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me immediately to the hospital. I checked in at 7pm; at 10pm I was already out of surgery.
They told me that one of my arteries was 99% blocked. They cleaned it out completely. I
was lucky not to have a major heart attack.”
The stories are all interesting and different. They lead to other stories and we begin to share
our lives in more depth. It all reminds me sometimes of my hitch-hiking experiences back
in the early seventies. People would often pick you up to help pass the time of a long, bor-
ing drive. Or, you would find yourself in the back of a pickup with another guy was who
headed in the same direction. Sometimes you would buddy-up and continue hitch-hiking
together for the next day or two until your paths diverged. Often the conversations reached
a level of intimacy and self-disclosure in the space of a few hours that you hadn't reached
with friends back home in the course of years. If you were traveling long distances, say
across Canada or across Europe, intense friendships would form and dissolve at a giddying
pace.
It's true that in normal life you also made and surrendered friendships, and you occa-
sionally moved from one place to another. It's just that on the road, while patterns were
the same, they were vastly condensed and accelerated. Hitch-hiking was to normal life as
casino gambling is to business enterprise. And, now, here I am again making friends and
exchanging phone numbers, talking about life and death and how I see the world with
people who were strangers three days ago and who are moving on tomorrow.
I notice after a couple of weeks that my Italian has gotten more fluent than it's ever been
before. I listen to hours of chit-chat and story-telling ever day, and I tell my own tales as
well. It's definitely having an impact.
Visiting Americans have sometimes asked me whether I dream in Italian. When I think
about it, I realize that I dream in English, but there are people who appear in my dreams
who speak Italian. Typically, I reply to them in Italian. My dreams perfectly reflect my ex-
istential situation: Pam and I speak English at home with our girls and with each other;
when I go out, I engage people in Italian. Now I have landed in a world where the situation
is reversed: it's all in Italian with occasional interruptions from English speaking visitors. I
realize that, for the very first time, I am speaking Italian without thinking beforehand about
what I want to say. I'm paying attention to the topic, not the means of delivery, and the
words are gushing forth. It's exhilarating; I never thought I would get here. I had come to
believe that I had started learning Italian too late in life to ever achieve fluency and trans-
parency. Now, thanks to my month-long language immersion class here in the cardiology
ward, I am finally beginning to hit my stride.
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