I’m not complaining about the weather this winter (or even today), although I could. Other places and people have had it much, much worse.
But I’m not sure how many other places could offer you the blithe little experience I had a few days ago.
It had snowed. The wind was blowing, it was cold and gray — as you can see. We got off the vaporetto at the stop for the City Hospital because it was closest to where we were going. So far, so banal.
Two men emerged from the hospital through an unidentified door and began walking down the fondamenta with us. Somebody was with them. Somebody who was going — in fact, had already gone — in a radically different direction.
Just what we needed on a dismal sodden morning, a jolt of the old memento mori, the “Caesar too must die,” whatever fragments of macabre poetry by Edgar Allan Poe might have remained stuck between your mental molars, and any similar lugubrious injunctions that could be really helpful if we were ever to take them seriously.
But you know how it is. Instead of running to confession and giving all our goods to the poor, we went and drank coffee with our friends. I can only hope that our anonymous confrere would have done the same in our place.
