Talismans, the Empty Maw and the Pope
Whenever I travel a distance farther than a few hours away I take pieces of my grandparents with me. I started doing this in 2011, on the occasion of my first long-haul solo flight. (The trip was in preparation for a move to Hong Kong for a job; I loved Hong Kong, but ended up turning down the job.) One of my brothers gave me a talisman, a small medallion my grandfather had worn. The plane landed, obviously to the credit of the medallion and not the laws of physics and decades of aeronautical engineering.
I’ve got the formula down now. There’s my maternal grandmother’s bracelet, my paternal grandmother’s earrings, a stained handkerchief that belonged to my maternal grandfather. As for my paternal grandfather, there’s that habit of packing too many jackets and my growing intolerance of alcohol as I get older. I carry it all.
When three of my grandparents died in rapid succession in 1999, it marked a sudden end to kid-hood, and not just because I’d lost the people who let me have ice cream when my parents wouldn’t. Two of my grandparents logistically raised me. They lived next door, a screened window away, part of a five-house family commune on my mother’s side. Almost every morning my grandmother yanked the snarls out of my hair, “styled” it, and sprayed her work with pesticidal amounts of Aqua Net, all while blowing light cigarette smoke in my face. Her name was Florence Valentino.
I traveled to Italy this week, the talismans with me, so I’ve been thinking about my ancestors and their trinkets from the past and how we remember things. There's the passive productivity of carrying an artifact (look! I’m remembering you), the sudden olfactory assault from food (square-cut pizza just smells different, I’m telling you), the still spaces where the real memories actually show up. The other afternoon as I half-napped in my hotel room I heard a family congregating on the street below, kids shrieking because that’s what kids do, and I thought about the short driveway distance between us and my grandparents’ house.
A friend once said when she gave birth that in that moment of pain-soaked lucidity she understood that it was all part of something bigger, that her ancestors and their ancestors and their ancestors before had all gone through it too. She’d heard their joyful roar in the maw, the way I heard it out on the street below my window. Over the past year and a half it’s become a medical reality that I’m probably unlikely to have kids that carry my own DNA, and coincidentally during that same time period I have visited the places from where my ancestors came, Ireland and Italy. Although maybe it’s not coincidental. A vacation, sure. A “holiday,” as people call it. In reality, something more like a farewell tour.
What do trinkets and talismans actually do and why do we hold on to them so tightly? Nothing, and, for no rational reason. As I’ve carried on with book research (a pretty terrible slog, but that’s working full-time and trying to write a book on the side) I’ve oscillated between two schools of thinking. Most memorabilia is useless, nostalgia is a wasted energy, and talismans, of course, don’t work. At the same time, the events of the past two years have codified for me that these objects are an essential part of living and remembering, like tiny toy soldiers in the civil war between head and heart, bits and atoms, truth and propaganda, spirituality and corporeal limitations, disaffectedness and grief.
While in Florence this week I wandered away from the city center in search of a trattoria known for fresh pasta and no-frills plastic tablecloths. The woman seating us mistook me as part of a duo with the man waiting in line in front of me, and the both of us just went with it—the wait had been long, and we were hungry. Despite him not speaking a lick of English, and my Italian being limited to niceties and some words my grandmother used to fire off, I gathered he was in his 50’s, originally from Sicily, fixes up old cars. (I translated using ChatGPT; he hadn’t heard of it). He pointed to the dark circles under my eyes, asked if I was of Sicilian descent, smiled through nicotine teeth and shared his bistecca with me. Then he pulled up his shirt sleeve to reveal a charm dangling from his wrist of the archangel Michael. He searched for the word, which sounded like defense. Oh, I said - protection? Si, protezione, he said, from evil. Italians, it turns out, are lovers of amulets. Basically, I inherited this.
So of course I was carrying my grandparents’ jewelry and kerchief on me two days later when I went to see the new Pope. This sentence has been delivered for dramatic effect. I saw the Pope! Thousands of us crammed into St. Peter’s Square in Rome, having all secured (free) tickets to the Pope’s weekly prayer address to a General Audience. When in Rome? And with an American Pope, no less? A once-in-a-lifetime occasion.
The absolute stranger I was sitting next to turned out to be a retiree from Mountain View. A grandmother. We filled the time waiting for the Pope with chatter about Silicon Valley, Stanford, and the disaster of American politics. She spoke very quietly, compelling me to lean in to hear her. When the Pope drove past in his popemobile, which moves with surprising speed by the way, this 75-year-old woman hopped up to stand on her wobbly chair so fast that it struck me as a small miracle. She steadied herself with a hand on my shoulder. The Pope took his seat on the altar. The morning sun showed off. Later I left feeling no more or less blessed than before, but maybe a little lighter, as though the things I carried had shed some weight.
