THE VALUE OF WINE

Armed with a glass of wine, I am ready to do battle in the cultural wars over the issue of “values”.  Forget the role of wine in the New Testament, since it is clear that only really crazy people take the bible literally, and some of them still use grape juice in their sacraments.  I will make my case solely on my own personal experience, which, with all humility, I consider to be very valid.

Wine to me means family.  As a young boy I helped my father and grandfather pick the grapes in our vineyard.  I wish I could say that I stomped around on them in my bare feet, but alas, that pleasure was denied me.  I did however play in the huge upright barrel that remained from the commercial wine making days; access was through a small door that opened near the bottom.  I remember it as huge, but it was probably about 8-10 feet tall and 5-6 feet across.  But I digress.

Like so many first generation Italian-Americans, my father made wine every year, even long after the grapes were gone.  In fact he did this his entire life excluding the few years his health prevented him from doing so.  There were always 5-6 barrels of wine in our cellar.  In later years 5-gallon glass and plastic vessels replaced the wooden barrels.  A gallon of red wine was a fixture in our kitchen, often on the floor by my father or grandfather at dinnertime and the wine was sipped from small juice glasses, never the stemmed wine glasses we see today. 

When aunts, uncles, and cousins came to visit they never left without first having coffee, wine, and more often than not, food.  Until he died, all of my visits to my uncle Ferrar, dad’s older brother, began with a glass of wine along with some bread, cheese, and perhaps peppers and/or salami.  Of course he made his own wine, as did my uncle Ren, another older brother, who left the farm and moved to Long Island. (His name was Communardo, but everyone called him Ren...quite understandable.)  He had his own grape arbor in the back yard.

Wine means the warmth of friendship and sharing.  I do enjoy a glass of wine alone, at the end of the day, but I enjoy it more when I am sitting with one or more friends and neighbors in our kitchen or on our porch.  It is a quiet way of saying, “I am glad your here with me”.  It is a gesture of friendship and hospitality.

Family, friendship, hospitality...sounds a lot like love to me.

THE MAN IN BLACK, and other friends I never knew

 

The following journal entry was written in response to the death of Johnny Cash, but the sentiment applies equally to the other friends I have lost. I have mourned the loss of these artists whose work has, in ways I cannot explain, inspired me to pursue my own creative dreams. Their music, their voices, their stories, all reach deep into a place within me that unleashes sentiments and will that were previously unfamiliar to me. I miss them dearly.

Harry Chapin, John Lennon, John Denver, Johnny Cash, Jerry Orbach, and now,
Luciano Pavarotti.

9-13-03

Amy called me at 7:30 in the morning to tell me Johnny Cash died, and sadness and melancholy quietly settled in and accompanied me for the rest of the day. The man whose music has been so much a part of my life for over 25 years is gone, and I feel like I have lost a friend. I saw him perform twice in my life, but never met him.  He was present to me in his music, looming larger than life, representing what I admired - strength, independence, sensitivity, and creativity, a fragile and vulnerable man, taking life on his own terms. In my mind, the man in black felt the worlds pain, and responded to it with love, for only love could allow someone to create such an abundant body of work, spanning generations and cultural divides, as his has done.

Whether or not Johnny Cash really possessed these attributes is immaterial, what matters is that through his music and his life they were made real, and shared with me and countless others. .

His music encompasses wide range of emotional experiences, but the common denominator is the evocation of all that is human and personal. There is nothing abstract in his songs, only the presence of the personal, and I admired and respected him for that. His music makes me feel what I want to feel.

Johnny Cash was a man who successfully pursued a creative life, doing what he wanted to do, on his own terms. For that he was my hero.