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When I was very young, the head of the mafia in Florence told my family we had precisely three days to get out of the country--Sunday, Tuesday, and Veteran's day. I can remember the look in my father's eyes as he pleaded for Thursday as well, only to learn it had been loaned to the Pope for the war effort.
We packed all we could into our little horse-pulled carriage: bicycles, tricycles, barrels of bread, additional horses, the family car . . . but even so, some things had to be left behind. The boat, for example. That boat had been my whole life--looking at it, drawing it, imagining sailing it, watching friends sail it, sailing in similar boats, and the countless other things a child and his boat might do. I shed a tear for my childhood as the carriage bumped along and the Swiss Alps grew larger in the distance.
For weeks,
we struggled to find a path through the mountains' rocky labyrinth. Our only company were ghost towns and flocks
of lonely sheep abandoned by shepherds fleeing the glaciers. At one point, we stopped for 3 days of
repairs when the
Before we could enter the country, we had to get past the guards at Borders. My father didn't want to wait until the store closed at 9:00, so we disguised our carriage as Finnegan's Wake and went right over the heads of the vigilant, Dan-Brown-reading sentinels. We headed for the first town we saw.
It was not easy for my father to find work in our new homeland. On his second day as a store clerk, he was fired for exhaling near female customers. Picking himself up, he tried several other jobs, but each was another disaster. He worked as a baker, but he ran out of bread. He worked as an opera singer, but he ran out of breath. He worked as a plus-sized model, but he ran out of breadth. The situation seemed hopeless.
Yet God's designs are subtle indeed. As my father's opera singing grew worse, his voice grew hoarse, and his horse grew tusks, furnishing us with a continuous flow of ivory. Pianos being all the rage at the time, we sold our treasure to the King of Spain for a patent on unscrupulous business practices and the name "Antonio". In a few short months, we had built our own Swiss mafia.
The next decade
was a happy one. Our business prospered,
and survived even the economic collapse of that first summer--brought on when
the Swiss banks switched to gold from the popular but short-sighted snow
standard. I could tell something was
bothering my father, though. He had
grown increasingly cranky, and had taken to cutting off the thumbs of any boy
he caught staring at my sister's library.
I didn't have to ask what was wrong.
We both knew what it was--the unfinished business with that man who had cost
us our boat and our home in
As I write these
words, my father travels to
