Ho paura del ragno.

This is the one sentence I remember from the two years of Italian I took in college. And I probably got it wrong.

Yes! So! I am here! This computer at this Internet place, it does not function as I am liked it to! I am having the unhappy!

When I go to other countries I can't do their language, so I just speak the broken Englishes. They love it. No, really.

I must make this short, as the proprietor here, she is liking the incense, and my husband, he is having of the sickness regarding this. So! Our trip so far: pretty! We are surrounded by, um, what do you call it--nature. There are lizards in our beds. And snails in our shoes. There are many pretty sights. The pasta! What can I say! Hospitaliano! On the minus side, there has been some vomiting, and some not pooping, and some fever, and some refusing to eat a single foodstuff except for gelato. Guess who I'm referring to! C'mon!

Okay, Scott is reenacting Henry's regurgitation in the car on the way to San Gimignano, so I must leave you. More there will be at a later times! Me are hoping they will have the happy, the times in the next days! 

Hello, we must be going.

So we’re going to Italy tomorrow, and did I brush up on my Italian? I did not. Zut alors! Wait, that’s wrong.

We are going to a farmhouse in Tuscany with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law and brother-in-law’s new wife whom I now get to call my sister-in-law. For two weeks, we’re going! We’re going to be in the country! With, um, donkeys? I think there might be donkeys. Really I have no idea. I have done very little thinking about this trip. Does it show?

My mother-in-law wishes to celebrate her birthday by taking us on this trip, and who am I to argue? I’m a little nervous about the flight with Henry (read: I’m picturing Henry flinging vomit and feces all about the cabin as he skitters across the ceiling and screeches the Nicene Creed backward) but I’m sure it will be fine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! Hurgh!



Anyway, then we’ll be in Italy, so even if the ride is as awful as I can imagine, we’ll still end up in Italy. The last time we were in Italy it was our honeymoon, and it was fantastical and wonderamic, except we flew Air France and therefore we had to deal with the French. On the way there I sat next to an aging, bitter old crone who wore too much makeup and applied smelly salves to her hairy cheeks and then berated me when I suggested that maybe using nail polish remover in a plane wasn’t the most considerate way to go. She actually called me a “spoiled American” and repeatedly sneered, “You want your own plane,maybe?” And oh, how I loathed the French, on that trip.

But not as much as on our way back, when we missed our connecting flight and ended up being put up in a hotel in a town called Bagnolet. Bagnolet, Where the Hookers Are! Actually, maybe it was a nice town, I don’t know—we were too busy hiding in our room from the hookers down in the lobby. They looked mean, those hookers, like they wanted to cut up some Americans. As for the room we were in, there were brown streaks running down the walls out of the vents and the sheets made us itch and the only channel that worked on the television was airing “Men in Black” in French.

But the Italy part, that was nice.

This time we’re taking Lufthansa, so I expect we’ll return with tales of Germanic cruelty. Along with many, many pictures of Henry eating gelato.

Everything is true except for the part about the mustache.

The humidity level is somewhere past 100 and it’s 97 degrees and my computer is melting. The child is in his crib, doing what he does best: napping and sweating. There’s air conditioning on in there, so I don’t know why he wakes up sopping wet. Then again, this morning he told me he had just been “flying a little” and “there was some basketball downstairs.” Sounds like a workout, son! You should dream about sending email, like I do!

A while back, I promised two exciting tales: my tale of subway drama, and my appearance on Bravo. See, I didn’t forget. Only I began to think that neither of these anecdotes is all that interesting after all. But whatever, I have nothing else to give.

The subway incident went something like this: Henry and I were with our friends, J. and F., who hail from the town of P___ S___. We had just been to the New York Aquarium, which is all the way down in Coney Island. The outing had been my idea, and like so many of my ideas, it had been a terrible one. There were many subway stairs to negotiate. The toddlers were cranky, as toddlers so often are. The aquarium was both expensive and crowded. Henry had no interest in anything but the sharks. The sharks, and then we were done. DONE, do you hear me? DONE. No, he did NOT care about the starfish or the seahorses (they’re horses of the sea, kid! Give them a chance) nor would he give a second glance to the walruses, even though they were much more impressive than the sharks, if you ask me. But he wasn't asking me. No, no NO. So I shelled out $18 for fifteen minutes of holding a screaming 40-pound child while I searched for the shark exhibit and then two minutes of holding a silent 40-pound child while we looked at sharks. Then we went down to the beach, and hey! What a worse idea to have than the aquarium! At the beach, the children can coat their sunscreen-marinated bodies in sand, and be like hot little breaded fillets. Fillets that want to be held! And don’t want to go anywhere near the water even though it’s hotter than hell!

And then we poured some melted ice creams down our shirts and hauled them up the assload of stairs to the subway and there we were on the subway, finally. We were sweaty and disheveled and two out of the four of us needed diaper changes. It was our stop. I was holding Henry and I ran ahead to the door because I’m paranoid about the door closing before we can escape.

And then it closed. On my foot.

My foot was inside the train. I was outside, on the platform. Henry was in my arms. J. and F. were inside the train, looking out at us. My stroller was inside the train. Next to my foot.

And the door, it would not open.

For those of you who do not hail from these parts, the NYC subway doors are merciless. They will close right on you. They are not the friendly elevator doors that occasionally decapitate people but usually are quite nice about letting people through. Not these doors. Once they begin closing, nothing can stop them. You may think they will open. But they will not. No! Usually, if you get a limb stuck, you can wiggle yourself free, but in this case, I couldn’t.

And we were in the last car, which meant that the conductor, wherever he or she was, could not in a million years see me. Me and my trapped foot. My trapped and doomed foot.

So I screamed for a while, but nothing happened, as my scream is thin and girlish. Actually I think I was calling out, “Um, hello? Hello? Trapped foot, over here! Helloooo?” which is not going to get anyone’s attention, especially not here, where the subway conductors will rip your foot off as they head out to their next destination and not think twice about it. Subway conductors would sooner leap out through their window and gnaw at your ankle with their extra-long incisors until your foot is severed from the rest of you than open the doors for you. This is true.

Fortunately, a man sporting a thick, lush handlebar moustache was standing on the platform. He heard my weak cries and, with a booming baritone, demanded that the doors be opened. And lo, they were. And my foot was freed! Hurrah!

Henry was exceedingly concerned about my foot, but this didn’t stop him from demanding that I hold him all the way home. No stroller was good enough for him, as I had been in danger, and this was no time to be separated from me. Never mind about the limping! You hold me, damn it! You see how I love you!

The End. You see? There have been better stories. Like the one about when I was on Bravo! Which I will get to eventually.

Why I should probably be back in therapy.

I have a complicated relationship with supermarket cashiers. They’re serving me, and yet at the same time they have all the power—tallying my purchases, weighing and considering each item, silently judging me. I’m always a little mortified (I can hear them thinking, she pays that much extra for organic? chump) and yet also grateful because hey, they're letting me take this food home! I mean, I have to pay for it, but still. Mostly, though, I really want them to be nice to me. I’m not asking for much. A smile here, a “have a nice day” there. Sometimes the exchange with the cashier is the only adult interaction I’ll have all day. I want a little validation that I exist. Is that too much to ask?

At any rate, there’s a new cashier at the Met Food across the street, and this woman is One Cranky-Ass Bitch. She’s a middle-aged woman with badly dyed red hair and a thick Russian accent. She scowls at every item that rolls towards her, and then regards me with an icy stare and spits, “Give me $35.17,” like she’s mugging me. And oh, when I tell her I’m going to use my debit card! The sighing and the rolling of the eyes! “Cash back?” she growls, and then looks at me like god help you if you say yes. If she could get away with balling up the receipt and hucking it at my face, she would. She is not a nice person.

So of course I’ve been trying to make her my friend. I head straight for her cash register and I put each item down right where she can pick it up—no making that conveyor belt roll, my friend! That’s too much work for you! Then when she accosts me with the total I always beam at her and say, “Okay!” and I count out my money—exact change for you, neighbor! You’ve had a hard day! And then she shoves my receipt at me and my bag and I tell her to have a nice day and she hates me more than ever.

I went in on Saturday to buy a bag of potting soil. I had a hard time negotiating the bag, as it was big and heavy and I am small and puny. I plopped it down at her register and said, “Whoa!” because I’m a dork. She glanced at me to sneer, but then something changed in her expression—and she smiled at me. She. Smiled. At me.

Finally, I thought. I’ve broken through. She could only resist my charms for so long.

Of course I smiled like a crazy person back at her, and I handed her my money and she gave me my change and I shrieked “Thank you! Nice day, isn’t it! Hope you get outside! Bye! See you later!” at her. She looked right at me and she smiled again. I was in heaven.

When I walked in the door I was about to tell my husband about my breakthrough when he said, “Did you know that you’ve got something on your face? You’ve got a big black smudge under your nose.”

So. It wasn’t my charms, but my dirt mustache. Cranky-Ass Bitch was laughing at me. She was thinking, “The American whore looks like Hitler. And my heart is glad.”

I'm sort of considering doing it again, just to amuse her.