The Rise and Fall of Luigi's

Back before Big Oil came to St. John's and gentrified the place, there were very few eateries whose main offerings were not deep-fried. One of these places was a fascinating dive down on Water Street called Napoli Pizzeria and Restaurant. The proprietors were a colorful old couple from Naples who came to Newfoundland for some undisclosed and wholly incomprehensible reason and opened the place years and years ago. He scowled at the world through a style of spectacles not in use since the fifties and possessed a kind of furtive hunch suggesting illicit knowledge, an apron which was never either notably clean or particularly dirty, and a tone of voice that seldom varied from a querulous trumpet. She, on the other hand was a jolly, rotund little thing, wreathed in smiles and black taffeta, usually wearing 3-inch heels which brought her brain pan maybe 4 ½ feet off the floor. She spoke virtually no English but could turn out a remarkably tasty meal with the best salad available in St. John's and a lovely chewy Italian bread she made in the pizza oven.

As near as we could make out her name was Mamma and he didn't have one. We referred to the place as Luigi's just because we knew what we meant, and went there from time to time because it was handy and cheap. Most of their patrons went there to get take-out pizza but there was an actual menu with spaghetti and ravioli and such on it and they were always excited when somebody ordered from it because it was more expensive than the pizzas and it looked more respectable having people sitting at the tables with plates and forks rather than just lounging at the counter waiting for the heavy-on-the-pepperoni.

After we had gone there a few times it got so they recognized us and Luigi would escort us solemnly to a table and trumpet something to Mamma in the kitchen. Then he would carefully unfold a couple of paper napkins and deploy them over the spots on the table, first in front of Jim and then me, then deposit a second pair of virgin paper napkins in front of each of us, as if he was preparing for surgery, and dump a heap of sticky cutlery on them. Then Mamma would waddle out beaming beatifically and chattering in some hybrid tongue incomprehensible to Anglophones and Italianophones alike. And we would beam back at her and pretend we knew what she was trying to say, which we almost never did. Then we would order something and wait for our salads to appear.

There was no shortage of visual distractions to while away the time and spur conversation. There was usually either wrestling or greed shows on the tiny black-and-white television which was thoughtfully placed so all the customers could share the entertainment. Or idiosyncratic floral arrangements which ran to a jelly jar full of plastic flowers with an occasional daisy tucked in for authenticity. And on the walls, which had not been washed since 1953 when Luigi got his glasses, there were great numbers of original paintings lovingly rendered by somebody's relative who was either very young at the time or almost entirely lacking in talent. Or we could squirm around in the chrome set chairs and pick at the clothes pins that held the construction plastic in place over the tablecloth.

For most of the nine endless years I spent in that dreary land Luigi had been engaged in a no doubt fragmented and certainly frustrating dialogue with City Hall concerning the acquisition of a liquor license. As you can imagine, it was a red letter day in the annals of Napoli Pizzeria and Restaurant when some minor functionary inadvertently allowed this application to slip through. Luigi responded gamely by immediately acquiring an artistically calligraphed sign, conspicuous by its absence of fly spots, announcing FULLY LICENSED, and propping it in the front window next to the menu. While it didn't draw tumultuous crowds as anticipated, it did cause a tiny flutter in the breasts of certain of us regulars, and on our next trip we plumbed the depths of this veiled promise and discovered that what “Fully Licensed” meant to Luigi was a bit of cheap scotch, a bottle of gin, three or four varieties of local beer and two kinds of Italian red wine. Having sampled both of the latter we settled on Chianti Classico and as soon as we walked in the door Luigi growled a greeting, very nearly smiled, and rushed off into the kitchen to fetch us a bottle.

Meanwhile Mamma effused and we looked at the menu and then for the sport of it, asked her what she thought we should have since we once discovered that there was a whole world of stuff which was not on the menu which was frequently better than what was, and furthermore what was on the menu was often not available. The menu was just a coded notice which said “We've got stuff that isn't pizza.” Encouraged by our interest, she launched into a very long and perfervid discussion involving clams and spaghetti and “shrimpa like dis” (indicating a point halfway up her forearm) and since she clearly wanted us to do this we ordered it with no clear idea what to expect. When it came, it proved to be one of the happiest surprises I've had at a restaurant. They charged us twice the price of anything else on the menu bringing it up to the price of an average meal anywhere else in town and it was worth every dime.

I think it was this meal that earned us Most Favored Diner status down at Luigi's. Be that as it may, the next time we went in there we got cotton napkins.

Then one momentous Valentine's Day we thought we should have a night out, and naturally thought of Luigi's. So we set out through the rain, drizzle, and fog thinking about all those nice surprises in Mamma's scrupulously tidy kitchen only to discover first, a big, red Closed sign, and second, and altogether unnerving, an accompanying For Sale sign right there next to FULLY LICENSED. We were dumbstruck. This was like selling Mount Rushmore.

A few days later I happened to be strolling down that way in the middle of the day and looked in. I was pleased to note that Luigi was there in his usual spot propping up the counter and watching the TV, so, consumed with curiosity and concern, I badgered Jim into going down there for dinner shortly thereafter to explore the mystery of the For Sale sign. All seemed as it should be: Luigi fetched out our Classico and Mamma came and told us what we should have, and then ensued a fractured conversation slotted between the arrival of the wine glasses, napkins (cotton), salad, and the unreasonable demands of Other Diners, the upshot of which was that they (i.e. Mamma) suddenly decided she had had enough and wanted to go home. So they put the place up for sale and were returning to Naples the following Tuesday. The catastrophe confirmed.

Then after we had finished our meal (a lovely bit of squid, unremarkable sausage, and world class salad), Mamma waddled up and planked herself down at our table, which she had never done before, and poured out their whole sad story. I think this is what she said.

She and Alfonso (not Luigi after all) had arrived in Canada donkeys years ago and had gone to Hamilton, Ontario, where there were lots and lots of Italians. Then 19 years ago they had decided to strike out on their own and open a restaurant in St. John, New Brunswick. Unfortunately there was some misunderstanding when they bought their tickets and they found themselves in St. John's, Newfoundland instead. One can only guess what ran through their minds when they discovered their mistake. But I guess they didn't have the price of return fare and one barbaric outpost was no worse than another so they stayed on. But now Mamma was 63 and Alfonso was 68 and they were unable to entice any relatives to come over from the old country to take on the restaurant, so they were throwing in the towel, which is the most sensible thing they could do, I suppose, but it left us bereft and uncertain about where we would find another source of shrimpa-like-dis.

With heavy hearts, Jim and I went down for dinner on their last day for one last culinary adventure. We took along a little going away trinket accompanied by a Farewell and Have a Lovely Retirement card (the range of greeting cards available these days takes my breath away). Mamma ordered us lobster tails (three apiece), which were delicious, the usual wonderful salad and chewy bread, and of course the Classico. When we were finished Mamma brought us a couple of glasses of Sambuca with a couple of coffee beans floating in it which you are supposed to suck on while you drink the stuff - not bad. Meanwhile Mama brought us a doggy bag with breadsticks and apples and butter packages and we finally broke away (the bill came to $60 Canadian, including 12% sales tax), shaking hands all around and turned our backs regretfully and forever on the legend that was Luigi's.

Laws

A while ago some blowhard on the radio proudly proclaimed that we are a nation of laws as if this was some praiseworthy feature unique to our culture.  Why this should be a point of pride is hard to understand, since laws are pretty widespread throughout our species.  Even the Taliban have laws, which largely seem to boil down to “Do what we say or we will shoot you.”
Long long ago and far far away, God himself handed over a list of all the laws he figured were important, and you could tell it was a Jewish god because right up there even before “No Killing” and “No Groping the Interns” was “Be nice to your Mom.” But the important thing is that there were only 10 of them.  They were easy to understand, and you could reasonably expect everybody to know what they were.  When you were told that you are not to steal, it was not felt necessary to explain in great detail what that meant. There was no talk of technicalities. If you were caught stealing, the townsfolk would gather and then they would cut off your hand or stone you to death or some other unmistakable deterrent to any others who might harbor notions of larceny.  I imagine theft was rare.
In stark contrast, let’s consider our legal underpinnings of which we are so proud.  That would be the United States Code, a monument to garrulous obfuscation by 250 years of congressional representatives with too much time on their hands. It is composed of not ten, not even 20, but of 50 sections or Titles, each of which contains hundreds if not thousands of pages of rules any one of which you break at your peril, bearing in mind that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
The main titles cover such diverse areas as Banking, Commerce, Patents, Indians, Agriculture and 45 others.  Nobody knows what is in all of these titles and very few people know what is in any of them.  Take Title 26, for example.  That’s the Federal Tax Code.  It turns out that a random sample of Republican congresspersons guessed that the tax code might be anything from 774,000 to 500 million words in length or somewhere between 2500 to 2,500,000 pages.  Many couched their guesses in terms of bible equivalents, that is something between 2 and 7 times the length of the bible which was clocked at 1291 pages.  I think a Republican’s estimate of the length of the bible may be considered reliable, but I would prefer a second opinion on anything else.
Fortunately, the Government Printing Office is available to backstop Our Elected Officials, and according to this credible source Title 26 runs to 3,387 pages of turgid, incomprehensible prose.  Of course that’s only the part Congress wrote.  In addition to that, there are the refinements that have been added by the Internal Revenue Service, and these run to an additional 13,458 pages.  (It is not clear if this includes the 721 forms involved in the lawful execution of their duties) That’s 13 bible equivalents and does not include such thoughts on the subject as the states may have codified.  In the end, it seems likely that various levels of government have covered something like 20,000 pages in rules that must be obeyed and the specification of punishment for those who fail to do so.
This would be Really Bad News if there was any chance that we might get caught not doing something, but fortunately the steely-eyed centurions with the hand-cuffs don’t know the rules any better than the rest of us, so their failure to apprehend civilians claiming ignorance of the law is a galling source of rage and frustration, sending dozens of them straight to the analyst’s couch.
But what we started out with, remember, were a few basic easy-to-handle felonies, and a quick scrutiny of the list of our 50 Titles suggests that the greater part of them have been lumped all together into Title 18 – Crimes and Criminal Procedure.  The first of the 5 sections of this 836-page Title lists the crimes that are sternly dealt with.  There are 123 listed, but some have subcategories, like number 113 (Stolen Property), 113A (Telemarketing Fraud), 113B (Terrorism), and 113C (Torture). Indians get their own number (#53), while Gambling and Genocide have to share #50.  And now, having studied this list carefully I am stunned by God’s lack of imagination in proscribed activities.  How could he have missed #9 Bankruptcy or #59 Liquor Traffic.  
Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that a culture that is governed by a succinct legal code that everybody knows and understands is inferior to a system of laws that is so vast and convoluted that a very extensive and expensive industry has grown and prospered whose practitioners justify their bloated fees by claiming, with some justice, that they, and only they, can guide the uninitiated through the tangled wreckage of our laws, of which we are so proud.

How it Feels to Be the Earth

I think I know what the earth feels like, floating around weightless far away from anything else except of course its attendant moon always hovering around, never close enough to be interesting but always annoyingly there. I found this out one day when I was SCUBA diving along a cliff near Halifax, Nova Scotia.

We were on a noisy little trawler, 3 or 4 of us. There was much fuss and lungeing around as we struggled into our wetsuits on the tiny deck and sorted out our gear, checked our tanks and regulators, looked for lost straps and weights and sample bags, tripping over each other and interrupting, shouting questions and orders, and finally got our last minute instructions. Then one by one we flopped off the back of the boat into the water. Then there was the shock of the cold water invading the suit, the final adjustment of the face mask, and the splutter of clearing the mouthpiece of water. A few quick hissing gulps of bottled air to make sure everything was working and then with a flip and swirl I made the transition to the parallel universe under the meniscus.

Everything changes when you step through the looking glass. It is not that sound is gone, but rather that the emphasis is different. The clamor of the trawler’s engine is a distant thrum here, while the flick-flick-flick of the propellors cutting the water is distinct. The sloshing of waves against the hull is reduced to a rustle, while the sound of the rising bubbles is nearly deafening. And the barely-noticed background sounds of gulls and distant voices is replaced by clicks and squeaks of the creatures of this new realm.

I swam after our leader dragging my sample bag after me like a reluctant puppy. The sunlight rippled and dappled on the sand and stones and seaweed, occasionally igniting a cunner that had come to see what was happening. It was a good day. We were quickly done with what we needed to do, and still had a half hour of air left. We quickly dumped all the samples and pencils and other scientific clap-trap into the boat and then as quickly dispersed to follow our various fancies and interests.

I headed straight seaward toward the 50-foot dropoff just beyond our work site. I paddled along about an arm’s length above the flat seabed, with a small entourage of cunners, ever hopeful that I would break open a sea urchin for them, which I did once. Then suddenly the bottom vanished and I was suspended over the abyss, alone except for my attending cunners. I executed a slow roll and marveled that there was nothing visible anywhere except the rippling sun. I rolled over on my back and watched my bubbles fall into it for a while.

That is when I realized that this must be what the earth feels like, floating weightless somewhere between the sun and the darkness, watching the universe slowly expand, and listening to the click and snap of distant cosmic events, with its single cunner circling circling, hoping that its companion will relent one day and offer it some little celestial snack.

My Sporting Life

When I was 10, I enjoyed schoolyard games. We used to go outside at recess and play baseball and soccer and romps of our own devising. Of course we were pleased when our team won, which was why nobody was really thrilled to be stuck with Stanley on their team, but then usually the other team got Henrietta, so it all worked out. And anyway, win or lose, tomorrow was another day and who cared anyway? Soon after this we got uniforms so that we could play schoolyard games with other schools and the visiting parents and such could tell who was on which team. Then somebody said we should play extra hard because now we were playing for the school. This made no sense to me, so I shrugged, put on my ugly blue shorts and mismatched pinafore and went off in a station wagon to play schoolyard games with strangers in the next town anyway.

Then I went to boarding school where we had a very complicated sports uniform which was a green tunic – cotton for the summer, wool for the winter – which was to be worn no more than 3 inches above the knee over a white camp shirt. White ankle socks were to be worn in the summer, green or black knee socks in the winter. We were assigned to opposing teams inside the school for the purposes of intra-mural sports conflict, and given rousing speeches on school pride and team loyalty for the purposes of extra-mural sports conflict. Since sports were a required part of boarding school life, I played their little games and sang their stupid songs, but there was no longer any pleasure in it. I could see absolutely no reason why I should invite bodily harm at the hands of incomprehensible zealots set upon mutilating all comers in the name of the institution that was teaching them Latin. Needless to say I was not included on the first line teams.

Eventually I did find a modest refuge from these bloodsports in gentler activities such as tennis and badminton. These had the added benefit of offering no off campus venues, so it was possible to pass the required sports time paddling non-lethal projectiles back and forth across a net, while chatting about more interesting things. When it was made clear that we were supposed to be trying to beat one another, keep score, improve our tactics and so forth, we nodded solemnly and carried on as usual, but offered up scores when the instructor came to glare at us.

There was a sports requirement at college too, but only for two years. The first semester was occupied with a thing called “basic motor skills” where we were taught how to walk without slouching and carry a suitcase. I can’t think how this filled a semester, but I clearly remember that it did and that I actually received a passing grade. After that schoolyard games were available of course, but there were also harmless things like modern dance which I tried for a semester with as much success as a hippopotamus might have at ballet school, but it passed the time. Archery was my closest approach to an enjoyable sport and filled the two remaining required semesters and then I was clear of sports requirements, and slammed the door with pleasure on all pointless, sweaty activities done in support of meaningless social entities.

It was about this time that I took up mountain climbing. My boyfriend owned a rope, and one of his roommates owned some hardware, but mostly we just clambered up steep rocky places and drank beer at the top. I didn’t realize at the time that this was a sport, or I would probably not have enjoyed it so much. At one time or another I have tried SCUBA diving, bicycling, hiking, most of which I enjoyed right up until they became fashionable at which point further participation involved enormous expenditure on scientifically formulated clothing and gear, licenses, permits, classes, clubs, regulations, and other accoutrements of a society in which anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

Then one day I had an epiphany. A booming bass voice rumbled out from the sky, frightening my cats right out of their tiny minds, saying “So why the devil did you do any of that stuff? Was it just to keep fit? Was it all in a fruitless attempt to return to size 10? Was it in hopes that some day a reporter on a really dull day would ask you why you took up bungee jumping at the age of 87? No? Well why then?” Then the world was suddenly silent again and I went inside, put a cold cloth on my face, and thought about this.

When I awoke, the cats had returned, and I went out and bought a kayak. I have lived happily ever after.