Florence: Introduction

For a moment, while our train sat at its origin in Rome we feared no air conditioning. We found unexpected solace in the accompanying fears of fellow riders, whose status as natives added credibility to our suspicion that the lack of a/c was not the norm for this first-class car and assuaged our continual fear that we as tourists find ourselves innately inadequate to navigate a social structure without language or sufficient knowledge of culture and customs. Mom whipped out her trusty yellow fan, one of our first purchases upon arrival in Rome, that hot spot, and we set to discussing options in a worst-case scenario before the heat got to our powers of logic. One, to detrain at some unknown station when we couldn’t stand the heat any longer and to catch another train with the sincere hope that it would be air conditioned; or, two, to debark now and find another train. We decided to hold out when we saw the conductor running here and there as if working on the problem. Which turned out to be the case, and we traveled in a lukecool cabin until our thirty-minute layover one stop shy of our destination.

Florence. Neal had already made it a little bit of home by the time we found him in his studio not far from the Duomo and in his resident artist’s beard. And such a meaty beard it was that as soon as Mom and I returned to the hotel room on Via de Calzaiuoli I shaved my pitiful two-week rendition. Previous experience tempered the potential surreality of a reunion in a foreign setting, and so instead of ohing and ahing over the novelty of it we got straight to telling stories, taking pictures, and making comments, some congratulatory, some critical, about Neal’s beard. (“What a bushy beard you have.” “The better to assert my credibility in the classroom via the appearance of age, my dear.”)

Mom, in one of the stories we ran through during this reunion, had left her travel BoM lying somewhere on her bed in Utah after a last-minute search for our train passes. Neal, who had the news of the omission from Michelle, who had it directly from the horse herself before departure from Baltimore, tossed Mom a little red book across one of the workstations without warning. Mom nabbed it out of the air like a professional second basewoman, figured it for a replacement travel BoM, and returned the volley with a thank you all in one fluid movement. Neal worked the travel BoM back to second with a similar fluid obstinacy, and there it remained, the first of several generous exchanges that would make Florence and, later, England, a landmark family memory.

2006.08.01