A Dreary Day in Steerage

A picture I wish I got but didn't was of a scene in Riva del Garda, where we were walking through a five-bucket rain storm toward a bus stop, hoping to catch a ride to Torbole. That's another resort town on Lake Garda four or five kilometers from Riva. Hannah was eager to go there, and she'd been a good sport on a morning hike that she wasn't enthusiastic about, so we were trying to help her salvage the day.

We had just one umbrella. But lo! At a phone booth we came upon an abandoned umbrella, which had been turned inside out, with busted ribs akimbo, and it was splattered with sticky brown stuff. For a moment, we considered adopting it. It was like that scene from The Odd Couple where Oscar Madison uses the point of an umbrella to spear the end of a stogie that he finds in a crosswalk, then examines it, obviously with good mind to light it up, before his superego (Felix Unger) intervenes.

Well, every family has a Felix, and that busted umbrella stayed right where it was, though some of us continued to speculate on both the origins and solubility of the sticky brown stuff (Q. Couldn't we maybe rinse it off in a puddle? A. Oy vay. Why don't we just buy another umbrella?) as we approached our bus stop. There, we found that we had just missed a bus to Torbole, and the next bus wasn't due for an hour. So we retreated to our pensione-ish hotel (read: no TV) to figure out other ways to amuse ourselves on a rainy afternoon.

Tobias once again assumed the lion's share of our entertainment burden:

While he was running a three-ring circus from the bed, Hannah had assumed her usual pose on a nearby chair:

I asked her what she was reading, and she said, "Great Expectations."

Girl with Great Expectations

And I was like, O...M...G! We're cooped up in an hotel room with nothing to do but stare at the walls watching Tobias bounce off of them, and someone brought along some Dickens? How unbelievably fortuitous! Dickens wrote his books to be read aloud, around the happy hearth, in those stultifying days before TV. So naturally I suggested to Hannah that she help us pass a dreary afternoon by reading aloud.

And so she began, right there in the middle of page 62 where I interrupted her, and she sounded just like this:

"myfatherwerethatgoodinhishartthathcouldn'tabeartobewithoutussohe'dcomewithamosttremnjous..."

"Oh, for crying out loud," I said, cutting her off. "Never mind!"

Before long I took refuge back outside in the rain, where I came upon this kid trying to throw himself down the town well:

I couldn't help but notice that his parents were doing nothing to stop him. (I'm just saying.)