SEVENTY-FIFTH
DAY
IT’S ALL
ABOUT THE GARBAGE
November 27, 2005
I am
seated at my usual spot in our breakfast nook (ha) next to the kitchen so that
I can talk to Kim while she is cooking and I am writing. We just finished our first entertaining in
the new place. We met a nice woman on
our walk and talk last week. She and her
husband live 30 yards from us on the main street of the Ghetto. He is an historian taking a break from
writing documentaries and television production to spend a couple of years in
Rome. Their son is a high school
freshman at the St Stephens School, the number one private school in Rome. They have just returned from a week in Amalfi
where it was cold and wet, too. The
apartment now looks great thanks to the intervention of Kimberly and IKEA. It
also has the benefit of being larger than most apartments in this part of
town. With the heat working and all
lights on, we have cocktails in the living room and compare lives. This guy has no issues in Rome and has
suffered none of the hassles that have affected me. It seems that his wife’s major complaint is
that he never leaves the building, preferring to stay inside and read. His view is that they will be in Rome for a
while and he has plenty of time to see all the sites. I must be somewhere in between these points
of view. Frankly, I am getting plenty of
time to read and am always anxious to get out and about.
Today, we
kept things pretty low key. In perhaps
the funniest moment of our Roman lives, we decided to go to the Campo to a bar
with wireless Internet service. For the
price of a drink you get to use their system.
It is a fine small bar and a drink is not out of the question. When we get there, it is closed, as is
everything on Sunday. We were
disappointed because we wanted to get our E-mails and send a couple of messages,
the usual stuff. Suddenly, I remembered
that my oldest son Buddy had gone to an Internet café in Sonoma and when it
wasn’t open, he simply took out his laptop on the sidewalk and the signal
carried out to him. The streets in this
part of Rome are very narrow and with cars and scooters coming by it is rather
dangerous. We set up our computer on a garbage can and in our funniest moment,
it worked and I didn’t even have to buy a drink. There were people in an open café across the
street who were rolling there eyes and laughing, but because we know nobody it
didn’t matter to us. Strangely enough,
we ran into one of Kimberly’s fellow students from her Italian class less than
5 minutes later. I am glad she missed
our E-mail session on the cans. Now I
know more about garbage E-mails.
The rains
continue on and off; we got soaked last night.
We hear that the weather in SF has finally yielded some rain. I am glad because we always need the rain in
Northern California. My guess is that
here rain is not a big issue.
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