On 10 Apr 2023, I started taking Italian lessons on Preply with my instructor Marina. That was over two years ago.
Tuesday night was my last lesson before her summer vacation and my anticipated work visa and move to Italy. I don’t know what the next few months will be and if Italy will grant me a visa or if-and-when I restart lessons with Marina, but the current moment is emotional.
I couldn’t quite understand, and yet I could, why this was hitting me so strongly. I remember college and you take classes and you leave and you take more classes and maybe you have that teacher again but maybe not. Even favorite teachers don’t create an anxious absence after they are absent. But with these Italian lessons, two hours over two days a week with pauses over the months but more consistency than pause, I’d spent more time with Marina than with anyone else except my wife and coworkers.
And finally I realized that I felt like I was losing a friend. This seems obvious but then again not so obvious if you’re not extensively around people.
I’ve lost friends at work with similar-yet-milder emotional results. As with any smaller company there is a certain flux and so over these three+ years there have been several close partners, people that have been primary contacts, that have moved on (and one that got moved unwillingly on, but that’s not relevant). This has been that but more.
This all started when we decided to go to Italy with my brother. He and his wife, the nieces, and several from the sister-in-law’s side of the family planned a week in late May 2023. He had started taking lesson on Preply a few months prior. Maybe four months? I was using Duolingo but had felt that one-on-one would be a better way to ramp up. I followed his lead and looked around on Preply. My criteria was not only Italian but I’d also thought I’d like to have a teacher that could continue my German studies (well, rekindle my German studies from college).
I probably just forgot but it wasn’t until several months ago, when I declared to Marina that I was no longer interested in Italy and was instead a Francophile because I’d discovered Guy Debord and the French Situationist International movement, that I realized that she has a philosophy degree. You don’t drop a name like Debord and have someone immediately recognize it: “si si, Italia anche ha un movimento filosofio come l’internazionale situazionista…” (my broken phrasing of what she said as I remember it). This is one of the ways in which it maybe switched to friendship.
One of the random memories I have is after a lesson discussing a certain aspect of Italian society or history she asked me if there were a parallel in America. You forget how little you know until you’re asked about one of those basic subjects that you never consider. Background noise of society. I had nothing to offer he in reciprocal information and so my response was an apology that “non sto portando niente a tavolo” (I’m not bringing anything to the table.). That’s not an Italian colloquialism but she immediately understood so… maybe I did bring something?
We never moved to German language lessons–and after a few months from the start I realized what an absurd approach that was–but the relationship was more valuable with her providing a continued entrance into Italian culture. The naivety I remember having at the beginning would never stop making me cringe if it weren’t for the naivety I still have in not only language but also culture.
I sold my car over the weekend partly because we only use it to go the the recycling center and partly because I will need it considerable less, bordering on not at all, when I go to Italy. I purchased my Fiat 12 years ago and so it was getting to a point where a costly enough repair may arise that surfaces the question “do I reallllly needed a car??” It was time. (For those interested who also have a 2013 Fiat 500 Abarth with no history of major repairs that they want to sell, it’ll bring you around $3,000.) In fact over the past few years I’d been waiting for the transmission- or engine-related shoe to drop and miss my window to sell the car while it still has some value. The Fix It Again Tony epithet was haunting me.
Our last lesson was really just us chatting about nonsense. My museum visit over the weekend, her being stuck in her home because of the weather, and of course me selling the Fiat. “Ripararlo ancora Antonio” didn’t really carry the weight of the English phrase so when I gave her the English she laughed but insisted that that wasn’t her experience. And it really wasn’t mine either so I kind of miss it too.