In My Own Bed

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

     I have to be at Fiumicino airport by 8:30 a.m. to catch by 10:00 a.m. flight without undue anxiety. "Yes!" I arise at 5:00 a.m. as I planned, and am out of the apartment a few minutes before six a.m.  to make sure I have enough time.  The bus stop is down the street, and as I bought my ticket the night before, have only to wait at the bus station until the #8 bus arrives, which happens without delay.  On the way, I meet two young Americans who join me on the ride out to the airport.

       They are Mormons --which I can tell they admit expecting the worse.  However, when I tell them that at my university one of the deans was Mormon, and that I lived in a house with lots of Mormons, and have had Mormon neighbors in my apartment building in New York, they relax.  He is a university student in Washington, D.C., interning at the Department of the Treasury, she a Harvard School of Education graduate teaching high school in the capital.  They are on their way to Croatia and Montenegro as part of a Grand Tour that had them in Paris and Rome before. We end up talking about 9/11 and two novels built around the event, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as well as Let The Great World Spin.  I tell them my experience that day and then it is time to leave.  It is certainly a better ride to the airport than most.  I am at the airport an hour earlier than I needed to be, so I get to have a cappuccino and walk around the airport shops, which are already open.

     By this time the rain, which was just a sprinkle when I left Rome, has started coming down in ropes.  There is a flight to Zurich due to leave at 8:30 a.m. which is delayed until 10:00 a.m. and then departs, even though the rain is still coming down hard.  Roman rain is heavy and unceasing and the clouds are dark and stubborn.  My own flight is delayed 3 hours, until 1:00 p.m.  Fortunately I have my copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations at hand.  I am completely absorbed by the book, so the delay is put to good use. Like Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms, I think the Meditations ought to be given out free at the seating areas in airports.  Marcus Aurelius' encouragement of stoicism in confronting difficulties would be a great aid to travelers facing delays.

     By the time we board the storm has passed and the weather conditions are perfect.  We fly high over the Mediterranean, descending over the Mediterranean near La Grande Motte, France's pyramidal resort on the Golfe de Leon.  We coast onto the landing field and touch down.  Within a few minutes we are off the plane and in the airport.

     Walking along the glass covered passageway into the main terminal, I see a strikingly thin blonde woman with a crop of hair that looks like a coxcomb: actress Tilda Swinton, squeezed into a seat against the window, a teenaged boy (probably her son), next to her.   She is wearing no make-up, but her Scottish coloring and unusual features are unmistakeable.  I read an interview with her once in which she complained that she really didn't have very much money, that she and her husband live very simply in their place in Scotland.  And it may be true: she had the look of someone who did not want to be noticed in the place and the way she was, stripped of all glamour, without attendants.

     I left the car in long-term parking and wondered whether I would find it where I left it --or would it be towed or stolen?  In answer to my prayers, the car was there, in the condition I left it.  I quickly drove to Caunes and resumed my life here, a world away from Rome.