Last week on the day of the blood moon we took the 20 minute cable car ride up Mount Baldo, which overlooks Lake Garda at an altitude of 2200 meters, which translates to 7200 feet. Arriving at the summit we enjoyed a spectacular view and decent meal at a window side table of the restaurant. Unfortunately after lunch I often get tired and with a bit of an uphill hike to get to the cable car by the time we were done eating it was siesta time for old Dakota. At the summit there is also another restaurant and bar where there is a sweet outside lounge section. The next time we go there I might want to nap in that area, but since we had Diana’s mother’s birthday to attend that night I felt that I needed a good nap in a comfy bed, so off we went.
My relationship with Diana’s parents, and in particular her mother, has been an interesting thing worth sharing, even though I don’t really expect to get through the reader the whole extent of how unusual it is given the starting point. Basically Diana let me know from the start that her relationship with her parents has been challenging and tense her whole life to say the least. Additionally her parents were not happy with me from day one and they didn’t seem to want to have anything at all to do with me. They didn’t attend our wedding which was a little understandable since it was in November, 2021, during the pandemic, and they were both very cautious of catching covid. Afterwards they did come to the door of her apartment were we had our makeshift post-wedding party to tell me in Italian that if I don’t make Diana happy that she will kill me. It was all tongue-in-cheek, but this woman doesn’t seem to have a humorous bone in her body so it came across very much like she was serious. Not that I cared about the threat but it was just creepy for her to show up and that was essentially what she wanted to say. I took it all in stride, given the circumstance, but it was really just reinforcing of the fact that she had a general distain for me that she had no interest in hiding in the least.
Just as something changed radically between Diana and me, so had something changed between her mother and me. She stopped being overtly negative, even subtly hostile, to me. For my part I found her to be, well, a trip. She is just a stereotypically bitter old Italian women and once I learned to just take her shit in stride I began to truly enjoy being with her from an entertainment standpoint. She knows that I don’t speak Italian yet she talks to me, often times in rapid fire for extended periods of time and sometimes with nobody around to translate, as if I know exactly what she’s saying. She just cracks me up for a wide variety of reasons. Plus, somehow, she seems to have come to like me. She sometimes tries to look out for my comfort, for example on a cold day a couple months ago showing me to the comfy chair in front of the fireplace.
So it was a pleasant enough time at her birthday dinner, but the real fun started when we left just as the blood moon was on the rise. The moon was as beautiful as could be and the optical illusion that is well-known to have the effect of it seeming to be enormous as it is on the rise was in full display. Diana was driving and I couldn’t keep my eyes from the beauty of it as it was on the rise, still as orange as an orange might be. As we were going along a country road I had to point it out repeatedly and at one point Diana felt a need to pull over and she suggested that the three of us, which included friend Agostino, have a gratitude chant together. We all recognized it as a great idea and once we got to chanting within a minute the color changed from that great orange to a deep yellow. Once we were done chanting we all had a great time acknowledging what we had all witnessed. What a great gift all of these things were, all day long.