The blog is delayed this week due to illness. Please check back Thursday. To mollify impatient readers, here is a picture of my dad and me in front of the Parthenon. I am thinking, “Don’t get get too close you’re sweaty.” He is thinking, apparently, “Look at that UFO.”

(The second of two guest blog posts from Rachel’s friend Anne.)

Buon giorno! This blog post is coming to you direttamente from Rome, where my husband is attending a conference, and where I am seeing the sights. Sights seen so far: the Vatican Museum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Largo di Torre Argentina (a square filled with various Roman ruins and various Roman cats), the Colosseum, the Forum, and Palatine Hill (one of the famous seven hills of Rome).

Whenever I visit someplace I’ve never been before, I’m always struck by how many things I thought were outdated stereotypes turn out to be true.

The Parisians really do carry baguettes down the street. There really are red telephone boxes on the streets of London.

In Zambia and Botswana, I really did see African people carrying objects on their heads.

In the Netherlands, I spotted a pair of wooden shoes on the doorstep of the rural family I was staying with. When I asked the father what they were for (I was assuming they were planters for flowers or something), he replied, “Um, those are my shoes.”

And yesterday, as I rode a public bus on my way to the Vatican, I really did hear a young Roman man exclaim, “Mamma mia!”

It’s all kind of comforting.

Now, I’m not trying to be a condescending Yankee who thinks that other cultures are adorably quaint, or that people in other countries run around acting like cartoons of themselves all the time. When I visit France, I don’t expect to see Pepe le Pew sauntering down the street (“Le skunk! Le stink!”).

I mean only that in an age when American culture seems to have spread over the globe, it makes me happy that there’s still a purpose to travel, that other places really are different. It reminds me that there is more in this world that I can imagine. That—as difficult as it is to remember sometimes—the world does not begin and end with my tiny little mind.

Mamma mia!

 

 

(Hi, everybody! I’m Anne. *waves* Thanks to my friend Rachel for inviting me to guest-blog while she’s away.)

My youngest stepdaughter doesn’t like to eat breakfast. I get that some people aren’t big breakfast-eaters, but I feel pretty strongly that she needs to eat something before school, even if it’s only a few bites. This morning she took an apple with her to eat in the car on the way to school, and a few minutes after we pulled out of the driveway I noticed that I didn’t hear any chomping from the backseat.

“Eat your apple, Kit,” I said. (Note: Her name is not Kit.)

“I’m GOING TO,” she said, aggrieved. “I just don’t like taking the first bite. It HURTS.”

It was pointed out to her that someday when she is rich and famous, she can hire someone to take the first bite of all her apples for her. It was subsequently pointed out (by Kit) that that would be gross. And then we were at school, and she and her sister got out of the car and plunged into the netherland that is high school, and I was left to drive home and think about my own apples and all the first bites I’m waiting to take.

I don’t like taking that first bite into a whole apple either. I usually cut my apples up into nice, thin, manageable slices, which don’t sound all loud and crunchy and impolite when you chomp into them, and which don’t make your front teeth ache in their sockets. But sometimes there’s no way around it. You’re hungry, with no knife, and there’s an apple in front of you.

This week I am working on an article I’m scared to write. I spend a lot of time sitting in front of my computer thinking about how I Better Not Mess This Up, and how probably They’re Going to Ask Me What in God’s Name I Was Thinking, and Why I Call Myself A Writer Anyway When I Clearly Should Have Gone Into Accounting.

And then I shake myself and start making the phone calls I need to make and asking the questions I need to ask, and before I know it, I’m curious instead of anxious, and I remember that I know how to do this after all. Yes, it hurt, but just for a minute. And now I am fed.