Green

By Antonio Malara

Could sounds silly but the words “green” reminds me to the tragic death of a seven years old boy, his name was Nicholas Green. It was 1994 and Nicholas was an American kid traveling on a freeway with his parents and his sister, when a car went beside and started to open fire. The episode struck me because it happened in my country, Italy, and in my region Calabria. Nicholas was seriously injured and shortly after the drama I predicted that the family, as Americans, would have donated the organs. It was  exactly what the family did once Nicholas had been declared clinically dead. The death on Nicholas saved other kid’s life, at that time in the bigot country of Italy that behavior was considered unusual but people found out the positive side. In the prehistoric region of Calabria the behavior was considered just strange. The point was that I always considered the USA the perfect place where to have the right education system while I never liked the mentality of southern Italy people. The fact that an innocent American kid was brutally killed by the hand of a man in my region, definitely made me hate my entire country.

Investigations concluded that the killers attempted a robbery to the wrong car, two person are in jail for that and one still declare himself innocent. I will not go deep in the investigation and I will not talk about justice in Italy, because my thoughts about it would need a separate post and probably I would vomit before to finish writing it. I described Calabria prehistoric because people fake respect each other while they’re just a group of human being who are hating and envy each other. A “Calabrese” is happy for the misfortune of the other in an eternal competition about nothing. When this is how a community lives, it will never be able to grow.

In this reality Nicholas’s parent reacted to this tragedy as gentlemen, they were superior human beings, capable of forgiveness and starting the trend of organs donations in a country who was mentally stopped at the Second World War. They did many other things and the figure of Reginald Green (Nicholas’s father) always inspired me for his behavior. As a strange kind of “Calabrese”, my reaction to that tragedy would have been ten time worse of the one of John Wayne in “The Searchers”, cynical like the scene when he shot in the eyes the dead Comanche. I have to say that the good “Calabresi” did something positive like naming roads or schools to Nicholas and they also gave some kind of awards to the family but nothing changed in the mentality of people here and personally I’m not optimistic about the future. It’s since then that when I heard the the word “green” I immediately think about that event, trying to take about the episode only the superior figure of the father Reginald.

​This outfit was born for a strange destiny, the fact was that I bought these boots in dark grey but they sent me the wrong number. The color was out of stock and instead of a refund they gave me a discount coupon. After one month wasted on the website looking for some model I decided to buy the green one, it was the end of 2018. Last month I decided to buy the Hamilton leather jacket (which is my favorite) winter model in green so I could pair it with the boots. Probably I choose the green boots unconsciously, because in this way I could set a blog post and dedicate it to Nicholas and Reginald Green.

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Jacket: D'Arienzo
​Jeans: Dsquared2
T-shirt: Zara
Boots: Faruk Sagin
Sunglasses: Gianni Versace

Photo: Luciano Zingali