When In Rome…2010 Retrospective: Basta!

Basta! Enough!

It is one of my favorite phrases these days now that I am in Italy…especially since I was raised in the kind of family where “shoot” was a bold insult and “shut up” was taboo until the age of about 15. It sounds a bit naughty and violence-based. “BASTA!” is handy when you have had enough pasta (“More pasta?”  “Basta!”), when a dog jumps up on you and you’d like him or her to get down, but most especially when you’ve “had it!”. And you know the “it” I’m talking about here, people. It’s not a difficult concept to understand. Especially if you are like me and racing the end of the finish line that says “2010: Complete”. 

If you are like me, you don’t want to stick around for another penalty kick or a couple of rounds of overtime just to create additional suspense and make things more “interesting”. If you are remotely like me, you would rather have this final stretch of 2010 end in a “no-hitter”, a “bye”, or some outrageous 125 to 2 upset. (Incidentally, can you believe all of my sports references? I’m like a 46-year-old ex-quarterback with lifelong rotator-cuff injuries over here…sheesh! Basta, even.)

As I was saying, if your weary little gams are sprinting around orange cones, leaping over red and white hurdles and/or you are finally willing to join the track team where your height’s “center-of-gravity” advantage would be a real asset to the high jump (“we need folks for the high jump, Susan”), you are ready to ring in the year 2011.  Slogan-worthy or not (I need some help rhyming “eleven”), I think we are all more than ready exchange the old energies of 2010 for the bright, shiny unknown of the new.  That’s right, I am speaking for YOU.  I know you too well.  

Now, before you start that panic attack and wonder where they took the good ‘ol reliable, optimistic Suz, I advise you to open up that brown paper bag you’ve been ripening your Anjou pears in and breath in and out a few times. I am still here. Present. Si. It’s just that during this past year, I may have gotten a bit too big for my britches in the “water off a ducks back” department (please see Facebook for my visual rendering of Weird Al’s “I Wanna New Duck”).  By that I mean I faced a few challenges (most recently, being Robbed in Rome…a forthcoming article–if I feel like it) and decided I would mostly laugh rather than cry.  I used a dispassionate, detached attitude which included self-talk like “oh, well, it’s just the most expensive piece of equipment I own and…shucks, I lost all of my footage and a bunch of files but, you know…la-di-da…”.  I suppose it wouldn’t have hurt to kick a dog or at least club a baby seal, but there were QUITE a FEW challenges and, honestly, I couldn’t be bothered to summon the energies required to constantly complain.  

On the adventurous side (the plus side of 2010), I have lived or visited in fits and starts the following locales: the Oregon Coast, Los Angeles, Mississippi, New York and the “tri-state area”, and now Rome, Italy, where I plan on staying until they kick me out in 3 months.  I have dabbled in short documentaries, Flip films, and lame article-writing.  I have cleaned motel rooms, booked reservations, pretended to be friendly t0 motel guests, genuinely been friendly to motel guests, played clown for my mom, dressed and re-dressed wounds with Pseudomonas infections, spent days alone with heartbreak, spent days with others and heartbreak, and generally wondered what the heck to do with myself.  I have drunk coffee by the “venti-full”.  I have spoken to strangers when there was no one familiar around.  I have laughed, cried, practiced sirsasana, and eaten way too much cheese.  In short, I guess, I have lived a Year of the Thousand Bastas.  And now that the end of the calender is here, it seems like a bit of an illusion and here is one reason why:

One of the many times I went to Starbucks during my brief stint in L.A., I encountered this guy in his late-sixties who was one of those people I saw and thought…”Oh, crap!  He’s coming this way and he’s going to start talking and I am going to be too polite/passive aggressive to shoo him away.”  Well, I was right, but if I hadn’t been so polite, I would have missed out on his stories of having invented the world’s most functional life-saving raft built for stormy ocean conditions, and the following bit of wisdom.  Starbucks man said:

“You see, I was a kid who had Polio and had to fight against all odds to teach myself to walk.  I don’t belive in God, but if I did, I would still think the same thing: life is a series of experiences and challenges.  That’s it.  If we are lucky, we get to experience them all and show what we are made of by living each one.” 

I am paraphrasing, of course, but very little.  He had rehearsed this philosophy like the all-important “Elevator Speech”.  But he believed it.  I could see that in his steely gaze and his effort-worn arms.  Here was the kind of man who woke up every day and said, “ok, world…what’ll it be today?” 

I am no Columbus, but I have discovered this: there is only “Basta!” for a moment.  “Basta” passes, and life begins again…or continues.  Dates change and the year increases by one number, but we go forward with our same selves and are lucky if we meet others along the way who help us through each “Basta!”

Happy New Year to all of the friends who have become like family, and the family that has sustained me along the way.  X.