W Milan

W Milan

One essential trait in growing up in Milan, or any other Italian city for that matter… is belonging… that sense of belonging you may find in the US when waving a national flag… except in Italy, and most of modern Europe, national flag waving are identified with neo-fascism…
Back to my belonging… as a young Italian male, I had to have a favorite team… Milan (red and black), Inter (blue and black) and Juve (black and white)… Milan and Inter were local Milanese teams… while Juve was from Torino (Juve was owned by Agnelli owner of Fiat)… I chose Milan because red and black were my school colors back in Alexandria, making me a Milanista, i.e. rooting for the Milan team…
The only problem I have with this is that Berlusconi (yes the clown who is prime minister of Italy) owns the AC Milan team putting me, and many others, in a very uncomfortable position… by the way the W in W Milan is short for Viva…

After three years of school, I graduated with a Diploma in Electronics… where I learned basics in electronics and television. As the school end approached I went to the British Consulate and got a list of UK television manufacturing companies and wrote them asking for a job in England, explaining that I was an alumnus of British education system and was looking to live in England…
As the summer approached, I spent two months vacationing in Greece until I received a telegram from my great uncle Edmond indicating that he had a job for me in Cambridge, England.

Cambridge was a dream… it reminded me of the dreams I had of “going to university”. Atmosphere was so relaxed in Cambridge, after the hectic Milano… everybody was biking… luckily after two days I met a guy who had an extra bike… I was living in the east part of town, some six miles out… so the bike was really handy…
Work-wise was less pleasant, my boss felt they should employ a young Englishman… so I went less often to work… and I had lots of fun… until I met by chance my boss’s niece and… I was given a train ticket to Milano … So off I went back to Milano, and found a job as television technician in a local factory.

One way of making extra money was installing UHF antennas on roofs, I had paired with a colleague, who was a carpenter and spent Saturdays and Sundays installing antennas, earning another half salary, if the weather was good…

After some three years as a television repairmen, with various companies… I finally found a job in computers… I was accepted a job at IBM.

Oriundo...

Oriundo…

An Oriundo is a person of native origin, i.e. a person whose ancestry is Italian in as my case… it was/is a terminology used by soccer players to allow them to join the Italian national team…
It also was a proof of my Italian roots… it gave me a sense of belonging… it was strange because until that moment I had lived in a city who was cosmopolitan “par excellence”… Yes, I was both Italian and Jewish and I identified with both… at times.

Luckily my father, who had been living in Milano for two years, had already arranged for me to get an Italian passport… because it had been impossible for me to get one in Alexandria since I was born during WWII, and Egypt was at war against Italy, it was impossible to register my birth in the closed Italian Consulate
Everything was OK except my father indicated my birthday to be on June 18th, instead of June 28th. It took some twenty years to get that birth date rectified, but everyone knows that bureaucracy in Italy is slow…

So now I was Italian, 14 and spoke barely the Italian language… which was a problem when deciding what school to go to.

It appeared that my mother was moving to Greece because her husband Guido found a job with an Italian company in Athens… leaving me in limbo in Milan, where my grandfather (and father) would take care of me…
Schooling was another issue… where and what school.
There was in Milano a vocational high school called ORT… they had a three year program in electronics. I remember looking at a textbook in electronics at the school and the first lesson spoke of electrons… it reminded me of chemistry, which used to be my favorite subject in Egypt… so I accepted going to ORT. The school had a boarding house and we lived and ate our meals there…

Refugee

Refugee

When I was 11 my father decided to divorce my mother and marry another woman… It sounds very common, but during the mid-fifties in the Alexandrine Jewish Community it was quite scandalous… to the point that my father, and his new wife decided to make their life elsewhere and emigrated to Milano, Italy in 1955.

In late 1956 Egypt was attacked by Israel, France and Great Britain and these forces occupied the Suez Canal within a few days… By coincidence the day before this surprise attack, my mother and her newly wed husband, Guido, embarked on a liner for a vacation cruise… you can imagine the atmosphere on this ship when news of the attack came known to all…

I was staying with my grandparents, and I remember, in late October 1956, biking to school, ignoring completely about the attack, and being told to go home… until I hear from the school.

Even though the attack in itself was a surprise, there was tension in the air in Egypt, ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, without caring who built the Canal i.e. who owned the Suez Canal…
In Nasser’s view the Canal was built on Egyptian soil, by Egyptian workers, and the colonial forces had gained ample profits to date… it was time for the rightful owners to benefit from this century old construction.
I remember buying dark blue paper, the one we used to wrap our school books with, and tape the paper to the windows… in case we would have an air attack in Alexandria… luckily the only attacks, air land and sea, were in the Sinai and in the Suez Canal area far from Alexandria or Cairo…
My mother returned a few weeks later, school started… and things returned to normal…

Things were changing… First all British and French citizens were given fifteen days to leave the country… that included citizens of Malta, a British colony (my best friend since fourth grade Carmelo Baldacchino was one of them), of Cyprus, another British colony (my mother’s friend Tassia had to leave), even Algerians were viewed as French… victims of colonial rules had to rush back to their homeland…

Egypt was ruled by a corrupt king (Farouk 1) who was deposed and exiled to Italy in 1952… He was deposed by a military Junta led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, who tried to right some wrongs in his homeland… Egypt had a population of twenty million, of which one million were in Alexandria and three million in Cairo… Of the million Alexandrines about one third were non Arabs and practically everyone spoke at least another language… a real “cosmopolitan city”… Being a trading capital, life in Alexandria was pleasant and easy going for almost everyone… Egypt was rich with cotton and revenue paid for the Suez Canal… but most of the riches stayed in Alexandria…
In spite of these monies, the Egyptian "fellah" (farmer) was one of the lowest remunerated in Africa… infant mortality was at an all time high… in brief the have (in Alexandria and Cairo) had much more than the have not (in the farmland)…
So Nasser decided to put an end to it… He “encouraged” the non Arab population to leave Egypt to the Egyptians, even though some families were in Egypt since the Roman Empire, others since the twelfth century, etc…
All of a sudden there was a flux of refugees who were “homeland seekers” throughout Europe… Greece, Italy and France were the principal ones…

On June 29th, 1957… I was one of them… embarking on the Esperia from Alexandria to Napoli… Little did I know that I was seeing Alexandria for the last time…
I was a “profugo” (refugee)

She is with God

She is with God…
Written in August 2008
It is so simple,
Tikva is with God…
Says Dahlia…
And Dahlia knows…
God is a simple way for a four (and a half) year old to accept death…
So…, what’s wrong with being simplistic…
Why am I writing this… why am I addressing the most important question in the universe… the meaning of life and the meaning of death…
Am I playing with words… as an easy way out… as a way to avoid the meaning of death… or as a way to avoid the inevitable… as a way to avoid death…
Why… why did my little angel die… I already know that… I already said that… she was too tired of suffering… of suffering every breath she was taking… I remember looking at her breathe and thinking what short breaths she was taking… Vai con Dio… my little one… you will always be in my heart…
What is a coincidence… why did my generator (Cyborg) break down on the day I had to go to Tikva’s farewell… to my granddaughter’s goodbye I remember how distant to Tikva I felt when I was shaking vigorously… I felt so much out of touch with the world… just me and my shaking… was this a reminder… to tell me that I am still disabled, and that my Cyborg is just a stop-gap… a temporary stop-gap…

Did I lose all my optimism for the future… can I allow my emotions to control me… the facts…
My generator implant (the one that makes me a Cyborg) all of a sudden stopped…and
The portable remote generator which I keep for cases like these broke down too… so it was impossible for me to function…
Also when I called Stanford Hospital they told me that they could do nothing till Monday (it was Friday)…
Coincidence… or Murphy’s law…
Am I condemned to live with Murphy breathing on my neck all the time…

Cyborg II

Cyborg II
Written in August 2008
A couple of days ago, I realized that my life, the life I blessed technology for rendering me a Cyborg, for inserting a generator in my brain, a generator which would eliminate my Parkinsonian tremors.
And when I had the proof that this generator works… I felt like I was leaping high into the sky…
But that lasted a mere year and a half… Yes Cyborgs do break down they are machines… and my machine suddenly said pluf!!!, no more…

If I go back to Logic101…
Cyborgs are machines,
Machines break down,
Therefore Cyborgs break down…

Is that acceptable, for a human being to go pluf!!! because of Logic101…

Some two weeks ago, I have been confronted with the death of my two month old granddaughter, it was, and still is extremely painful to lose a child… especially because there was a reason for my sweet Tikva to leave us… she was tired of struggling to breathe “every second of her life”…

When my machine went pluf!!! without a reason… and my hands were shaking and shaking and shaking… I got scared… scared that I am going back… back to my inability to walk, drive, eat properly, etc…

It was the “GOING BACK” that scared me… I have spent my last year and a half in “GETTING BETTER”, and with great success… I found that I still “have a family”… I found that I could still travel and have friends on both sides of the Atlantic… I found that I am still a human being with love of life…

And now I am going to lose all that because of Logic101???

Unless…
Unless I remember that I am now Cyborg II
and Cyborg II is a “New and Improved” cyborg technology…
Therefore Cyborg II is unbreakable…
or unpluff!!!able

Cyborg

Cyborg
Written in August 2008

Late this morning as I was sitting on a bench waiting for my ride back home from Stanford Hospital, I was remembering about a year and a half ago when I called myself a cyborg… with my new brain probe I was jokingly (?) speaking of adding a xxxx to my brain…
What is xxxx? I could be a port, c-sb or other, a blog or a novelty which is yet to be invented…
The common thread between them is “How do you kill them”… simple just pull the plug… all you have to know is where/what is the plug…
It’s hard to realize that, all of a sudden, the cyborg armor you have been wearing for the last year and a half, disappeared… pluf!!!
And that is how I felt after spending my most crucial and painful weekend IN MY LIFE …
Painful because my hands were shaking like cake batter in a shaker…
Also the deep regret of missing my recently departed granddaughter Tikva’s celebration of hope, as I was talking to Gal on the phone I heard Dahlia’s voice in the background, say “Tikva is with God”
Go with God my child… and bless your sister Dahlia…

To Be Proud

To be proud
Written in August 2008
Some time ago I wrote this brief poem…
I love you because you’re mine
I love you because you’re mine
I love you because you’re mine
Are you?
What does this have to do with pride…totally random… I ignore it… but it will come to me…
Who am I proud of…
Proud of my daughter Gal, my forever princess… and her daughter Dahlia, who really believes she is a princess…
Proud of David, Gal’s husband, for giving his family the love and attention a husband/father is supposed to give…
Proud of my daughter Sharon, my sunshine always… for her gleam of light even in the darkest moment…
Proud of myself… for having made it through in these difficult times… where I can proudly say… I now know who I am… I now know where I am… I now know what I am… as they say in Latin… cogito ergo sum…
Is it sufficient for me to think…
We are in 2008, and for most of the past decade I was totally “out of it”… my drugs and my instability due to my Parkinson and the medications I was taking, made me I kind of zombie who could sometimes hide the disability of my intellect (by blaming it to Parkinson)…
As the Beijing Olympics are in full swing, I tried to remember the past Olympics…
1996 I think it was in Atlanta…
2000 I was told it was in Sydney… Zero recollection
2002 Winter games in Torino… Zero recollection
2004 I heard it was in Athens… Zero recollection
2006 Winter games ???
It is fascinating for me to notice the difference in my sanity and my memory immediately after stopping this forsaken medication… in more than just taking drugs… my life priorities have evolved… unfortunately during these years of oblivion I managed to spend all my money… thanks God for Social Security…