Small Talk

Tuesday

I sat down at my desk this morning and went to fill up the green glass that I snagged yesterday from the SYA kitchen with water from my water bottle.  (I've lost the water bottle I got for Christmas, so really, this one is from the previous tenants of our apartment.  They left a number of water bottles.  We've lost all but this one.  We're the same way at home: no matter how cheap or expensive, flimsy or sturdy, common or unique, most water bottles we acquire go missing.  My aunt years ago made fun of that saying, Go missing.  She'd say, "What's that?  Someone went missing.  It sounds weird.  How did that become a thing?"  In this case, I wanted to use it to avoid the passive voice since I'd gotten myself that far into the sentence.)  I like drinking from the glass rather than from the water bottle.  It's easier.  But this morning the glass wasn't here on my desk.

Sometimes I make myself a cup of hot water or tea at work.  I think I leave my mug on my desk, but the next day I don't see the mug.  Daniel asks me sometimes at home, "Do you know what your hands did?"  And the truth is that I often don't.  When Daniel first met my parents, Thanksgiving 2001, he learned not to leave anything out.  He went into the kitchen to find a tennis ball that he had left on the counter to play four square.  It was gone.  He was flummoxed.  My mom had put it away.  She didn't like for things to be left out for no reason (she likely didn't know he had a reason, but even if she did she might not have wanted it out in her kitchen amidst the Thanksgiving cooking).  Sometimes after Christmas morning, my mom would say, "I have another present for you, but I can't remember where I put it.  I just can't find it!"  This has happened to me numerous times, and our kids sometimes get a present a day late, buried under clothing or hiding in a bag on a hook because I don't remember what my hands did with it.

So when I don't see my mug, I think that perhaps I brought it to the kitchen and washed it.  It's crossed my mind that Rosaria or Anna, who clean the school every afternoon, could have picked it up, but that seems far-fetched.  They would have picked it up from my desk, taken it to the kitchen, washed it.  They have much more to do than collect a mug or glass from my desk.

The green glass wasn't here this morning, and I'm sure I left it on my desk.  When I went to make my hot water between AP proctoring sessions, I found it washed and on a shelf in the kitchen.  I'm thinking that likely Rosaria or Anna have cleared those mugs from my desk this year.

Rosaria I met early on.  She works here at SYA cleaning after school, and then some evenings and weekends she works at the baths.  These are not the free baths that we frequent, but the Terme dei Papi, the Pope's Baths as they're called, where you pay to sit in the huge piscina of thermal water or you can get a massage or other treatments.  (I've been to these baths on a school excursion.  I don't think our kids would like them so much because they're so placid, so filled with people enjoying the quiet.  I found them luxurious and wonderful.)  Last week I saw Rosaria outside the walls on my walk.  She had two dogs.  The next day we talked about her dogs and her work schedule.  Another day I saw her at a tabacchi when I went in to recharge my phone.

Anna I met later and it took me weeks to remember her name.  We speak a little less, but we laugh, too.  As with Rosaria, our conversations are choppy attempts at connecting, and we connect enough, but not as much as I'd like because of my Italian.  I'm reminded of the women in the dining hall at Thayer.  They're funny and kind, and they have a good edge.  They're tough with that kindness, and the humor can be affectionate or sharp.  I know more about their lives than I do about Rosaria and Anna, but still a limited amount.  They help me out when I need snacks for the National Latin Exam or food stored for Fr. Bill's, or they find me a bag of chips, and they tease me when I don't go over to lunch.  Mary likes science fiction movies I would never watch, and Darlene has two dozen chickens.

Often people make fun of small talk, and I can be one of these people.  I like real conversations that connect me to folks.  But sometimes small talk is a fine start and good enough.  Small talk can turn into something else, conversations about what someone does in free time or about family or work or daily routines.  I imagine that my early conversations with LeeAnn, our mail carrier at home, started small.  Or with the women who work in the TA dining hall.

Wednesday

Lots of AP exams this week and I'm proctoring.  During one of my breaks, I headed down to Bar 103 on the corner for a decaf cappuccino, not for any reason other than it sounded good on this rainy day.  I go to Bar 103 if I'm with SYA colleagues mostly.  Occasionally I go with one of the kids, but I think of it more as an SYA break place.  Nadia and her daughter Olga work there six days a week, long hours.  They are both tall, blond hair, smiley, chatty with customers they know.  With me, they're kind, but we don't speak much.  One December evening after a Paradiso performance, when I was there with the kids, Olga made them beautiful hot chocolates and gave them each a piece of candy when we left.

This afternoon I brought TA sophomore summer reading, The Universe Versus Alex Woods, which I didn't care for during the first ten pages, but now want to read every moment I can.  (I love the narrator, a teenage boy with both a lack of awareness and total awareness at the same time.)  Maybe that's why I don't go to Bar 103 much.  They know me a bit, as in with SYA people, and sometimes I just want to read the news on my phone or my book, and it might feel awkward to do so at Bar 103.

As I walked in, a man was walking out.  Nadia said her farewells and said, "Di mi."  I ordered, stood at the bar with my book, not reading it quite yet.  Then she started talking with me.  She asked when we were headed back to the U.S., whether we were coming back for another year, how we liked it here in Italy.  I told her about the family vote and the decision to go home.  She was baffled that we were going home when the vote was 5-1, when only one kid voted to go home.

She told me how Olga, who was ten when they moved here, didn't want to come, cried and cried, wanted to go back to Ukraine.  Nadia imitated her with her fists up to her eyes as she said, "Piangere, piangere, piangere!" She missed her home and friends and grandparents.  Nadia told her, "You can go back when you're eighteen.  For now, I'm here in Italy, so you are, too."  We talked about language a bit, how Italian sounds like a song and I love the sound of it, how she used to know German and Ukranian and some Russian, how now she's been here for twenty years and she speaks mostly Italian now.  At this point she has spent half her life in Ukraine and half her life in Italy.  As I walked out, she called loudly out the door, "Ciao, bella!" with a laugh.

I couldn't pass the AP Italian Language and Culture exam I'm proctoring today, but that's okay.  I'll take the ability to have a conversation with Nadia or Anna or Rosaria.  Nadia said, "If you stayed another year, your language would be perfect."  I'm paraphrasing because she speaks Italian, and it's good enough for me that I got the jist of it.

Eventually small talk can become something else.  Even if we don't speak the same language.