Sant' Egidio Abate

Something strange happened this morning. I woke up early, at 5 am, to make Art a lunch to take to work. After he left I couldn't go back to sleep so I came into my office to knock around on the computer. Looking back into my browser history, I still can't figure out what led me there. I was updating some pages, then I was researching 2012, a date the mother of one of Alfred's friends assures me is "when it's going to happen." She is a New Age Mormon, a character of relative rarity, but if she were to be found anywhere, it would have to be here in California. Then again, I'm pretty sure I did that after I found the Linguaglossa link because I remember being really bleary when it happened. It was soon after I started browsing but how I got there I still don't know.

There was a link to Linguaglossa somewhere. Linguaglossa is a town at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily, not far from Catania. My father's father Alfio was from there. Its name means "glossy tongue", as in a glossy tongue of lava lapping at its city limits. Suddenly I was in a Google satellite map of Linguaglossa itself, zooming in and out - in to the sere summer piazzas and small irrigated plots, out to the hard, curvy, volatile slopes of Etna. Then there was a Wikipedia entry. The patron saint of Linguaglossa is Saint Egidio, Abbot. Today is his feast day.

Saint Egidio (Saint Giles, in English), was a 7th century French hermit who lived with a hind ( a female deer) who sustained him with her milk. A Visigoth (or Frankish) king who was out hunting tried to capture the hind, but Saint Egidio managed to miraculously create an invisible shield to keep them back. The king came back another day with a bishop and one of his party, trying to shoot the deer, shot Egidio instead. The king felt badly and established a monastery for Egidio. Egidio became the patron saint of cripples, maimed people, lepers, the poor, and for some reason, weavers.

Today is the day, the first of September, the saint day of the town from which my father's father, my namesake, hailed. Part of me feels very Sicilian, which isn't surprising given that I grew up in a house with a Sicilian-American father and his immigrant family. Even though I am adopted, I feel this way. I talk with my hands, I yell, I hug and kiss, I worry irrationally about the evil eye, I attribute magical powers to olive oil. Linguaglossa, non ti domenticaro.


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