CHAPTER FIVE: "Smile From Your Heart!"

The more I wrote in Italian, the more excited I got about the language, and about how it was opening me up to new feelings. Italian was infusing my life with vigor; it felt sometimes like the words, and their rolling sound, were filling me with passion and energy!

Each morning after I finished meditating, I sat down with my journal and used the translator program to write all kinds of phrases and sentences that appealed to me.

“Each moment is a gift.”

Ogni momento é un regalo.

“Life is a precious flower.”

La vita é un fiore prezioso.

“May you enjoy all the small and the large miracles today.”

Potresti goderti tutti i piccoli e grande miracoli oggi.

I felt a kind of thrill when I spoke the sentences out loud. I just loved the way they sounded. Using Babbel, I tested my accent -- I spoke Italian into a microphone, and if I had the right accent, the program would ring a little bell!

One morning out of the blue I recalled one of Dee’s (my mom Dena’s nickname) favorite sayings. "Li cascado lu caso sober le maccheroni." Translation:

The cheese fell right on the macaroni!

Meaning, things worked out perfectly well for me!

My mother said that to me frequently after I left for college. I suppose she was right. After all, I was attending an Ivy League school on an academic scholarship. But when I met and married my husband Richard in 1978, she said it more than ever. My in-laws were fairly well off, and they were in the gourmet catering business, so my wedding – which we announced only five weeks before it happened – was quite an elaborate affair.

There was another saying my mother used to say to me: “Hey, tu se fortunata!” – Hey, you are so fortunate!

Honestly, though, I had never really considered myself fortunate!

Looking back, it is fair to say that I spent most of my life in a low level of depression.

My first dip into depression occurred during my sophomore year in college. In March of 1972, my high school boyfriend (who was a freshman at Harvard) and I parted ways in a rather romantic, sweet way: he and I sat in Harvard Square long into the night. He, being a musician, serenaded me with his beautiful blonde Martin guitar! We hadn't fallen out of love; we were simply recognizing that we needed space in order to live our lives fully at college.

Well, so, back at Brown that spring, I found myself nosediving quickly into a state of torpor. I wandered around Providence feeling lost. Lonely. Unable to focus. I tried going to the counseling center, but they couldn't seem to remember my name from one visit to the next.

And then, a rather remarkable physician, Dr. Horace Martin**, who was my lab instructor in microbiology, reached out to me. He called me up to his desk after class one day and began talking to me. As we left the classroom, he told me about his family -- he had seven children. And soon enough, he asked me to come over for dinner. So that night, I accompanied him home to eat spaghtetti and meatballs.

He and his wife were incredibly sweet; after dinner, they insisted that I stay overnight.

I guess I must have worn my depression all over my face! What I didn't learn until later was that Dr. Martin had suffered from depression himself. He was keenly aware of the signs and he had recognized them in me because he knew them so well himself!

The next morning Dr. Martin drove me back to campus and when he dropped me off, he told me to play my guitar. He also gave me a very simple piece of advice that I have remembered for more than 50 years!

"Remember to do something really nice for yourself every single day," he said. "Even if it's just treating yourself to a candy bar."

I think back to my Mom's saying: “Claudia, tu se fortunata!” And I realize that Mom was right. God knows what would have happened to me if Dr. Martin hadn't reached out to offer his incredible kindness!

I recovered from the depression in 1972. I was again, very fortunate! I was invited to spend that summer in Norway, living with a lovely young woman named Liv Bremer, who had been the foreign exchange student in my high school. Liv and I had bonded, and now, she really wanted me to come to Norway, and miraculously, even though I had very little money, I did! She found me a job in a "margarinfabrik," a margerine factory where I wore a white coat, a white net on my hair and a pair of white clogs. I packed huge slabs of margerine, and also, on a separate machine, peanut butter.

Liv and her friends and I trekked all over Norway's gorgeous landscape, from the remarkable fjords in the south to the beautiful mountains and bay of Bergen up north.

I was so smitten with Norway that I actually wrote the Dean of Students at Brown in August of 1972 and asked him if I could spend the semester at the University of Oslo. It's hard to believe, but I really thought that I would be able to take chemistry in Norwegian!

Thankfully, reason prevailed and I returned to Brown feeling excited about my junior year!

I had managed to steer through my first serious episode of depression. Miraculously, I would go through most of my adult life before it did flare up in a big way.

Looking back, however, I realize that I lived most of my life under the shadow of a low level of depression. That feeling of being frozen. That inability to experience deep joy on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis.

It's quite apparent to me when I look back at photos. My husband and I would always bemoan the fact that I couldn't seem to smile.

He on the other hand had a knockout of a smile.

"Honey, just smile from your heart," he would say, aiming the camera at me.

Over and over again, I would try. Over and over and over again, I would fail.

Honestly, I didn't understand what it meant to smile from my heart until I finally embraced my ancestry, deep in my soul!

And I didn't embrace my ancestry until I allowed the Italian language to pour out of me!

**The kindness that Dr. Martin showed me back in 1972 cannot be overstated! I hope readers will click on the link to the story I wrote about him and his wife Florence, both of whom deserve metals for their deep and abiding humanity!

CHAPTER FOUR: "More, more, more -- Ancora, ancora, ancora italiano, Per Piacere!"

Over the next few days, whenever I started to feel anxious, I simply turned to the translator.

I typed in whatever I was feeling, and boom, instantly the sentences in English appeared in Italian.

Over and over again I wrote, “Don’t be afraid!”

Non aver paura!

Non aver paura!

Non aver paura!

“Feel the life inside your body.”

Senti la vita dentro il tuo corpo.

One morning, however, something happened when I started typing. Without warning, without my being aware that I was even typing the word, out came:

“BREATHE!”

Respirare!

That word, breathe, stopped me cold. Instantly, it jogged an incredibly vivid memory. I was a little girl again, only about four years old, and I was standing beside my mother’s bed.

I can see her shiny black hair lying in soft curls on her shoulders. My mother

is so beautiful, but today she is hunched over a couple of pillows and she is wheezing and sweating and struggling to breathe, as she so often was when I was a young child. I am watching her with mounting anxiety. I am so terrified that my mother is going to die.

I get up from the computer. I am crying. I put on my emerald jacket and my purple boots and ignoring Poco, I hurry out the door. The temperature has dropped and the wind is wickedly cold. I walk out into the meadow, with no gloves or a hat, heading for the willow trees. Overhead is a cloudy sky. I cannot shake the image of my mother

bent over those soft white pillows. I close my eyes and breathe in and out, forcing myself to slow my breathing way down. Then I go back inside.

I can’t decide whether to go back to the computer. So I make myself a cup of turmeric and tension tamer tea. I add honey and milk and carry the tea to the sofa. I sit there staring out at the meadow. At that moment Poco starts barking furiously.

Curious, I stand up. I gasp! I count SEVEN young deer

prancing and dancing across the meadow. I feel a rush of love and gratitude for the deer. Suddenly I feel overwhelming love rise up inside me!

That's when it hits me: I remember Mom saying how deeply afraid she was during those asthma attacks! I remember Mom telling me that her worst fear in those days was that she would die and we kids would find her, dead, in her bed.

Mom had three young kids and no one to help her. My dad was in school, in another city, training for a better job. He was away most of the time.

My father's mother, who lived nearby, could have helped her, but she was working in the clock factory, and she didn't have time.

Eventually, my mother's mother, Grandma Mish, came to the rescue. She had one of her sons drive her to Bristol, where we lived. Grandma Mish packed us up and moved Mom and the three of us kids to her house in Canton, Connecticut, where we lived for six months or more with her and Grandpa Claude (yes, I was named for him.)

Thinking about Mom now, I can feel just how terrified she was!

Thank God for my blessed

grandparents, who came to her -- and our -- rescue!

As I was only three or four, I'm really vague on how long it was. My older brother Rich*, however, has perfect recall: he remembers attending first grade at the Canton Elementary School, where Grandpa Claude was the custodian. Rich was more than happy to escape Saint Anthony's School, where the nuns were unbelievably mean to us! More on those wicked nuns -- Grandpa Claude called them black "crows!"-- (in his dialect, "cornudi nidi!") later on!

Meanwhile, the deer are gone now.

And somehow, I feel like my own terror has passed. I sit here, glad to be alive.

*****

*My brother Rich recalls with great joy the Canton Elementary School, where he went as a little boy. "All the floors were really shiny and it smelled good, and that was because Grandpa Claude did a good job as a custodian!" Saint Anthony's School, which he refers to as the "prison," didn't smell so good.

"I remember going down the hall to visit Grandpa in his little room, the place where he kept his cleaning supplies. He ate lunch there. I remember that he had a bottle of wine, it was small, like a salad dressing bottle. He had a glass or two of wine at lunch at the school."

CHAPTER THREE: "How Italian Comes Alive Inside Me!"

Looking back now, I know that I never would have connected to my Mom or to my bis bis nonna Filomena, or to any of my other ancestors if I hadn't started "speaking" Italian.

Italian has been inside me for as long as I have been alive.

My Mom was fluent, and she always spoke to her parents in Italian. So often when I was growing up, the three of them would be conversing and I would be sitting with them at the dining room table, listening to Mom and Grandma Mish and Grandpa Claude. I was absorbing words and sayings without realizing it. While I couldn't speak Italian, I could understand much of what I heard growing up.

In high school, I studied Spanish and French for four years. Italian wasn't offered. But in college, when I could have immersed myself in the language and in Italian history, I wasn't the least bit interested.

It wasn't until I fell into that endlessly frozen pit back in 2020 that I turned to Italian to rescue me.

And the strangest thing? I had no warning, and absolutely no idea that it was happening!

One morning, early in February of 2020, just a month or so before the GP descended, I found myself staring out into the meadow, which was blank with fog. I sat in the living room, on the sofa, feeling blank myself. Completely empty. Confused and lonely.

I thought it might help if I wrote about what I was feeling. But every time I opened my laptop, I just stared at the screen. My breath felt frozen inside me. My heart felt like a dark stone.

I felt lonely and scared. And the worst part of it was, I wasn’t sure why I was feeling so desperate.

At some point I started crying. A few minutes later, without really thinking about what I was doing, I opened Google translator on my laptop and set it to translate from English to Italian. And then I started typing:

“Try saying it in Italian." Instantly that became:

Prova a dirlo in italiano.

I spoke the words out loud. Once. Twice. Three times. I really liked the way the Italian sounded coming out of my mouth. Better yet, I liked the way the vibration felt as the sumptuous words resonated throughout my chest.

It was as if somebody had turned on a warm faucet inside me.

I sat there, translating every sentence that came to mind. And the sentences came fast and furiously.

“I am so afraid of being frozen.”

Ho cosi paura di essere congelato.

“I want to melt the ice inside me.”

Voglio sciogliere il ghiaccio dentro di me.

“Let go of the fear and feel the love!”

Lascia andare la paura e senti l’amore!

“Why am I so afraid?”

Perche ho cosi paura?

I was no closer to understanding why I was so frightened. But there was something about the soft round sounds of the Italian -- I couldn't get enough of them. They were just so... comforting.

And affirming.

The melodic words made my chest feel alive, like it was filled with a thick garden of pale green ferns and palms, with orchids

growing here and there; at the center of this garden was a beautiful fountain sprouting sparkling blue water.

Saying the Italian words out loud made me feel like I was speaking something very true and special to me, something that was peculiarly warm, and beating incessantly inside my heart.

For days I wrote the translations down in my journal. I wrote the English sentences in red pen. And then I wrote the Italian sentences in green pen. Soon I enrolled in an on-line Italian class. A Babbel class, in which I started...

Babbling in Italian!!!

The desire to speak the language of my grandparents had taken over!

How come, I wondered, had it taken me until I was 68 years old to want to speak Italian? And why was it, now that I was locked in a frozen pit with no way out, that I couldn't seem to get enough Italian?

And while the answers to those questions were really very simple, and should have been obvious to me, it would be almost four years before I figured them out!

****** That first morning when I began "speaking" in my native tongue, I lost track of time. I was writing down sentences for God knows how long.

Finally I got up from the computer. I walked into the living room. Poco was resting in her fluffy little chair, the way she always does at this time of the morning.

“Let’s go Miss Poco,” I whispered to her as I attached the leash to her halter. I opened the door to the meadow.

Together, we strode out across the brown tufts of grass. A layer of fog still sat on the far hillsides. There were no birds. Where were the birds? Where did they go? And why was there no snow?

Every so often we stopped. I inhaled. The air was so fresh and clean. I held my breath. We walked to the very edge of the tall tufted marsh grasses.

It started to rain, a spiffy little sprinkle. Here it was February and it was 44 degrees out.

I turned to face the house. My husband was on the back porch, sitting on a bench. He waved to me and I waved back.

I continued standing in the field, inhaling the cool moist air.

Soon, Poco and I headed back to the house. Suddenly there was so much I wanted to say. But now, I wanted to say it solo in italiano.

Oh. And it was right about that moment that I began writing a fictional story. A story about a character I called Leah!

CHAPTER TWO: My Healing Begins as Mom Reaches Out to Me From the Great Beyond!

In that last crazy chapter, the one I called "All Things Must Pass and All Things Stay the Same," I mentioned several times that I was suffering from a meterological crisis four years ago, that is, I was emotionally blocked. I felt as frozen as my crusty white lawn.

I know that I threw a lot of you for a loop with that chapter, telling stories about Leah and Gina. Talking about climate degradation. Lecturing you the reader about Einstein. About TIME and CHANGE and CALCULUS. Apologies for all that.

So this time, I'm going to keep it simple.

I'm going to tell you about how my healing began, on the day when Mom came to me, when I first began to open my heart to the possibility of miracles.

It was SHABBAT, Saturday, MARCH 21, 2020, the very first Saturday of the GREAT PANDEMIC. When I refer to the GREAT PANDEMIC

from here on, I will refer to it only as the GP.

I was sitting that day with my laptop at the desk that Mom left me years back. It is an especially handsome oak desk, and the seat of the chair looks like something Mom

might have done herself, a tapestry of navy blue with colorful flowers.

I have no explanation for what happened next. But I am convinced that for the first time (but not the last) my mom, Dena Rotondo Ricci, reached out to me from the GREAT BEYOND, which I will refer to from here on as the GB, although that might be easily confused with the GP, the GREAT PANDEMIC. I believe Mom made herself known to me during that stressful time in order to offer her reassurance that everything would turn out alright.

It is only now, with the benefit of hindsight, that I can look back and say, yes, this was definitely DAY ONE of what is/was my healing, the melting of my deeply frozen self!

On that Saturday, the end of the first official week of the GP, that damn COVID 19 virus had closed everything down, including, of course, our synagogue. It being Saturday, and me being quite shaken and upset about the GP, I decided to Zoom into a Shabbat morning service at another temple in town. I even donned my purple prayer shawl.

To say the service was chaotic does not begin to describe what was happening that Shabbat morning on the zoom. How boring and disorganized it was. And when everyone tried singing together, oh dear LORD, what a disaster!

So I sat back. I muted the Zoom. Sunshine was pouring through the window of my studio/study, falling gently on my keyboard. I was enjoying sitting at Mom's desk, because most of the time I write in the living room, sitting as I am today on the sofa!

I began scrolling through Word files, just because, and suddenly I came upon a file called “Oh Spring!” which originally contained a poem that I had written a few weeks earlier for a local magazine, called "Edible Berkshires."

I decided to reread the poem, as I knew that I might have to find another home for it because the editor had told me he wasn't going to be able to publish the spring issue of the magazine, because of, what else, the gd GP!

So I opened the file. HUH? Somehow the poem had disappeared! Instead, the file contained THE BIRTHDAY LETTER that I had written to my mother seven years earlier on

March 30, 2013, her 87th birthday.

How could this be, I asked myself. How could one file suddenly replace another? This was impossible, and certainly this had never ever happened to me before.

So odd. So strange. But then something even more strange happened.

As I was sitting there puzzling over the disappearance of my poem, my husband walked into my study. "Going to the grocery store honey so wish me luck," he said. This would be the first time during the GP that he had tried to shop for food.

I turned to him. "Hey honey, would you mind buying me a small purple orchid?" I begged. Not that I needed another orchid. My kitchen counter had seven orchids already. But hey, the GP was a huge downer. I knew an orchid would boost my quarantined spirits.

He chuckled. "Hey, I have all I can do to buy food in these COVID times. Darling, you can do without another orchid."

With that, he turned and left. I then turned back to read THE BIRTHDAY LETTER that I had written to my dear Mom seven years earlier.

Imagine my shock when I read this:

"Dear Mom,

"Today is your 87th birthday. When you turn 87, there aren't a whole lot of birthday presents one can buy. You want health and happiness for yourself and all of those you love.

"Well, so, you love ORCHIDS! The one I bought you a year ago, all the blossoms have disappeared, and recently Dad said, ‘let's get rid of that plant, it's just three bare sticks.’"

"But no, Mom, despite your vision issues, you saw something tiny and green budding there on one of those bare branches. And yes, something wonderful did happen -- four or five new pink blossoms appeared!"

I stopped reading for a moment. I sat there in shock. I had just asked my husband for an orchid moments before and then I opened the letter to Mom and BOOM, it was filled with

ORCHIDS!

The letter continued:

"So eager are you to visit your sunroom each morning. And each week, on Tuesday, you put two ice cubes into the pot and not a drop more water.

"You are just adorable caring for your orchids.

"So today, your day, it wasn't difficult to know what to buy you: another orchid, of course!

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!

"We Love You So Much,

"Claudia"

I sat there staring, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Here was a coincidence of major proportion. Mom had reached out and brought me the orchids from her birthday letter, in order to offer me comfort and reassurance at a deeply stressful time.

Coincidences were/are not new to me. I had/have been witnessing them in my life for quite a long TIME. So many that my husband had coined them

COINKYDINKIES!

The more formal term for this kind of event is

SYNCHRONICITY,

a concept introduced in the late 1920s by psychologist CARL JUNG. He formally introduced the term in a paper he published in the year -- coincidentally -- that I was born, 1952.

OK. Speaking of SYNCHRONICITY, something just happened which is very very strange indeed.

JUST JUST NOW AS I WAS WRITING AND REVISING THIS CHAPTER IN ANTICIPATION OF POSTING IT IN THE BLOG TODAY, I stopped writing for a moment, just to check my gmail and

the very first email that popped up was one that began:

"Coincidence /ko-in-si-dens,/noun A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged."

HUH? How weird is that?

What I want to say about synchronicity and coincidence, and that day MOM APPEARED VIA THE ORCHIDS and all the other COINKYDINKIES I have experienced IS THIS: When you are open to the concept of SYNCHRONCITY and the infinite wisdom of the Universe and Divine Consciousness,

COINCIDENCES SEEM TO HAPPEN ALL THE TIME.

Part of what has helped heal me over the past four years is my willingness to embrace this idea. I finally OPENED MY HEART AND MIND COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY TO COINKYDINKIES and to the possibility of miracles like my mom reaching out to me. It takes faith and even, courage to believe in coinkydinkies AND in the idea that loved ones will contact us from the GB.

Oh, by the way, something that is in itself

STILL ANOTHER COINKYDINKY is the fact that

my Dad

always

used to call

my mom, whose name was Dena,

DINKY.

Back to that morning, MARCH 21, 2020,

that first weekend of the GP, I wrote this in my journal:

“So OK Mom I guess you have sent me a sign. I see that now. I accept it. I think I am beginning to understand what [my therapist] Mary is trying to tell me, that life is full of mystery and miracles. And that we must embrace them. Also, I realize that Mary may be right when she insists that 'there is no such thing as death!'"

A few days later, when I told Mary about MOM AND THE ORCHIDS, she wasn't at all surprised. She simply told me to keep track of these small miracles. Mary Marino has a PhD in Jungian psychology; she is a brilliant therapist, and she has studied Carl Jung's work in depth. She knows all about synchronicities!

Mary said to me:

"Claudia, just write them down, keep a list of the miracles. And trust the idea that your mother was reaching out to you. Like all of your ancestors, your mother loves you so much!"

So I began to write down all the little miracles that were starting to happen to me. (I also wrote down some amazing synchronicities that had happened years before.) Pretty soon, I had such a long list that I posted them on my blog.

Meanwhile, I am very grateful that MOM REACHED OUT TO ME,

because that was the beginning of my HEALING! Today, I am delighted to say, I am no longer frozzzzzzen, but more about how that came to be, at another TIME.

If you recall, I wrote a lot about TIME in that last chapter, Chapter One. I wrote about the fact that

Einstein believed that there is no such thing as time. Or change.

He contended that everything happens all at once, in the ETERNAL NOW.

So, that Saturday of 2020 is then but it is

ALSO NOW!!

I know. This is a difficult concept to comprehend.

So too is the idea that SOMEHOW our loved ones can communicate with us from the GB, the GREAT BEYOND. Our ancestors are (and I cannot explain it) still with us!

It's taken me a long time to come around to believing this.

But I know now first-hand

that it

does indeed

happen!

And I know, at least in my case, that believing can help you to heal!