He couldn’t have been more of a jerk, this handsome young man who worked at the ticket counter of the funiculare. (A train on a cable that runs up and down the very steep hill to the medieval town in Italy where I moved last fall.)
Of course, it was our fault. Local residents can buy a pass that is good for multiple tickets. I have one and my mom has a handicapped one that let’s her go through the special handicapped gate, since she can’t get the walker through the turnstile on the regular gate. You swipe your pass and the gate opens.
With her walker, my mom is like a greyhound. I can’t keep up with her. So I was shocked to discover, after I had swiped her pass for the handicapped gate, she had paused to dither and was not right behind me. The gate opened and closed without her. When I tried to reopen it with the pass, it wouldn’t.
Thereafter ensued a comedy of errors in which we wound up with both of us inside the gate and the walker still outside. Finally, I was able to get the handicapped gate to open, I dashed through backwards, grabbed the walker and shot back in. We got on the funiculare, having only spent four tickets for two people.
But then, here comes the ticket guy, who tells me I have to swipe my ticket yet again. I tried to explain what happened and that I had already spent four tickets because my mother didn’t get through the first time. He informed me that I must obey the rules. And, by the way, I must muzzle my dog. (At this, Prose looked at him to reveal her black muzzle the size of a thimble.) “Ok,” he said, “but you must swipe your ticket again.”
Even without a nasty ticket agent, it’s a little terrifying.
So I did, and we made it home. But my mother was livid. “These people are rude. And they don’t like Americans.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“No they don’t. It goes back the War.” She can’t get it through her head that by the time Mussolini fell, no one was happier that most of the Italians.
She flounced into her recliner. “I hate this place. I want to go home.”
One man. One incident out of literally hundreds of interactions with Italians who have been beyond helpful, kind and generous, including the city worker who got dog bit rescuing Prose from a pit bull. When I finally found him a week later to thank him, he was unable to tell me the feeling he had when he saw Prose being carried off and me in hysterics. So he laid his hand over his heart.
But I do understand something of what my mother feels. There’s a vulnerability in being in a new country, and the tiniest things can have a huge impact on our moods. If the woman checking my groceries is hateful, I feel belittled. I, too, might think, maybe we should go home. If then, on the way back to our apartment, ten people I don’t know smile and say buongiorno, I think, what a warm, friendly place. I want to stay forever. But most of this is my own overreaction, my own inner weather.
I think we do the exact same thing with our writing. We are so sensitive to the opinions of others. If we let a friend or family member read something we’ve written (which I don’t recommend), unless they write an oath in blood that it should win the National Book Award, we are plunged into self-doubt. Maybe we should just quit.
If we have trouble finding the information we need, if our timeline won’t work out, if we read what we wrote yesterday and conclude it’s worse than awful, we are so despondent, we have to eat a large bag of Funyons (ok, maybe that’s just me.) And when we reach that stage of sending it out to agents, we have to buy our Funyons by the case.
None of this is connected to reality. Our friends are not likely to be literary authorities, and all writers suffer from timeline snafus or swing wildly from thinking their own work is great to using it for toilet paper. That is the nature of the beast called a writer.
To lay aside our writing because of some negative moment is as silly as my mom and I leaving Italy because one man was a jerk.
And the rest of that story? I went back to him. I told him I wanted his name so that when I told my friends how rude he had been, I could use his name. I told him that my mother thought he hated Americans.
“No Madame, I love Americans! It is my dream to visit New York. And Chicago!” And, of course, that led to a real conversation toward the end of which he said, “It’s this guy over here.” He pointed to the empty desk where his supervisor usually sat. “Twenty years I’ve had this job and I love to come to work. But then this guy comes and now I hate my job. He’s always onto me. Obey the rules! He calls me back from home if I fail to do one little thing on the reports.”
Was he playing me? Maybe. But I felt better. I think we’ll stay.
–Alison