Fear of Flying

First of all it is official, Giulio did NOT damage Ermanno’s car, or if he did, they aren’t telling us. I called Theresa twice last week and sent one text message asking about the car and each time I got an “It’s FINE, Claire.” Then they invited us out to dinner on Saturday night and I remember thinking that they can’t hate us that much if they still want to have dinner. They drove Theresa’s car though, not Ermanno’s and went we got to the restaurant I joked that they had decided it would be safer to bring the other car since Giulio was going to be there. Ermanno responded by playfully punching me lightly on the arm and telling me to stop it, so if he can smile and laugh about it when I joke around then I guess we are OK.(Insert sound of exhaling here.)
My vacation looms on the horizon. On Friday I will be on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic ocean trying to keep Livia from dumping a half frozen Little Debby Cherry dessert cake into my lap. To be honest, I still haven’t mentally prepared for the flight. By now I should just know that it will be long, uncomfortable, and horrible and just go with it, but like a runner preparing for a marathon, I need to be mentally prepared for when I hit the 18th mile and I want to stop. Except that on an airplane what am I going to do if I want to stop? Perhaps I will just rise from my seat, dump Livia in the lap of the stranger sitting next to me and go hide out in the bathroom for the rest of the flight, knocking back mini bottles of vodka stolen from the Business class trolley, ignoring the screams of my children calling to me from the front of the plane, or the flight attendant pounding on the door.

At any rate before I can begin reflecting on the flying part I have one million logistical questions running through my head: Where to leave the car for three weeks (answer: at the police station at the Malpensa airport, thus avoiding paying for three weeks of parking worth roughly the cost of our entire trip to the States.) And will we be able to eat our way through all the food that is lurking in our fridge and freezer? Judging from a general inventory taken last night, cheese and hot dogs will feature prominently on our menu for the next week, along with popsicles and breakfast cereal. Except that Livia won’t eat hotdogs and Giulio is rather hit or miss with them, eating them some days and snubbing them on others. And finally we come down to the Big Debate, is it better to pack sooner or later. I’m a last minute kind of girl, I always pack the day before for fear of leaving something out while Lorenzo would pack a month in advance if he could, except that there is no where to keep a fully packed suitcase in our bedroom. Neither of us is a light packer either, though I have made great strides in recent years when coming to the States to leave most of my clothes in Italy because no matter how much I swear up and down that this time I won’t go overboard shopping, my first day back always finds me at Target, dazzled by the low prices, buying cute summer clothes even though I don’t think I need them, and then the rest of my clothes just hang in the closet for the whole trip waiting for me to take them home again.
The other thing I promise every year is that we won’t go overboard bringing people gifts. Every year we spend hundreds of dollars bringing back t-shirts and cute kids clothes for various friends and colleagues, which is a nice way to say thank you to people for all the times they lend us a hand, and in fact I ask my girlfriends if they need anything in particular for their kids. But sometimes it gets out of hand, with us buying numerous gifts for people in Lorenzo’s office, many of whom say thank you and then proceed to be the same jerks that they always have been. Plus, in all the years of us bringing gifts I can think of one time when someone actually brought us something back, which is fine, but the fact that I have to go broke taking things back for people that I only see on the odd occasions when I go to Lorenzo’s office—no thank you.
I started packing on Saturday, but other than Livia having 10 million dresses that she has never worn and needs to wear in the next month or otherwise will never get to wear them, we don’t have a lot of clothes to bring. What is taking up a lot of room are bottles of blueberry infused grappa that I have been nuts about ever since I went to Bolzano for the first time two years ago and therefore feel that everyone should be as nuts about it as I am and therefore want some as a gift, limoncello, and various other goodies, most of which are in glass jars. My biggest fears are 1) the bottles breaking and leaving the mother of all stains on our clothing and that we will have to take our bags off the baggage carousel with grappa dripping out of the side and b) that customs will stop us and accuse us of trying to bring in the contents of an entire liquor store illegally into the US.
I guess it will depend on who is carrying the bags, my bets are on my husband. Lorenzo, who is not a US citizen and therefore always goes through the line at immigration, who speaks heavily accented English always gets these teddy bear immigration officers, men who stamp his passport and make pleasant chit-chat, comment favourably on the fact that he is Italian, and then wish him a pleasant stay in the United States. Then there is me, who is always slightly overcome with emotion when we land, excited to be back in my homeland, thrilled to be hearing people speaking English, and I always get these total grumps. Men who barely glance up from my passport and when they do they make me nervous that they aren’t going to let me into the country. Standing before them, juggling babies in my arms along with the 50 back packs we always carry (At JFK they won’t give you your stroller back when you get off the plane. You have to go through customs and baggage claim before you can get it,) I feel about 2 feet tall and like I have just tried to sneak into the US crossing over the border from Mexico. In the eight years of going back and forth I have gotten one “Welcome home” and 10 “Next!” It is the passengers themselves that make me remember why I love coming home. Almost two years ago I flew to the US alone with Giulio who had just turned 3 and Livia was barely 3 months (just writing that makes me feel tired) and I must have looked so pathetic, so bedraggled I had people rushing up to help me from when I got off the plane in NYC until I collapsed in my parent’s arms at the airport in Cincinnati. There was the woman who carried two of my bags and Giulio’s carseat down to immigration for me, the two girls who helped me haul my luggage from baggage claim over to where the baggage for connecting flights needs to go, and best of all, the airline CAPTAIN who asked me when we arrived in Cincinnati if I needed any help getting myself and the kids to where we were staying. It’s people like this that keep me flying, let’s hope there are a few good ones on the flight on Friday, and maybe this time I'll get a cuddly (and handsome) immigration officer who will let me sit on his lap while he stamps my passports and will have the band strike up as I move from immigration into baggage claim, with airport employees singing and helping me on my way like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz when she set off from Munchkin Land to OZ. Or maybe I should just hope that the grappa bottles all get there in one piece.