Five years ago, I (Claire) spent a fairly miserable summer in Florence, Italy with one of the readers of this blog. The same reader, in fact, who convinced me two years ago to this day in Berkeley’s Café Roma to write my travel book (or semi satire of, as the case may be).
The summer we spent in Florence together was mildly horrible, for a variety of not very interesting reasons. One night, Jo said she had something to show me. I closed my eyes and stood in the center of the kitchen as instructed. When I opened them (it was all symbolic of course, to see the situation as it really was with eyes all afresh) I saw what she had realized just thirty minutes prior: our living quarters were covered in sheets upon sheets of paper with endless lists on them a la Beautiful Mind. More simply: someone had lost their mind(s).
Five years later, I came into our Goa hotel room tonight, stepping over Jack the displaced Louisianan (who missed his bus after dinner), to see Lara, curled up in the sleep sack her mother sewed for her (for each of us, really).* Everything looked normal, until I saw a slightly crumpled piece of paper on the bed.
Lara’s writing: “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain…”
And then, in what I assume to be Jack’s handwriting, because it looks like a 12 year old’s and Jack is a boy (they supposedly have less hand bones), it reads: “The plain…(a bad start).The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”
Ah, what strange beings we are. I wish there was someone here to share my moment of befuddlement and delight.
*Thank Melanie for the sleep sack, which Lara uses when she is sick, which I think is the single reason I have not caught either of the two fevers Lara has had in the past 110 days.
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