ROME
Today was the day marked on my calendar when I was flying to Rome but I am in Marshall and not going anywhere.
It is a sad and complicated story. When Rob told me almost a month ago, after I had bought my round trip nonrefundable, nonchangable, $570 ticket to Rome, that he was unlikely to be able to go because his wife, Leslie, needed a hernia repair operation, I have been looking for an alternative. I immediately wrote to Efi who oversees Efi’s Rooms in Naoussa on the island of Paros, Greece, to ask if I could rent an apartment there for a month. I wrote in English because I know no Greek. Efi knows very little English. Efi replied right away with a picture of herself looking elegant outside her house and another of the purple bougainvillea plant on the balcony of her airbnb, but no words in either Greek or English. I remember motherly Efi fondly. Last time I stayed there I was invited to the memorial service in the large church on the hill on the 40th day after her mother’s death. Even though meals weren’t included with my airbnb she would come up the stairs to my apartment every noon calling Beeel, Beeel, with a steaming dish of food and she had invited me to join her and Wolfgang, a German tenant for a huge pot of boiled snails that she and Wolfgang had collected after a rain when the snails suddenly appeared. I looked forward to a month at Efi’s place with the blue Aegean just past the blue domed church below her place. But instead I got a letter from Efi, I’m sure from her English speaking daughter, saying Efi wasn’t presently in Naoussa and that she would not be able to accommodate me.
But I didn’t give up. My daughter Susie was applying for a job at a very interesting retreat center near Marshall that was about to open up. But when she was told she would have to wait at least a month before hiring she decided to go with me to Italy and began looking for places to stay, deciding on Perugia, an hour or two away from Rome. I got her a ticket to Rome using airline miles. Susie began to search for an airbnb, but before she booked it, only five days before we were to fly out, she was offered the job beginning immediately.
It was easy to cancel her ticket and I got all my air miles back, but I thought my $570 nonrefundable ticket was a total loss. But I discovered that nonrefundable only meant that I wouldn’t get my money back. The ticket was cancellable for a fee of $200, with the remaining $370 being a credit toward a later flight. So after all my efforts to make use of the ticket I lost only $200 and saved quite a bit by not spending a month at an expensive airbnb in Perugia.
So I am quite happy to not be flying to Rome and instead wait for my next trip, to San Miguel, Mexico, in January
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 