The Day After - A World and a Lifetime Ago

Yesterday morning, very early, I had this odd sensation. I remember lying in bed, as I have done for the past month, recovering from full-knee replacement surgery. I hadn’t been sleeping well for that month, so I just figured it was part of the process, wailing and flailing and general discomfort.

And then I heard an ancient song, by the Shangri-las, whispering lyrics to their hit song, “Remember”:

(Remember) walking in the sand

(Remember) walking hand-in-hand

(Remember) the night was so exciting

(Remember) smile was so inviting

(Remember) then she touched my cheek

(Remember) with her fingertips

Softly, softly we'd meet with our lips

And then, I remembered.

The same day, a Saturday, 23 years ago to the day, February 17, 2001, I got a call from the care center where my wife Lizanne was. It was 5:30 AM. “Mr. Cevola, you need to come. Your wife doesn’t have much more time.”

So, I got up, fed the cat, got dressed and headed out to say good-bye to my dear wife.

And the wind, it cries Mary [Redux]

After all the jacks are in their boxes

And the clowns have all gone to bed

You can hear happiness staggering on down the street

Footprints dressed in red

And the wind whispers Mary

I woke up from a dream last night. My wife Lizanne, who passed away in 2001, appeared. She was no longer sick, but she was delicate. She only appeared for a moment, and in her way she kindly tapped me on the shoulder. Remember. Outside the wind was blowing.

We all run around making busy lives for ourselves to fill them up with meaning. We are like the little goti glass of Venice, made from left over scraps of glass, all different. All fragile. But still we step outside in the wind, and we run. And run. Competing in a race we will never win. But still, we run.

My Funny Valentine

 In memory of Lizanne Feb.14,1953 - Feb.17,2001

Has it really been twenty years? I only knew her for fourteen years. She’s been gone longer than I knew her alive. Time is the culprit, our hearts are the allurement, excavated from a chasm of temporal grief.

Half a billion heartbeats, is all

Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar?

Hard to imagine, but it is. 15 years since Lizanne took her leave.

The heart is a strong little bugger. And time is even tougher.

But this is our lot. And we got lots and lots and lots of it.

How many heartbeats are there in 15 years? Half a billion heartbeats, is all.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W

And the wind, it cries Mary

After all the jacks are in their boxes

And the clowns have all gone to bed

You can hear happiness staggering on down the street

Footprints dressed in red

And the wind whispers Mary

I woke up from a dream last night. My wife Lizanne, who passed away in 2001, appeared. She was no longer sick, but she was delicate. She only appeared for a moment, and in her way she kindly tapped me on the shoulder. Remember. Outside the wind was blowing.

We all run around making busy lives for ourselves to fill them up with meaning. We are like the little goti glass of Venice, made from left over scraps of glass, all different. All fragile. But still we step outside in the wind, and we run. And run. Competing in a race we will never win. But still, we run.

The last dress in the closet

I’ve been living in this house of mine for longer than I have ever lived in any one place. We moved here when the family got a little bigger, when my gal Liz and I decided to move in together and get married. We lived together there for about 3 ½ years before the disease she had, M.S., took her last breath. Most of her earthly belongings, her furniture, her writings, her computer, her car, her clothes, eventually went elsewhere. Her ashes were gently laid in a spot in Assisi; I mourned her loss.

Over the years, the darkness in the tunnel became less or I just became adjusted to living in the tunnel. I kept my home dark, a man cave. Over the years I moved furniture around, changed the carpet, painted here, added there. It wasn’t my dream home, but it is home. For now. And for the last 15 ½ years.

A few months ago, I was consolidating things in a closet and saw her wedding dress. I never had the heart to part with it; who could want it? Like her diamond ring and her pearl ear rings – they were hers.

But the dress, enshrouded in a shiny red garment bag, there it was peeking out from a corner, telling me, “It’s time.”

Quattromila Diciotto ~ Giorni e Notti

Non dimenticherò mai

Photo by Domantis

Elegia di Nera

I pulled out the bottle of 2000. Around this time it was being born, right about that time we were watching her last sunrise, she was breathing her last breaths. The appassimento was only ten years old, I shouldn’t have opened it. It was too soon. But things happen.

What can one say about the last ten years that this wine cannot? In ten years I have lived everyday without her, thinking about her, losing her everyday I wake up. She is now younger than me, than all of us. She doesn’t age, unlike this wine. But like this wine, neither had the time to grow old, really age. And so, once again, something is in front of me, dying.

The wine from the Veneto. I was just there. I should have gone down to Umbria and visited her site. I’ll go in the spring, when the lilies are covering her spot on the hill. Now, I am relegated to the gloomy skies of winter, and this bottle of wine and my memories of a love lost to the ages.

New Oil

Another year has come and vanished. Another harvest. And the new oil is now here. New oil, showing us the promise of the harvest in its sharpest, youngest, most fiery expression. Lovely stuff, as long as you just taste a little bit. Not too much.

What We Loved

In what seemed a lifetime ago, I remember watching her as she waved through the window. It was one of many departures that would torment our life together. Business called; Puerto Rico and a meeting, or Cincinnati and a convention. The seconds away from each other were millions of sharp pins jabbing at the bubble of our affection.

As the years progressed, we spent more time with each other, but other things would conspire to separate us. A stumble in the clear daylight, a numbing of the legs, a blurring of the vision. Something was always trying to pry us apart.

In better days, there would be dinners outside under the portico that I had built for her. I remember her crying as I drove a nail through my arm when I was bulilding it, and she took me to the emergency room. Her affliction was usually to blame for a mishap, and now I was stealing thunder from the disease from which there was no cure.

I remember back when the doctor took us in a room and told us that he had good news and bad news. The bad news was that what she had was incurable. The good news was that it wouldn’t kill her. The good doctor was wrong about the good news.

I have been thinking about the wine we loved. One I remember so well was on a summer day in Rome. We were sitting in a little trattoria near the Vatican, drinking wine from a carafe. It was yellow. It was cool. And it was from the hills surrounding Rome. A sweet memory that wine and Italy played a minor part in.

When her eyesight would fail her, she would walk with me, holding me, with complete trust that I was taking her where she would find no harm. On a porch on Victoria Island we would dangle our legs together as we sipped on Chenin Blanc from the Loire. We were taking a break from the onslaught that was heading in our direction, aiming to level us, pulverize us and tear us away from each other, forever. In time it did, but for that evening one summer many moons ago, we sipped without care, gently lapping the sweetness up.

She loved to cook. Squash casserole, pork loin, red eye gravy, she didn’t consider herself a cook. But the simple things she did, I loved. And the wines we loved with them were from a time that was so much simpler than now. A lovely Verdicchio from Matelica. Or a Pinot Grigio from Friuli, before such a wine would be spoiled by its own success. And the aperitif from France, Lillet, that she loved so much.


When I met her, she was a martini gal. She loved her gin. The Italians loved her for it. At a hotel we were staying at in Rome, where the Italian President had a penthouse, the bar had every kind of spirit. They would make her a dry martini, with the proper proportion of vermouth. It made her very happy.

When she reached the autumn of her very young life, wine ceased to have the appeal for her that it did in our earlier years. She would have a glass with me, but I could tell that wine wasn’t going to cure what was taking her apart, day by day. So, what we loved we left in the wine closet as she and we made one last stab at fighting the Goliath that was blocking our light.

Our last wine together, a few weeks before she died, during Christmas, was a Dolcetto. I don’t remember how we came to decide upon that as our last wine to love together, but from a not so sweet several years of doing battle, this one last glass of red, raised to our lips, was so very sweet and moving.

To this day I remember all of the wines we loved in our life of love with great affection and melancholy.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Otto anni fa...

Happy Valentine's Day, wherever you are...

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Drink in Eight Years

Yesterday would have been Liz and my 11th anniversary. On our third (and last) anniversary, in 2000, we were given a bottle and encouraged to put it away and drink in eight years. At that time the election hadn’t yet been decided, but what had been put in place in the next three months, by a power greater than any of us, was the downward spiral of my wife’s health and the last days of her life. We were cut off, never got a chance to drink that bottle of wine.

This weekend, while rooting among my wine closet I found that bottle of wine. It was an Italian wine, and it was red, and from a very good vintage. Now the issue isn’t whether the wine is ready to drink. I’m not sure I am.

The last eight years have been a time I would never had imagined in my life. I never planned to turn 50 as a widowed person. Jobs and friendships, loves and passions have all tried to make up for the giant crater in my own personal ground zero. And yes, we do rebuild, if ever so slowly, again.

So I will put that bottle of Italian wine back in its slot in the wine rack and maybe let it rest a little more.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Sette anni fa...

It must have been 20 years ago when the little VW Jetta took us down the road to Hillsboro, Texas, with Bob Marley wailing “I don’t want to wait in vain,” on the radio. It wasn’t that long ago, but it all belongs to history now. She has joined the Ancients.

It has been seven years, a short time compared to eternity, but a sea full of tears and loss. A half-full glass moment, raised to remember her on this day when she passed away from us.

Last night I opened up a bottle of a 2001 Italian red, grown not too far from where she now rests. It was bright and clear and sweet and too young. As I drank it with friends and family, I thought of all the people who made wine that have passed away as well. All around us there are the signs of those who love us and want us to be happy. Some of these signs have been put there by those who are now part of history. And yes, they are no longer pumping blood and cuddling their warm bodies next to us anymore, but there are ways they still connect to those of us still here.

Wine, love, art, music, all around us we are influenced and nurtured by those who have gone before. I think of my wife, she will always be young, as I age and get ready to shake this body off, some day. But not yet, “non voglio morire”, as Puccini’s Manon cries.

Floating all around us in the eternal ocean of peace and tranquility, there is the spirit of love, and we get all shook up about silly things like micro-oxygenation or large champagne houses. “I’m a mystic man, don't drink no champagne”, Peter Tosh sings, “'cause I'm a man of the past, and I'm living in the present, and I'm walking in the future, stepping in the future.”

With a little help, as I step forward, on or off the wine trail, may our loved ones be there, to give us a hand, to let the sunshine in.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Dreams In My Cellar

The Dream:

I walk into an ancient Italian restaurant where I used to work that no longer exists. Ali is standing by the salad pick-up line, in his waiter clothes. I say hello to him. Then I ask him, “What are you doing here?” He says, “What?” I say, “Ali, you died. What are you doing here?” He says, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where I am.” I move forward to give him a hug and tell him, “You’ll be back. Just relax and move through this.”

I’m still in the restaurant, now discovering that the building that went up over it (a 4-story condo complex) has kept most of the original restaurant. The owner is there with his wife, and they are running the place. All this at their current ages (he is 90). People are coming in. I think to myself that I should bring the restaurant critic here. I see the wines that are there and that the selection needs work. The interior of the restaurant is looking more Mexican-Southwestern than Italian.

I am now shirtless and shoeless and know I must get out of the restaurant because the owner will say something to me.

My friend, Ali, died almost two years ago. He was in his early 50s. Although he played soccer and didn’t smoke, he had diabetes and was overweight. He had a heart attack and died. It was Christmastime, and his parents came from Iran. They have a large and close family. They buried their son and went back to Iran.

I felt like I lost my friend and his family. We talked of going to Iran; this was before the two countries started acting like enemies. Then he dies, and the country turns into our enemy.

How would it affect me if this happened to Italy? I don’t know what I would do. My parents and their parents had to deal with it during WWII. I remember talking to my cousin Luigi in Calabria about what that was like, from his perspective. He had been compelled to join the Italian army and was captured by the Americans and sent to a prison in Tunisia. While he didn’t seem bitter 30 years later, he lost part of his youth, incarcerated for the crimes of his leader.

Ali and I often talked about Persia, one of the birthplaces of the grape. I studied the Persian people from my work in restaurants and learned some of their language, enough to back off the most macho bullies. I think the Persians were, to me, the most Italian of the peoples of the Middle East. I recognized some of the moves and traits, probably from my own DNA, the Sicilian melting pot that houses all these codes.


And, out of the blue in my dream, Ali appears and looks lost and confused. As if he hasn’t even been able to rest in peace. I know there are souls who don’t know they have lost their bodies. Was he one of them? And what was I doing telling him to relax, that he’d return?

Another friend of mine, Brad, should have died many times, but he is very much alive. Working as a war correspondent, he reported from the front lines of the first gulf war (GWI?), under the night lights, in front of the advancing Marines. And in Afghanistan and China and Albania, wherever there was a conflict or trouble, Brad was there. When he wrote me and told me he had stage 4 cancer, we stayed in touch. My wife was entering the beginning of the end of her life, which had been ravaged by multiple sclerosis. So we had a common thread, the closeness of death and the fragility of life.


After my wife died and after my friend overcame his cancer, through meditation (and with a little luck), I have managed to stay in touch with him. As with many people in my life, it seems I have to be the one to reach out over to their side. Now Brad has embraced yoga, is on his way to mastery of it, changed his name to a more appropriate yogic moniker, and passed into the fogless realm of self-realization. It’s not that we aren’t friends. It’s just that he seems too busy to be an active friend. So I talk to my dead friend while a living one is as if he had passed over.

These friends are like wines in my cellar. There are old wines that have lost their life and sit in the darkness, not knowing they will never be opened or enjoyed. There are wines that are still alive but going through a stage where they are undrinkable. Of course there are wines in there that are ready today, like some of my friends. A Carlo or a Patty or a William or a Joe. A Chianti or a Riesling or a Zinfandel or a Barbera.

Choose your wines like your friends. Enjoy them both. Forgive the friends (and the wines) if they don’t come up to par all the time. And open them all, often.



Photos by the author

The Way You Haunt My Dreams

200th post

It’s 5AM and I’m staring at cameras on a shelf, wondering which one to choose, to photograph a shadow. A €2.00 Euro coin, and pottery shards from over 2,000 years ago, crowds the desk, making little room for the cup café latte that will help me through the fog. Winding roads through a park, the scent of the sea and some eerily familiar feeling is slowly receding as the sun pulls its way towards the new day.

“The Salento Peninsula”, she whispers, from her secret grave. Here where the cult of the goddess reigns, where the Mas of the Languedoc becomes between the Masserie of the Salento. Where silent temples rest among fields of wheat and vines. Here is where one can find a sense of Italia Antica, a place where one can reclaim some of that which has been lost by time. Where one might look into an ancient mirror and come face to face with Her.

How easily we are satisfied. All they have to do is find an abandoned building, get some government funding, fix it up a little, a couch here, a television there, maybe an internet connection. Make sure the beach has sand and umbrellas, stock the kitchen with fresh vegetables and seafood, and pasta, always the pasta. And voila, the buen retiro for the traveler or vacation bound is ready.

We were sampling some Falanghina and a few other varieties that will never make it to America, except perhaps New York. How can I have that sort of thought in a place like this?

In a courtyard, in the shade, Arturo and I are talking. Arturo is a man who once lived in New York; he watches the city from the internet now. “How is it someone like Joe Bastianich goes on national TV,” he asks me. “to talk about water?” I tell him we are now a country of city folk obsessed with where our water comes from. “You should worry more about where your oil comes from or those gigantic cars you put them in!” I cannot disagree. But I do wonder if the folks in New York have gotten so distracted that they no longer concern themselves with which wine. “Maybe Joe thinks he can turn water into wine,” Arturo comments. Or maybe water into gold. Wine into gold, wheat into gold, tomatoes, pasta, fish, the whole experience will turn into some golden god that is the fashionable one to worship today. New York, you can have your melted down idol of gold and water. Here, in The Deep South, you'll never touch our goddess.

I get an email from a friend in Manhattan, she tells me that I am sounding a little crazy. “There are many many crazy things,” Sinatra sings, “May I list a few.”

I could stay here for more than these moments will allow. But the road calls, Calabria, Sicily, Tunisia, Malta.

But under the shade of the tree, napping a little, I hear Her, calling from inside the earth. No, they can’t take that away from me.

The Wine Lover

Wine? My first love? What one wants to say is really impossible to tell. It was a soft and easy love, it was forgiving and unforgettable. It was lightning in the first few moments. It was sweet and sassy and I loved it. And then it was gone, the cellar was empty, the bottles had all been drunk. There was no more wine in the barrel.

The wine in the barrel was about 11.9% and very mellow. Red, but not too strong, not too heavy, just the perfect fit. For 14 years we enjoyed each others admiration and love. How can a wine love? Have you never had a wine that you loved so much that you felt it might not be just a one way thing? They say wine is a living thing, yes?

To me, this wine was alive and was very much a woman.
She was French with English beginnings. People thought her to be Italian, so did I. She was unique in all my life of tasting and experiencing the different vintages and cuvees. But she was not a blockbuster, not bombastic or capable of great hedonistic pleasure. She was very refined but much understated, went with every occasion, loved by all who sat at the table and supped with her.

Never written up by the great wine critics, seldom at the table of a wine master, she wasn’t important in that way. But those masters who knew her knew of an enduring and extraordinary character with great balance and length. All in harmony with the stars and the soil.
After 14 years of enjoying vintage after vintage, the barrels finally were emptied. She had no more wine to give, she was gone. That year the harvest all over Italy was one of the greatest, but her wine wasn’t made that year. So I went to search for the hidden vineyard of the wine lover. I searched in every place from the southernmost islands to the alpine meadows. In Puglia, Calabria, Tuscany, Piedmont. In the hills of Umbria there was a sign of rejuvenation, but the messenger by the river sadly confirmed nowhere was I to find it like it had been.
Then, in a deep sleep, in a dream, an image appeared to me. It wasn’t where I was looking for. I had taken on every vintage from every appellation, looking in every little village, every hillside vine, every cloister, every abbey. I was looking to replicate the experience and it wasn’t possible. I was looking too hard when all along she was sitting there, waiting for me to open my heart back to her and to all that I had professed this love for.
There wouldn’t be lightning bolts this time. This wouldn’t be as easy; it might not be so mellow or balanced. That was once upon a time.

She spoke to me in the glass, as I took in her perfume and looked into her ruby slipper eyes. "I was made for love and for lovers and if you must love without me, you must love. If I am not here, it’s only that you think that. I have been here for thousands of years and will be here for many thousands more after you are gone. I will wait for you on a farther shore. Until then, you are the bearer of the spirit of the wine lover and it is a favor I must ask of you until we meet again."

Assisi ~ from the Heart

A spot of heaven on earth. From the center of one of the least known but well loved regions to Americans. Art, hills, green hills, deep spiritual roots, the Umbrian treasures. Great red wines, wonderful white wines. But this isn’t about wine. Yes we’re on a wine trail, but this trail cuts deeper, to the heart and soul of what is important to a person like me. You won't find clues here, but questions and wonder bordering on the inner region of bewilderment.

My son took his first steps in Assisi. We spent two weeks there once on a hillside in October. And during that time the little guy decided this was the time to take that step. Or more like a “move” out of a John Travolta movie from the times. It was only the beginning of many steps he took on that soil, in the footsteps of the mystics of the area, Francis and Clara and many unknown. The green heart of Italy is what the Italians call Umbria, the region where we are in this moment.

My wife, we laid her remains to rest a little higher up that hill. First steps and last resting spot. The cycles of life and death interwoven in my life story. How could I have imagined this?

Why couldn't this have just been a dream?

A close Italian friend of mine, who helped arrange for her interment in a most sacred spot in Assisi, told me about what he did not too long after. He was in his town in the Marche region and was at a plant nursery. At the shop he saw some grape plants with a name that was familiar to him.

It was my name. Our friend bought two of those plants and took them to plant, one at his home and one at the site in Assisi where my wife rests. On top of a rocky crag, midway between the summit of the hill and the forest grove, he planted the vine. The vine grew out of the rocks and is flourishing. Life from lifelessness, beginning from the end of a cycle?

This friend found out last year, about this time, that he had cancer. Two months later he passed away. I was in Sicily the day he died. He was in a hospital in America. The sign, from the Sicilian countryside, was in the form of a bird landing in the gully of a field. It was early morning, the sun was rising and a slight wind was blowing throughout the vineyards from the south. A grey bird with white under wings flew up to my window sill from the gully, landed, looked at me and flew west. That was all the notice I got. Twenty minutes later my cell phone rang.

How sad I thought, it must be for an Italian to die, to have to leave all of this beauty.

written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

wine blog +  Italian wine blog + Italy W