Leaving for Italy in four days, we’ll be looking for a world with older layers of time underfoot. We’ll begin in Bologna, which claims the oldest university in the world (started 1088 C.E.). Then to Fano, a much smaller city on the eastern Adriatic coast that harks back to the Caesars. After seeking “the meaning of Christmas” in some old Catholic church, we’ll train down to an even smaller city called Polignana a Mare, in the bootheel of the peninsula (Puglia/Apulia). 

Finally, another old city at the end of the train line, Lecce. A website calls it the most beautiful city in Puglia. “Lecce is for experiencing—wandering the narrow streets of golden sandstone, finding hidden piazzas, lazy lunches in wine bars with a glass of local rose and a view of an extravagantly carved baroque church.”

Austin, Texas, is not like that. We’re here for a baby shower. 

The baby shower has a theme: Hobbits, the Shire, and Middle-earth. I have my costume.

Oddly enough, Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Rings creates a consciousness of Time that I think old Italy can match. In contrast to our narrow sense of Time in America’s rushing car- and consumerist-culture, Tolkein’s fantasy world is actually more like the way Time has produced Humankind, alternating between myth and history, stories told and records kept.

Like Hobbits, we have lived too long with comforts and a sheltered peace. But unlike Hobbits, we lack even a vague sense of ancient wars and dark lords that were defeated in the backward and abysm of Time. We remember not the Plagues and battles with the Witch-lord Angmar, nor the Guardians (Rangers? Jedi Knights?) on which our orderly ways were set for a thousand years or more.

Hobbits attributed to the kings of old “all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.”

We have made it to today by the skin of our teeth (and vaccines). But rumors of war and the darkness of ICE raids and mad “kings” are rising again.

The Elves, who rarely appeared in the Shire, were passing through and not returning. Dwarves were on the road in unusual numbers. 

“They were troubled, and some spoke in whispers of the Enemy and of the Land of Mordor.”