Iliade

 As I've mentioned, our time here in Terrasini has featured occasional victories and a motley collection of failures. One of our biggest failures has been in trying to find alternative spaces to read and writer and simply be. Essentially, we look for other spaces so we're not in each other's grill all the time. Actually, we get along famously, and are very good at working side by side, but I think we would both appreciate optional spaces that we could go to in the course of a day. One of the things that I found most disconcerting about retirement was that for the first time in over four decades I didn't have an office, another space where I could go to work. There were many aspects of retired life that I predicted, but that was one that I didn't see being such a problem. Maybe it's simply a reminder that I don't really matter anymore, and have entered the +1, trying to do die as unobtrusively as possible, stage of latter life. Our new place is better for carving off space, and Janet is putting together a great little unofficial office upstairs, but it's still only a one bedroom apartment. I work at the kitchen table, which is perfectly fine, but wherever we settle in the future we'll definitely need another room or two to truly make it all work (oh, and some bookshelves, obviously). When we were investigating possible towns and cities, we came up with a lot list of prerequisites (most of which seemed to be reflections of what we loved so much about Evora, Portugal). One of them was a library where we could take turns working. However, the concept of a public library is much more of an American phenomenon that we realize. There's a lovely, and growing, little library here in Terrasini, La Biblioteca Comunale, Claudio Cataflio. However, it doesn't have separate carrels or even a table where a person could set up a couple books or notes or a laptop and get some writing done. There were a couple tables in the children's section, but the woman behind the counter was insistent that I not enter (although there were other adults there). I'm assuming that you thought I was some mysterious creepy old dude and it would be best to keep me away from the children, and I completely understand that. So, the search goes on. Sometimes I just set up at a local coffeeshop and work for a bit, slowly nursing drinks and snacks, and you can make that work occasionally, but I need something more structured and dependable.

There was a lovely and musty and growing collection of books in the stacks - and Italian versions of Homer just screamed a perfect place for me to work - but there wasn't really anyplace inside of the stacks to work.