When I Learned to Live – Part I

This entry is part one of my chain of entries named “When I Learned to Live.” To see part two, click here.

My life up until the age of 18 had consisted of two cities: Denison and Cedar Hill, Texas. My time in Denison left me with the very hidden Texas drawl that could rival or out-slang any of my friends, unbeknownst to my many Philadelphia acquaintances. Those lucky enough to have heard me regress into the southern drawl in the Northeast have probably only been around me when I was either inebriated or incredibly livid. Neither situation allows for me to watch my diction and maintain eloquence, unfortunately. Alas, my formative years were spent in the southwest corner of Dallas County and a bastion of cultural hodgepodge – Cedar Hill. But I don’t care about my early years – those stories can be left for another day.

This entry is aptly titled “When I Learned to Live” and should be viewed as only scratching the surface of my very complex, eccentric, and introspective personality. Up until my senior year in high school, I hadn’t much explored my ability to learn and experience what this world has to offer. Never having been one who shied away from spontaneity, my choice in applying to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania very simply boiled down to one thing: Wharton was the best, and I was going to go to the very best (obtaining an Ivy League degree had a nice ring to it as well). I had never visited anywhere northeast of Tennessee, much less spent any amount of time in Philadelphia where I was applying to spend the next four years of my life. I wasn’t going to let fear or hesitation handcuff my efforts to continually better myself and my experiences in life.

This seemingly quick decision to apply to Wharton at Penn began what became the most rewarding four and a half years of my life. In December of 2003, during my senior year and right near my birthday (oddly my twin brother’s as well), I received my letter of acceptance and a subsequent e-mail, offering me the opportunity to study abroad with Penn’s undergraduate summer study programs. Now, I should digress here for a moment to provide a brief overview of my lineage. My terrifyingly vibrant, and at times insane, 4’11″ mother is of Italian, particularly Sicilian, descent. Thanksgivings were met with ravioli and meatballs and misbehaving children were met with incredibly entertaining moments of belt-chasing and door locking. Beau and I certainly deserved all of what we received – we weren’t the easiest twins to handle (stealing cars, starting fires, and breaking wine bottles all before the age of 5). This Italian descent is incredibly prevalent in my family’s physical features – tan skin, dark hair, green eyes – the Sicilian rearing its wonderful head, and is something that I take great pride in. Noone in our family had been able to converse in Italian since the very early years of my grandmother Vera Mae’s life. All of this had been lost. Naturally, seeing as how Penn requires every single one of its students to be proficient in a foreign language prior to graduation, I decided to apply to the Summer Study Abroad program in Florence.

I graduated from Cedar Hill High School in June of 2004, and within a week and a half, I was onboard a British Airways flight to London Gatwick airport from Dallas-Ft. Worth by my lonesome. I was 18 years old and had never been out of the country before, much less travelled this distance by myself. Now, my personality is certainly not timid – more of the gregarious and confidant kind. This did not completely alleviate my nerves during the flight, but certainly aided me in the journey that was about to commence. Upon arriving in London, I caught my connecting flight to Pisa, and immediately began to absorb the cultural differences that I was going to be experiencing over the next three months. I was greeted in Pisa by five rifle-wielding carabinieri and ambled over to the train station in order to catch my train ride to Florence (hereafter referred to as Firenze). Not only did I not know a word of Italian, but I was certainly nervous that I would manage to board the wrong train and find myself heading northbound, as opposed to the beautiful Tuscan hills and the city of Firenze nestled on the Arno River. Arriving safely in Firenze, I took a cab to meet the first of two amazing people: Paola Bacciardi (then Paola Renzoni), and then later, her then-husband Francesco Renzoni, my host parents for the next three months.

In less than 24 hours, I had departed the monotony of Texan life and was standing on a balcony in Firenze with an awful Italian dubbing of Ally McBeal playing on the television behind me. I spent the next three months doing the following: class four days a week, then travel on the weekend. During these three months, I was able to accomplish the following: visit the splendors of Rome, including climbing to the very top of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City; travel to Siena for Il Palio, and standing in the middle of the town plaza with thousands of other adoring fans waiting for the ancient horse race to begin, and what would ultimately become the most exciting two minutes of my entire life; travel to Le Cinque Terre, an 8 km hike on broken pseudo-footpaths along the edge of the cliffside that strode the coasts of the Italian Riviera, and witnessed the most breathtaking natural beauty that had ever graced my two very appreciative eyes; visit a friend whom I had never met in person, but had known online from the time we were both about 13 years old in Antwerp, Belgium, including the story of missing our flight there only to end up on a 10-hour bus ride from Milan to Brussels, before ending up in a small studio apartment for his gay friend’s cannabis-laden birthday party (ask me this story sometime if you want – I swing for the straight team and have never indulged in any drugs – but it is still an incredibly entertaining one); having my very first alcoholic drink be a bottle of Chianti from the region, followed by a snifter of limoncello, which is to this day still my favorite liquore; and making two life-long friends in Paola and Francesco, both of whom became my genitori italiani (Italian parents), and to whom I still talk today.

Three months. That’s all it took. I was never again going to be satisfied with complacency or no adventure, and my collegiate life certainly reflected that. Here I was, returning from my Italian trip, becoming conversationally fluent at an incredible pace in Italian, meeting people from all walks of life, and with less than a month to recover in Texas before taking a road trip to Philadelphia to move into the city and the school that would become my second home, but not after some extensive trials and tribulations. I arrived with my parents in West Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill River from Center City Philadelphia, moved in, and was now there, not knowing one single individual closer than the state of Arkansas. Hello world – my name is Ben. My three months of initiating conversations with random strangers and travelling extreme distances with nothing but my backpack, my thoughts, and a terrible obsolete digital camera made Penn seem simple. I made friends my very first night there, of which I am still incredibly close to five or six who joined my large Northeastern family of friends that I built over the next four and a half years.

The continuation of this entry can be found here.