In how many languages, I wonder, do they have a greeting that is commonly used as both hello and goodbye? In Hawaiian it’s aloha, and in Hebrew, shalom. I’m pretty sure that I learned about these words in elementary school and looking back, I can’t think of an easier way of explaining the importance of context, but like so much of my early schooling, I didn’t really think about it until experience gave me something first-hand to reference.
It was the summer of 76 and America was giving itself a huge pat on the back for having lasted two hundred years. Among the festivities, were a series of performances put on by America’s Youth in Concert which was sponsored by a Mormon organization called The Universal Academy for Music. High school kids from every state in the US and (I think) every province in Canada sent in taped auditions so that they might participate in one of the several musical groups that were to perform during the bicentennial celebrations in New York and Philadelphia before leaving on a one month concert tour of Europe.
I was one of them.
I’ve always been a singer, in the shower, church and school choir, and now in bars and festivals with just my guitar or the occasional band. But, who’d a thought that I’d ever get to sing at Carnegie Hall in New York, Royal Albert Hall in London, and Notre Dame cathedral in Paris? We performed outside of Independence Hall on the Forth of July; we were on Italian television in Venice and represented our country at The International Music Educators Convention in Montreux, Switzerland.
We were America’s kids, in red, white and blue. Showing the world what America could do.
Whatever.
I wasn’t exactly the picture of patriotism that the “Academy” was presenting us to be. I just loved to sing. I also found that I loved to travel and meet people from backgrounds completely different from my own so, even though we had a tight rehearsal and concert schedule and didn’t get to see as much of the places as I would have liked, I had nothing to complain about.
I also had very little money. Unlike most of the examples of “America’s Youth” who made the trip, I had had to pay for the entire thing myself (which I did by mowing lawns and selling my motorcycle). My Dad helped me out with a little extra spending money just before I left, but otherwise, I was on my own financially.
For this reason, during the last five days of the tour (which we spent in Rome) I was dead broke. I had also found that I love to sample all I can of the local cuisine when I travel, and had foolishly (but happily) spent the bulk of my money in Paris before realizing that I’d better buy a few souvenirs for the folks back home. Fortunately I was able to find one nice thing for everyone along the way, before ending up dead broke in Rome.
To further rub my face in my lack of foresight however, we had our concert on the second day in Rome, and thus had three whole days of freedom to do whatever we liked (or could get away with). As one might expect with a group of over three hundred and fifty high school kids that had just spent nearly two months with a strict schedule, we all went a little nuts.
There were parties every night, and since the laws about under-aged drinking were much different in Italy than in the US, we got a little wild. I had already drunk more than I ever had before during most of the tour, but Rome was my first experience with things like a plugged watermelon and shooting beers. I think our Mormon sponsors hadn’t expected it to get quite so out of hand since we were all suppose to be such serious and studious young men and women.
There was also a disco near our hotel that most everyone (who had the money) started frequenting and that’s when things got scary. People were reported to have been seen having sex in the restroom and a group of Italian guys followed them back to the hotel where they stood outside trying to get someone to let them in. A few girls stood out on their balconies and blew them kisses and giggled with delight at the attention they were getting. That is, until the Italian guys actually did get into the hotel. Then the police were called and there was hell to pay.
There was even more hell to pay when one of the girls ran away with an Italian guy, determined to get married before her parents could drag her home. And the worst was when an African American guy from Portland, Oregon (who was a friend of mine BTW) got into a fight with a total asshole (who I also knew) from my home state of Minnesota, I’m sorry to say. The asshole was (he claimed) a black belt in Tae Kwon-Do, but when they went outside to have it out, the guy from Portland pulled a switchblade on him and the asshole ran like a scared rabbit.
The police arrested the guy with the knife (who tried in vain to explain that he’d never intended to use it to do anything other than scare the asshole) and he spent his last two days in Rome in a dingy Italian jail and they let him out only when our plane was about to leave and delivered him to us on the runway. We cheered him like a returning hero and jeered the asshole for what he’d done to our friend.
As for little ol’ dead broke me, I had my good times mostly on the good graces of others. And, since I tend to be generous when I’m in the money, I was usually given free drinks at many of the parties and even got some dinner and bus funds from a guy who couldn’t bear to see me dependent on the cafeteria food that came with the tour. Also, a few of the girls I knew who wanted to go to the disco, but didn’t want to continually fend off the Italian guys that hung out there, offered to pay for my drinks to go with them and be their chaperone.
But, on the day before we were to leave Rome and return to our respective homes, I was completely alone and completely dead broke, so I ate a big breakfast at the cafeteria and started walking. Our hotel was quite a long walk from the center of Rome, but I had all day and I had a good map. It was the perfect thing to do and I really felt like part of the city as I wandered the streets and hung out among the statues, fountains and buildings I would later study at length as an art student.
Before I saw all of those things, I saw on my map that I could get to St. Peter’s from the hotel by cutting though a residential district and going the back way round the Vatican wall. Here I saw a part of Rome that most tourists with bus or taxi fare would never see. It was still early in the day and the cobblestone streets were completely empty. As I came over a small rise, I saw a group of children playing in the middle of the street. They were playing a game of marbles and as I approached one looked up at me and said, “Ciao”.
At the time I don’t think anyone had ever told me that it was one of those all purpose greetings that can be used for hello and goodbye. It was just so natural for me to respond in kind with “Ciao” that I knew instinctively that it was the thing to say. Then, more of the children chimed in with the greeting and seemed to delight in my response. As I continued walking passed them, our exchanges of “Ciao” also continued so that eventually we were shouting it and waving to each other down the empty street.
