Dinner in Padua - short story

Watch 'n Wait: I'm certain that if Biden was the candidate I would support him. I think he would be a welcome change from the last Democratic candidates. But of course I would support anyone running against a Republican. I would have to hold my nose if it was Kerry, Hillary, or Gore. No more Republican-lite! I'm not positive but I think Hillary is actually on the Board of Directors of WalMart. That in itself would be enough to disqualify her as a Democratic candidate. I rather doubt that Biden will be able to get the nomination but we can always hope. After all, what else is left?

I actually heard as a news item on CNN this morning that the Pope ate ten biscuits and some yogurt for breakfast. I was happy to hear that. When I woke up I thought to myself: I wonder what the Pope is having for breakfast this morning.

I am so fed up with the whole business of politics for the moment I will escape with another short story.

Dinner in Padua


Will was not the kind of person to take advice; didn't even listen to it as near as I could tell. He certainly wouldn't take advice from his daughter, even though she had traveled widely in Europe and had been living in Germany for the past year. Will and Rosemary had never been to Europe. They thought it would be nice to visit while we were there so we could "show them around." They had two weeks in which they wanted to see "everything."
On the drive from the Frankfurt airport to the city in which we lived they complained of the heat, a complaint that might have elicited more sympathy had we not repeatedly warned them not to visit Europe in August.
During dinner the first night they complained that the bottled water they were forced to drink didn't come with ice. The waiter, incredulous, was coerced into bringing ice. He placed it on the table in a shallow dish as though he were feeding his dog.
While Will and Rosemary thought bed and breakfast was "cute" they were unhappy with only rolls and coffee. The idea of serving cold meats and cheese for breakfast they found totally abhorrent. The coffee required hot milk to make it drinkable, but they were not accustomed to the combination and didn't like it. The salads they preferred for lunch were not up to their standards either; the absence of a choice of salad dressing they found unforgivable.
There was a huge, sweating, but appreciative crowd in Munich to watch the glockenspiel. Will, after having seen it, observed that "Disney would have been able to do it much better." Rosemary's only comment was that she had never smelled so much body odor in her life.
Will did entertain us with his recurrent accounts of battling the shower curtains. "These are the smallest showers I've ever seen," he reported. "How are you supposed to take a shower when the curtain keeps wrapping around you and clinging to your body?" Of course when the showers didn't have curtains the complaint was that water spilled all over the floor. "How in the hell are you supposed to take a shower in these things without getting water all over the bathroom," he groused. Often they could not figure out how to flush the toilets. "Why don't they standardize these damn toilets?" Will complained. "Sometimes they have a button to push! Sometimes they have something to pull up and let go of! Sometimes the lever is on one side and sometimes on the other! Sometimes you can't even find anything to push or pull! The last thing Rosemary said as she was getting on the plane to return home was "I can hardly wait to get home and have a real shower. I haven't felt clean for two weeks."
Castles on the Rhine had little appeal for either of them. "They wouldn't last a minute nowadays," Will asserted, "what with airplanes and bombs and all."
"They don't keep them up very well, do they?" Rosemary commented. "They must have been terribly uncomfortable to live in."
So fearful were they of the roads in Switzerland they scarcely noticed the Alps. They did observe that things were expensive and that they could get them cheaper at home.
Venice was crowded. There was no hope of getting a hotel. "You'd think if you were willing to pay for it you could get a room anywhere," Will grumbled angrily.
"We told you not to come in August," his daughter said sweetly in her best "I told you so" accent.
We found rooms in Padua. Will insisted on the most expensive, apparently out of spite. We returned to Venice the following morning where we waited for over an hour to park. Then we waited in another line for that long again to board a flagrantly overloaded water taxi. It was seasonally hot and exceptionally humid. The narrow streets were packed with smelly, rude, overripe humanity who flowed through them by the thousands like living torrents of uncontrollable lava. You could scarcely breathe and when you did you wished you hadn't. What was worse as far as Rosemary was concerned was that you could scarcely shop. "People shouldn't come to Europe," she had announced the first day, "unless they want to shop." By the time we returned to Padua that evening we desperately needed respite. We suggested they dine without us.
"You should have seen us last night," Will announced proudly the next morning. We were headed north to Austria with Will driving the car we had rented at his request (for more than we would have had to pay had he rented it through an agency 'back home'). "We went to that American Bar. They have a restaurant there too, you know. It was so funny. The waiter couldn't speak a word of English. We couldn't read the Italian menu so we asked for a menu in English. He looked all over and couldn't seem to find one."
"I think he was embarrassed," Rosemary added, "He wouldn't have anything to do with us. We kept motioning to him but he just ignored us for the longest time."
"Yeah, every time he came near he'd say something we took to be 'just a minute' and then he'd be gone again. There were two other waiters, too, but he was obviously in charge. He just rushed around everywhere. But he couldn't find the menu and I guess he was upset about it because he wouldn't come back to our table. We had ordered a bottle of wine which we proceeded to drink while we were waiting. Finally he came, still without the English menu, so we tried to ask him what different things were. It was really funny. My few words of Italian and his lack of English. He was actually sweating because he couldn't find the menu. Then he stood behind me and read everything on the menu to me, in Italian! As if I could understand it."
"It really was funny," Rosemary agreed. The poor man was desperate. The sweat just poured off him."
"The only thing we could understand was soup of the day -- minestrone. And pesto, we could get that, too. So we ordered soup and pesto for both of us. But then we had to wait again. Even though there were two other waiters it was obvious that he was in charge of everything and they just got out of his way. He was running all over the place doing everything for everybody. Then finally he brought us soup but only one pesto. We tried and tried but couldn't get his attention so we went ahead and ate that. Then...you won't believe this...he brought us two more pestos! So we ate them too."
"Your father ate two pestos!" Rosemary said, "I think he had too much wine."
"Me! No way. Your mother was blotto."
"I was not."
"She was so drunk she couldn't finish her dinner."
"I wasn't hungry by then, after the soup and all that wine. Anyway, you should have been there. It was a riot! That waiter actually did break out in a sweat over that menu. You could see it just dripping off him. It was fun, wasn't it honey?"
"Yeah, we had a really great time. You should have been there."
"I don't know what American Bar stands for," Rosemary added. "It certainly doesn't mean they speak English."
My wife, cringing in her corner of the back seat, looked over and rolled her eyes. No one spoke for several minutes. We moved at high speed along the autostrada. Will broke the silence.
"You know the only thing we didn't do last night that we should have done Rosy? We should have asked that waiter to take our picture