Formula One

It’s been a difficult week here. Things started off with a bang when I checked in with Lorenzo Monday morning at his office not long after I’d arrived at work. He had gone in at 6 am, due to a demonstration from angry commuters who take the train every morning to Milan scheduled to take place that morning. But what he told me had nothing to do with people who were furious with Trenitalia. “It’s a mess, he said. “There’s been a murder.”

Perhaps you think that being married to a cop means this sentence crops up fairly often, that between doctor’s visits and parent-teacher conferences a few dead bodies must fall, at least in his line of work and perhaps if Lorenzo worked on the homicide squad in Baltimore (at least according to The Wire) this would simply mean another day at the office. But in the almost eight years we have lived in our smallish town Lorenzo has been called into the office only once because of a homicide, so Monday’s call to an apartment in a neighboring town where Lorenzo and his partner found the guy stabbed and dead in a pool of his own blood couldn’t have been pleasant. It certainly helped me put my crappy day into perspective, work sucks sometimes, but at least we all lived to tell about it.
The only thing worse than dealing with a murder victim in Italy is perhaps processing all the paperwork that follows and Lorenzo didn’t get home until 10 that night and was (obviously) in a foul mood.

And so our crummy week continued, with the high point coming on Wednesday, just in time for Giulio’s Christmas School play. Schools in Italy have no obligation to be secular at the holidays, pictures of Christmas trees and Santa Clauses have adorned the halls for weeks at the preschool, and the Christmas show is the high point. Last year’s was pretty incredible, it involved the kids all dressed in white while black lights and neon props where used. It sounds bizarre but it looked very cool and Giulio earnestly singing “We are the World” in Italian with the other kids at the end of the show is something I will always remember. The show was set for 6.30, which would mean that I would leave work at the usual time, get Livia, and the head over to the town gym where the show was being held.

Then on Monday afternoon while I was at work I got a call from Giulio’s teacher. I spent the first 30 seconds of the call waiting for her to tell me that Giulio had a fever and that I should come and get him, so it took me a moment to realize that she was saying something else. That the show had been moved up to 4.45 due to previously scheduled basketball game set to take place at 6:45, that the kids needed to be there, all dressed in white at 4,30. Fine, ok. Lorenzo said he would leave work on time, get Giulio and Livia, take them to the gym, change Giulio into his white duds, and I would leave work an hour early in time to catch the beginning of the show.

Fastforward to Wednesday afternoon. I’m at work dealing with the explosion of a huge, unpleasant in-house email with me as one of the main recipients. In the middle of trying to formulate an articulate, concise, intelligent reply that knocks my critics to the ground, all in Italian no less, I get a call from Lorenzo. It’s 3:40. He’s in bank where they are in the middle of seizing someone’s bank account, something he has never done before. It sucks, and he can’t get away. “I need to find a new job,” he moans down the phone, which means basically, he can’t get the kids. “You have to get the kids,” I say. “I can’t leave before 4:30.” He says he will try and puts the phone down. I slog on through my email, the stress forming a knot in my stomach, when my phone vibrates again. It is Giulio’s school, it is 4:05, was Giulio to go the after school program or was someone coming to get him? Wasn’t he going to the play at 4:30? After assuring the Sicilian school custodian that my husband was surely on his way I placed a frantic call to Lorenzo. His calm detached tone when he answered told me everything I needed to know. He was still in the bank. I blinked at the clock, it was almost 4:10 and Giulio wasn’t going to make it to the town gym at 4:30 at this rate. An image of a mournful Giulio, waiting at school for his daddy and missing his school play came into my head. I had no back up. This wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you called and asked your neighbor to do at the last minute, “Yeah, Eugenio , listen…I was wondering, I’m stuck in the office and Giulio has his school play in 30 minutes………”
I wasn’t going to let me son miss his school play because of my job or even Lorenzo’s, was I a mommy or wasn’t I? This was a time for action! “I’ll get him.” I said down the phone. ‘Yes,” says Lorenzo, “But his white clothes are locked in my car.” “Meet me at your office in 10 minutes,” I said and tore up the stairs to my boss’ office to tell her that there had been an emergency and I had to leave now.

I ran out to my car and booked it over to Lorenzo’s office where, during a second frantic call discovered that Lorenzo was in a bank nowhere near his office, at least not near enough. I could see his car, with Giulio’s clothes and all our audio visual equipment locked inside, and thought of the spare key sitting at home, while Lorenzo tried to explain which bank he was calling me from. “Nevermind!” I said and hung up, hit the gas and tore over to Giulio’s school. As I drove I was weighing the balance of which would be the best use of time: to get Giulio from school, go home and get the key and then drive back to Lorenzo’s office, get the clothes from the car and then take Giulio to the gym, changing him somewhere along the way—OR—getting Giulio, going home and praying to find some other white substitute clothes and then taking Giulio to school. I decided to see what I could find in the way of white clothing at home and take it from there. Giulio, as he is a 5 year old boy, doesn’t own much in the way of white. Our plan had been for him to wear some white pjs turned inside out so the football pattern was on the inside and wear a white turtleneck over it. I had forgotten about the school play when I had Giulio wear the one white turtleneck he owns on Sunday and because it was still clean, again on Monday. Tuesday night Lorenzo dug it out of the dirty clothes to examine the yellow stains on the front. “It’s fine,” he ruled after studying the lemon colored marks and put it into the backpack along with the white pjs and the video camera to take to work with him the next day. Racking my brains for other wardrobe possibilities (could he wear a shirt of mine??) seeing that it was now 4:30, the time when Giulio should have been at school, I thought of the mess that I still had to resolve at work, and groaned. “Damn!” I said, gripping the steering wheel, and blowing past a white Fiat Panda, “Being a grownup SUCKS!”

Arriving at Giulio’s school I ran as fast as I could down the long drive in heels, where I found a happy Giulio waiting for me with the afterschool teacher. “Run!” I said as we booked it back to the car, “Go! Go! Go!” I called, like a high school football coach on the first day of preseason practice as I hustled Giulio into his carseat. “Mommy, why were you so late?” Giulio asked as I buckled him in, reducing me to tears. I am such a failure as a mom.
We drive up to our house, and leaving Giulio in the car with Stefano our neighbor keeping watch on his bike, I ran again, all the while thinking all I needed was a sprained ankle on top of everything else, down the walk and up the three flights of steps to our door. I go to the kids’ room and made a beeline for Giulio’s closet, wondering if Giulio had a spare pare of khakis that I had forgotten about, khaki being about as close to white as I was going to be able to find at this point. Instead I hit the jackpot, finding a pair of cream colored pants that I had forgotten about. I grabbed an undershirt and paused for a second, it was too cold for short sleeves. A quick search through his shirt confirmed that Giulio’s only white shirt was that white turtleneck locked in the other car when I suddenly remembered a white thermal long sleeved shirt of Livia’s that I had decided was too big for her, even though the tag said 2T. Well…Giulio was skinny………..I grabbed the shirt from Livia’s drawer, took the other clothes and rushed back to the car.
“Why are we late, Mommy?” Giulio called from the backseat. “All the kids are at the party and me, no.” Flooded again with guilt I gun the car onto the main road and head back to the center of town, only to be met by a long line of cars at the traffic light. Who are these people causing traffic at 4:45 on a Wednesday afternoon and where could they possibly have to go?” Suddenly I remembered that I had said that we would get Livia early and take her too. Not happening now. Ok, I would deal with Livia in a second, right now I had to get Giulio to the gym. It seemed that my entire town had turned out for the show, there was no parking within a square mile of the place, so I pulled up the front of the gym, parking illegally in one of the two handicapped parking spots. “Ok, Giulio,” I said, coming around to the backseat. I tore off his coat and shirt and put on Livia’s thermal shirt, which fit him just fine, though the sleeves only came down to his elbows, and put the white undershirt over it. “Giulio, do you wear your shoes during the show?” I asked. No it seemed that socks were fine, so I pulled off his shoes and jeans, got him into the cream pants and then, leaving everything in the car, carried him into the gym where the show was just getting underway. Spotting his class seated and gathered on one part of the “stage” i.e. the basketball court, Giulio ran over and took his place next to the teacher while I went back out to re-park the car. Walking back I tried to call Livia’s nido and realized that I had never changed the number in my phone from the old one. I made a frantic call to my office where my colleague looked up the number on line and updated on me on the email bomb situation. Lorenzo called me to tell me that he would get Livia and I called the nido to tell them that her daddy would be there as soon as he could, or if nothing else, I would be there before six. I come into the gym and stand with the other parents and relatives at the entrance who came too late to get a seat, and marvel at all the parents seated whose lives are together enough to get their children, bring them to the school play scheduled for 4:30 on a weekday and still get a seat in the bleachers. Who are these people? What club to they belong to? Where do I sign up?
I can feel the stress of the last hour radiating through my body, and notice also that this year there are no neat special effects with the lights, perhaps due to the imminent basketball game that could not be rescheduled. And I see Giulio seated with his class on the floor, scanning the crowds. And then he sees me, and his face lights up and he smiles and waves, and I wave back and blow him a kiss which he blows back at me, and I realize he doesn’t care about anything that happened that afternoon, that he is just thrilled that his mommy is there watching him, and I’m suddenly thrilled to be standing there watching my son in his school play. I make my way over to the side of the gym which is closer to Giuio’s class and where I see a mom I know, and after about 15 minutes I see Lorenzo come through the door with Livia. He has made it in time, and somehow, once again, we have pulled it off.