We arrived this morning in Italy, which makes us very lucky people.
Everything is different here. It’s like Brigadoon. You would think that air is air, sky is sky, light is light – it’s the same wherever you go, the same world, right? Nah. Italy is enchanted. They even speak a different language over here. Crazy, no?
Today – to tide over my jet-lagged body until dinner – I had half a salami sandwich. That’s all we had in the house at that point. I sliced a thin piece of whole grain bread off the loaf, slapped three or four slices of salami on it, folded it in half and took a bite. It’s not the same, baby.
Nowhere else in the world does a salami sandwich taste like this.
I took my sandwich outside to look at our vegetable garden and I noticed that our cherry tree had ripe cherries on it. Crazy, no? The problem is that it’s a big tree, which means that most of the good fruit is ten, fifteen feet off the ground.
This poses no problem whatsoever for the birds – we have thousands of birds around the house and they all seem to like cherries. What they do is they wait until each cherry is perfectly ripe and delectable before they plunder it.
They won’t touch a semi-ripe cherry. They’re very particular.
So for us to be in any way competitive we have to set up a ladder and at least one of us has to be up in the tree on a twenty-four hour basis. So the birds win. However, there’s a store in our village where you can buy cherries that are just as good. You can just walk in and buy them.
Crazy, no?
Michael Tucker is an actor and author whose recent novel is "After Annie