Greetings from the PMC Bike Across Italy Tour

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Spello Italy where 8 PMC cyclists, our guides Massimo and Tyler and I are on our 4th day of riding from the tiny coastal town of Fano where my grandfather was born in 1893. We are riding the first every PMC Italy, sponsored by Ciclismo Classico and in memory of my mother Valia Orazietti Hefferon who died four years ago this fall from Lymphoma. I chose this tour because it travels through Le March, the region where my mother’s parents came from.

The tour started in Fano with a celebratory dipping of our wheels in the Adriatic and a welcome from Fano’s Mayor Francesco Cavalieri. A special GRAZIE to our super guide, Fano native and my adpopted “cugino” Paolo Taberetti who helped me make this dream come true. He wrote press releases that got us into the local papers too! We had a celebratory Sunday lunch with his whole family, including his new baby, Andrea. I am very blessed to have such an amazing family of guides whose instill their passion for cycling into everything they do.

Then we were off on a challenging ride to Urbino, the birthplace of Rafaello. From Urbino it was off to Genga, the birthplace of my grandmother Beatrice Fracassini. There the group visited the Grottos of Frassisi, the largest grottos in Europe while I had a wonderful reunion with my cousins and great aunts and uncles. Their tiny village is located at the base of a stunningly beautiful canyon. As gorgeous as it is today, my grandmother left when it was extremely poor and depressed. From Genga, we cycled along to Scheggia, the same route my grandmother took with her brother Mario to Genova to take the boat to America, never to return to her tiny village again. As I rode through this gorgeous landscape, I thought of Beatrice’s bittersweet voyage. Thanks to her courage, I am able to return to this wonderful landscape again and again.

May 21st would have been my mom’s 75th birthday, we would have gone out to dinner and she would have indulged in cheesecake with a single candle. She also loved to join us at the Tyler Place where she would dance the night a away with my dad, win at charades and belt out New York, New York on Broadway tunes night. With the arrival of mother’s day and our birthdays, May was our month and will always be. She loved the smell of lilacs and the glow of forsythia. This time of year is a colorful, yet a sad reminder of mom as I continue to miss her deeply.

As I approach the fourth year memorial of my mon’s death, so many more of our loved ones have had their lives cut short to cancer. In 2007 Ciclismo Classico sponsored our first PMC team, team Gelato. We now have 20 members from around New England. Our team gelato dedicates our ride to Avallana, 10 year old Katie Paras who has ALL Leukemia (our 08 pedal partner) and the hundreds of people we collectively know whose lives have been changed forever by this terrible disease.

Every year since 1990 I have ridden in the PMC, a 192-mile cancer fundraiser from Sturbridge to Provincetown that to date has raised 145 million dollars making it the largest single contributor to the Jimmy Fund. Nearly 97% of all funds raised by PMC riders in 2006 (an extraordinary 20 million in one year!) went directly to the Jimmy Fund making it the leanest and most efficient fundraising operation in the nation today.

While the ride itself is long and tiring, it is a walk in the park compared to the grueling journey cancer patients endure.

I thank you for your support and ask that you PLEASE donate to our 08 PMC ride in memory of Val and your loved ones who were taken too soon by this terrible disease. In the midst of darkness, the PMC is a powerful ray of Hope for all cancer victims and their families. There are many fundraisers to choose from but few have been going strong for 27 years like the PMC. As you know I am not a fickle participant either! Since 1991 I have raised almost $88,000 and ridden over 4,000 miles for the PMC.

I ask for your support with a minimum pledge of $75 (any amount is welcome!)

Please link to my pledge page and support my ride (by 8/1/08)

http://www.pmc.org/egifts/giftinfo.asp?EgiftID=LH0006

Checks should be made out to: PMC (See pledge form below). Thanks in advance for your support.

Save paper, save time by donating on line via Egifts:

http://www.pmc.org/egifts/
My gift ID is: LH0006

A Very Special College Reunion: Slide Show

A Very Special College Reunion

At the beginning of June I took my entire family to “gorges” Ithaca, NY to my alma mater, Cornell University for my 25th college reunion. It was my second College reunion and we repeated much of the fun events we did at my 20th. While I made so many wonderful friends at Cornell, my most special memories revolved around my experience of living and cycling on one of the most beautiful campuses and most gorgeous areas I know, the Finger Lakes region of Upper New York State. So instead of indulging in reunion events, I took my family swimming in the infamous Cornell Gorges and hiking around Sapsucker Woods

Cornell was also my first experience with professors that would totally change and open up my views of the world. Top of the list was Peter Kahn, one of my all time favorite people in the world. What made this reunion so very was our stay in Trumansburg with Ruth Kahn the 83 year-old widow of my dear art history professor and mentor, Peter Kahn. Ruth lives alone in the same beautiful yellow farmhouse that I would ride my bike to while I attended Cornell. The farmhouse where she and Peter raised their 7 daughters and where Peter would paint and create in his attached barn studio. H. Peter Kahn (1921-1997) is fondly remembered by generations of Cornell students and Ithacans as a man whose life was dedicated to art, especially the arts of fine printing and the handmade book. A prolific typographer, illustrator and book designer as well as a painter, the German-born artist was a member of the Cornell community for forty years.

Our stay with Ruth, better known as Ruth Stiles Gannett and the author of the My Father’s Dragon series of books not only gave me a chance to revisit and learn more about Peter and Ruth’s fascinating life but it gave my children the privilege to spend time with one of their favorite award winning children’s authors. As we sat around her kitchen table enjoying fresh blueberry pancakes and hot biscuits, Ruth kept my children enthralled over stories about the origins of the dragon, her life as a young writer and where her story ideas came from. Her Father’s Dragon series has been published in dozens of languages including a cartoon series While the kids were playing in their barn filled with old toys and a miniature bank, general store and toy store, Ruth showed me around their home, the walls covered with Peter’s landscape paintings and and a filing cabinet filled with his sketchbooks, class presentations and prints. I was blessed to have had Peter as a professor. He was an original, a man who lived a life of authenticity and total dedication to his art and the teaching of the craft of Art, an art he believed was sacred and sadly dying.

The first class I took with him, Materials and Techniques, was as all his classes were totally hands on. The class consisted in teaching the History of Western Art through the history of (and making of) the actual materials that artists used. So when he talked about medieval paintings, he would crack and egg, squeeze some pigment onto a board and create tempera, or he would take a knife, cut a piece of bamboo, create a quill pen and then quickly sketch a student’s face to demonstrate the Renaissance technique of Chiaroscuro, all along going into philosophical and often existential discussions about art theory and the modern world. He was a brilliant, charming and totally engaging Renaissance man, one of a dying breed whose life ended much too soon in 1997 with a massive heart attack while directing traffic at the scene of an accident. Unfortunately not much is written about Peter (being an extremely humble and private man I am sure he preferred it that way) except for a multi page unpublished biography that Ruth handed me on my way out the door.

In addition to inspiring me to write my own book, Cycle Food a Guide to Satisfying Your Inner Tube, Peter’s writings called to all his students to raise the bar and look higher and deeper into the world around us. Below, a quote on Florence, a city I lived in for three years and left for the reasons he describes below.

” Florence can teach us all to desire more and to love the city better. This city causes one to reflect. I couldn’t live here: it would be a disaster to take this city for granted. Those who don’t believe that there is a mind body conflict come to Florence where the material and spiritual world live side by side, each express toward its greater tensional difference. “