A True Story with a Happy Ending

Stuff happens as people like to say, hence the long time since I posted a blog. The most recent excuse is that after years of wanting to see Italy, I finally was able to join a two-week tour with a group of twenty-one. I was the oldest and though prepared for lots of walking and stairs and hills, I was not prepared for breakfasts at 6:45am, flights of stairs with no railings, and more things especially disagreeable to someone my age (84). My delicate circadian rhythms were ripped asunder and I found myself challenged to keep up.  After the first five days or so, two of our group's younger men became my steadfast escorts. Holding on to their arms meant I was safe on naked steps and in the streets I could look at my surroundings instead of the cobblestones. Our guide, a woman from Croatia with boundless energy and knowledge, was superb. Our group coalesced around her effervescence and learned and flowed as one under her tutelage. 

My thrill in walking the streets of Pompeii and looking up to see the wicked Vesuvius for real, to walk and drive along the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, to walk into the Colosseum on two-thousand year old steps, to see sites of villages where the clever Etruscans lived as far back as 900 BC, to walk part of Venice, and so much more in between all this, satisfied my years' long yearning. These experiences were enhanced by my own private happenings like getting lost in Rome and finding two poliziotti, so handsome in their berets and form-fitting uniforms, to ask for directions to the street I knew; or sitting on a cathedral’s steps in a little Umbrian village watching people and pigeons (at that point I didn’t know I would soon end up eating pigeon for lunch); or basking under the Tuscan sun eating a local tangerine, sick, feverish, and, thus, alone; or even becoming skilled in using the Venetian water bus system the hard way (missing a stop). Venice also taught me how diverse the population was in what is now Italy. Given the proximity to the Middle East and Africa, from early times, there were people of different colors, cultures, and languages.

There was so much more such as making friends, absorbing the perspective through thought and touch of the connection from sophisticated people two thousand years ago to today, and getting the sway of the land, the countryside, and the villages off the expressways.

The tour of Italy over with me miraculously still in one piece after the ups and downs of hundreds of stairs, the mincing of steps over thousands of ancient cobblestones, the craning of my neck into the upper reaches of cathedrals, the viewing of the Tyrrhenian Sea from the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, and then the Adriatic through the mist of Venice, all seasoned by the downing of excellent wines and olive oils: getting home was the proverbial trip from hell except for the extraordinary ending.

With all the others in our group already on their way, I left Venice, bespeckled with some twenty or so bed bug bites from the otherwise nice hotel. Still somewhat ill since the two days of fever, congestion, fatigue, and coughing that kept me in bed two days in Tuscany, strong arms grabbed me as I teetered into the water taxi, leaving foggy Venice behind. No elderly woman in the brink on their watch! I exited from the boat directly into the airport. This entry did nothing to assuage the slight sense of unreality, even that of an alternate universe that I had felt since arriving through low lying mist into this watery, magical, and ancient city.

Alone the entire time, I was close to a day and a half trying to get home from Venice's Marco Polo Airport: delays, main flight cancelled, strange hotel for the night, back to the airport in the morning, then finally on the plane to the US only to sit on the tarmac for two hours while maintenance fiddled with who knows what. Nine more hours and we finally landed in Newark late, of course, so I missed my connecting flight. Even with wheelchair service (my first, ordered because of my illness) it took the very nice and competent woman pushing me about an hour to get me through the necessary reentry stops and across the airport to another terminal for the rescheduled flight; that much time, even though I had no checked bags to wait for and Global Entry for customs which literally only took a minute at their face recognition station. I could not have possibly negotiated all this myself as the remains of my illness, certainly exacerbated by this ordeal, along with the lack of sleep and food, had rendered me barely functional.

At the rescheduled gate at last, an astonishing thing happened. I was about to board for home and was one of the first in line due to my “handicap.” The man just behind me asked what my seat number was! My first thought in my sickly befuddlement was what in the world was this man doing? After he asked again, feeling a bit vexed, I turned around and saw a slightly round middle-aged man, his rosy cheeks set off by a bowler hat and nice suit accentuated by a distinctive tie with a fob chain across his chest. He looked like he had just been dropped on earth from the 1920s. By then, I was in front of an airline attendant and looked to her for help and reassurance. I have no doubt I looked pitiful and was certainly slow and wobbly. Still carrying some of the Venetian feeling of other worldliness, all this seemed strange but, perhaps, fitting. I was beginning to doubt my sanity. He addressed the attendant, "I want her to have my seat. I will sit in hers." I tried to get his name, but passengers were pushing in and he had to move on to the back of the plane. As he did, he said to me "I get to sit in first class all the time and you'll get free wine where I usually sit."  So, with the attendant’s nod of assurance, there I was in first class with my feeling of being in an alternate reality well settled on me for the rest of the way home.