Finding oneself

But let's put our Dante down for a few days, and acknowledge the fact that summer's also for easy, low-friction fiction: for Dan Brown, read onsite (as above), and, for part of this past weekend, Christopher Krovatin's youthful but rather touching Heavy Metal and You. Written when Krovatin was just 20 (and a PUSH intern), it's the story of a West Side prep schooler who finds himself torn between his allegiance to metal and his love for a warm but straightedge girl across town. Drawing heavily on Nick Hornby and Junot Diaz, and nodding reverently towards Salinger, Krovatin manages to craft a sweet story that fairly evokes the intensity of those years, and that is ultimately about the importance of being true to oneself (or of avoiding, as Salinger would put it, the phonies).

But finding oneself can take, of course, many forms. And while some of us go about it with our toes buried in the poolside sand of Meadowbrook, other folks begin to discover themselves at - well, at the neighborhood trattoria. That, at least, seems to be Cleo's way. On one of our last nights in Venice, we joined the fourteen students and several colleagues at a restaurant in Dorsoduro for a farewell meal. Generously, a waiter placed a bucket of pens and several sheets of paper on the table, and so L. and I let Cleo take care of business, as we chatted with others about upcoming travel plans and about the Angola pavilion. And then I happened to glace over at what Cleo was doing - only to find that for the first time ever, she was writing phonetically. And no small potatoes, either: the girl had tried to figure out, on her own, how to spell sailboat. Granted, she says it a bit differently than us: it's more sao-bot than sailboat. But that only helps to explain her spelled version, as you can see here:

I was floored. Of course, every kid eventually figures it out. But, still, when it happens, it's a small miracle. As is, I suppose, a high schooler's realization that he wants one thing more than another. We find ourselves in the strangest of places: in mosh pits, or Venetian restaurants. But the environment doesn't really matter, in the end, for as we remove the sheath, all else momentarily disappears.