Category Archives: bio

Recycling: A New Italian Tradition

Growing up in Bangladesh and India, I observed that every scrap of paper, or anything else potentially useful, was re-used. Peanuts bought from a roadside stand were given to me in a little bag, carefully handmade from a page of a Singapore telephone directory. At school, the kabadi-wallahs (second-hand men) would come around collecting paper, cloth, and tins, for which they would pay by the kilo. This meant that our school papers and love letters could (embarrassingly) turn up as bags in the bazaar; we took great care to burn anything that we wouldn’t want anyone to read.

Woodstock School and its environment encouraged thrifty habits. There simply wasn’t a lot of stuff to buy, let alone throw away. Sometimes even the basics, like electricity and water, went missing. In a drought year (the spring and summer after a failed monsoon), power frequently went out because there was no water in the mountain rivers to generate hydroelectricity. Studying by candlelight sounds romantic for Abraham Lincoln, isn’t so great in real life. (Woodstock now has generators, and uninterruptible power supplies for its computers.)

Then the local springs dried up, and we had no water to take showers or even flush toilets. Servants would bring up water from a rainwater tank, and we flushed using buckets. Nowadays, although I love taking hot baths, I always wince at the water left in the tub afterwards, wasted. In our previous (small) apartment, the bucket used for mopping the floors lived under the bathroom sink, so I would simply leave the water in the tub, and flush with that water until it ran out or we needed to drain the tub to take showers. I have had to explain this habit to people who couldn’t understand why I do not reflexively pull the plug after a bath. I’d like a house designed to use bath and shower water to flush toilets.

India’s recycling habits meant that there was very little trash on the Mussoorie hillsides, until recent years when plastic shopping bags and packaging became popular. Suddenly, the garbage bloomed. I suppose increasing wealth (for some) also meant that people were less careful, because plastic bags weren’t the only thing being thrown away. Dick Wechter, a Woodstock staff member keenly interested in mountain environmental issues, found a solution. He paid local sweepers (untouchables, the poorest of the poor) to collect trash from the hillsides, which they sold to the kabadi-wallahs, in the end making more than enough money to pay the collectors’ salaries. Dick has also been promoting the use of biodegradable paper bags or reusable cloth bags for shopping, and composting wet waste.

Italy was becoming recycling-conscious just about the time we got here (1991). It started with glass, which you would put into a large plastic bell, usually located on a traffic island or sidewalk within a block or two of your home. The bell had little round portholes near the top, into which you would push one bottle at a time, dropping it with a satisfying crash to the bottom. Once a month or so the glass truck would come along. It had a miniature crane on the back, with a hook which would pick up the bell by a loop of steel cable sticking out of its top. The crane would swing the bell over the open bed of the truck, and then a second hook would pull a second loop which opened the bottom of the bell – MEGA CRASH as hundreds of glass bottles fell. This was a less pleasing sound, especially at 6 am.

A little later, paper recycling bins turned up on the streets as well, though they were sometimes set on fire by vandals. Then plastic. For a while, in Milan, we had to separate out “humid” (organic, compostable) garbage into special containers and biodegradable bags, but the Comune of Milan gave that up when it was found to cost more to make it into fertilizer than farmers were willing to pay for it. A couple of years ago, Milan’s sanitation authority also moved recycling closer to home, by putting bins for paper, plastic, and glass into the courtyards of apartment buildings. This was a good idea, but the execution was confusing. Aluminum (soft drink) cans were supposed to be placed with glass; I never did figure out what to do with other kinds of cans. Some kinds of plastic could be recycled, others not. The city also tried to increase recycling rates by fining anyone who messed up. In a building complex with hundreds of people, this meant fining the entire complex, since no individual culprit could be identified. One irritated resident of a fined building noticed that sometimes the garbage men themselves weren’t fussy: he photographed a truck loading both recyclable and general garbage into the same compartment, clearly wasting the public’s efforts at recycling.

Lecco was up for an award last year as one of the most recycling cities in Italy, and I can see why. We have three bags: umido (compostable “wet” waste), sacchetto viola (violet bag, for plastic, paper, cardboard, wood), and sacchetto trasparente(transparent bag – non-recyclable). I assume that the stuff in the sacchetto viola is hand-sorted somewhere along the way, which is more sensible than trying to make confused old ladies do it at home. I recycle even more paper now that I don’t have to tear the plastic windows out of envelopes and food cartons. We have separate (small) garbage bins under the sink for umido and general garbage. Glass, unfortunately, still has to be carried to a bin down the road. We collect it into a plastic container out on the balcony, and every now and then Enrico takes a walk with a big bag of glass.

The plastic shopping bag problem is somewhat mitigated in Italy by the simple expedient that supermarkets charge 5 cents each for them. So people tend to take fewer of them (I am always left gasping at the profligacy with which American supermarkets bag groceries), and/or bring re-usable bags of their own. Also, kitchen garbage pails are small enough that these bags can be used to line them, saving the expense of buying garbage bags. You have to take the garbage out more often, but you can take it anytime, down to a trash room in your building, where the people responsible for cleaning the building will get it out to the street on the correct day for collection.


Jan 10, 2004

Mike Looijmans writes:

“In Belgium it is very common to collect rain water (usually from the roof) in an underground tank, and use this water for things like flushing toilets, washing and so. In many Belgian places, tap water is not drinking water but usually untreated ground or rain water. ‘Clean’ water for cooking and drinking is usually provided from separate taps.

In the Netherlands, all tap water is drinking water. In the east and south of the country, the water is taken from underground wells and is the same stuff which is sold in bottles at exorbitant prices in supermarkets. In fact, some types of bottled water sold internationally would not pass the Dutch criteria for tap water. Though it sounds like a terrible waste to use this water for car washing and such, the water as it is pumped up from the ground needs very little treatment, just filtering out the sand is usually enough. The water companies use trout to monitor the quality. A trout swimming in the water stream is monitored by a computer system. When the fish makes a sudden movement, alarm bells start ringing as these fish are very sensitive to pollution.”

The True True Seaborn

A few of you have read some portion of the fantasy novel I’ve been writing for almost 20 years (and still haven’t finished). You may have wondered where I came up with the name of the protagonist, True Seaborn. Even if you haven’t, I’m about to tell you (patience – I do have a reason).

When I first started this back in college around 1983, I collected interesting words and names that I thought I might use ­ I’m not Tolkien and am not going to invent entire languages! I was then working part-time at a printing company, and saw the name “True Seaborn” on the masthead of a magazine that happened to be lying around. I thought it was about the coolest name I’d ever heard of, so I appropriated it for my hero who, among other things, is a sailor. I even wrote a bit of backstory to explain how my character came to have that name, though I’ve always wondered how the original True Seaborn got such a great name. It has class and is full of meaning, yet it’s easy to spell and pronounce – the best of all possible worlds, in a name!

It’s been in the back of my mind for some months to get in touch with the original owner of the name and ask his permission to use it, in case I ever do finish this novel and get it published. I did a Google search and found him easily enough. But then I got distracted and never finished searching out an email address for him.


Well, I didn’t have to. Last week, True Seaborn got in touch with me. It threw me at first, seeing email in my In box from the name I associate with a fictional creation of my own. (Probably there’s the germ of a novel in that, but I digress…). Mr. Seaborn was feeling equally confused. He said: “It is a strange experience to stumble onto a work of fiction that appears at first glance to be written about oneself, by an author one has never met. Of course I’m not quite so vain as to believe you actually wrote your City of Light about me. Still, the name of your protagonist seems like a remarkable coincidence. Would you mind telling me how you came up with it?”

So I explained it to him, and he has graciously consented to let me go on using his name, with some very kind compliments on my writing (he’s now reading through the whole novel). The real True Seaborn turns out to be a very nice person, which is a relief – I might have become hopelessly confused about my protagonist had he been otherwise.


He also told me how he got his name:


“The name Seaborn has two possible origins. One was a family legend that described a young couple from Wales who boarded a ship bound for the New World sometime in the 17th or early 18th century. Either the voyage originated in London and stopped at Liverpool or vice-versa, but according to the story the young man jumped ship at the first stop, leaving his wife to continue the voyage alone. She died in childbirth along the way, and the captain placed the newborn with a family on the coast of Virginia, hence the name. This story supposedly appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, or Colliers, or some such popular magazine sometime in the 1920’s. Whatever the provenance of the name, I’m inclined to believe the magazine story was the source of the family legend and not the reverse.


Militating against the orphan story is the fact that there are a great many Seaborns in Wales and North England today. I met a few of them myself in a trip there about 25 years ago, in an unsuccessful search for relatives. I suppose it’s conceivable an orphan could have been given the name in Virginia, independent of all the real Seaborns living in the Old World, but as you can imagine, I have a built-in bias against such a shameful origin.


I’ve traced our family in this country to a Benjamin Seaborn who died in Tidelands, Virginia, in 1782. I have since learned from a distant cousin that Benjamin was the son of one of two brothers who arrived in Virginia as indentured servants. After Benjamin, the record is pretty reliable – from Virginia, to Tennessee, to Oklahoma, to California.


Another distant cousin let me know he had discovered that the root was Sigbjorne or Sigbjorn, a common Norwegian name today, meaning – I think he said – spear carrier or spear thrower.

The origin of True is fairly direct: I was named after one of my father’s old girlfriends (Mary Ann True). My parents went to their graves without volunteering to explain how that came about, or how my mother felt about it. And I never had the nerve to ask.”


I don’t suppose anyone will ever write a novel with a Deirdré Straughan as the main character – too weird-looking in print, and impossible to spell or pronounce.

Life Without Buffy

We’re suffering Buffy withdrawal. Angel, the show which spun off from Buffy four years ago, is good, but it’s pretty much guy-centered. I have no complaints about watching all the good-looking men on “Angel,” but I miss the presence of powerful women, and the role model that Buffy provided for my daughter.

Ross started watching Buffy when she was 10, and at age 14 said that she would have grown up a different person without the show.

Hurt, I responded: “You weren’t exactly lacking for a strong female role model at home.”

“Yes, but Buffy made it cool.”

Which is a very good point. Being a strong, self-confident female is not easy at any age; strength is a characteristic not appreciated in women by most cultures or individuals (male or female). It wasn’t easy for me to grow into my strength (compounded, as it is, with geekiness), and I certainly wasn’t comfortable with it as a teenager, if I even had it then. And I spent most of my adolescence in the nurturing environment of Woodstock School, more accepting than most schools of student diversity. So I wouldn’t know how to advise Ross how to feel comfortable in her own skin at this age and place, if it weren’t for Buffy.

But don’t take my word for it. “[Father John] Pungente used Buffy as a role model for conveying solid values for teens. ‘She is smart, willing to learn about herself and live with who she is, even if she happens to be a vampire slayer. She is independent, reliable, maybe too much a Type-A personality, but still an entirely credible 1990s teenager. Other shows deal with teenage problems – love, sex, peer pressure, school work, family problems, body image, dreams, insecurity, self-esteem – but Buffy adapts a literary and film genre for television. The vampire myth and the sexuality it evokes speak powerfully to today’s teenagers.'” (MARTIN O’MALLEY: Orange County blues, CBC News Viewpoint | November 14, 2003)

A point often overlooked by writers about “Buffy” is the role of Xander, Buffy’s average guy friend who, unlike her other friends, has no special powers (magical or intellectual) to help him fight the forces of darkness, both interior and exterior. “You know, Xander is as important a role model as Buffy and people will never really get that, I think, most of ’em. But, the fact of the matter is that I had a two-fold intent, which was to create a role model in the idea of a girl who’s a genuine leader and the role model in a man who is not only comfortable, but turned on by that.” Joss Whedon, MSN Interview

Hear, hear. The world needs not only more women like Buffy, but more men like Xander. Unfortunately for Ross, I don’t think she’ll find many such in Italy, and even fewer in her age range.

Bible Stories

When Rossella was still in preschool and I was travelling to the US a lot for work, I brought her with me several times on extended trips, usually while Enrico was also travelling for mathematical research. So Ross experienced daycare in several different places in America, which was good for her English, and gave her exposure to American culture.

The year she was four, she was slated to spent some time with me in California. Before she arrived (accompanied by Enrico), I went to look at daycare centers with the wife of one of my Italian colleagues, who also had a young child. At one center the owner said, in a very aggressive tone: “I have all the kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.”

I had my own run-in with the Pledge when I was a kid, so you can imagine how I felt about this. “But these kids aren’t even American,” I protested.

“All the more reason for them to realize how lucky they are to be here!” she snapped. We decided against that place.

The only other option was an avowedly Christian daycare center. I was worried about what kind of indoctrination we might come up against, but the place was bright, cheerful, and clean, and I liked the staff, so I decided to risk it. I gave Ross a talk about how these people might tell her a lot of stuff about God, and she wasn’t to feel bad or strange if she didn’t agree with it; she was always free to make up her own mind.

She came home one evening and told me excitedly about the Bible stories she had heard that day: the adventures of Jonah and the whale, and Noah.

“Do you think that stuff is true?” I asked worriedly.

“Oh, no!” she said brightly. “They said they were stories!”

Nov 18, 2003

My friend Ivo wrote: “When I was in the US on my first day of high school [9th grade, in Georgia] I got the teacher yelling at me because I didn’t stand and recite the pledge! He said: “Are you Russian!? Would you prefer to be in Russia!?”

When I explained that I was Italian and had no idea of what that funny thing was, we found an agreement, and for the remaining 2 and a half years I was expected to stand up, but could avoid speaking or keeping my hand over my heart!”

How My Italian Adventure Began

Strangely enough, my Italian adventure began in India. In June, 1986, I finished up my study abroad year in Benares. It had been a fun but intense time, and I looked forward to a vacation in Mussoorie, my “home town,” site of Woodstock School. My dad was supposed to join me, having just finished a contract in Indonesia, and we would travel back to the States together. When I got to Mussoorie, I used most of my remaining rupees to rent a house on the Landour hillside. I was just settling in, organizing food deliveries with the various wallahs, getting scorpions out of the sink, etc., when a telegram arrived from Dad: “Not coming to India. I’m broke. Make your own way back to the US.”

Umm. This presented difficulties. I did have a return ticket, but we were now in the airlines’ peak season, so I’d have to pay a $100 premium to leave right away. Which was a lot of money in India then, and I didn’t have it. There was no prospect of getting the rent money back from the landlord, nor did I have enough cash to stick it out in Mussoorie til the end of peak season. So I went to Delhi, sold my beloved Nikon, and booked a flight out. I used more of my scarce cash to call my friend Julia at Yale. (We had seen each other the summer before, when she was just returning from her own study abroad year, in Italy, and I was just leaving for Benares.)

“I’m arriving in the States flat broke,” I said. “Please rescue me.”

“Of course,” she said. What are friends for?

I flew into New York on July 6th with $32 in my jeans pocket. Julia’s dad picked me up at Kennedy airport and took me to his home, where I stayed for two weeks, doing odd jobs at his printing company in Darien, CT. I figured I should earn enough to get back to Austin, where most of my stuff was, and I could live with my aunt Rosie til I figured out what to do next.

Julia was spending the summer in New Haven, so I took the train up from Darien to visit her. My return to the US had been so abrupt that she already had a full social schedule for the weekend, and all I could do was fall in with that.

“We have to have a picnic with this Italian guy,” she said, “because I told him I would. I think he likes me, but I’m not interested.”

I shrugged. Whatever. But I had time on my hands, Julia being off at an audition, so I baked banana bread. I had missed cooking in Benares.

When Enrico arrived, Julia introduced us, and I was careful to pronounce his name precisely, rolled R and all; it was oddly important to me to get it right. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me; something exotic, no doubt: my hands were decorated with henna, a parting gift to myself in Delhi. The three of us picnicked in East Rock Park; Enrico loved the banana bread. After lunch he climbed a tall pine tree.

“Do you think he’s doing this to impress me?” asked Julia.

“No, I think he’s doing it because it’s fun,” I replied.

We parted in the afternoon knowing that we’d meet again in the evening; Enrico and Julia had both been invited to a party by a mutual friend. But Julia received a last-minute invitation to a classical music concert that she couldn’t bear to miss.

“Do you mind if I go? You can go to the party with Enrico.”

No, I didn’t mind.

I met other people at the party, but don’t remember them. Susan, now a family friend, years later said about that evening: “I had just broken up with someone, and had my eye on Enrico, but when I saw you two together, I knew there was no chance.”

We left the party for a concert on the New Haven Green, where we ran into Gabriel and Inger, friends of Enrico’s. The four of us went to a disco in Gabriel’s car, and stayed very late – the club provided a breakfast buffet. I kept trying to call Julia to let her know I wouldn’t be back that night, finally reached her around 3. “I’ll just crash at Enrico’s,” I said.

We did more than just crash. I guess I’ll never be able to lecture my daughter about not kissing on the first date. Oh, well. I never did play by The Rules, and look where it’s got me.

The next day I went back to work in Darien, not sure how to regard the events of the weekend. Just a fun fling, I first thought. Then Enrico began calling: “When are you coming back?”

It took several months. I first returned to Austin, where I realized that I actually had enough credits to graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in Asian Studies and Oriental & African Languages & Literatures (double major). I didn’t need to stay in Texas, and the economy was in a slump, so there didn’t seem much point. I might as well be… somewhere on the east coast?

My next port of refuge was with family friend Donna and her teenage daughter, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. I stayed with them for several months, working temp jobs to stay afloat. I looked for the cheapest possible way to get to New Haven, and found a ride board in one of the Congressional office buildings. A Federal employee with a large car drove every weekend to his other home in New York state, to tend his garden on the Hudson River. For a share of the gas costs, he’d get me as far as NYC, where I could catch a commuter train into Connecticut.

Also riding in the car that Friday was a woman with a wild history that she was eager to share with us. She was an anthropologist who had studied the Coptic Christians in Egypt, and for years had been the mistress of the prince of all the Copts. She told us lots of interesting things. The poor, mild-mannered Federal employee shrank into the leather seat of his Lincoln, turning various shades of crimson.

“So why are you going to New York?” she finally asked me. I explained that I was going to visit a graduate student at Yale with whom I might be starting a relationship.

“Oh, you can do better than that,” she said. “Let me fix you up with a rich man.” I declined, and continued on my way to New Haven.

Some weeks after this, I landed a “permanent” job as an administrative assistant in the political department of the American Consulting Engineers Council. (Which was an instructive look into the workings of K Street, but that’s another story.) The office overlooked a green square, diagonally across from a Washington Metro stop. So, when Enrico came to visit, he took the train to Penn Station, and then the Metro to meet me at the office. I waited eagerly, looking down from our 5th-floor window, and recognized him across the square by his walk. The thought floated into my mind: “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

And I was right, though it took him another 18 months to figure it out.