The Italian job: My summer labor

In July, I moved from the U.S. to Italy. I planned to start my new life with a five-week vacation, by far the longest of my adult life. In the process, I would attempt to embody dolce far niente, literally translated as “the sweetness of doing nothing.” That would largely entail hanging out with my family, eating Italian food and a hard-core commitment to frequent naps. After all, I’d worked as an adult for 45 years, and almost every day for the last eight.

But my son-in-law Vito was renovating the house in Puglia that belonged to him and our daughter Caroline, acting alone for months now. As luck would have it, he is a veteran contractor (as well as an artist). He had started as an apprentice to his uncle at age 13. And within days of my arrival in the town of Martina Franca, Vito asked me to help him redo the house.

I was thrilled to pitch in. I typically sit all day at my desk in front of a computer. My most strenuous physical activity during my work hours is typing. The heaviest object I lift is a paper clip. Besides, I’d long since outgrown my youthful knack for dolce far niente . My biggest incentive to join the enterprise was that our toddler granddaughter Lucia would live in this house, too.

“Are you sure you’re up to it?” Caroline asked me.

“I can do whatever Vito can do,” I said, “unless it requires any skill.”

And so my summer vacation this year turned into a summer job.

The organizational strategy for our partnership proved simple. Vito told me what to do and I did it. Mainly the chores he assigned to me involved heavy lifting. We carried a long counter into place in the kitchen. We installed an oven and hoisted a shower door into a bathroom. Wearing protective gloves, I shoveled a massive pile of rubble, consisting of uprooted tiles and weighing hundreds of pounds, into an open trailer that would be carted away by truck. Most days, the heat soared to 100 degrees, both of us quickly breaking a heavy sweat.

“Piano, piano,” Vito instructed (“slowly, slowly”).

Back in the summer of 1971, while still in college, I took a job at a warehouse in Paterson, N.J. Some days I unloaded 50-pound sacks of cement stacked high in scorching train cars onto wooden pallets, then to be taken by hydraulic lift for storage and delivery. I would go home so filthy I had to wash my hands with industrial soap and snort accumulated gunk from my nostrils with projectile force in order to resume breathing freely.

I often awoke the next day with my body so sore it seemed even my hair ached. In short order, my exertions so wore me out that I began to call in sick about once a week. The boss soon saw I was no match for the job, and before the summer ended, he let me go.

My father worked with his hands for decades as he managed real estate properties residential and commercial. And although he graduated from college, he could fix almost anything: boilers, refrigerators, washing machines. Next-door neighbors routinely came around seeking his services. I’ve struggled all my life just buckling my seat belt.

Now I watched Vito with growing admiration. He knew what fit where and how to get it all to stay put. He operated power saws and drills and could handle lathes, levels and trowels. He stood back from his handiwork at times as if assessing the play of paint on a canvas. I witnessed at close hand the legendary Italian flair for design and craftsmanship. He moved his family back in soon after.

In the bargain, I had a latelife opportunity to establish some admittedly minor blue-collar bona fides. For a few hours a day for nearly a month, I performed manual labor for the first time in almost 50 years. I felt vaguely heroic. I was living what Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” I was Paul Bunyan chopping down trees and John Henry building the transcontinental railroad. I was Sisyphus shoving a giant boulder up a steep hill, only for it to roll down as it neared the top and need to be pushed anew.

Even so, I would soon be back at my keyboard, tapping away, still suffering, if only a little, from a case of working-class envy.

I would never redeem myself for getting canned from that warehouse job. I would never know how to do with my hands what my father and Vito could do.

Still, we each do what we can do, whether with our minds or our hands or both. No chore is ever truly menial. All work counts, and always will.