There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I usually mix with fruit juice. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices of wine, which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I was unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits.

I lived in Italy for four years, in an apartment with a spiral staircase at the top of the complex, overlooking the city and Monte Berico. Now I’m at the Safeway cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D., and without fail this fantasy surges to my mind, in which I imagine that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In a way it feels infantilizing. In this fantasy I always suppose the cashier wanting to land a kid whose trying to use a fake I.D. and quickly become nervous that it’s going to be me. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of stolen beer, Harry Potter, and a watermelon.

Gigantic Hearts is a term I think of when you have an impossible to explain feeling of a particular moment in life, particularly good feelings which are embedded in a group of friends. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she understood that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of surrounding neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, usually the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes and sparks some kind of push to the protagonist’s boundaries. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before meeting Stephanie and the siblings, and felt extremely free, thinking it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t think was possible, imagining it would shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter books by stealing them from Safeways. 

Today, as I look at the Safeway entrance and recall the stacks of cases of beer piled up to our ceiling which we called a byramid , I realize it’s the same store I stole a few watermelons from, and threw out in the middle of the intersection nearby. I live just minutes from here now, and it just occurred to me those events years ago. On these drives home from our stealing escapades, I would always get a melancholy feeling which latched onto my anxiety acutely. I would think that I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it became true. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really met close friends, who lived carelessly and by the minute, until I moved to Italy a few years later.  Stealing beers and books is an odd memory to look fondly back on, but it’s the people whose company I was surrounded in I cherish the most.