Frenky Banana: A Man of Many Turns

This weekend, I set out for Perugia with two new friends, architecture students Emily Parker and Virginia Boyd. Perugia is north of Rome, about three hours by train, in Umbria. Built into a hillside, no street goes straight: all streets double back on themselves, making little headway up the elevation.

There's an overabundance of churches in Perugia. Pick your patron saint and go.

Dynamite chocolate. Clean empty hostel. Nice old man.

I even had good roommates. Peter and Phil were Austrailians moving from Europe bottom to top with their girlfriends. Phil, a devout Catholic, gave me a little spiel on relics. Today they hold mostly a symbolic position, he said.

But, most certainly, the highlight of the small trip (and quite possibly crown jewel of Europe; the jury's out) was our dinner. We ate at a small restaurant in the wall of a narrow side street called Vecchia Perugia, in Italian, or Old Perugia, in the language civilization and justice.

We were met outside with cries of "My friends, my friends!" from an old man in pin stripes and red. The pin stripes were from his suit; the red was from everything else: his vest, his shirt, his scarf. As he ushered us inside, on the walls were pictures of him in the exact same clothing: in the newspaper, at a jazz festival, with Don King. This was Frenky Banana.

Pronounced Frankie, Frenky Banana (for with him, both names must always be used) is a seventy-two (72) year old man who sang his handwritten menu to us, to the tune of James Taylor song(s) (I'm not sure if he used more than one tune; he was that good of a singer). He instantly recognized us for Americans, and started calling the girls "My Love" and I "Schwartzenegger." I'm not exactly sure how he made that last jump of logic, but I think he sensed my confusion, and in order to clear up what was muddled, boldly shouted "Viva La France!" He then sat at the table next to us and read the newspaper while we ate, alone in the restaurant.

I'm not really sure how to end this. It's impossible to relate his Don King impression, or his stories about Las Vegas. I can only say that at the end, when we took a picture with him, right before the photographer pulled the trigger he managed to get off a face more awkward than any I have ever put on. That is what earns my respect.

I Validate the Relics of St. Paul

It turns out that the Rome program is for architects, and people interested in architecture. I don't really belong here. But I don't mind - buildings are starting to grow on me (be built on me? No, too forced), and there's a lot of outside class time, like today, when we toured St. Paul Outside the Walls. It's a beautiful big church, which houses a marble and granite forest of pillars, with stone from three different continents. It also has a room strictly for relics.

The main relic is the purported iron chains that Paul wore right before he was executed. These chain links are housed in a little gold bird house in a room that many people have knelt in. In fact, when the church was first built, people used to scrap shavings off of Paul's chains and put them in medicine.

I'm not sure about now, but in previous years the Catholic Church used to require all churches under it's jurisdiction to house a few relics as proof of something - divine right, archaeological interest, thriftiness, who knows? Churches were shut down because of the lack of relics, or the presence of false relics.

It's not just the Catholic Church, but it seems humanity as a whole has taken what Jesus said and just ran with it, like Jim Marshall, the Minnesota Viking who picked up a fumble and ran it all the way back, the wrong way. Humans are so desperate to insert themselves into the gospel and justify themselves to God, like the story told of Paul's decapitation, where the newly separated head bounced three times, leaving three new springs of water. Then his eyes turned to dollar signs and out of his mouth came one thousands nickels, like a slot machine.

And it's me too; whenever I cling to absolute rules or concentrate on strict purity, I'm just trying to make myself matter to something who's intrinsic scale is on a different level.

That's probably all just fancy talk, though.