A Word from David

Someone recently asked what I do all day while we're in Rome. From 10:30 a.m. or so on, I'm up to the same things as Sharon and the boys (though Sharon's the only one who mops floors with her watch). But every morning except Sunday, I wake up an hour or so before the rest of the gang and walk to a neighborhood cafe four or five blocks away. For the next three hours (I usually begin with a caffe Americano and a cornetto pastry-- don't tell the boys about the pastry-- and order a second caffe a couple of hours later) I work on a book manuscript on my laptop. The book is a memoir about myself and two friends from college (don't worry, they're both a lot more interesting than I am). My "office" is an octagonal wood booth, where I set up the laptop, and arrange several old journals and a few books (most days: Robert Lowell's poems and memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Loren Eiseley and Lauren Winner), and I watch the other regulars filter in. The setting is perfect for the kind of writing I'm doing. With the Italian music and conversation swirling around me, I feel as if I'm in a kind of cocoon-- thinking about the early 1980s, when Reagan had just taken office and (of particular relevance to the chapter I'm working on) people still hitch-hiked. For the first two months, I worked in anonymity. But yesterday one of the baristas and a woman who meets with a group of thirty-something mothers at the cafe every day after they drop their kids at school asked if I was working on a book. They each have interesting stories themselves (the barista is an aspiring singer, it turns out, and one of the women apparently is an actress). But that will have to wait for another book.