The Ruins of Roma

  

The first time I went to Europe was with my sister. We were graduating from college soon and it was a capstone experience/reward from mom and dad. With an art history teacher as our guide, we swiveled through the alps and across the midsection, slicing cities but breathing in museums. We did not sit at cafes but moved through the streets awake late, missing nothing - we hoped. My pictures and notes from this expedition resonate with wonder, but I still can't help but think of what I may have missed.  Are Innocence and Youth just as blinding as they say love is, or does it simply offer a different lense through which we view the world? 

I must have seen something because when I returned, I Immediately changed my major to French and signed up for a semester study.  6 months. That should do it, I thought, and I headed to Besancon, France. A town that was perfect in every way.  I was only 21and 6 months still felt like at least three years... And I came home wise, I thought.

Years passed. I married. Returned with a friend. A short visit here and there. I brought my students and introduced them...I even left the continent and saw other countries for a while. But then life set in and some how ten yeArs passed without our being together. Europe and me... I missed us. 

So I found a way to take my students again, affording Europe the only way I could- as the traveling teacher with 20 high schoolers in tow, I packed mes valises and prepared for what I thought was "me settling."  A less than ideal scenario for my continental reunion, I thought.   What I found was that She didn't disappoint. Despite the years and changes that life has a way of handing you, the travel still satisfied.

This time, nearly 40, I expected to love the cafés most.  I expected to enjoy the routine moments of markets and meals- but it is the ruins of Rome, Italy that surprised me. And not just for their historic significance-I had been awed by centuries before. This time it was the ruins themselves that captured my attention.  

Our guide at the colloseum  held pictures of what it must have looked like in its prime.  She asked us to use our imagination to envision the columns and floor... Then to see the gladiators, muscular and spirited, sprinting forth for the arena battle.She walked us through towering arches and had us touch the ancient stones and it was like touching Time itself, to think of the crowds and the fear and cheering that were once held in that stone.  Yet,  even though I could feel the immensity of the past, I found myself preferring to rest in the present. Preferring the feel of cold under my hand to the imaginings of glory.  I saw my feet in the arena, not the athletes' of old.

We walked away from the ancient stadium and headed toward the Roman Forum.  Among the flowers and amid the grass, lay stumps of mightiness that have all passed.  Like Ozymandias, from Shelley's poem, monuments strew the field.  I felt comfort and found majesty in the thought that it was all in the past.  The glory wasn't from today- and that was okay.  It was still worth guarding, worth keeping just the way time had altered it.  

And I walked between the stubs of columns, content with myself - thinking that perhaps my own ruins could also be left that way.  In middle class America, we have such a desire to polish and prune. We are always mowing lawns and hiding cracks in the paint. But here, in Rome, one appreciates the value of the ruin.  Existence is enough. It is in fact beautiful.  And it is this philosophy that I am sure my younger  self would never have noticed.  In fact, I looked around at my students and found myself thankful to have twenty years on them, for they sat on my ruins and sighed.

They checked their phones for text messages from home and they missed the appreciation. They even missed the history.  I tried to call them together and explain that this was where Caesar was slain, his body then dragged to Piazza Navona, where we had eaten lunch earlier that day. Their eyes were glazed, though. They had been In Europe for 10 days already.   They had seen the  Vatican and had told me they thought it would be bigger.  They had taken selfies in front of too many pretty churches.  This place of perfect ruin seemed to them only a neat old place- a pile of rubble to most. In their defense, on my first travel expeditions, I am sure I too missed awesome opportunities.  Perhaps.  But I wonder if it has changed for teens.  I wonder if we have taught them at all how to value history.  In this moment, I felt a twinge of guilt, for I wanted to teach them to study the past and to listen for stories in the wind.  I wanted to place their hands on stone and force an honoring.  But I failed that day.  My selfishness won over and I turned my back to them so that I could pay homage to the Roman ruins, almost apologetically, for I had brought the irreverent into a sacred place.

I stepped away and rested on a fallen stone, caressing it for its sturdiness.  I lingered in front of layerings that revealed centuries and loitered over temples opened to the earth.  From high peaks I watched glory still hover, and I listened to Pride shout its name. 

And in my mind, I thanked Time for showing me the beauty of ruins. 

I left vowing to learn more deeply, promising to teach from the heart.  But Time touches each traveler a different way, I know.  And I ponder now, perhaps, if there was some wonder behind those selfies and in the text messages my students sent back home. Perhaps they will return at forty and crop out the selfie pose, zooming in on the rubble.  Perhaps they too will vow to share the ancient with the modern.