We gorged ourselves on the bounty of a Mediterranean August as we sat in the shade of our umbrella and scanned the horizon of the Gulf of Genoa. Figs bursting pink and milky, grapes that were in huge, odd-sized bunches still warm from the sun, vast sheets of wax paper on which micro-thin slices of prosciutto marched in solid ranks of pink and white tenderness, olives of every size and color, nimbus clouds of fresh buffalo milk mozzarella cheese floating in a bath of whey, tomatoes—long, thin, orange ones and huge, fat, misshapen red ones, red with a flame of yellow or green at one end, so fresh that they smelled like the bruised leaves of the plant when you pick them off the vine. All this our mother spread before us along with a loaf of fresh saltless bread and a square of focaccia, oozing olive oil, which I loved but my fastidious sisters would not touch. Calvin’s “grease bread,” my sister Janet called it.

After Mom had eaten a little, she would sit back in her deck chair, a queen among her grateful subjects, and we, ranged on towels about her, would keep eating while she read aloud.

And so it was that my outer eye and inner eye, my nose, and my taste buds conspired together each lunchtime with my ears to offer me a surreal kaleidoscopic vision of an intensely bright world. A world of slow-moving Italian families, hot sun on blood warm water, peppery tastes, stories read aloud of Huck Finn or Ratty and Mole on their beloved river, all tangled with crusty bread and wafer-thin slices of salty pig flesh, which melted in my mouth.

The water lapped, and I awoke from the part in The Wind in the Willows where Ratty’s boat had just tipped over and his beautiful picnic basket had gone to the bottom of the river.

“Were you asleep?” Rachael asked accusingly.

“No I was not!” I said.

“Then tell me what just happened.”

“The basket has gone to the bottom of the river!”

“No, before that.”

“I . . . I, well I do know!” I said.

“No you don’t, you were asleep!” said Rachael.

Then Mom would rescue me. “Rachael, we’re on vacation, we are all supposed to be resting. If he took a little nap that’s fine.”

Rachael looked darkly at me for a moment then said, “Well he doesn’t sleep at night if he sleeps in the day, he’ll keep me awake!”