Thank you, Maddie.
That's really sweet.
And thank you, Ander and Alison and everyone here.
Thank you, Tyler.
Thank you, Becka.
Yes, it feels like coming home, and it also
feels kind of very surreal at the same time
to be able to do this.
And I feel very, very lucky.
So yeah, thank you for having me in this kind of temporary home.
I write very long essays most of the time.
So I think I'll just read two halves, and they're both about,
I guess, transformations.
Maybe that's kind of a BS linkage for them.
But they're both about transformations-- two halves
of those.
And the first is called "The Path to the Saints."
And you really can hear me?
You swear to that?
OK, all right.
So this is "The Path to the Saints."
"In 2008, microbiologists discovered two new species
of bacteria growing within the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome.
This discovery thrilled the admittedly narrow set
of biologists since the bacteria's existence
contained useful keys on how to better preserve
the underground networks.
Yet the bacteria also ate away at the catacomb walls,
staining the volcanic rock white,
causing minerals to dry out until they became
a fine powder, an efflorescence like granulated flour or ground
bone.
Their presence created a dilemma.
What is to be done when the only thing left alive in a place
also destroys it?
I lived in the north of Rome in the fall of 2006.
Tourist maps cut off this part of the city, the neighborhood
outside the ancient walls where the Romans buried their dead.
I was studying abroad for a semester in college,
and so lived is probably the wrong word.
A friend once said you only lived in a place
if you received mail there.
And I did not.
Instead, I rolled my suitcase into
a small, windowless bedroom for a home stay
with Paolo, an architect in his late 30s.
Paolo lived by himself in an apartment
his mother owned on a street named after Vivaldi.
He rented the extra room to students.
I was one of the dozen or so Americans that
had stayed with him over the years,
though he did not speak much English.
And I, despite having wanted to go to Rome for three years,
knew no Italian.
Paolo, by his own account, was a melancholy guy.
He listened to Tom Waits at night.
And since architectural work was slim in the Italian economy,
he drafted freelance designs at his desk.
He owned a computer from the 1990s that he never turned on.
He had curly, pipe-cleaner hair swept back from his forehead,
giving the impression he might bald someday.
He looked like the villain from a movie I couldn't remember.
I was very nervous to meet him.
And the first thing I did was to explain,
with demonstrative hand gestures,
that I did not like George W. Bush.
Paolo was disciplined.
He trained for half marathons in the park,
and he timed his pasta with a stopwatch.
He allowed himself a baby can of Coke with dinner each night.
Mio vizio, he'd say, pointing to the can, my vice.
We ate together at his kitchen table
while watching histrionic Italian game
shows where contestants had to choose
between the unknown contents of large wooden boxes
and follow sets of seemingly arbitrary, inconsequential
rules.
'I hate this show,' Paolo would say.
Then he'd go on to explain its rules to me.
Shortly after I moved in with Paolo,
my father became unexpectedly sick and he began to die,
hospitalized first in Rio de Janeiro and then New York City.
I did a lot of walking around those months,
beating the same path between school and Paolo's apartment,
waiting for bad news via expensive cell phone calls.
I watched old women walk around my neighborhood
and grew furious at them for their health.
I'd wandered down to Villa Borghese where
I'd stare at the Bernini sculptures
alongside the other tourists.
Dutiful Aeneas with Anchises on his back,
carrying his aged father out of Troy.
I'd circle the highways that ringed the city, lost
in the middle of the night until the metros opened
in the morning.
I'd walk back to Paolo's house, sleep an hour, then wake up
and walk to my elementary Italian class.
In short, I had very little mooring me
to real life except for my host.
He asked how I was doing.
He'd make me speak in Italian.
And then he let me switch back to English when I got tired.
He'd moon his eyes out to let me know he understood
what I was trying to say.
When I did the same, he laughed.
And he called me Mr. Bean, the Rowan Atkinson character
from another stupid show we both had watched.
He'd share his little can of Coke with me.
Afterwards, when I fell asleep at 9:00 PM, he'd wake me up,
so we could get gelato.
Somehow, we understood each other,
as if language were only a river whose rocks and mud
we had to wade our way through.
Paolo's house stood a 15-minute walk
from the catacombs of Priscilla.
Wealthy patrons in ancient Rome built these catacombs
beneath their property in exchange for sainthood.
Priscilla, my neighborhood benefactress
and the wife of a Roman politician,
donated her land in the late second century CE.
Roman catacombs were originally designed
like a fishbone, a central spine with galleries jackknifing off
on either side like ribs.
As burials increased, their structures
grew more complicated until, by the fifth century,
a map of the catacombs would have
looked like the molecule you memorize
for an organic chemistry test.
As the catacombs grew, it became more difficult to determine
who was buried where.
To ease navigation, the catacomb diggers
left itinera ad sanctos--
paths to the saints, skylights that guided visitors down
corridors until they reached a martyr's tomb.
Families left small markers by graves, statues or trinkets
of little value.
They carved epitaphs as well, brief messages
imploring visitors not to disturb the body,
like the no radio sign taped to a parked car.
"He lived 30 years" or "in peace" or "not a seventh part
of what once existed."
I spoke to my father twice while I was in Rome.
He was paralyzed on his right side,
so he was no longer capable of forming real speech--
only a breath and then a syllable,
a Tuh that could not become Tom.
On the other end when I spoke, I wanted to shout out loud,
like the game show host Paolo and I watched every night,
eager to window dress the Italian I was learning.
I wanted to parade the words, the short, staccato twin
syllables.
Ho dimenticato tutto mi Italiano.
I've forgotten all my Italian.
Sono stanco.
I'm tired.
Or the words when wanting to leave a crowded bus, Scuzi,
scuzi, permesso!
Excuse me, excuse me, I have to get out of here.
We visited the catacombs of Priscilla on class trips.
The tour guides showed us the mosaic
on the ceilings of women leading the Eucharist, smudged over so
that the women appeared as men.
God forbid the historical record reveal female priests.
On the walls, there is a censored Medusa's head,
her Gorgon curls whited out, the snaky
ends now a mess of ringletted hair.
All over the catacombs lay the evidence
that people reconstituted bodies to better suit a message.
I stood at the back on these trips,
bored, and waiting for the tour to be over.
I traced the electric cabling that ran along
the tops of the tunnels.
I thought how I should probably leave Rome and move
back home with my father.
I wondered why I didn't.
The tour guides told us about the walls,
the soft volcanic tufa the Romans initially
believed bees nested within, walls
that now were filled with tombs, stacked three or four high,
like bunk beds.
I thought of the rehab ahead, how my father's body and mind
would be permanently changed.
I thought of all he'd lose.
I realized I did not want to go back because my father would
not be my father anymore.
And when I knew this, I told myself,
he'd be better off dead.
I was tired, I said, and so is he.
And sometimes, it's OK to give up.
The tour guides told us that when
it grew too hot in the summer, Priscilla
would bring her family down into the catacombs
to eat their meals.
I thought how, if you thinned out Paolo's face,
and you gave him a darker head of hair,
and you cast him in dim enough light, you could say,
there goes my father."
That's all I'll read of that.
That's transformation number one.