Flight of Fancy

In the morning, the campi between San Giacomo dall'Orio and Rialto whisper with quiet local activity. There's the bump of a push-cart on the steps of a bridge, a slurrish shout-out, always in dialect. Fruit vendors and cafe owners are the first ones, more than ready for the waves of tourists that break upon the city at 10 sharp.

The Sagra continues, I think it lasts a week. Maybe less. Each day the rows of wooden tables are unstacked and hosed down, the plastic outhouses cleaned out by a limby old man. The string lights still stretch from church tower to treetop, and the row of white tents still has a vague perfume of sausage and polenta.

A carrier boat pulls up to to the nearby canal steps and unloads a couple hundred crates of Beck's. Yesterday's shipment lies in chips and pieces over the cobbled pavement, some held together by the red label.

At the gelateria near Anna and Juliana's place, they have the weirdest, most outlandish flavors. Basil, peach, licorice, to name a few. A Japanese guy in front of me asked if he could have a taste of the coconut. The gelato man shrugged. "Why? It tastes like coconut."

The next morning, I walked the streets for the last time with Venetian keys jingling in my pocket. At 11:13 I dropped them into an empty jam jar on Juliana's shelf.

Alessia had told me she worked at the airport. I found her at a wine-tasting kiosk, sans those fabulous new glasses of hers. Instead she wore an orange lanyard around her neck. She said she'd offer me a drink before my flight, but she wasn't allowed to open any bottles until her boss arrived.

Lufthansa is steady, efficient, German. On-board refreshments include any kind of drink and a snappy choco-hazelnut bar. It's a step past British Airways, all they give you is a twinkyish ham-roll for breakfast. Alitalia I've never tried, but my intuition, ahem, stereotypography, makes me feel like the CEO puts more funding into in-flight dinners than on-time arrivals.

Dinner on my transatlantic flight rolled around, first on silver trays, then in our stomachs. The baby kicking the back of my seat in time with "Frere Jacques" did not make things easier. But it stopped long enough for me to ask the flight attendant if wine came with dinner. "Yes, and it costs 6 dollars," she said. "Oh," I responded. "So wine doesn't come with dinner." With a confused expression, she assured me that it did. "Not for me, it doesn't," I laughed. She knelt and asked me if I preferred red or white.

That seemed an appropriate end to those adventures.
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