Incompleat Iconoclast » Travel

Exercise #20: Paper That Changed Your Life

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:30:02 +0000

Mental Note #7639471

Larry M. was my roommate for the semester we spent at the University of Dallas Rome Campus. He was one of the gang that traveled to London together before the start of the semester for a week and then took the train to Rome by way of Paris. He was my companion on several weekend trips out of Rome, too, including Florence, Munich, Salzberg, and the ill-fated attempt to get to Malta for Easter, which was aborted in Siracusa, Siciliy, when we found that the boats were all booked up, and then turned semi-tragic when we were robbed at gunpoint in a pizzeria in Messina on the night before Easter.

Larry used to carry a tiny notebook everywhere he went, into which he would write notes about photos he’d taken, places to visit and sights to see, addresses, hours of operation, Italian phrases, and so on. He filled several such notebooks, I think, as the semester wore on. One day, in circumstances that have completely escaped my memory, he wrote a note to me that said:

Mental Note #7639471
Don’t, under any
circumstances, associate
with Assholes.

I apparently found this to be such good and useful advice at the time that I folded up the tiny scrap of paper and stashed it in a safe place in my wallet. (He must have written the note some time after Easter weekend, because the note wasn’t lost with the wallet that was stolen in the Sicilian robbery.)

The semester ended and we all went home. My sister Anne was taking a photography course the next semester at University of Houston, and she made black-and-white enlargements of a few of my Rome semester photos to decorate my dorm room. One of them was a shot of Larry and our friend Alexandra sitting on my bunk bed in our dorm room in Rome. At some point in the fall semester of 1983, I cleaned out my wallet and found Mental Note #7639471. I placed it inside the acrylic box-frame with the 8 x 10 photo of Larry and Alexandra. It stayed there for as long as I kept those photos. Visitors to my dorm room and later apartments would move in close to find out what the little scrap of paper in the corner of the frame was, and then grins would break out on their faces as they read Larry’s messy college-kid chicken-scratchy handwriting.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the photos, so I pitched the aging acrylic frames and packed away the photos. I still told the story of that note, though, whenever I wanted to talk about Larry and the fun times we shared in Rome. The note went with the enlargements into a box of photos, and that’s where Gayle, my professional organizer friend, found it a few weeks ago as we were working on a project to sort and categorize my old photos. She said, “You wanna tell me about this?” and handed me the yellowed piece of 26-year-old paper. The characteristic frayed edge that results from being torn out of a spiral notebook was still intact. The scrap had been folded again in storage, and the fold lines were fragile and crumbling.

There wasn’t much to tell her about the fragment. I didn’t remember what prompted Larry to write the note. I only knew that it had meant a lot to me at the time as a symbol of our friendship. To me, that note meant far more than what its words said. It also meant, “The world is full of assholes, but you and I have each other.”

I’ve come a long way since I first carried that note around as a touchstone next to my 20-year-old butt. So when Gayle unearthed it again, I had a good laugh, told her an unrelated story or two about Larry (who long ago took on the much more serious and dignified moniker of “Lawrence”), and put the note into a small stack of materials designated for scanning and demolition. I scanned the note, put the JPEG image online in an album of UD photos on Facebook, and tossed the ancient scrap of paper into the recycling bin.

On top of the old story of my friendship with Larry that the note symbolized—the story of all the support, kindness, and patience he offered me through the rough years of college—I’ve added a new layer of meaning. The note now signifies my ability and willingness to transcend the “stuff” that I’ve imbued with meaning in my life, and instead to embrace and cherish the meaning in its purer form. We human beings love to create meaning—it is, to use the old cliché, “what separates us from the beasts.” We make meaning, we assign meaning, we collect and hoard and share meaning. Our lives become full of things that signify something to us, things that remind us of an event or person, some treasured experience or emotional state.

But things can never be more than just things. Paper can’t be more than just paper, no matter if King John or John Hancock or Elvis himself once handled it and wrote on it. And as much as we are free to assign meaning, it’s also in our power to take it away, to release meaning from the objects to which we’ve ascribed it and into the realm of pure forms. And so, although the paper form of Mental Note #7639471 has gone off to be recycled, the significance of Mental Note #7639471 will always be with me.

Note: The prompt for today was to “tell a story about a piece of paper that changed your life.”

Exercise #18: Food That Defines a Place

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:08:27 +0000

Note: I wrote the following exercise at the end of a long day when I didn’t have much energy or imagination left for writing. I’m only posting it on my blog because I don’t want to upset my loyal readers by leaving a gap at Exercise #18 in the series of exercises on which I’ve been chipping away. I don’t usually inflict the raw, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness emanations of my tortured brain on anyone else—except my friend Jo. So unless you’re reeeeally bored—or one of the aforementioned loyal readers—I’d skip this one if I were you. (No, really.)

It’s very late, and I’ve had a long day. I was up early without very much sleep, and I had a mountain of work to get done before a meeting with a new client, and then I had an event to go to in the evening, so I was blowin’ and goin’ pretty much all day, and so I haven’t taken any time to write to the 50/50 prompt yet. My usual routine is to write in 25-minute “episodes,” but the 50/50 prompts usually take me a little longer than that. I’m also still working on my “3,000-Word Initiative”—trying to write 3,000 words a day. And a lot of what I do for the 3kWI is stream-of-consciousness stuff. When I write stream-of-consciousness, I can crank out about 1,500 words in 25 minutes. But when I write to the 50/50 prompts, I tend to be more careful and deliberate, because, after all, someone else is going to be reading them, even if it’s just my captive audience of one. But tonight I’m in a hurry. I’m sleep-deprived, I’m exhausted, and I still have a full day of activities to get through tomorrow before I can call it a weekend. So I’m going to try to kill two birds with one stone and write stream-of-consciousness to the 50/50 prompt, no matter how rough it is, no matter how run-on my sentences may grow, and no matter how many digressions about men and sex and any other topic off the top of my head might pop up.

So the prompt is about food, food and place, foods that remind me of something, and so forth. The thing that I thought of first is probably the best approach on this one, and that was to talk about Rome. Of course it’s about Rome! My favorite topic. And the food in question is antipasto. Antipasto in the United States has come to have a fairly conventional definition—some cold cuts, a few slices of cheese, maybe some olives or a little fresh fruit. Nine out of 10 Italian restaurants will give you some variation on that theme. But those are only a few from among the many things that Italians would serve as antipasti.

Antipasti is the plural of antipasto. And as long as we’re talking about language, here’s what’s wrong the American idea of antipasto: all that the word means is “before the pasta.” And you can serve all kinds of things before the pasta. Sure, cold cuts are an option. Italian cuisine is full of wonderful cured meats—salami, mortadella (what we call “bologna”), prosciutto—and they frequently turn up on antipasto plates. And cheese turns up, too. And not just mozzarella. In Italy, restaurants will serve whatever they have, or whatever was good that day at the market. That’s really the only guideline for putting together antipasto—you serve what you feel like serving, based on what looked good at the market and what you felt like cooking—which is probably guided, at least in some cases, by what the cook felt like eating that day.

I’ve had antipasti that included assortments of freshly pickled vegetables—carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, olives—or roasted vegetables, or breaded and fried vegetables. My all-time favorite in nearly any form in which they care to serve it to me: artichoke hearts. The artichoke is king in Rome. It’s the centerpiece of Roman cuisine from the first harvesting of small, delicate buds in March all the way through the summer and into the late fall, when the last huge heads are served braised or stuffed and roasted. And speaking of blossoms, zucchini blossoms are another thing you’ll find on an antipasto place, usually stuffed with some kind of mild or soft cheese spiced with nutmeg and herbs.

The antipasto experience is typical of the Italian outlook on life. It’s not about blowing you away with the most expensive ingredients or an elaborate technique. It’s about taking things as they come and then finding ways to savor them. I’ve had antipasto plates that are a simple as a pile of olives drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil and served with thick chunks of rustic bread.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for tonight. Out of gas.

Note: I warned you, didn’t I?

Exercise #11: Favorite Thing to Do in Your Favorite City

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:55:53 +0000

I’ve decided to return to the online workshop on which I was working when Hurricane Ike arrived last September. Had some trouble with the first prompt, though. My first attempt turned into unpublishable erotica. Here’s my second attempt:

Fragment #2

I want all of my life to be like these moments:

The day that Continental canceled our flight out of Rome, so we spent the day exploring Ostia. We surprised ourselves with how much fun we could cram into one unexpected extra day of vacation.
The day you led me through rush-hour traffic to Griffith Park, then showed me where the trail began. I was energized by your kindness.
The day the cold front blew through the city, and then you took me to your soccer practice. It was too cold for me to spend two hours waiting on a bench, so I wandered the unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a coffee shop open. Then I came back and climbed up and down the pedestrian staircase to to the road high on the hill above the soccer field to keep warm. While I walked the stairs, I had a heart-to-heart talk directed at a silent God. I told him that I thought he was irrelevant, and that I’d listened to his people and their bad ideas for long enough.

50/50 Fall 2008, Exercise #1: Storm Story

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:22:52 +0000

Water, Water Everywhere

My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the players couldn’t make it to the legendary domed stadium, much less the fans. We didn’t know that factoid until much later. The news the next day focused, of course, on the eight lives lost and on the damage to the Texas Medical Center and several of the city’s art museums.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story starts earlier in the day, on the last leg of a four-day trip from our previous home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d spent a night each in Roanoke, Virginia, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. It was slow going in a station wagon pulling a tent trailer camper and bearing a kayak on top. The car carried two adults, six children between the ages of 15 and five, and the family dog. (I have four sisters. I think we made a potty stop about once an hour.)

On the fourth day, we were eager for the trip to be over. We’d seen some photos of our new house in the Westbury area of southwest Houston, but only Mom and Dad had been there. We would all have new schools in our new city in the fantastical state of Texas. We would have a new landscape to explore and new friends to make. I was even going to have a room of my own!

After a lunch stop, Dad turned on the radio and searched the dial for music. He stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to an enthusiastic voice preaching that Jesus lay in the tomb “for thuh-REE days and thuh-REE naaahts!” The Southern accent and the strange diction puzzled our Yankee ears as much as his confusing argument. At least three or four squeaky voices pleaded for a channel change. Next up was a weather report—severe thunderstorms in the Houston area. Someone asked, “How bad can it be?” We kept going.

By the time we reached Beaumont, we heard that the rain was starting to let up, so Dad stuck with the plan. We could expect to reach our new home by mid-afternoon! But he made an adjustment to his proposed route. He’d spent a few months in Houston, so he knew that traffic on the west side of Loop 610 could be unmanageable even in good weather. In that boom year of 1976, the city was growing up and spreading out, and the west side was a focus of expanding population, development, and traffic. So instead of taking the most direct route, we’d circle south around downtown on 610.

The storm clouds were breaking apart when we exited Interstate 10 and made the turn onto the southbound feeder road for Loop 610. The exit ramp from freeway to freeway was under construction. The feeder road ahead of us disappeared into a pool of rising floodwater that lapped over the curbs on both sides. Dad pulled into the right lane for a moment. The freeway onramp was only a couple of hundred feet ahead on our left. We watched an 18-wheeler in the left lane muscle its way through the water. When another big truck turned the corner behind us, Dad stepped on the gas and followed in its wake. Mom breathed a sigh of relief when we reached the safety of the elevated Loop.

About a minute later, all four lanes of traffic came to a complete stop in front of us.

[To be continued….]

Note: The assignment today was inspired by Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall in Louisiana this morning. The prompt: write a “storm story.”

I promise that I’ll come back and finish this soon!

Whitewash and Boredom

Edward F. Gumnick — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:18:50 +0000

Sheldon Avenue in Baltimore was where my maternal grandparents lived, the home where my mother grew up, the place my brother and sisters and I dreaded visiting. Or at least I dreaded visiting. It was an orderly street of row houses and sycamore trees, with long concrete staircases at the lower end, shorter staircases at the top end where the street intersected with Belair Road. Belair Road was the limit they’d placed on our wanderings; we were not to cross the six busy lanes of asphalt under any circumstances.

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.

Note: An unfinished piece from a travel writing workshop called “Wish You Were Here,” which took place on July 26 at the Spectrum Center. The assignment was to “Write about a place that is either dominated by a certain color or color scheme, or by a certain emotion.” I was working toward describing both a color and an emotion, but I ran out of time, so the piece doesn’t say all that much about boredom (so far).

Boot Camp Day 6: Things That Stood in the Way of My Writing 1,000 Words Today

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:30:21 +0000

The first thing I had to do this morning—after brewing a pot of coffee, of course—was to soak in the bathtub for a while. See, I overdid it yesterday in a couple of different departments. I walked 6-1/2 miles in the stifling heat and humidity of mid-day because I had received an invitation to a party that would conflict with the usual timing of my walk. Then I went to the party in question and drank four beers, which is about four more beers than my normal daily consumption of late. So when I rolled out of bed at the crack of 10:15 this morning, my first rudimentary (dehydrated, hungover) thought after “must have coffee” was “must soak in tub long time.”

Coffee mug in hand, I crawled into the tub with the latest issue of Granta, my favorite “literary magazine.” I had read most of the issue, so this morning’s soak was focused on finding every scrap of text that I hadn’t already read.

When I finally got out of the tub, I had to make my bed, which didn’t really contribute much to keeping me from writing 1,000 words. But then I rewarded myself with another hot, steaming cup of java and took a look at my e-mail inbox. There wasn’t much there that needed my attention, but I was ambushed by an e-mail update from Pharyngula, the blog of biologist and atheist agitator PZ Myers. PZ posts items of interest to evolutionists and all manner of freethinkers on his blog several times a day, and I get a daily e-mail with the most recent updates. He’s an enjoyable writer with a razor-sharp mind. His posts draw attention to stories he’s found in the news or on the blogosphere. Which of the new items that I found there sucked up the rest of my morning? There was an interesting piece about Jefferson’s version of the bible, which he compiled by “chopping out all the miracles and unbelievable stuff.”

I also got sidetracked for quite a while by a scathing critique of Barack Obama’s recent speech about keeping alive—even expanding, God help us!—President Bush’s ill-conceived and relentlessly partisan Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. I’m very disappointed in Obama’s blatant pandering to religious fundamentalists. Does he really think that he’s going to get their votes, and doesn’t he care that if he moves much farther to the center, he’s going to be losing mine? The most disappointing thing about him is that he doesn’t seem to see that progressives have been a big part of getting him where he is today. [Sigh.]

Next thing I knew, Jorge was calling to ask if I wanted to take a quick road trip with him to check out the logistics on the new job he’s starting tomorrow in Texas City, an industrial town about 40 miles south of Houston. He said he’d be over in about an hour to pick me up. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial yet, so I went to the freezer and dug out some pasta putanesca that we made a few weeks ago. Tossed it in the microwave and came back to Pharyngula for a while longer.

I can’t honestly say that spilling pasta sauce on my laptop for the second time in a week was a major factor in my not writing 1,000 words today, but I thought I ought to mention it in passing.

It was easy to see by 2:00 p.m. that the day was racing by, so I took my laptop with me on our journey. As we headed into downtown, I started a free-writing exercise. I wrote 349 words on the topic of trying to write in a moving pickup truck on a dazzlingly sunny day on a laptop with a dusty screen. Truly inspired stuff. Even though I was immersed in my topic, I couldn’t help but notice that Jorge had passed the exit to head south on I-45. It turned out that he wanted to stop at a refresqueria (a purveyor of cold drinks) on our way. And it had to be a particular refresqueria in the middle of a Hispanic neighborhood that was not even slightly on the way to Texas City.

About an hour later, we were headed in the right direction, aguas frescas in hand. An agua fresca is more or less a fruit smoothie. Mine was mango; Jorge’s was papaya. He also didn’t have to work too hard to talk me into a serving of elote, a snack of boiled sweet corn, a touch of mayonnaise, crumbled white Mexican cheese, and a splash of hot salsa. He assures me that after eating this snack, I am now at least as Mexican as he is.

There was nothing remarkable about the rest of the drive to Texas City, but somehow it still kept me distracted from doing any more writing. But I had a phone conversation with Gayle (The Cheerleader) on the topic of why it’s not always easy to write, no matter how much one might want to do so.

Once we arrived in Texas City, we spent about half an hour looking for the contractor parking lot where he’ll have to leave his truck at 6:00 tomorrow morning. It turned out that he’d been given a very poorly drawn map, and we were driving up and down the wrong road for most of that half hour.

Then we took the long way home, via Kemah, Seabrook, and Pasadena. I wrote 343 words about Gayle’s suggestion that I need to work on finding ways to turn writing into a game I can win. This idea needs further exploration.

On the way home, we stopped at Kim Son for an early dinner. Since tomorrow is the first day that Jorge has to be up early after a few months out of work, he’s planning to go to bed very early tonight.

Oh look! I’ve written 1,000 words after all—without even counting the earlier efforts I mentioned. It turns out that for today at least, life wasn’t as much of an obstacle to writing as I thought it was.

Note: When my siblings and I were kids, my father used to tell us “Don’t make noise just to make noise.” I fear that today’s post is making noise just to make noise—pure writing-workshop-word-count-quota babbling. Sorry!

50/50 Exercise #48: Indispensable

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:11:38 +0000

The car bumps and shudders over broken pavement and rutted dirt. It makes a lot of turns. I try for a while to track our route, but I lose count after only a few minutes. I have no idea how long I was unconscious.

As I’m trying to piece together some kind of pattern in the few available clues, we make a turn uphill and onto a smoother road. The car picks up speed. Unless I was out for more than an hour, it seems likely that we’re on the Via Nacional, which means that we’ve left the city and we’re headed north parallel to the coast.

I return to the question: What would anyone want with me? My family doesn’t have money, and I think it’s common knowledge that the network is on the verge of financial collapse. The union that represents my camera crew agreed two weeks ago to a 10-percent cut in pay in exchange for a promise from the network execs to keep layoffs to minimum.

The State Department under the present administration isn’t keen on lifting a finger to help journalists who stray outside the “safe zones” and get themselves in trouble. And that’s assuming you consider what I do journalism. Some of my critics call it “infotainment.” Others aren’t so generous.

If my captors have kidnapped me for ransom, they’re in for a big surprise when they discover what a worthless hostage they’ve taken.

Still searching for clues, I think back to lunchtime in the Libertador Hotel dining room. I sat at my usual table, ate my typical meal. I’m billed as a culinary adventurer, but the truth is that off camera, I like predictability in my foodstuffs as much as the next guy. Maybe more than the next guy. I like the Libertador because two or three of the waiters speak passable English. Also, the dining room features an “American menu”—tough steaks cut as thin as the tongue of one of my shoes, but still identifiable as beef, and served with French fries made from the little purple potatoes they grow in the mountains around here. They also serve bottles of Budweiser chilled to something less than 98.6 degrees, which passes for cool in this climate.

No, I’ve been overlooking something important. Before lunch. Something that happened this morning.

Note: Okay, this one is a lonnnnng stretch from the assignment, which was to write about someone or something “indispensable.” From that prompt, I somehow got back to my story about the kidnapped field reporter, who is most decidedly NOT indispensable—not to his network, not to his family, not to the partner cheating on him back home, and probably not to the gang of thugs who’ve just kidnapped him. Unless he can convince them otherwise.

This is the sequel to Exercise #35 and precedes, by some indeterminate amount of time, Exercise #34. (I know, the numbers don’t make much sense, do they?)

50/50 Exercise #43: Identity and Place

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 05:32:11 +0000

“This is my city, and I am as much a Roman as anyone here.”

—Words that I will put in the mouth of a fictional character one of these days

The prompt is to describe a place—a location “that is meaningful and powerful for you,” and then to write about who you are in that place. I’m thrilled and terrified by this assignment. No one who knows me will be surprised at my choice. It’s the place that I return again and again—Rome.

I’m excited by the task because I’m always happy to think about Rome. I can talk about it for hours and hours. I’m scared because so much has already been said about it that I can’t conceive of adding so much as one original phrase or fresh observation. (Even that statement strikes me as a cliché.)

And it’s hard to imagine expressing a rational basis for the city’s appeal for me. Sure, there’s all the history, the art, the architecture, the fountains, the pines, blah, blah, blah. But the city is filthy, it’s noisy, it’s falling apart, it’s damp, it’s full of tourists. And yet it compels me again and again, so I have to face the possibility that at least some of my love is irrational, and I don’t like thinking of myself that way.

So, down to work. The place? I can’t think of a favorite. When I try, I walk in my mind’s eye from one favorite spot to another. Rome is all about the walking. I could start at the end of the Via dei Fori Imperiali where it runs into Piazza Venezia, near where I took the panoramic photo last January—the one at the top of this page. Broken remnants of the glory of the Imperial Age are scattered at my feet. I try to envision ancient people walking on the decorative tiles on the fragment of floor a few steps from the sidewalk. I find that I can’t picture it. Cars race by behind me, horns blaring. I walk toward the piazza past a South Asian man who sells silk scarves and plastic souvenir Colosseums made in China.

A right turn would take me up the Corso, but I don’t want to go that way. It’s a noisy canyon of buildings that seems to trap the vehicle exhaust. Instead, I make my way around the bottom end of the piazza, even though that entails crossing four or five side streets, mostly without benefit of traffic lights. I dodge the current of taxis and buses like a native Italian.

I don’t know the name of the street, but by habit I find my way to a place where pieces of an ancient structure have been incorporated into the back of an 18th- or 19th-century building. Three columns look as if they’re lifting the modern construction up out of the excavation pit. The hole is separated from the sidewalk by an iron railing in front of which Czech and Polish expatriates sell magazines in Slavic languages. I look for a family resemblance. I wonder what subtle twists in history turned me into an American tourist and left these distant cousins of mine to become citizens of the European Union.

Note: That’s as far as I got before I ran out of time (and steam) tonight. Since I’m still three days behind on 50/50 assignments, I’m going to offer this up to you in its unfinished condition. It seems like a good bet that I’ll write more about Rome at a later date.

50/50 Exercise #31: Taking a Leap

Edward F. Gumnick — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:21:13 +0000

Marie was sure he never said a word about a motorcycle. He said, “I meet you at Piazza Bologna metro. We eat dinner, we drink a cup of coffee, we see what happens.”

Then her laptop battery died. She stuffed the computer back in her bag and left the Internet café. She walked the four blocks to her hotel wondering if she would be able to figure out how to make a telephone call. From the room, she dialed “0” for the reception desk.

“Can you help me make a local phone call, please?”

The voice on the other end belonged to the beautiful Russian girl. “Does the number begin with 33? That is a cell phone.”

She fished out the scrap of paper. “Yes, 33.”

“You have only to dial the number, but first I must set up the line. Give me one minute, please, and then you can make the call.”

She hung up the handset and mumbled a count to 45. She picked up the phone and dialed the number he had given her a few minutes into their chat session. The phone line made four long electronic buzzes. She started to wonder what an Italian busy signal might sound like. Then there was a loud click, and a husky voice said, “Pronto!”

“Alberto?”

“Marie?”

The line went dead. She put it back on the base. She picked it up again and couldn’t remember what the dial tone had sounded like a moment earlier. She dialed again. No answer.

“This just isn’t meant to be,” Marie said out loud. She stared out the windows at the minuscule balcony. She looked at her feet. She got up, took a quick shower, toweled dry, and dressed in an outfit her best friend back home described as her “ex-nun-gone-wild look.”

“If I don’t like the neighborhood, I’ll turn right around and come back to the hotel.” That’s what she might have explained to her mother, if her mother had been there.

She walked to Piazza Barberini and down into the metro station. Line A eastbound to the central train station, and then downstairs through the rush-hour crowd to Line B. The cars on the newer line were less crowded. She examined the route map. At the third stop, she exited the subway car and climbed the stairs to street level.

It was twilight, but there were plenty of people around, and the neighborhood looked okay. Graffiti everywhere, but the shops were opening up for the evening hours, and she felt safe in the pedestrian crowd.

He had mentioned Via 21 Aprile, so she looked for the plaque that marked the junction of that street with the circular piazza. She leaned against a patch of wall that looked reasonably clean.

“If he doesn’t show up in 20 minutes, I’m out of here.” She thought of the unsolicited advice that her older sister offered so generously. “You have to grab your share of power in any relationship. You should always meet a man on your terms.”

She studied the faces of the men who passed by on the broad sidewalk. That one was too young—she hoped. That one definitely had much fairer skin than the picture in Alberto’s profile. As she watched an old man in a blue uniform sweep cigarette butts to the curb, she wondered again if his profile was completely honest. Could he really look that good?

Just then, a motorcycle pulled to an abrupt stop at the curb in front of her. The rider dismounted. He stared in her direction as he removed his helmet. Curly black hair fell almost to his shoulders. He gave his head a quick shake and strode toward her.

She heard echoes of cautionary tales from childhood. “Don’t talk to strangers.” She looked at the bike and considered what her father would say if Alberto ever pulled up in front of her family home. In the half-second it took for him to reach her, she took in the brown bomber jacket, the khaki cargo pants, the earrings, and the tattoos on the backs of both hands. She wondered for another tenth of a second whether she ought to be afraid.

“Marie?”

“Alberto?”

She felt as if she were watching herself from a distance. He led her toward the motorcycle. She understood the gist of the instructions as he showed her how to strap on the spare helmet. “Come questo. E questo. Sì.” He helped her climb on to straddle the back of the seat. He settled himself between her legs, and they pulled out into the traffic flowing up the dark boulevard.

Note: The assignment was to write about “a leap of faith, a leap into the unknown, a leap forward.”

50/50 Exercise #28: Stillness and Motion

Edward F. Gumnick — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:26:49 +0000

Spring out of bed at the first squawk of the alarm.

Stumble to the shower.

Lean under the strong stream of hot water, the last good shower for a while, but only for the 10 minutes you have allotted.

Hurry to dress in the clothes you laid out last night.

Load up the car.

Pause in the doorway to review the checklist once more: passport, wallet, spare contact lenses.

Drive to the airport, exceeding the speed limit even though you’re right on schedule.

Park the car.

Sit waiting for the shuttle-bus, taking a moment to memorize the route back to your car.

Jockey for a position close to the doors.

Sway with the loose suspension of the shuttle on the ride to the terminal.

Step down to the curb.

Roll your suitcase through the automatic doors.

Queue up at the check-in counter.

Shuffle your way toward the desk, keeping one hand on the handle of your suitcase.

Wait while the counter agent examines your passport and clicks an inexplicably large number of keys to produce a boarding pass and check in your bag.

Scramble to beat a group of 15 students to the security line.

Contemplate the geopolitics of the modern world and the excessive carry-on luggage of your fellow travelers.

Step, wait, step, wait, step, wait, step, wait. (Repeat many times.)

Pass through the metal detectors without incident.

Take a seat to put your shoes back on.

Stroll in the general direction of the gate.

Stop for a leisurely cup of coffee and a day-old Danish; your flight won’t board for another hour and 15 minutes.

Browse a magazine with as much concentration as the blaring announcements allow.

Explore the gate area for a suitably empty bank of seats.

Sit.

Muse on the fact that you’ll be sitting for the next 12 hours.

Pace back and forth between the bookstore and the duty-free shop.

Press forward into the crowd waiting to board the plane.

Consider, as you always do, the eagerness of the passengers to be first in line to surrender their freedom of movement.

Pause and smile politely as the gate agent checks your passport.

March down the jetway.

Duck to enter the plane.

Squeeze past the passengers blocking the route to your seat.

Heave your carry-on into the overhead bin.

Shoe-horn your large frame into the seat.

Fidget with the light switch, the call button, the air nozzle, the seat beat, and the emergency instruction card.

Eye the in-flight magazine, but decide to leave it in the seat pocket.

Await the boarding of the remaining passengers.

Listen for the sounds in the luggage compartment, the activity in the galley, the closing of the main hatch, and the other clunks and clicks that precede departure.

Stare out the window as the plane taxis and stops, taxis and stops.

Recall statistics about the danger of take-offs and landings.

Seek the still, quiet place at the center of your being.

Hide there from the uncomfortable seat, the noise and vibration, the dry, recirculated air, the coughs, the sneezes, the crying baby, the Nintendo game, the leg cramps, the mindless chatter, and your own impatience to be back in motion.

Note: The assignment was to consider the states of stillness and motion. I opted to make a game of the exercise by starting each sentence with an imperative verb. I tried to stick to verbs that suggest either a lot of motion or none at all, but that wasn’t always possible within the context.