Captain Reverend Mother

Almost every morning, in the half-hour before I am fully awake, the bed begins to rumble. A small reverberation, the kind of thing that, in any other place, might be explained away by some outside factor like a semi or train. Where I live, however, there is no clear cause. Our parco is surrounded by farmland, nowhere close to a railroad, and I have yet to hear a truck pass. By the time I am awake enough to truly pay attention, the shaking has stopped, and I file it under the regular phenomena of living in Naples.

A few weeks ago, the bed moved. Actually moved. A magnitude 4.4, originating under the Gulf of Pozzuoli just before 6:00am, and traveled, as these things do, the 10 kilometers or so (about 6 miles) directly under our house. My boys were in the hallway within seconds, wide-eyed, asking what just happened. My spouse, blessed with the ability to sleep through natural disasters, did not stir.

The Campi Flegrei caldera (which the Italians, whose language has a way of meaning what it says, translate as the “burning fields”) has been in a phase of slow unrest since 2018. The ground at the center of the caldera has risen about a meter and a half (about 4.75 feet) since 2005, and the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology has been recording between 40 and 70 small earthquakes a week. Most are too faint to feel. A few are not.

There is the actual kind of being shaken awake, the kind that puts us in a hallway at dawn asking what that was. Then there is another kind, the slower one, where the world keeps shifting while we are mostly still asleep, literally or metaphorically. The trouble is that the second kind almost never wakes us. We sleep through it, the way my spouse slept through a 4.4, and one morning we are jolted upright when we realize that something we used to be able to count on has moved.

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School is out, with eight open weeks ahead of us. Screens would happily fill the days, and instead we have set up “Kane Academy” (cue the boys’ eye rolls at my punny cleverness). Handwritten notes on the subjects they are studying. Math drills. Daily reading. Limits on the devices that loosen a little from the school year (but not by much). Good morning and good evening to each other out loud, Buongiorno and buona sera to neighbors we pass on the street or a storekeeper in a shop.

At my funeral, the boys will likely eulogize how I insisted on “good manners, good grammar, good eye contact, and good hygiene.” They will say it with the affectionate exasperation of people who lived through it. I also hope they will say this insistence was about something larger than courtesy and conduct. That attention is a habit, and the paying attention to small things is where that habit is built.

Reps and sets, I keep telling them. The World Cup opens today, and many a midfielder ran drills since they were ten years old so the touch is ready in their feet tonight, and goalkeepers whose hands know the angles because their coaches made them face the same wall a thousand times. Manners are like that. Grammar, too. As is looking up when a person is talking with you, and the daily discipline of being clean and on time and a decent person in a room with other people. Decency is a practice. So is staying awake.

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The caldera will keep doing what calderas do. The smaller tremors are ours to answer, every morning, by what we keep doing and what we refuse to stop doing.

The earth is shaking. Stand your ground.