jumpingfish

When it rains, grow rain lilies.

1. If I Had a Pencil

If I had a pencil in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me, I might scribble something. A big soft-leaded pencil, maybe, that could make dark black lines across the page.

Except that isn’t true.

I wouldn’t make dark black marks. And if I had a brush, I wouldn’t paint dark strokes. I might do something with black paper, cutting out geometric shapes (little triangles and trapezoids). But even then, when I got done, I just don’t think the thing would be dark. Sure, there’d be black. But there’d be lots of colors. And lots of shapes. And there would be movement across the page like maybe a breeze blowing. Or someone walking across the lawn. Or a path thru the woods.

But not dark.

And anyway, I don’t have a pencil right now. No paper on the table. No brush. No scissors to cut with. And my digital tablet is sitting under a clutter of miscellany that really needs to be organized.

2. The Thing of It

So here’s the thing of it. There’s no easy way to say it. I have cancer. Again. 

A swollen lymph node on my neck that’s kind of hard to miss. I wonder if the forth graders noticed. Cancer growing at the base of my tongue. The doctors have seen it in scans. And biopsies.

There’s a treatment plan coming together. I’ll be spending some quality time in Houston. Taking some time off work.

So maybe I’ll get a chance to put that pencil in my hand after all.

1. The Hunger

It was early afternoon on our last day in Florence. We had postponed lunch, and now I could feel the hunger rising.

“I just need a sandwich,” I mumbled as we walked down the narrow Via de Neri.

At that moment, I noticed people on the other side of the street sitting on the curb eating… sandwiches. But the fair and industrious Trudy would not be distracted.

“It must be down further…” she said, studying her map and guidebook, periodically looking up to orient herself.

As we walked, the crowd of sandwich-eating-people grew. Now they were in the street and on the sidewalk beside us. All of them were eating sandwiches from the same place, All’antico Vinaio. And now I saw this place on the other side of the street.

“Let’s go there,” I said, with a (not so subtle) hint of desperation.

2. Lampredotto

“We’re almost there,” Trudy said. Then she stopped. “Here it is!”

Club del Gusto was a small place with one or two tables on the sidewalk in front of a small window that said, Trippa e Lampredotto. We walked thru the door past a narrow kitchen where two guys were cooking while a single customer ordered a late lunch. We sat at a broad wooden table in the back, and just a few moments later the owner, Paolo, walked up and began speaking in English.

He apologized for the menu being exclusively in Italian and proceeded to explain each dish with loving detail. And he gave us a gift of lampredotto to try before we ordered.

They brought the lampredotto to our table on a small, wooden board. It was served hot on crispy bread, and seeing as Trudy took a pass, I ate it all myself. When Paolo came back, I pointed to the empty board and said, “It’s good!”

Paolo’s eyes widened.

“Ah,” he said, “well now we know!” And he laughed. Then he reached down with his left hand and slid the board to the far end of the table. Now we know, he said, as if I had told him something he didn’t know.

An old man was sitting nearby finishing his pasta lunch and had been watching us. As the board came to a stop, he laughed.

3. About that Sandwich Place

After we had finished our (delicious) lunch, Paolo came back to talk. The rush was over, and he had two capable guys running the kitchen.

I explained to him how I had barely made it past the gauntlet of sandwiches just up the street but how Trudy had known what she was looking for.

We could see the look of frustration in his eyes at the mention of the sandwich place. And he told us how TripAdvisor has thousands of reviews for the place and as a result, as people come walking down the street they stop to have a sandwich there before ever making it as far as his place.

Now, admittedly, if it’s a sandwich you’re looking for, then stopping up the street is the right thing to do. Even in retrospect, I admit that those paninnis looked really tasty.

Paolo continued, “I know these are hard economic times. I know that quantity is good, but…” And here he paused momentarily, “but, quality is important, also.”

And that, my friends, is what Trudy had been looking for in the first place. And that is what we got. And it is a lucky thing, because (well, let’s be honest) I can have a pretty good sandwich just down the street from here, but lampredotto and Paolo’s pasta, that’s another matter entirely!

On the agenda at the beginning of this day in Florence was a trip to the laundromat. As it happened, there was one just down the street from where we were staying. So before going to breakfast at Caffè Il Sole, we took our bag of dirty clothes down the street to try our luck with the machines.

On our way, we came across a man on a phone pulling a suitcase holding a suit and several shirts over his shoulder. Between the wall of the building and the phalanx of scooters parked along the curb, there was not enough room for all of us. So we waited at the corner. He glanced up and mumbled his thanks and quickly disappeared around the corner. 

We took a few more steps, and then we saw a pair of black pants on the sidewalk. They must have fallen from the load he was carrying. I picked them up and ran back, but he was nowhere to be seen. He certainly couldn’t have made it all the way down the block, it had been only a few moments. I turned back to see if he had doubled back. And then across the street I saw an open doorway. He must have gone in there.

So I trotted across the street and peered into the darkness. There was a vestibule with a hallway and stairs that went up. I took a half step in but could see no one.

At that moment, I heard some yelling back on the street. I turned to see what the commotion was. There was an older woman walking toward me in a state of some agitation. And she was looking at me wagging her finger and waving her hand, clearly telling me to get out of that doorway where I had no business.

She spoke Italian. I do not. I tried to explain, pointing to the black pants I was carrying and trying to tell some kind of sign language story of a man walking down the street and… Well it was hopeless. She was angry with me, and clearly I was not going to find the guy at this point. So I walked back to the corner followed by the woman’s stares, and I folded the pants over a bike rack, thinking that maybe the guy would eventually discover that his pants were missing and, retracing his steps, he might find them there.

Later, after our clothes were washed and dried, we walked back from the laundromat past that corner again.  The pants were gone.

Sadly, I have no way of discovering their disposition. Perhaps the man did retrace his steps and find his pants. Or maybe the woman took them. Or maybe someone else had wandered by and noticed a fine pair of black pants and took them. In any event, the lost pants had clearly been found.

When we got to the cathedral, a line of people stretched away from the cathedral and wound around the piazza. Frankly, it was too long to be worth it. But, we had bought Firenze Cards, red plastic credit card sized cards that get you into museums “free” and (bonus!) let you go to the front of the line.

So we walked past all those people to the red Firenze Card sign. We scanned our cards and were waved in just like that. We walked thru a door and began to climb.

And so now what do I tell you? We climbed and climbed.

At times it was more like scrambling, the steps being so narrow and so steep that it was tempting (and indeed in some places necessary) to go on all fours. There were rock spiral stairs going way up.

There were stairs running between the inner and outer skins of the dome with port-hole windows periodically letting in the Tuscan light.

There were stairs upon stairs. And more windows looking out over the city.

When we got almost to the top, we had to wait for a long string of climbers descending back down. We stood aside, pressing our bodies to the stone walls as climber after climber squeezed past us. And when finally it was our turn again, we scrambled the last few steep steps thru a hatch that opened out onto this.

We wandered around and around the walkway, looking north and west and east and south and then doing it all again. We sat with our backs to cool stone and looked out on the city. We took pictures of people who were traveling together. People took pictures of us.

We looked down on the piazza at people milling around on the cobblestone streets, tables being set for dinner and artists selling their watercolors. We looked over at other climbers standing at the summit of Giotto’s Campanile. And on the hour, the cathedral bells in that tower began ringing.

We were, frankly in no hurry.

We stood. We sat. We walked. We held our faces into the breeze. We peered into the hills where Tuscany beckoned. Distant magical places.

And as we were up there, the sun sank low in the west, and the shadow of Il Duomo reached out over the city.

While we were up there, in what now seems mere moments, all of Florence and Tuscany was ours. And then… it was time go go back down.