Un Amico Italiano by Luca Spaghetti

Author:Luca Spaghetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

12

Country Road

Bernie was an American friend I’d met during his time in Rome a few years earlier; he was spending that summer at home in Philadelphia. Bernie must have been around forty and was our height, about six feet, but instead of weighing 165 pounds he weighed quite a bit more. His physical bulk and his amiable face made him resemble John Goodman.

Bernie was a priest. He spoke seven languages, including American sign language, and was very proud of the fact. We had met him in Rome, at our parish church. At noon every Saturday, playing soccer with our friends on the little field, we could hardly help but notice this odd overgrown lad dressed like a Boy Scout. Only later did we discover he was a priest, and extraordinarily likable.

Equally out of the ordinary were his dreams and ambitions. One of his dreams, for instance, was to become a character on Star Trek: the chaplain of the Starship Enterprise . Unfortunately, when we met Captain Kirk in New York, we hadn’t managed to put in a good word for our friend back in Rome. But Bernie never gave up. Every year he attended the STIC Convention, the meeting of the Star Trek Italian Club. All the fans and experts on the Star Trek saga show up dressed as their favorite characters. We always knew in advance what Bernie’s costume was going to be. Every so often we got a glimpse of his creations. We were always bowled over by the incredible attention to detail he lavished on them. We wondered how his big, clumsy-looking hands could cut, glue, and stitch things the size of a pinhead. It was astonishing.

He also had a deep and abiding love of trains. Real trains and model trains. He knew absolutely everything about trains. He was proud that he had actually driven more than one real train, and we were proud of him after seeing what he was hiding away in the basement of his house in Magnolia, New Jersey, near Philadelphia: a giant model train set the size of the entire basement, with tiny trains chasing each other along yards and yards of winding tracks, whistling feverishly the whole time. It was an entire city built down to the smallest details by his miraculous hands, his patience, using tons of model trains and other various accessories purchased over the years.

Padre Bernie would be glad to give us a place to stay for a couple of days outside of Philadelphia. After showing us around the house in Magnolia, where he had been born and had grown up, he took us out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. When it came time to order drinks, vaunting our experience with Mexican alcoholic beverages in Tijuana, we suggested he have a delicious frozen margarita, but he ordered a Long Island iced tea, to our general, if still respectful, dismay.

When the waitress brought our drinks, I couldn’t keep my opinion to myself. Confident that I was expressing the

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