125. Bonanza: Not Just About Cowboys

But this is an all year round affair. The students throughout the year went round the houses and collected the elderly poems or phrases written out on old pieces of scrap paper and compiled them into a book which they published, read out at the party and gave a copy to each guest. The interesting thing is that these old folks do not speak in the official Italian language but a dialect that changes from region to region. So the kids learn this ancient dialect as I did when a child and is rather amazing because it’s almost a completely different language. I can’t resist to give this example:

“Wealth Mine” could well be another word for “bonanza”- a term that not even in your wildest dreams would you imagine someone using it to describe “Old Age”. Yet this is not just my view, but what most of the old people in my village considers, this age, the third and last age of our earthly sojourn to be- precisely- a bonanza.

People often associate, depression, walking sticks, wheelchairs, useless limbs, if you’ve still any, when you touch the threshold of becoming a “Pensioner”. Yet, who says it has to be so? Even if you don’t run as fast as you did, that is if you still run at all, does not exclude you from enjoying other pleasures of life. I’m not going to say what these pleasures are because what may be exciting to me could bore someone else to death. All I’m saying is that even if one’s body does not have the same calibre as it had it does not mean that life is at an end. Someone who spent the best part of his last twenty years in a wheelchair said he would not swap that period of his life for any other- I’ll let you figure out why he said that. Obviously it was not because he sat in his wheelchair day and night doing and thinking about nothing.

The "server" here is the third sister

No matter how adverse our physical state may be, if we do not cease to marvel at the wonders around us, our state is an enviable one and not vice-versa. It is when we close ourselves up in a little ball and shut everything and everyone out that it’s time to say “I’m old!” and our wheelchair, our bodies, our surroundings become our own handmade prison cell.

Parties for the aged are not a once a year showcase, it reflects the village attitude towards its elderly. Some of the volunteers serving at tables are the Town Hall Councillors, Aldermen/women, the parents who brought the children to sing, sat on the steps of the school gym and the teenagers of the village read the poems serenading with the accordion .

“baby” in Italian means “bambino” in dialect it means “putin”

Precisely, that’s why the Russian President is so popular in this area!