Another episode from…..Living, Loving & Learning
By: Leo Buscaglia, Ph. D

(I, again, quote to you from the above book)

“In my family I learned to share….and I learned a wonderful sense of responsibility from Mamma, who was a rugged lady.
When she said something, it went.
This always amused me when I got into the university and I studied theories of counseling and all this permissive stuff.
Mamma was the most magnificent nondirective counselor.
She’d say, “Shut up!”
We always knew what that meant.
It was a beautiful kind of interaction with the family.
Not too amazing, none of us have ever had a mental problem.
I remember as a kid, I wanted to go to Paris.
She said, “Felice, you’re too young for traveling.”
“But, Mama, I want to go.”
At that time, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were all involved in the wonderful concept of existentialism: and Felice wanted to go there because he heard that everybody was in misery and he wanted to go there and be miserable, too.
I wanted to try everything.
Mama says, “OK, you go, but if you do, you’re declaring yourself an adult and don’t ask me for anything after that. You’re an adult.
You’re free, go.”
Oh, was it fantastic!
I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had a little bit and I went there and I lived everybody’s dream.
I had a tiny apartment.
I could see from my skylight all the rooftops of Paris.
I sat at the feet of people like Sartre and de Beauvoir - didn’t understand a damn word they said - loved every minute of it.
Suffered!
Oh, did I suffer!
And it was wonderful, on Camembert cheese and French wine.
Pretty soon there was no money.
I had no real concept of money.
I was sharing with everybody, I was the last of the big spenders.
I always had the bottle of wine, everyone came to my place to share it.
This had been the way I grew up, the modeling I had learned.
At our house the postman would come and Papa would pour him a glass of wine. “Eh, poor man, he’s working all day. He needs a good glass of wine.”
We would say, “Poppa, don’t give him wine!”
It would kill us when the teacher came to visit and Papa offered her wine.
“The teacher won’t drink wine.” Then we were shocked when the teacher drank wine.
She was no kook.
It was good wine!
But I remember getting to the point where I really had very little money - almost none.
I thought I’d just wire home, that’s all.
I went to the telegraph office in Paris, and, to save money, just wrote,
“Starving. Felice”.
One word but significant.
Twenty-four hours later I had a telegram from mama and it said,
“Starve! Mama.”
The moment of truth!
At long last I was an adult.
What was I going to do now?
I’m going to tell you what that taught me.
It taught me about hunger, it taught me about how cold a place can be, not only physically, but when you don’t have the bottles of wine to share, the people who called themselves your ’friends’ don’t come around anymore.
It taught me a lot and I never would have learned it if Mama had relented and sent me a check.
And I stayed there and stayed there, just to show her I could do it!
When I went home many months later, she said to me one evening,
“That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but if I hadn’t done it, you would never have grown to be Felice.”
And it was true.
So through modeling, they taught me so much about living and loving together…..”