Attenzione by Sam Hill
Jerry and Janet Hill’s nephew, Sam Hill, is stationed with the Navy legal department in Naples, Italy. Janet asked Sam to write a blog about how he was experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Each day I’m greeted by a woman sitting at her window reading in the sun. We’ve never met, but I’ve seen her more than anyone else in the last five weeks, at least if you don’t count faces on screens. She is elderly, maybe 75, and rotund with sloping shoulders and blond-gray hair drawn back with a headband. She sits on a lounge chair with a book in her lap, but every minute or two looks up and stares out the window with a longing expression, like a kid who’s been grounded and watching her friends outside.
She lives in the apartment building next to mine in a neighborhood called Arenella, a middle-class quarter in Naples, Italy that overlooks Mt. Vesuvius and the bay. My balcony faces her window. Most mornings, when I step outside, she’s sitting there in a red sweater.
Once a week, I leave the apartment and walk down the stairwell into the lobby where there’s a printed notice taped to the door, titled
ATTENZIONE.
My Italian is lousy, but I know what it says. The prime minister issued another decree extending the lock-down for a few more weeks. Stay at home, wash your hands, keep your distance, cover your face when you leave. This makes two months without the pedestrian market ways, the elderly men arm-in-arm gesturing, the kids kicking soccer balls in the piazza, the espresso and cigarette smoke on patios, the white-knuckled driving.
ATTENZIONE
The first weekend in March, the Italian government ordered everyone to stay at home and leave only for a situazione necessaria—trips for groceries, medicine, medical emergencies, or essential work. In Arenella, only pharmacies and grocery stores are open, and people out and about have to carry a signed declaration that states their national identification number, address, destination, and reason for their trip. The police set up neighborhood checkpoints, and those caught breaking the rules are subject to fine or arrest. As an American outsider, a straniero, I don’t want to get stuck babbling in broken Italian to an overzealous cop, so I stay home each day, working full-time from my couch and venturing outside on Mondays to buy groceries.
On my first grocery run during the lockdown, the line to get in the store stretched down the street, everyone standing a couple of meters apart and only a hand-full allowed in at a time. When an ambulance passed, the devout nonnas donning masks and gloves genuflected and said a quiet prayer.
ATTENTZIONE
In these hyper-individualized days, the phenomenon of a universal hardship is a thing for the history books, for times of vast catastrophe long outsmarted or outgrown. Or so we thought. We live our lives in huddles with curated rituals, attitudes, interests, media, and facts. Almost never are the sufferings of one huddle felt by other huddles across neighborhoods, countries, time zones, and hemispheres.
But here we are. High school seniors and nursing home seniors, bankers and baristas, prime ministers and plumbers, millennials and boomers, the Cracker Barrel crowd and Whole Foods crowd, east coasters and west coasters, and everyone in between—all of us yielding one way or another to a force that transcends our tribe and shoves us into a different way of life.
And while no one is spared, we’re each affected in different ways. For some, it’s cabin-fevered kids day after day. For others, lonely isolation. For others, the missed ritual—a commencement, wedding, or funeral. For others, an anxious furlough, missing paychecks, or unpaid bills. For others, the risk of sickness for the health of strangers. For others, distance from a loved one who suffers. And for others, pained breathing and fear of the end.
All of these struggles, different as they are, have a thing in common: each draws us to attention. Shaken from our regularity, we’re confronted with everyday frailties we’d rather pretend weren’t there: vulnerabilities of elderly loved ones, ambivalence toward human connection, injustices in the economic status quo, brazenness toward nature’s ways.
In the last analysis, these times teach us that our bodies, relationships, families, communities, and environment are things to be nurtured, not exploited. They require attention; these days, they demand it.
ATTENZIONE
Several of the gospel storytellers write about an encounter with Jesus and a few of his disciples on a mountaintop. The stories say that during their hike, Jesus’s appearance changed—in an instant, “he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” At that moment, Elijah and Moses appeared alongside him, and the disciples stood there dumbstruck.
The transfiguration story holds a special place in Christian lore and yields all sorts of theological insight. But at its heart, it’s the story of a few disciples being called to attention to see Jesus for who he really was for the very first time.
The irony of the transfiguration story, by my lights, is that it wasn’t Jesus who was most transfigured by the encounter—it was the disciples. Shaken from a daze and confronted with realities, both frightful and beautiful, they were forever changed. Transfigured, if you will.
ATTENZIONE, it says. What was first a warning is now an invitation.
We each have a transfiguration story. Mine involves no mountains or shining faces—just a neighbor sitting at her window and wishing she could go outside. But she has my attention. And with a little attention, even in the dread of these days, beneath the folds of grief and anxiety, we may find a grace that calms and renews our fevered hearts.