Adolescence At The Time Of The Lira Read online

  Today, sixteen years boys own everything, or rather, all that you can actually buy on the market, but despite this I always get the feeling that something is missing, it is complex to be described, something of which it is only possible to notice the lack.

  That world, that sometimes some kids today envy, will not come back, it will be of any help to try and resurrect something like the old Lira, to help us to remind it; it won’t come back because we never did anything in order to preserve at least something of it, on the contrary it was often considered as stupid agony of the small ancient world of our grandparents, as something that would impede the progress of Italian civilization and that for this reason had to be rejected as soon as possible.

  I can say that we have succeeded in full, we have thrown everything that could have let us bring along with us some fragments of that life, starting from the most trivial to the most serious one.

  An example, perhaps the most banal and invisible one, is the fact that believing that sophisticated sports made a better service to the maturation of the guys, we ended up taking them off the flowerbeds and the open spaces of the neighborhoods, where they learned to have fun with little, often almost nothing, but with that nothing they needed to be together with their pairs, they had to use their imagination to make up an afternoon of games, imagination indeed.

  How many of those sites are not today convenient parking? Without so many problems they had been transformed into something else, for the simple fact that it is much more reassuring to know that in the evening you will be able to find a place for your car than worrying about where to send your kids to play.

  The oratories do not exist anymore, I agree on the fact that education and leisure time of young people can not be delegated to the Catholic Church as if it were a monopoly, but I think that when you delete something you also have to create an alternative, otherwise not only you are unable to improve what already existed, but you even destroy it at all, and the resulting is zero.

  I still can see our old priest who dabbled in making the referee of our matches, from some parts of his uniform he was even able to recreate in some way the one of a real referee; he was influential in his decisions and could keep the meeting within certain limits of education, he liked to say that football is a game, nothing more.

  A few years later I've worn myself the uniform of the soccer referee as well, and it happened to me many times to arbitrate games played by boys of the same age as my friend who is here today to talk to me, and this experience was not at all comforting.

  Rarely I have met guys who reawakened the true spirit of the Sunday game between teams; for most of them, however, those ninety minutes represented the culmination of the week, the real work and commitment, important enough to even replace school.

  " Winning " is the ultimate goal, no matter what you are forced to suffer or cause to the others in order to get there, which would be legitimate if there was really something to be won, but it is not; perhaps the only consolation for having brought home three points can be represented, for the parents, by the possibility to tell about it to their friends at the bar the following Monday, while for the guys who play by doing it at school with their classmates.

  I have personally experienced situations in which the figure of the referee, represented by me actually, he had not the task to direct the match, but to maintain public order, complete madness; and when I had the opportunity to speak to some of those guys when I saw them with bloodshot eyes, I tried to reason with them, pointing out that they were ditching a great opportunity, the only real chance to have fun for the whole week.

  It also happened to listen to some parents from the stands inviting their children to be smart, to fake a foul or to deceive the referee, or even to be violent against their opponents; then I happened to meet some of these fathers at the exit and in order to avoid further discussions, when they approached me, I had created a phrase that perfectly worked every time, to hush them all, telling them that according to the Law of the large numbers, among the thirty boys who had taken part in the match, at least twenty or twenty-two of them would soon become workers or unemployed, underpaid or frustrated, or maybe the four things all together, suggesting those gentlemen to teach their sons to have fun until they were on time, this phrase always worked!

  I honestly do not know if the sporting spirit in the '90s was the same, did really exist all this competitiveness? This desire to redeem through the sport a hard life? Did exist such a large number of hard lives?

  I still use to practice sport, even if I’m no longer a referee, at least once a week with my friends, the same as twenty years ago. They are many years now, therefore, that I attend the soccer fields in my area, the Castelli Romani area, and I must add with regret that I rarely ever get to see kids playing; before or after our matches we only cross groups of thirties or forties.

  My young friend got surprised of that too, of how easy it was for us, almost granted, to organize a weekly match, but when I asked him why they do not do the same he could not even give me an answer.

  Then I tried to give one myself, explaining that perhaps it was not the sport to have changed but how you live it; indeed for us football matches have always been a cheap way to be all together, and when I tried to bring to memory great moments such as the great goals by Baggio or the commentary by Pizzul, the smell of those summer evenings is always accompanied with images of friends, relatives, neighbors, all together, with the game in the background.

  Football, you know, has always justified everything, the celebrations at the limit of vandalism, the lockouts of the stores several hours before the kick-off, the fact that the home works always arrived the next day at school incomplete and even the missed dates with the girlfriend.

  It 's strange and specifically it’s a typical Italian thing, the fact that if one tried to justify himself with his partner claiming to a work matter as a cause preventing a romantic going out, you would be taken as fool, while it was much more credible and sheltered from criticism if you just said " I can’t, there's an important football match ".

  I myself can choose an evening of absolute freedom in the days when there is the Coppa dei Campioni ( we call it now the Champions League, but I prefer the Italian name ... ); with the schedule of matches in my hands I choose the match I can not miss, one among those on Tuesday and Wednesday and at this point the evening in question becomes untouchable, pace to dinners by candlelight.

  To hear today's teens, however, it seems that things have seriously changed if sixteen girls already prefer those boys who bring with them a beautiful dowry, consisting of a car

  ( the one they call micro-car ), branded clothes and electronic gadgets.

  For goodness sake, these could be also considered symbols of progress, the only problem is that, as my young friend rightly pointed out, when someone comes along with something more sparkling in his hands you are left out, it seems as if the charm that till a few days before your body used to produce was suddenly gone, so you find yourself alone again, you feel like the many scrapped cars that are so quickly disused.

  In the '90s a lot of people were actually interested to become rich, but far fewer dared to show it; it was considered improper to show off one’s wealth, even if only for the fact that you could expose yourself to claims of every kind; our parents were not that fool...

  Consequently, even us kids were less influenced, after all, if it was possible to have at home a bit of everything, why would you worry about going out? What would change if the neighbor had thought that you were a poor man? It would have changed nothing, a good laugh and better friends than ever; I remember how my grandfather, on the contrary, was proud of his peasant origins, of not trendy clothes he used to wear and struggles in the factory in which he had taken part, but then something has changed and many of us have started not to bear the fact that others might think of them as beggars .

  Since this was and actually is now the adults’ behavior, you can not be surprised that it infl
uence the children’s, although it is often fairly impossible to cleanly divide the two worlds, the clean and honest of the past, and the actual, superficial and arrogant; they actually change the styles.

  Still continuing the conversation with my young friend, I tried to point out one thing during his complain that today's girls say immediately yes only because they can cuckold you without wasting words, when our girls, those of the '90s, they would never have done such a thing.

  In the fact, boys today often take a rip off after, when they realize that the trust has been misplaced, while we used to take the rip before, when we came to nothing when the girl had been making you believe you were close to it for weeks; unfortunately there is no remedy for certain things, we will never be immune from certain disappointments.

  There are also many other things that have not changed at all, such as family.

  It is often said that the family of the new millennium is a bunch of people bound together only by ties of kinship, that the warm and cozy nest is gone, swept away by the new fashions.

  I believe, instead, that the Italian family is facing now all its contradictions, to try to return as soon as possible to be that cozy nest where you could hang on in times of trouble.

  This is a necessary step, perhaps painful, but any change brings with it more or less difficult traumas, it is important that we change for the better not to run the risk to do the same mistake I pointed out before about the oratories...again when something is lowered down you need to have an alternative ready, otherwise the result is only rubbles.

  Our afternoon was drawing to its end, a lot of things we said even though there would be many more to say, me and my friend of sixteen represent two different worlds, two ways of looking at life that will never meet or clash, simply because one of the two no longer exists.

  Anyway, speaking with simplicity, we still manage to alleviate the great distances, at each level of society; they’re there, before our eyes and still we often can’t see, at most sometimes we end up criticizing them.

  We also talked about our next summer vacation, and even here my interlocutor was falling into the trap of melancholy, that bitter feeling that you have for the things that you’ll never know, but on this occasion I was able to stop him, telling him that about this aspect they are luckier than us, having the opportunity to travel the world as we have only dreamed of.

  In the summers I remember that never happened to speak a language that was not Italian, at most some local dialect; we didn’t know how a Spanish or a German used to think, we surely didn’t have the Euro ... of course you could not go to Netherlands and have some coffee with the change you had got at the supermarket in your little town; we had our dear old Lira, beautiful I must say (after all, you should also please the eye ), but almost useless just outside the national borders.

  We left after an afternoon in which everyone has understood something more about the other, in which we have also agreed that if one day we will asked to choose between the Lira and the Euro, this choice will have to be weighted on strictly economic reasons, the nostalgia must be put aside even if it hurts, because an instrument of negotiation, which a coin actually is, can never revive a way of life, although it may seem the only means able to do that.

  Thanks

  To all those who still continue to

  consider me a modern guy

  although I happen to say sometimes,

  when my pockets are empty, the phrase

  " I do not have any Lira ... ".

  By the same author :

  A murderer’s enigma (2012)

  Commissioner’s Ghost (2012)

  An Italian in Brooklyn ( 2011)

  An American in Rome ( 2010)

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