On a Saturday afternoon, I stood before several boxes full of old memories. I sighed heavily. It was the last big bit of endless pieces that needed to be organized after months and months of moving last year.
I finally decided to walk away from it all, closing a chapter that included a 17th-century farm where I had accumulated pets and heaps of drama.
While the pets will be with me as long as they are breathing, I decided to let the drama go and surrender to a reasonable life.
Now 48, nearly a year after moving in with my parents, our household consists of my nearly 24-year-old daughter, 5 cats, and 5 large dogs.
No, the pets weren’t all mine. There is a “Brady Bunch” story behind the absurd amount of fur that needs to be vacuumed on a daily basis. My pet situation deserves its own chapter.
What I didn’t expect were the exhilarating finds within the boxes. I had to decide what to keep and what to get rid of, just as with every other box I had opened in the months before.
This time, it was life-changing. I found photos, letters, old passports, dating back to my birth... and two diaries from two very important transitional phases in my life.
The first significant letter was from my grandfather. Bologna, Feb 16th, 1978. It was addressed to my father. It was sent 2 days after my birth. A 6-page letter full of humor and emotion.
My father had married my mother one year prior, almost to the day, on Feb 15th, 1977. My grandparents hadn’t yet met my mother and two half-siblings.
In the letter, they talked about the joy of hearing my father’s happiness in his voice during the phone call the morning I was born.
In Italy, there is a tradition of naming children after their grandparents. If I had been born a boy, I would have been “Francesco.” My grandfather writes, “Your mother made sure I mentioned that regarding the name, she wins.”
My father had been sure I was going to be a boy, but my grandfather pointed out, “See, it’s all the same, isn’t it?” He said so many loving and endearing things that I’d love to share, but I think I’ve illustrated my point. He was known for being an irritable man with a short temper, but the letter gave me a deeper sense of our family’s heart, a first real glimpse at an emotional snapshot of what that moment was like. As my father read through the pages with a somewhat emotional voice, I could almost feel as though I were experiencing the moment firsthand.
Everything in those boxes was just thrown together. I laughed at horrible hairstyles, better pictures (although those were few and far between), admired my mother’s beauty during her “Barbie Doll” years, my brother’s and sister’s dorky periods, and mine, too.
I used my phone to take snapshots of some of the old photos and sent messages to people I’m still acquainted with, 25-40 years later. The laughing emojis and comments that came back were priceless. Between the letters and the photos, there were both laughter and some sadder, more melancholy moments.
Some of those letters were from friends who had unfortunately passed away. I’m filled with gratitude for having kept all of that after so long because I got the opportunity to be with them once again.
Then came two diaries. The first one I received as a gift shortly before moving back to the United States from Italy.
My father was an automotive designer at Ford. In 1986, Ford sent us to Turin, Italy, to live so my dad could have his “foreign experience” at their Ghia office.
My brother and sister opted to stay with their father in Ohio.
We rented a section of a medieval castle called “Castelvecchio” in Moncalieri, in Turin’s hillside. When I arrived, I didn’t know how to speak Italian. My parents decided to send me to an Italian public elementary school (Scuola Santa Brigida), an uncommon choice for transferring families, since the American school was right down our street and Ford had offered to pay the tuition.
I’m glad my parents didn’t go for that option. My years at Scuola Santa Brigida were among the most beautiful in my life.
My teacher, Rossanna Bargis, was a round, grandmotherly figure. She was about 4’ 10” tall, or 147 cm. She had long gray hair that she rolled into a French twist every day, and had a very sweet voice.
I remember her wearing a medium-weight navy wool twinset, a straight skirt that fell below her knees, nude nylons rolled just above the hem (visible whenever she sat down), and black leather lace-up shoes like the ones nuns wear. She dressed that way every single day, every season of the year, without fail.
At least, that’s how my 8-year-old self remembers it.
I had 6 classmates: Barbara, Fabio, Jonathan, Claudio, Paolo, and Mohammed. In my box, I found letters from all of them.
The first weeks at my new school were filled with a lot of gestures and pictures. Within 3 months, I was caught up to speed with my classmates. It’s like I had been speaking Italian my entire life.
Rosanna Bargis was both loving and strict. She filled us with affection and stories. She would take us out into the woods and show us how to hunt for mushrooms, march us up the hillside to her house, and teach us how to make tagliatelle. We were assigned homework daily, and when we didn’t do it, well, she had a long, thin whip of a stick.
One classmate, Claudio, seemed to always be the one standing facing the chalkboard. He rarely knew the answer to anything. After prolonged silence and his fidgeting with his shirt, she’d eventually haul him off by his ear. She’d pull out that stick and ask the class to answer the question. When it became apparent that no one had studied, wham! She’d strike one of our desks, her face beet-red, her French twist falling apart, scaring the bejesus out of us with the scope of asserting her boundaries!
She commanded respect, and while her actions are contrary to what modern school systems allow today, I look upon that time with a full heart. In fact, I know that every single one of her students carried her in their hearts long after she was their teacher. We used to get visitors from ex-alumni who shared some fun stories.
As the hours flew by, letter after letter, picture after picture, I felt the bittersweet memories coming over me.
Being called downstairs for lunch felt like an interruption of my immersive time-travel experience.
Saturday was turning out to be much more fun than I had planned. I hadn’t expected that reading old letters and diary entries from the late 80s and early 90s would be such a transporting experience.
I remembered specific friends writing me lots of letters, but until you start putting them in dedicated piles, you don’t realize just how many. It was overwhelming, and the adult me, knowing how precious time is, made me understand what a treasure it is to hold the time and energy those people invested in writing me. They held me in their thoughts, they took the time to write it on multiple pages, to put a stamp on it, and to take it to the post office. If that isn’t affection...
As soon as I got back to my boxes, I remembered a time when I felt less lucky than my Italian classmates. I got to be there for only two years. In Italy, when you enter grade school, you enter a class that you stay with for the entirety of elementary school. When you switch to middle school or high school, the same thing happens.
It can be either a miserable, traumatizing experience, or, as in my case, an experience so filled with happiness that it defines what your standard for what life should be.
Those two years in that class were filled with adventures, comedy, love, and a scenic backdrop of Monviso and the surrounding chain of mountains. I can’t recall a boring moment.
As the day went on, I found my first diary. It was a gift from Claudio that I received shortly before I returned to the United States. Each of my classmates and my teacher had written an entry with careful penmanship and a beautiful drawing, each telling me how much they’d miss me and hoped I’d remember our time together. They got their wish.
When I got back to the United States, I spent the rest of my grade school education longing for the life I had left behind, so much so that I think I talked about it every day of my life. That was one of the many reasons I had become a misfit.
Castle life with surrounding gardens, climbing trees, and friends I chased around all afternoon was very different from the 27-kid classroom I found myself in when I got to the 5th grade in Northville, Michigan. I hadn’t quite realized that I wasn’t, as the American expression goes, “ in Kansas” anymore.
I naively tried to save every underdog in my class, not realizing that popularity contests were a thing. I initially gave my teacher hugs and kisses on Fridays, just as I had with Rosanna Bargis, and I didn’t do my homework because my teacher never asked me about it the next day. I just thought, “Cool, no one is checking.” A mid-semester report card with a bunch of zeros from missed assignments let me know otherwise.
Because I had befriended every kid that was labeled as a “loser,” I was awarded the same label. Hugging and kissing my teacher only gave the other kids valuable material to rip on me with.
The only thing I felt capable of at school was not fitting in.
Throughout all of that, looking at mental and emotional snapshots of that time, reading through my school assignments and diary entries, I realize now how much I was in my own world.
My entries are full of me talking about playing the piano and flute, cooking, and porcelain doll pouring. Yes, at the age of ten, that’s what I was up to.
At around 3 pm, I found an envelope containing a letter from 1994 along with a picture of a teenage guy and a girl. I didn’t recognize them, but apparently, the guy in the picture knew me. He explains that the girl is his bestie. The letter was shipped from Novara. He mentions my best friend, Summer, and suggests that his best friend, Veronica from the picture, become pen pals with Summer. Then, I find another letter from Veronica to Summer.
I was so puzzled by the letters. I looked online and finally found someone with his name on LinkedIn who looked like it could be him. I took a picture of the old photograph and a screenshot of the guy’s LinkedIn profile pic, and asked ChatGPT if they could be the same person. Chat tells me it could. So I message the guy on LinkedIn and say, “Hi, we haven’t exchanged words since 1994.”
He replies shortly after with, “Excuse me, but do I know you?” I replied with the photo I was holding and a picture of the envelope with his Novara address, and asked, “Is this you?”
He confirms that it is and asks me how I have that. I respond, “Apparently, we were corresponding in 1994, but I don’t remember either.”
After some back-and-forth, I found a 3rd letter, and there it was. We met in 1993 on the beach in Gabicce, near Rimini. He was friends with a group of my cousin’s friends when I was 15.
Then he asked, “Did we have a thing going?” Me: “No, I had a crush on Pierre.” Him: “What does Summer have to do with this?” Me: “I don’t know, I must have talked a lot about her, she was my best friend.”
We exchanged more messages about where I was living at the time, where I live now, and so on.
Hours later, he writes, “Let me get this straight, in 1993, we met on the beach. We had nothing going on because you were crushing on Pierre. You talked my ear off about your friend Summer, I tried to pan her off to my friend Veronica. 32 years later, you’re living in the hills of Turin, unpacking boxes on a lazy Saturday that you had kept and moved overseas with over the span of 3 decades. You find my letters, you find me online, write me, and... what you don’t know is that, coincidentally, as you wrote me your first message on LinkedIn, I was talking to some friends from Cattolica, who used to go to that beach with me, about the Summers of 1993 and 1994.
We might meet up in a couple of months. At this point, while we both remember the period, neither of us remembers meeting each other. Who knows, maybe when we meet face to face, memories will get triggered.
I ended that night reading through my old diary entries. I haven’t laughed that hard since I can remember. My sides were hurting, and tears rolled down my face, still at 1 am, at the absurdity, yet my wildly consistent mind.
Some of it, I read out loud to my daughter, who laughed with me and at my terrible spelling. Some highlights included me writing, “Dear Diary, I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while.” Or, “Dear Diary, how are you?” Or, “Dear Diary, sorry I can’t write you tonight, I’m going to read.” Or, “Dear Diary, Happy Thanksgiving!” at the end of a long rant about my schoolmates.
I had a full-blown relationship with my diary. Apologizing to it? Asking it how it was doing - often?
What struck me was how similar my relationship with my diary was to my conversations with AI now. The diary had been a witness, a place to process my thoughts, feelings, and endless observations about the world. The only difference is that AI answers back.
When my daughter told my father what we had discovered, my dad’s response was, “It took your mom a few years to join planet earth.” He wasn’t kidding. I really was living in my own world.
What I’ve realized is that, from a very young age, I saw the world in terms of deeper meaning and stories. For example, a personal favorite was a 5th-grade journal entry.
My teacher had written on the blackboard: Who is Rumeal Robinson? My response: I think that Rumeal Robinson is a person who met Chist . And I think his name has ben menshoned because maby he loved Chist. Maby he was one of the few Romans that loved him.
After circling my many spelling errors, she comments below: “He is a U of M basketball player.” That pretty much sums up what my inner world looked like.
I’ve been meaning to write about my bi-cultural experience for some time. I never really knew how to approach it until now. Maybe it was meant to wait because finding those letters and diaries became a portal to my past self.
After opening those boxes, I can now see the memory from both the child’s perspective, the one that I’ve held on to all these years, and the perspective of an adult who now understands the child.
There are many recurring themes, such as in a diary entry at age 12, where I write, “I’ve been waiting for a man to love me my whole life,” in reference to all my friends having boyfriends. Barely being able to read that one out loud to my daughter as I grasped for air between laughs, she remarks, “Well, Mom, it looks like not much has changed for you so far.”
The multitude of projects and interests that have been going on since I can remember.
The way I approached the world was with a hope for universal goodness, gratitude, and a desire for deeper meaning.
People make many assumptions about me. That’s what we humans do: we fill in the blanks when we don’t know, and I’m certainly an individual who provokes a lot of question marks.
I realize my view of the world isn’t common. The reasons I chose to live in Italy aren’t the reasons that one would easily conclude.
I’m a true romantic. Despite everything, I still tend to approach life with curiosity, hope, and the assumption that there’s meaning hidden somewhere inside the mess.
Grounding myself takes extra work, but looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing. It has been my recipe for discovering a world full of rarely acknowledged truths.
Throughout my life, I’ve heard my father say, “No matter where you go, there you are.” I used to think it was a joke. At some point, I got it. That weekend, I found the proof.
*“My sweetest Tempesta (Storm),
Your serene exuberance, your joy for life, your warm humanity, and your affectionate presence illuminated our school days.
May our friendship survive time and distance, remaining forever fresh and loyal.”
— Rosanna Bargis, June 13, 1988