CHANCE
I was going to go to Tuscany, Italy, with my granddaughter Caroline in the fall. I have been dreaming of Tuscany for months. Rob Amberg, a photographer I know in Marshall, had invited anyone who could come to his 75th birthday party in Taormina, Sicily in October. Taormina, under Mount Etna, sounds beautiful. The party happens to be on October 14 and fit well with what I thought were Caroline’s dates to visit Tuscany in the second half of October. So I bought a cheap ticket from Asheville to Milan on October 1 and back from Athens on November 30 in order to cover everyone’s vague plans. Then Caroline got invited by a Spanish classmate to stay at the large villa her classmate’s rich father had rented in Tuscany after which she will go to Madrid. She is in Tuscany right now drinking fancy cocktails.
She no longer wants to go Tuscany in late October. Instead she wants to go to Greece. Kathy, her mother, has decided she wants to go to Greece, too, and so does my son Tom, her dad. Tom is going to come early, maybe to Sicily and then he and I will go to Greece and we will all go island hopping, spending a few days on the island of Paros where I was for a month two years ago, my first trip after Kathe died when Athens for $550 popped up on my computer screen and I pushed the button without thinking and bought a ticket.
So with these new plans I wrote to Efi, who rented me an Airbnb room two years ago and was a wonderful host, asking if I could rent a room with her for the month of November. I sent it to her in English (Efi’s English is however weak) on Viber, the European messaging system, but by mistake I sent my message to Wolfgang Vick, a German who has been visiting Efi’s place for years and who was in Paros two years ago when I was. Wolfgang got the message the afternoon he was leaving for a visit to Paros and said he would translate the message for Efi when he got there. He wrote me from the Athens ferry to Paros. He then phoned Efi. She will let me know tomorrow what is free and has promised me a bucket of snails for supper when I come to visit.
In the meantime I saw Phil Diehn sitting on his porch when I was inspecting our newly paved street. He invited me up, we talked of travel, then Gwen, his wife appeared. I mentioned my trip and how Tuscany was now out. Too bad, they both told me, because they had stayed three times in Tuscany at a wonderful country place with houses for rent where they made good friends. In fact, they arranged for their son to get married there with lots of invited guests a few years ago and had a wonderful time. If Efi didn’t answer (how could she, I’d sent the letter to the wrong place) I could go to Tuscany, instead, and they would help me to make arrangements. I dreamed all night of going to Tuscany. But that was yesterday and today Wolfgang wrote back. So now I’m going to Paros in November (I think) but dreaming of going to Tuscany and wondering when I can fit Tuscany in because I want to go to India in January to get my teeth finally fixed (my Indian dentist met me last month in Morristown, New Jersey, in a borrowed dentist’s office, but could only half finish the job) and then to sit on my friend Hasmukh Patel’s porch looking out through the neem trees in the village of Virampur and then to go with Hasmukh and his wife Manda to Sri Lanka for two weeks. Maybe I can go to Tuscany in April or to Winsen, Germany or to Haarlem, Netherlands or maybe everything will shift again.
The moral of this story is once you float free you have no idea what is going to happen next so let go and find out, the other message is, if you see an open door walk through it and see what happens. I’ll be 86 in October (and going solo to Montevideo for August) so anything can happen.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 