Postcards from the Edge

I should have known we were on the cusp of something—who knows what—when the Teletubbies showed up at the airport.

We’d landed in Milan almost an hour ahead of schedule, which turned out to be a curse disguised as a blessing, as the main terminal wasn’t yet open. The flight attendant informed us  that anyone transferring to another flight at Malpensa would need to wait in a holding area until the airport was ready for business.

At the top of the jetway, two men (?) women (?) in yellow rubber space suits flashed a wand at our foreheads as we passed, then disinterestedly waved us on. A bit of performance art for Milan Fashion Week? A fastidious and uncontested alien takeover? Who knew? Coming off a red-eye at 5am, life is but a dream anyway.

We pushed our way into the cramped holding pen with our fellow early birds, found an empty bench and fell back into a peaceful, jawbone-connected-to-the-collarbone, sleep.

They say that troubles travel in packs and I’m convinced it’s an exercise in deception. The little ones distract you from the big one just around the corner. Like the old comedy bit where the man steps over the banana peel lying on the street, only to plunge into an open manhole just beyond it.

When we woke up, we walked to the gate for our connecting flight from Milan to Rome and fell straight down the chute. Unbeknownst to us, Air Italy had chosen the morning of February 7, 2020 to go broke. We weren’t the only ones who failed to see it coming—the Air Italy staff hadn’t gotten the memo either.

So we crowded into the airless plane, took our seats and waited for a departure announcement that seemed to take an eternity to arrive. Maybe they were taking up a collection to pay for gas. Inside the plane, we were all in the dark. I went back to sleep.

By the time I regained consciousness 90 minutes later, we were disembarking. I thought we’d landed in Rome, but C curtly informed me that we were still in Milan. We’d never left the gate. As we piled back into the departure lounge, now overflowing with passengers waiting on another flight, we were instructed to stand by for further updates.

Look around any airport in meltdown and you’ll see that travel has its passive and active participants. I who cannot keep my eyes open fall deeply into the passive category. C is an activist. Rather than wait for news from an airline that we would later learn had ceased to exist, she was already switching our rental car.  Less than an hour later, we were on the autostrada heading toward our home in Le Marche. Meanwhile, I was still trying desperately to wake up.

Jet lag is random beast. Sometimes it passes you by; other times it sinks its teeth in and won’t let go. That morning, I couldn’t seem to shake off the cobwebs. Standing among the faux covered-wagons and teepees at the Old Wild West Express— one of the more exotic rest stops that line the A1 freeway—I sensed it would not be my last coffee break of the day.

In fact, we wound up stopping on a forty-five minute rotation, visiting every Autogrill from Milan to Modena to Rimini. Thanks to an unseasonably sunny weekend, a Milan Inter and AC soccer match on Sunday at San Siro, and the impromptu dissolution that morning of one of the country’s primary commuter airlines, the rest stops were standing room only, shoulder to shoulder crowded, like rush-hour subway cars with coffee-service. It was an inopportune moment for a bar crawl.

Looking back at that time four years ago, I probably should have been paying closer attention to current events. I might have had a heads up about the bankrupt airline, or even been able to put two plus two together in the mystery of the airport Teletubbies. It turns out that there was a lot happening in February of 2020. I missed most of it, spending the days of my vacation pruning the olive trees and getting the garden ready for an Italian summer I would never see.

On our last night in Marche, we went to the opening of an art show held in the ancient Roman cisterns underneath the city of Fermo.  The exhibition featured a collection of ceramic pieces collected by an English friend of ours who owns a home in the area. The event was full of familiar faces both local and ex-pat, and the conversations covered house sales and purchases, new grandchildren, and the ongoing struggle of the towns in the area to rebuild after the earthquake that struck in 2016.

A few people mentioned news reports from China and something the media was calling the Corona virus. But it came as distant rumblings from another continent.

After the art show, a group of us headed to a wine bar in Fermo’s central piazza. It was one of those blissful Italian nights that no one wants to see end. The next morning, we drove to Rome and  then flew to Madrid, and finally on to New York. The Teletubbies were noticeably absent at all three airports.

A week after returning to America, a friend forwarded a WhatsApp message from Milan. It was a photo of an Esselunga grocery store in the center of the city, its shelves stripped bare. The first case of Covid-19 had been reported in nearby Lodi and the government was announcing quarantines and school closures. The curtain had been dropped or lifted, depending on how you think about it. One period of history was over, and another had begun.

The Covid pandemic would be crushingly cruel to Italy, particularly in the North, which soon found itself at the epicenter of a worldwide crisis. Ultimately, there were more than 26 million cases in the country and nearly 200,000 deaths. We learned later that the virus had been present there as early as January, among tourists in Rome.

Today, it’s a little embarrassing to retrace that February visit, passing blithely by the people in hazmat suits in Milan airport, sitting for hours on a parked plane with no ventilation, touring the Autogrills of Emilia Romagna.  Underground art exhibits probably weren’t the best idea either.

But this is the human condition: sleeping through disaster, grabbing joy where we find it, dancing along a precipice we don’t even know exists. Given a window to see through, we use it mostly to admire our own reflection, not to look for what’s looming ahead.

I remember Easter 2020, watching the Music For Hope concert with Andrea Bocelli, filmed in an empty and desolate Piazza del Duomo in Milan. By that point, our own church in New York was empty as well, as were places of worship around the globe.

This year of course will be very different. For all the mistakes made along the way, often at a terrible cost, Hope did ultimately prevail. I desperately wish I could say that I learned something from all of it, or that I would do better now. But I doubt it. I remain as reliant as ever on dumb luck and divine providence.

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

What we lack in understanding or foresight, we can only make up in gratitude.

Wishing all of you a very Happy Easter.