"At some point in my life, nostalgia became a tumor. What began as a slight tendency to understand the cruelty of our established vision of time as a one-way street just suddenly got out of hand. I don't know the exact order of events, but it goes something like this. The risk factors were no joke. Direct descendant of Neapolitan nobility and the deep Italian south, daughter of a couple that had fallen in love at the end of the post war decade, at the beginning of the Dolce Vita, both of them tied up in loving knots with the United Nations and the NATO, two very benign fatherly presences in my childhood and youth... altogether not common anymore. Touches of the United States of America imbuing a bold Italian spirit, and of course, everything bathed in nothing but nostalgia. Especially since I had been the fulcrum of their most important decision ever, the decision to leave Italy and set up in Asunción, Paraguay. So as soon as I was able to perceive this, and I was a pretty perceptive kid, I took it upon myself to understand what it was I had caused. One of the ways was enjoying, deserving, the pain of longing for something I could glimpse at in photos and mute videos. Then, when I was four, my beloved cousin got killed. But nobody had it in them to introduce me to the concept of death at such an early age, so they told me he had gone on a super long trip to India. Of course I perceived things to be deliberately unclear, in a way that allowed for wide interpretation, for easy adaptation into the reality of what had happened, and understood, at a deep level, that I needed to explore my quest alone, and give the impression I was not even wondering, so as to be left alone. A part of me had to go along with them because I also had to protect them from the elevated concepts that I could understand, and the other part of me was probing the endless possibilities. There had to be a solution. I had to be special if I understood the things I understood, but I needed to prove myself at every level, while at the same time not letting my family down. My parents were gentle and loving, so I tried thinking of a place where we meet again, after death, or even in life, which was my internal hope for my long-missed cousin. This resulted in the land of Kijara, which lies in another dimension, and is among us and above us, in a cloud above Switzerland. But that is a fun spinoff I'll get into at another time.

IT MUST BE SAID THAT (Insertion #1) Hey, I was born in 1976. That means I belong to the generation that gaped at E.T. on a movie screen. In my case, a whole cocktail of magic-inspiring movies during the whole of the Reagan administration's economic pseudoboom. Given my unique coordinates and the point we were at in the family history, aided by a (probably guilt-ridden or nostalgia-ridden) uncle and aunt that regularly sent us fabulous betamax tapes filled with US movies and tv shows, I was in the perfect place, with a technology-friendly, photographer musician 15-years-my-senior brother, a father who was ahead of his years as far as home video was concerned, a mother who was an unblossomed film-maker, a simultaneously Padre Pio and US democratic devotee and JFK fan grandmother, and a fully bilingual and functional American School environment, at a time when everything literally seemed at hand's reach, when the turn of the century and the millenium was close enough that we felt the fizz but still far enough that we had time to fantasize even more and feel a very real part of it - let alone that when 2000 came along it was quite another '99. My childhood was the time for world premieres of jewels such as Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Ghost, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, Die Hard, The Last Emperor, Gandhi, Platoon, Amadeus, Tootsie, The Terminator, M.A.S.H., The Deer Hunter, Africa Mia, The Princess Bride, Rain Man, Poltergeist, When Harry Met Sally, The Little Mermaid (generation number 1), Cinderella, Die Hard, countercurrents including everything from Wayne's World to whatever spurned Michael Moore and of course the welcoming of computers into our everyday lives, oh the little bastards the little destiny altering new members of our families. It was delicious. And ah, the musical theater, it just swept my parents and me off our fucking feet. I don't know why my brothers never bit on the bait, or if they did, for that matter; as for me, Grease and The Little Prince (with Gene Wilder and the still now unreachable, impossible Steven Warner), not to mention The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Cats, Blood Brothers, Fame, Miss Saigon and Madame Butterfly, Evita and The Inspector Calls... are you able to embrace the largeness of this, the sense of power it bestows???

"As the years went by, these seeds germinated and started flowering with great side-effects in my everyday life. Thanks to nostalgia and my awareness of the decadence of time, I needed to elevate my living to a high power of itself, let's say. I was sensitive to beauty, to passion, to anything mortal, to the course of things, to turning points, to music that takes you away, to good reading, to expressing my joys and sorrows and wonders. And the sense of pain that grew alongside all that. Then my grandparents started dying off... gently at first, long-distance, an hour or two more without seeing my dad emerge from his room with a stuffy nose...and then suddenly, twice almost, with Teresa, my beloved Grandmama.

"Then came exactly a decade of joy. And then came another of sorrow. Sorry, I... I can't go on. I need a little break", said the woman, with a weak gesture of her hand.
"Ok, we'll come back a little later, Ma'am", said the writer, with a quick nod to the nurse that was checking the woman's tubing. The woman looked out the window, smiling. But an instant later, as the nurse replaced the pillow behind her back, she caught a glimpse of a tear wiped wrong, glistening royally on a still beautiful, slowly dying, ivory cheekbone.