Lodgers

Many of you may not know that we had an Italian roommate for a month. A lot of the time I didn't notice he was there either.

Matteo is from Rimini, Italy, located right on the Adriatic sea about an hour away from Bologna, where he goes to school. His English is extremely enthusiastic but not always the most intelligible, so I'm a little hazy on some of the details of why he first came to America and what he was doing before he came out to Michigan. (Although I do know that he met an Italian woman somewhere - Phoenix? - and they got married in Vegas shortly before he came here. She went back to Italy and is going to meet up with him back in Bologna.) He eventually came out here to the University of Michigan to do some research (engineering?) for a month and and somehow (I don't feel like giving the whole big explanation right now) he found us and rented the empty room in our apartment.

Most days he would leave bright and early to head to school, come home really late, and talk on the phone in rapid Italian. I would go several days without ever seeing him, but once in a while he would come and hang out with us as we watched T.V. or sat around talking. He was always super-nice and really considerate the whole time he was around. He was so grateful for anything you would do for him. A few days before he left I asked him how he was getting to the airport and he said he was going to take a taxi, which would have easily cost $50 bucks or more. He was astonished when Peter and I volunteered to drive him, and he thanked me profusely for days. He even gave me a pair of nice running shoes that fit me perfectly as a gift (well, mostly because he didn't have room for them in his luggage). By now he should be safe and sound back in Bologna with his Vegas bride.

My only regret is that I didn't try to speak more Italian with him. I consider myself fairly functional in Italian since it is similar to Portuguese, plus I took a third-year Italian class at the University of Utah, I read the entire Book of Mormon in Italian, and, believe it or not, there are a number of operas written in Italian. The few times I did try to speak to him I would start out in Italian but quickly slip into Portuguese, which he couldn't understand, and then I would get embarrassed and switch back to English. I could understand him pretty well in Italian, but spoke really fast and a regional accent that I wasn't used to. However, listening to him speak English was like an Italian lesson because you often had to take what he said and mentally rearrange it to make sense in English, thereby inferring principles of Italian grammar. Here are some of my favorite Matteo-isms:

• One day he asked us if he could use our "vacuum generator." I assume he was directly translating the name of the object from Italian, but I found the name quite amusing. After all, doesn't the machine generate a vacuum in order create suction? (The scientists and engineers in the audience may correct me if necessary.)

• He was a really big baseball fan and played for an amateur team in Rimini. Who new baseball was popular in Italy? He liked to watch baseball "matches" on T.V. and he even went to a Tigers "match" in Detroit a couple weeks ago. I would say things like, "I like baseball games too. I want to go to a Tigers game someday." I thought he might parrot me, but he persisted in saying "match." Perhaps his English teacher/textbook was British?

• Right before he left he told me that he had "one shahm-poe" (emphasis on the first syllable) that I could have, referring to a leftover bottle of shampoo.

So Addio, Matteo. His departure makes room for yet another temporary lodger, my friend Nick Johnson. Nick is in medical school in St. Louis (I stayed with him and his little family on my trip back from Utah in May) and he is coming here to do a month-long external rotation in plastic surgery at the University of Michigan Hospital. I'm stoked for him to live with us, but apparently he will be at the hospital at 4:00 a.m. every morning and in bed by 8:00 p.m., so like Matteo I may end up not seeing him around very much. But at least I should be able to understand him.