The Good Men Project

Grapes Ready to Harvest

I travelled to Italy with four friends.  The real Italian-American among us had spent months in Tuscany learning the language, studying art, and cooking in the kitchens of famous chefs.  My friends and I had each suffered losses that drove us to search for a personal renaissance.

We took cooking lessons and tried our hand at drawing.  I learned the history of Santa Maria Del Fiore Duomo, designed by Brunelleschi and built over generations with pure faith that its unprecedented scale would remain structurally sound, at a time when Black Plague had wiped out the city’s population and the Florentine republic was under siege by the ruler of Milan.  I stood on the floor of the church and looked up in awe because I couldn’t imagine that much faith.

We stayed in the countryside amongst olive trees and row after row of ripening grapes.  From my bedroom window, I often watched an elderly man patiently set out cheese cloth to harvest the olives, a single tree at a time.   He wore a green dress shirt and a wool cap.  He moved with great precision as he raked the olives from the tree onto the cloth.  He was never in a hurry as he went about his task.

One afternoon, I sat at a picnic table with my friends on the grounds of our little Inn outside Florence.  I heard a horse snort and stomp his feet on the hillside across the valley.  I turned to look at the animal intently, examining the color of his coat and the grace of his movements in the afternoon sun.
For the first time in years I recalled riding horses as a boy.  I remembered when my instructor told me that horses are the most intuitive beings on the planet.  They always mirror the mood of their human handlers perfectly.  She feigned indifference as I backed my horse into a briar patch the first time we saddled up.  She made me clean out the stalls, but always let me know, through the sideways look of her eyes, that something about my six-foot awkwardness stirred her wild streak.

As I continued to watch the Italian horse shake his mane, I remembered the day we rode bareback at a gallop through the woods near the horse farm her father owned.  Afterwards, I looked at my teacher with the eyes of a twelve year old boy who has seen sixteen-year-old-girl perfection and doesn’t need to take another breath.  Then, just a couple weeks later, she told me she had to leave, that she was pregnant and planned to marry the father-a mean looking guy with a beard-and move to Maine.    I could still see her fake smile and feel the shattered expression on my face that, as much as I tried, I couldn’t hide.

I drifted back to our circle and listened carefully.  One of my friends wept gently as he whispered the story of his wife succumbing to cancer.  He held her hand as she slipped away, their five children surrounding her bed.

In the awkward silence that followed, I looked back at the horse.  He had moved to the other side of his coral and was now munching on grass.

Another friend told the story of seeing his son on the evening news after he carjacked a car by bodily removing the woman driver.  In a black out, the boy had left the car in the middle of the road and walked home.  He only escaped serious jail time because a friendly judge allowed him to go to treatment instead.

I noticed that the old man in the grove below us was now up in the tree picking his olives.

The friend next to me described discovering his teenaged daughter having an affair with his best friend, how he had been at a cook-out when he finally put the pieces together and for months afterwards this man had stalked his daughter.

I was startled by the distant “POP!” of gunfire in the woods nearby, as locals hunted for birds or perhaps wild boar.

I told these men, most twenty years my senior, my story of financial success at a young age and complete failure as a man.

After, I looked up the hill through misty vision.  The horse lifted his head, mid-bite, to look my way.   It was the first time there was no darkness, only Tuscan sunshine and thoughts of riding bareback through the woods at a gallop chasing a school-boy crush.

Something let go with the telling of these stories.  And something else was restored.  My friends and I played Boccie that evening in the olive grove.  We swore at each other like brothers, smacking balls and talking trash until the sun went down and we had to go inside for dinner.