Our hoof tree

Publish date 01-01-2022

by Gian Mario Ricciardi

It was the summer of almost "free all", of the battles of the no vax, of the green pass, but also of the disaster in Afghanistan, of the attacks, of the refugees, twenty years after the twin towers. And everything seems to come across the atmosphere and the inspiration of the Tree of hooves. Yes, it is an uncertain time, both climatically, politically and economically.

Our granite truths are in a daze:
- the vaccine protects and must be done but does not immunize us 100 percent;
- the end of the pandemic that we all imagined last year dissolved in a flood of soap bubbles;
- the third dose will come for everyone or only for the frail? If so, how, with another injection or a tablet, in vaccination centers or will we buy it at the pharmacy?
- school in attendance? We hope it will continue;
- everywhere with the green pass despite the massive events (and for me not understandable) in various parts of Italy and the world;
- how will the economy go? Will the green light for layoffs give way to a difficult period full of almost always symbolic principals ?;
- you are looking for work, but the signs are multiplying too: "Wanted waiters". They can not be found. And to think that in the postwar period and up to the eighties it was they, conceived as double work, who partly built the Italian miracle. After the shift in the factory we went to "serve". After the shift in the factory, another shift took place in the fields and elsewhere;
- ideologies: we have experienced many, too many. It is time to stop considering the people of the right or the left. The parameters no longer exist;
- Parliament had to be opened like a can of sardines. We have seen!
How many certainties, how many illusions have been swept away. It is the time of chestnuts, but they are almost all fragile unripe. Yet the vaccination campaign has lived up to the honor of Italy, the attempt to break through the "fourth wave" contained and without the dramatic outlines of recent months. Yet Mario Draghi's government has given its all.
Let's hope a little more than a year ago. So? Perhaps we lack the enthusiasm of our old people, those we have closed in retirement homes and review with the dropper; perhaps we lack the enthusiasm of freedom.

So, the other night (because they program them - and I know why - always at night!) I saw the tree of hooves again. I recorded the piling up of misfortunes, bad luck, marked destiny, but far away, in the background I caught the flavor of the "desire to turn the page". And I thought: "Without miracles we wouldn't be here." It is true that we have had an avalanche of unhealthy deaths and this is a huge burden for many, a burden of civilization; a society undermined in relationships, fossilized on the telephone; the dad; the computer; the smiles all shadowed by a sort of existential melancholy.

But then I saw, on TV, those trees in the squares and hills; the grandfather who built children's dreams in his stories; the mothers who in polenta (only polenta without butter and sausage) embodied the desire to resist; in that tree trunk the wood of the hooves to continue walking and then I said to myself: «You continue to walk as in the mountains when you are exhausted but there are few curves to the summit. We'll make it. Our old folks made it. We can do it too ». "Start over" as Msgr. Straw. It will be tough with the economic recovery, with layoffs, schools, buses, the metro.
But it will be so! No, it's not a late summer night's dream. And more. Even the Berlin Wall could have been eternal, it fell, it ended like this gloomy time of uncertainty.


Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP October 2021

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