Monday, March 2, 2015

No Work Talk -15Feb2015

Imagine the scene: Friday night, after a week of work and school, a group of parents from the 1st grade class bring their kids to a class gathering at the local pizza parlor.  Maybe 8 or 10 families are there.  All the kids gravitate to the playroom inside the pizza parlor, the adults sitting at a long table with a beer or glass of wine.  The men generally congregate toward one end of the table, the women to the other.   A random selection of public school parents hanging out, getting to know each other. 

A couple of hours later we pull our over-tired kids away even as they cry bloody murder that they are entitled to five more minutes.  We finally get our kids in our cars, they instantly crash, drive home, piggy-back rides up to bed, pretty typical scene.
Back in the kitchen recuperating in the quiet, a few things dawn on me.  First, the past 2.5 hours of socializing was done in 100% Italian language, for the kids and the adults.  There were 0 other Americans present and most of the Italians spoke little to no English.  There was no hesitation or trepidation from anyone in our family to attend an event like this, knowing it would be all in Italian, which is pretty cool by itself.  It is still pretty exhausting to have to concentrate for that long, especially at the end of an already long week, and doubly especially with so much noise and distraction at the party.  {I lag behind everyone else in the family with Italian language skills and I am far from fluent.}
The second thing that dawned on me is that for the past 2.5 hours of conversation between 7 or 8 first grade fathers who don’t know each other very well, there was not one minute spent talking about work.  As a matter of fact, besides their curiosity of me and my role on “the American base” (which always generates a lot of curiosity among the locals), no one asked anyone so much as what they did for a living.  It never came up…in 2.5 hours of random conversation…ever.  I couldn’t tell you what most of them do for work and not because of a lack of comprehension.  I think one guy worked with the mechanical parts that are used in drilling equipment.  The only reason there was any reference to that is because Italians (most foreigners we’ve met) love to tell you about their travels to the U.S.  This guy had been to several places in the U.S. like Kansas and Texas and Louisiana – not exactly top 3 U.S. tourist destinations – which generated the question of why he went there.  His trips to the U.S. were work-related and I finally figured out the part about the drilling equipment.
There was never any declaration of “no shop talk” either. It’s not as if someone said, “Please guys, let’s not talk about work tonight.”  Nope.  It wasn’t even as if there was an unspoken understanding that this wasn’t the place to discuss work.  Really, it was more as if it never even occurred to them to talk about work.  It wasn’t on their radar.  Imagine that.  That would NEVER happen in the U.S.  There is no way 8 random dads get together for 2.5 hours of conversation without someone asking someone else “So what do you do?”
What did we talk about?  We talked about our kids, the school, the curriculum, the economy, and the weather.  We talked about the differences between Italian dialects and American accents.  We talked a lot about activities in the mountains nearby.  One guy in particular is an expert “powder skier” who spends most weekends in the winter exploring some “off piste” slopes, and was full of interesting information.  He showed us the “avalanche app” he had on his phone that provided up-to-date, detailed information on all of the avalanche conditions in the Dolomites.  I never knew so much about avalanches as I learned that night.  We talked a lot about favorite vacation spots, good food combinations, wine (which everyone here seems to know a lot about), and extended families (who all seemed to live nearby).
When I mentioned this observation to our good friend Eros, he looked at me blankly and couldn’t understand why I thought that was interesting.  Eros is a retired electrician, who spent a lot of time in the past playing soccer and hiking the Dolomites, and who is among lots of other things a regional expert in mushrooms.  He’s been married for over 40 years, spends a lot of time with his granddaughter, and keeps busy with his “honey-do” list from his wife.  His explanation was simple: for most Italians, work is something that goes on in the background to pay the bills.  It is just not such a central aspect of most people’s lives.  Why would it be?  We only have one life, he explains, why spend it so focused on work and money when there are so many other things to be passionate about?
That’s a generalization and I know it’s not true for all Italians.  Everyone falls on a spectrum.  But where most Italians fall on that spectrum is pretty far from where most Americans fall on that spectrum, for good or bad, and it was never so evident to me as our time at the “First Grade Pizza Night”.
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