Recall of Endless Alleys

Neither my wife nor I make much of anniversaries.  I can remember my first.  I tried to make a nice event of it.  The first year’s anniversary is important, I suppose.  We flew down to Tobago.  The East Indians clearly run commerce in West Indian Tobago.  A nice enough gentleman pulled up beside us as we walked down the street and asked if we wanted to rent a car while we were on the island.  Soon we had a car.  We were at that beach.  I dove straight into the waves and realized suddenly that I hadn't remembered to remove my glasses.  And, after searching, futilely in the surf for the next hour, I resigned myself to a blind man’s vacation and promptly backed my rental car into a coconut tree.  It got worse from there.

This year is nineteen years on.  Once again, this is presumably an important one.  Twenty is one we should or at least are supposed to, anoint.  I couldn't tell you what happened on the third one or the tenth or the one that passed last year.  Probably not much other than a dinner or some flowers.  And while this may sound like a hopeless husband, my wife is almost certainly less likely to remember the day than I. We will however remember that for ‘twenty’ we went to Venice. 

I haven't been there in . . . let's see . . . twenty-five years or so.  I can remember only a bit of it.  I seem to remember standing in St. Mark’s and listening to some Bob Marley and the Wailers “Talking Blues” and Fela Kuti’s “Who No Know Go Know”, and considering the slave trade, if I recall.  I have a memory of a bunch of American college-aged tourists doing some sort of hip hop mosh pit in the middle of a crowded area, looking like a herd jackasses.  I can see an incendiary poster that called on the local population, in Italian and in English to reclaim the city from the tourists.  What is layered beneath this is webbing recall of endless alleys that led to canals that were crossed by bridges that took you on another turn, always refreshing and redefining wonder, once again as you turned in to an even more breathtaking little piazza. I can remember as well that I never took a Gondola anywhere.  I was alone.  I suppose that silly romantic frill that I passed on last time will be something we shall address during this visit.

I had originally thought of a flight to Milan.  I've never been and the cathedral there, has always beckoned.  Then we could drive through Bologna or head up to Lake Como and then over to Venice and back, all in three nights.  If it were another solo trip, so be it.  But as this is supposed to honor, if nothing else, my wife's preferences in addition to our union, we will plop down in one place and go nowhere but there for three days and nights. Out to dinner the other night my friend told me that the way to go from the airport to the city was by boat.  "It's quite romantic." he said, with a French Belgian accent.  That sealed it.  The water taxi it is. 

There isn’t a direct flight yet from Beijing to Venice.  Rather we'll go to Switzerland first and on the return head through Vienna.  I tried to book the complicated and reasonably priced itinerary on the phone with Ctrip but eventually, as I waited and waited for the guy to return, I just set up the online purchase and bought it through the web interface.  I had a nagging suspicion then as they took the charge but wouldn't confirm if it had gone through.  Once we introduce that sort of tension it can be all consuming.  We're convinced that the special pricing will vanish and we'll need to take some gaping compromise. Some times that does in fact happen.  I fretted.

By the time I was home they had written me to confirm.  Now I could return to imagining being lost in those alleys and canals once again.

Wednesday, 3/1/17