Tuesday, March 26, 2024 Adventures in Italy Part 2

(To start at the beginning: Adventures in Italy Part 1)

MSP to Atlanta Airport – August 2016

You’re in luck!  I have another few hours to kill before the flight to Milan takes off. You’re probably thinking that I can’t possibly eke out any more to say after so little time has passed – but if you’re thinking that, you don’t know me very well. If Kris were here, I’d be chatting with him and wouldn’t give you all a second thought, so if it’s convenient for you, please blame this excessive narrative on him. My goal is to keep you really on the edge of your seats and make you care about the minutiae of my life (“did she choose pretzels, peanuts or a cookie for the on-flight snack?”). 

I’ve been struck with a condition that I shall call “jacket envy.”  A guy waiting for my flight had a huge gray cardigan just flung carelessly over his suitcase. Why did he bring it if he wasn’t going to use it at least offer it to someone else? I had a window seat and the man two seats down from me came in wearing a suit and immediately took his jacket off and looked annoyed at having to find a place to put it.  “Give it to me,” I urged silently. Not having perfected the art of ESP, I was not successful in getting the idea across to him subliminally and it seemed past the border of social appropriateness to ask him for it. 

Next thing you know, we’re soaring over the clouds and I’m contemplating why I can’t even make it to the top of Hermann the German because of my fear of heights, but I can look down from thousands of feet in the air and not feel the same way.  Nothing but air and fluffy clouds underneath us and I’m perfectly fine with it. Why is that? The flight was, as we say so cavalierly, uneventful. I read, worked on a crossword puzzle and looked out the window pondering various things that seemed quite profound at the time. In no time at all, we were beginning our descent (no time = 90+ minutes) and moving downward through many layers of clouds.  This is the point at which turbulence happens, as I learned on our trip back from NY, so I took a page from David’s book and decided to focus my attention on the clouds and the sights below (little miniature trees, tiny meandering rivers, and eventually many clusters of neighborhoods with their little tiny houses that looked like Monopoly pieces). This concentrated the mind wonderfully.

I had another invigorating walk to my gate in Atlanta and am looking around surreptitiously for the wife of one of my husband’s co-workers who is on the same plane to Milan to meet her husband over there. We exchanged photos, so I’m hoping it’ll be obvious.  Hey, just as I was typing that, she showed up!  So, thus ends this narrative about nothing.  There’ll be more interesting things for me to write about in Italy, right?

Love,

Lynn/Mom

P.S. I chose the pretzels.

I’ll probably delete this excessive narrative in the morning.

Adventures In Italy Part 3