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A blog in two sections. First the weirdness of electronic misadventures in my house. Let’s blame it on sunstorm activity.
Then a strange but exhilarating travel via V-R, virtual reality.

 

 

Not to sound like Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown, but hello again, dear reader, it has been a while and taken me a long time to cook another blog. I have to rewind to a strange series of electrical-type events and misplacements of objects which began happening in my house in May and eventually led me to an adventure:

I misplaced two books of checks and drove myself nuts looking for them. I never found them.

I misplaced a letter that I needed to refer to. It went POOF!

My Ring doorbell kept going off wifi, rendering it virtually useless. That I could fix.

One evening, all streaming platforms via my FireStick shut down, and then right after that, an alarm of the shrillest and highest and weirdest nature went off in the basement. I was panicking. I couldn’t find the source and weeks prior to this event, Con Edison, my utility supplier did a gas check; they found a barely detectable leak, fixed it and installed an alarm—I was told to call ConEd immediately should I smell gas or if the alarm went off. Well, upon scouting the basement, it wasn’t the house alarm system, nor little water alarms that I had placed around the laundry room on the floor, nor my phone system. I assumed that what I heard was the gas detector alarm.  I called 911, but I also called my son who came over within minutes. He found that the alarm I had installed into my sewer pit which occasionally backs up from tree roots outside, was the culprit. However, there was not a drop of liquid in the pit.

OK, so this could be a bit embarrassing: three fire trucks pulled up to my house and several smoke-reeking-uniformed very large and strong men and women came running in with picks in hand like they were going down to a coal mine. I had told the 911 operator that it was possibly the gas alarm going off, as I had never heard it before, and that set the tone for the evening.

A block of neighbors spilled out into the street, their silhouettes formed by flashing lights. I told the fire folk that we had found the alarm source shortly before they arrived, in the electric utility room and that it was not related to the gas utility room. After they left, their uniforms left the smell of smoke that lingered for days, but we all agreed it was better to be safe than risk a catastrophe.

ConEd pulled up within minutes: I told them the same story and down they went to the basement to check the gas meter and alarm. Again, the old adage: “It’s better to be safe than sorry.” “Don’t worry, ma’am, we are on duty 24 hours a day!” “you were right to call us!”

And just as things began to settle down there were flashing lights coming into the living room again, then there was a rapping on the window: two young cops were at the door. The story was told for the third time and when everything was ascertained to be OK, the officers left. But nothing explained why the wi-fi and Ring and Firestick had been wacky the whole day. A friend said there was a lot of sunstorm activity going on. Can this affect us “ici-bas”? You bet. But the goings on in my house were a combo of possibilities and miscues.

So, we’ve talked about weird goings on, misplacement of items, of failing or mischievious electronics. We’ve caught up and we go on to something else, electronic. It leads me here:

 

 

What would have been our forty-eighth wedding anniversary was soon to be, my mouth was filled with the bitter-sweet flavor of loss, my heart was filled with with the heaviness of sadness and my head was reeling with flashbacks.

Several days before, my family, my nephew visited. He brought over his Meta Virtual Reality headset and I figured, why not try it? So he acclimated me to it, set it up on me and taught me how to use the related handsets. In a practice session I found myself in an alternate reality, a vintage trailer with laboratory- science- stuff in it, maybe kind of like the trailer in “Breaking Bad.” I had a 360° view of being in this place while I stayed put on a dining room chair.

I could virtually pick up a can and throw it and hear the appropriate “clunk!” I could pick up toy rockets, pull a string and launch them: WHOOSH! I could dance with robots, walk through the matrix, feel the Universe in a whole new way.  I could  see galaxies, I could play robot pingpong. I was on a high.

Then I realized that with the right app, I could travel anywhere, anywhere on earth, ici bas.

You’ve heard me talk of my travels with Robert over the years, the nine summers in Europe, our beloved Orvieto in Italy. And I told you I knew that Robert was gone when in the nursing home, he no longer recognized the word. The town. The place. Orvieto: we had fantasized about living there, retiring there.

With the aid of an app that integrates with Google maps, I could go anyplace in the world. Anyplace, here on earth, ici bas.

 

 

I decided to begin with Venice. It was the first city that came to mind.
We were there in 1976.
We were there in 1983.
We were there in 1984.

From my dining room chair I was in the piazza San Marco amidst the crowds. But, there were so many people, walking past me, around me, talking. I looked up and there was the the Campanile di San Marco, the bell tower. Torre dell’orologio, the clocktower, with the two jaquemarts banging on the bell every quarter hour. I was back in that place I had been to three times. On those trips, every street of stone, every bridge, every tiny niche of Venice was explored.

At The Rialto museum we saw a painting of the Grand Canal lined with its beautiful palazzos. The painting was done in the 15th c and in it we saw the palace that became our hotel, the Hotel Gabrielli Sandwirth, where we stayed in 1976 for a week as part of our honeymoon, 

I needed more; Venice was only the test. I needed to go on a mental-plane to Orvieto. I packed my cerebral suitcase and took a non-stop flight into virtual reality.

With a click on the map, there I was, in disbelief, on the streets of Orvieto after almost 40 years. 

Alone.

My head was spinning, trying to get my 360° bearings, I found myself visually overwhelmed by temporal and spatial confusion  There was no year. There was no ground and yet I could “walk.”

I was so excited; partly laughing, partly crying. Thinking that maybe, in my time-travel I would see Robert and myself walking the narrow, winding, stone streets in 1976, or in 1980, or 1983, or 1984, or on our last trip to Orvieto in 1985.

 

 

We always stayed at The Hotel Maitani. Always in room 127, camera centoventisette. Somewhere in the house there is a photo of me: I am standing outside the hotel door and two or three middle aged bellhops in red jackets are greeting me, smiling, “Ritorno!” The hotel entrance is at the side of a building, a former palazzo. When one steps out the door, a slice of the golden cathedral peeks out and beckons. 

I hit a spot on the virtual map and Poof! I was standing in front of the Cathedral, it is my favorite of all I’ve seen in my travels. The architect was Maitani for whom the hotel was named. Across the small piazza and opposite the Cathedral is a bench built into the side of a stone building all constructed around the 13th c., atop ancient Etruscan ruins. The stone slab bench was so worn that one’s bottom can easily slip into an indented, reserved place for it. All these years people would sit across from the Cathedral and rest with this view: Orvieto was the home of popes who fled conflicts in Rome and who likely oversaw its construction. It is the home of Signorelli frescoes, the cloth of the Miracle of Bolsena. I was standing outside but as much as I wanted to, virtual reality would not let me go in. With virtual reality, many views from different times are stitched together. One could be standing in sunset, another angle, in the bright sun with glare on the golden mosaics. One view actually had scaffolding from repair work, but by repositioning myself and shifting the point of view, I could see spot on.

internet photo

Now I wanted to visit the hotel, at least the entrance I knew so well, where almost forty years ago I last stood with the welcoming bellhops. I knew the street: I walked up and down to the end. The hotel entrance was gone. I acknowledged this temporal shift; time had passed. Later research revealed that the hotel was permanently closed. I began to drown in sadness. My memory of Robert was locked in an abandoned, once beautiful place, the door chained shut, camera centoventisette.

I walked down the streets I remembered, I passed shops that were no longer the same, that didn’t wait for me over the last forty years. I recalled the angle of the street off the piazza and how it narrows and then widens to throngs of people. I looked for the place where the market was held but wasn’t sure where it was. It was there I had my first white peach.

I was looking to find myself on cool evenings drunk with the scent of blooming huge, white-cupped magnolia flowers on trees. I was looking to see Robert and me emerging from the Hotel Maitani on cool mornings then walking down the hill to a caffe for a morning cappuccino.

 

internet photo

There was no possibility of a time warp bringing Robert and myself out the door into the cool morning air. It was no longer 1985. Time left us behind. I tried to navigate the once familiar streets and got spun around. We visited, on every trip, Michelangeli and his workshop, the master carver of animals–incredible cats–and marionettes. Every time we visited we brought home more and more cats and others. Little ones. Huge ones. His daughter, Simonetta, was in medical school at the time. She would take us for coffee and pastry in a caffe. Every store in Orvieto featured her father’s work. The vino shop had wooden vines and grapes, the formaggio shop had little wooden mice feasting on wooden cheese. In an alley-way you might find a humorous sculpture of a cow, with a bench below upon which to rest. There were doors on the side of the cow that opened to a little calf looking out. It was delight after delight. I just wanted to see these things one more time.

Some of my Michelangeli collection

Orvieto is built atop of ancient tufa: I was walking to the end of the town, perhaps in ancient times this huge outcropping was a volcano. At the very edge of town at the wall there is the San Giovenale church in the medieval section, built in the year 1004. When we were there, in this area around the street, and within another, smaller church, there was a marvelous restaurant, the San Giovenale. This ancient stone ruins of a building shell was the perfect encasing for a multi-level group of free-standing platforms creating a gorgeous, modern bar and restaurant within. The higher the platform, the higher the level of the restaurant; we always got the table at the top level, at the rose window, a round porthole likely once filled with stained glass, that looked out on endless countryside, and, at dusk, there were stars, and the headlights, far off in the distance, of cars going back and forth to Rome. 

In my excited vertigo of being back on these streets with these emotions of longing, I was able to find that very building, that restaurant. The San Giovenale. Hours of searching of maps and photos on the internet, were reflective of what I had seen virtually. This is what I found: it is now a wedding venue.

photos from the net that I saw virtually

 

I left that area and “walked” in circles down stony streets. Virtual people walked toward me, away from me, passing me without recognition. I was in an electronic abyss of memories distorted by time. Moments from five years of trips to this one place melted together.

I was homeless as a visitor: my hotel was boarded up and the door chained. I couldn’t find my way to places that I had remembered. Yet everything was the same, I was different. I was in a virtual place alone, here on earth, now a concoction of electronics that let me walk down foreign, beloved streets. Maybe Simonetta Michelangeli was now a retired doctor and a grandmother. Maybe I passed her son or daughter as I tried to find my way to memory. This was the first time I have travelled, looking for my past.

I was looking for Robert.

This virtual, electronic world is a mystery, all things electronic are based on an invisible power. We can’t see electric charges but we know when they work, just like we can’t see wind but we can feel it on us, see how it treats objects.

To go on this trip I didn’t have to sit in a plane for seven hours and land at Fiumicino Airport, rent a car (un-airconditioned in those days) drive (a stick shift) for hours and deal with jet lag; it was a bargain. All I had to do was put the electronics on my head. The power, again, was the mystical invisibility and the manipulation of reality. In my trip there was no interaction; people looked through me, talked at me but it wasn’t me, I wasn’t there.

Robert was not there.

He was a projected memory, a ghost.

And so was I.

 

Ici-Bas (ee-see bah)
By Fauré

Ici-bas Fauré (1865) Ici-bas tous les lilas meurent, Tous les chants des oiseaux sont courts; Je rêve aux étés qui demeurent Toujours… Ici-bas les lèvres effleurent Sans rien laisser de leurs velours; Je rêve aux baisers qui demeurent Toujours… Ici-bas tous les hommes pleurent Leurs amitiés ou leurs amours; Je rêve aux couples qui demeurent toujours Toujours… Sully Prudhomme

Down here Down here all lilacs are dying, all the songs of the birds are short; I dream of the summers which last Forever… Down here lips touch without parting with any of their velvet; I dream of the kisses which last Forever… Down here all men weep for their friendships or their loves; I dream of the couples who last Forever… © translated by Christopher Goldsack

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey
(becomes the husband journey)

The previous post is here

The next post is here