lard… which sends many people, proportionally a good many Italians… Dott. You included and enthusiastically so… into swirls of ecstasy bordering upon how I imagined what winning a ga-zillion €€€’s in a lottery must be like. But, it is edible! Lardo instructions? Why certainly… you take a piece of thick Black bread or, a slice of bread made from castagne… or, chestnuts, and is called La Marocca… either one lightly toasted, and then, you spread the lardo… as smooth as butter and just as creamy… and drip extra-vergine olio d’olivo on top., and there you go. Oh! Have a good Red or White wine on hand too. Please do not mention this to You, if you are in the vicinity. In Truth, I actually found il Lardo di Colonnata… it’s Official Title. Easy to trace… utterly delicious. The problem for me is: I put up such A Big Stink about even tasting il Lardo di Colonnata…
back to Mom, who feared, we kids would become ENORMOUS eating…. or, gobbling… the myriad culinary wonders out of my paternal grandmother’s South Carolina kitchen using lard… like her absolutely divine cornbread muffins… that I have never gotten over the maternal indoctrination and, unfortunately, it has cemented my reputation as rompipalle… or, a ball breaking annoyance. I eventually confessed to You, who replied… Oh! You don’t know what you are missing and goodie! More for me. A rough translation of his Italian.
Back to Baldo’s desolation…
ONLY 3 passed The Qwtz! Yes, a terrible bit of news. Baldo looked crestfallen… in the extreme. Said he had had high hopes with this latest crop degli allievi dell’Autoscuola Fivizzanese of resurrecting a poor record of Qwetz performance with too many bocciature… or, failures throughout the year’s Spring and Summer.
At one point, we heard the List of the Failures. One, was the singing Eppi Borfdai Boy and Class Clown, Cana, who was swatted down for maybe the third time. Gosh.
Baldo lent over his desk in our general direction, his glasses twirling slowly in his hands. He eyed us in silence. Then, he set about with sharing his newly formulated I-have-thought-about-it-and-this-is-what-I-have-come-up-with speech, adding: hear me and hear me good. I won’t lay out the details of the half-hour long sermon, however, I can shrink it down to two points, the gist of which are…
1) The Qwtz is not a joke. It’s hard. It’s serious. E’ un impegno grosso!… a big commitment! There’s a lot to learn and to memorise than with previous year’s Qwtzes. He said… I can help clarify any elements in class you are unsure about, it’s my job but, you guys have got to…
2) study, study, study, study, study. No two ways about it.
In reply to his caveat, I have devised A Plan…
On October 9th…
this coming Monday, and two days after my art show in Milan, iPadness, which I hope will be a stunning success. I feel I deserve it. Especially, in light of all my Time & Effort, those too of the IT technician and suppliers who lent a necessary hand, and without overlooking that the artwork is WONDERFUL. I can hardly believe they erupted out of my head and onto my iPad…
I will initiate A Herculean Full-Immersion Pass The Driving Qwtz Campaign.
1) I will endeavour to finish reading the darn AND dull Rules & Regulations of the Road manual produced by the Italian Ministry of Transport. A bureaucratic tome of 278 ******** pages. Even if it kills me or, sends me into a long post-study nap.
2) Now, if I have not mentioned this, and I don’t believe I have then, this might be the moment to reiterate The Sage Advice from many of those Friends & Family, who have conquered The Driving Qwtz in recent History. And, that is…
do as many of The Qwtzes as I possible can.
There are tons of authentic, real, true Qwtzes on several official Driving Qwtz websites on the Internet. Baldo sent me an app to the most official one.
If I can do 6 Qwtzes a day, and survive the quest without incinerating any of my brain cells or, falling comatose from boredom, additionally taking time to analyse my Errors, brush-up on any Rules to which I have made an Error, distilling the corrected info and continuing on, I will need a few weeks. The rest of the month of October, for sure. And, when I feel confident… A Winner!!!… and have knocked-off a series of Qwtzes with no more than 2 Errors, I will book the next Qwtz in Massa through Baldo. He gets to drive me there.
3) And, though I am still driving on an American NC Driver’s License which the Carabinieri think they have denuded me of… there are subtle legal questions: I am not illegal-illegal, only semi-illegal… I am forced to a) drive less and b) when driving, to stick to the back roads… I will buck up Little Buck-A-Roo, and regularly attend Baldo’s Driving School Classes in Fivizzano. A Morale Booster, if nothing else, and good for its sideline entertainment value since, Cana will back in class for his Attemp-To-Beat-The-Qwtz No. ???.
My Plan was presented and APPROVED by Baldo, as he smoked a cigarette in his office.
So, plan permitting… an Italian Driver’s License by Christmas or, bust!
