“I’ll get the car and bring it round to the front of the terminal,” he said. “Then we’ll go for lunch.”
Then he repeated this a bit louder for my mother’s benefit:
“Are you hungry, Val? I know a nice little pub on the way to Stansted that I think you’ll like.”
“Wonderful!” she beamed.
He looked at me for confirmation. I smiled and nodded.
“Oh, he’s a nice man, Jane,” she said approvingly as Colin hurried away. “So cheerful. And tidy looking. I do like his hair.”
In the forty years I have been on and off the dating circuit, Colin is the only man my mother has liked. Well, there was another guy she sort of liked, way back when I was a teenager.
He was a drug user and a groper. She didn’t know that, of course.
“Is Colin coming to Italy with us?” she asked.
“No, but he’s coming in a few weeks when we get to Viterbo,” I said, wheeling her outside the terminal and scanning the sidewalk for a wheelchair ramp. I tried to channel Colin’s patience. “Remember? We’ve discussed that a few times now.”
She stared ahead, and I could see the cogs in her brain churning to retrieve the information.
Colin’s pale silvery-green car pulled up to the curb. I immediately pulled the luggage off the cart and began to stuff it into the hatchback. With an air of slight annoyance I stuck my head around the back end of the car to see why Colin was taking so long to help me. There he was, carefully helping my mother into the front seat of his car and ensuring that she was comfortable and that her arms and legs were safely tucked inside before he closed the car door. This is one reason why I love this man: He has his priorities straight.
“I didn’t think she’d be able to get into the backseat,” he said, joining me at the back of the car. “Sorry.”
He stole another kiss. I ran a hand through his gray-flecked ginger hair.
“Nice to see you,” he smiled. “You look stressed. Everything ok?”
“It’s my first time travelling with a disabled person,” I said.
“Plus she’s my mother, and she’s crazy. I don’t know how I’m going to handle this.”
“She seems fine to me,” he said. “Really chipper and lucid.
C’mon. Let’s get some lunch.”
I squeezed into the backseat, and off we drove.
It was a relief to be in the backseat. It meant I could relinquish my responsibilities for a while. Colin and Mom were bantering between themselves, and I was about to nod off when...
“But all the immigrants! I’ve never seen so many. Where would we be without them!”
“Mom! Stop it!”
“She’s so sensitive about this,” Mom said, shaking her head and confiding to Colin as if I weren’t there. “I just don’t understand her. Anyway, there were immigrants everywhere. ”
“You’re an immigrant, too,” I said, smiling through clenched teeth.
“I’m different,” she snorted.
Naturally. It is the considered opinion of all immigrants that the immigration door should have been bolted after they were let in.
“What do you think of all the colored people at airports?” she pressed Colin.
I emitted a painful groan.
“Mom, Colin travels a lot. And he lives in London, which, believe it or not, has ‘colored’ people.”
“I don’t believe I was talking to you, dear,” she said in a singsong cadence as she cast me a Hyacinth Bucket smile— the one that is part pity, part shut the hell up.
Colin gripped the steering wheel tighter—I could see the whites of his knuckles—and from the slight rev of the engine I knew he was surreptitiously pressing down on the accelerator pedal.
AFTER A cozy lunch at the Goose and Turd—or something like that—Colin delivered us to Stansted Airport and kissed us good-bye before we handed ourselves over once again to the indignities of an airport security check.
I had booked our flight from London to Bari over the Internet for the astonishingly low price of thirty-nine pence per person. The cost didn’t include taxes or luggage premiums but it did, I’m happy to report, include the wings for the plane.
It also included a chance to engage with a swarm of humanity the likes of which I hope never to experience again.
By the time we arrived in the departure lounge, our fellow Ryanair passengers were straining the flimsy fabric barrier of the preboarding corral. Some were practically crouched in a starting position, ready to make a mad dash across the tarmac to the plane as soon as the boarding announcement was made.
A steward noticed my wheelchair-bound mom, and then me, cowering in the midst of the foaming-mouthed horde.
“Might wanna move ’er over ’ere, luv,” the steward said. She bulldozed a path for us to the front of the line and, with a grim nod, added, “You get priority boarding.”
The horde seemed to take great umbrage with this concession.
Priority boarding among this group was a dubious advantage. It basically granted you a head start and a count of ten.
“I suggest you move smartly, luv,” said the steward, lowering her voice and giving me a knowing look of raised eyebrows and pursed lips. She unhooked the fabric barricade and let us through. The other passengers surged forward. The last I heard from the steward was a loud thwacking sound and her booming voice. “’Ere! Get back you lot!”
I pushed the wheelchair onto the tarmac and began walking briskly toward the plane. I looked back nervously several times to make sure the other passengers were still securely held in place. We were halfway to the plane when it became apparent that permission to board had been granted to one and all. It looked like a prison break.
I stepped up my pace. OK, I won’t mince words: I was running for dear life. Mom clutched our purses to her breast.
As we neared the plane, two ground crew workers intercepted us and hustled us into a wheelchair elevator. It lifted off and raised us to the airplane door just as the mob arrived, out of breath with their ties flopped over their shoulders and their hair and eyeglasses wildly askew.
“Ha, ha! Suckers!” I chuckled to myself in a victorious James Bond sort of way.
We grabbed our seats aboard the plane, and soon the silver beast was roaring down the runway toward a late afternoon sky streaked with the fading light of day.
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. We were on our way to Italy. Finally.
There have been times in my life when I have felt Italian to the depths of my soul, where the cells belonging to heritage reside. I do not possess a smidgen of Italian blood, yet whenever I hear Italian spoken on the street, my heart catches; whenever I hear Puccini’s La Bohème or Gianni Schicchi, I am overwhelmed to the point of tears; whenever I observe Italian families walking arm in arm or huddled in serious discussion around the meat counter debating the merits of one brand of prosciutto over another, my soul swells with happiness knowing that all is right with the world and that Italy is the last line of defense between those whose passion is political and religious fanaticism and those whose passion is living.
When I would hit the valleys of a roller-coaster life and wonder what, aside from my children, there was worth living for, my mind would default to a series of clichéd images of Italy that shuddered into action like an old film reel—boisterous families gathered beneath a pergola of grape vines around a table laden with baskets