In Love with France, At Home In Italy

 This being Italy, today started out great. And then there was no electricity. As on most wintry mornings, to warm up my bathroom, I turned on the wall heater whose swinging lever swung right into action. Next, I turned on the little-but-effective space heater I bought from Lidl and got ready to face the day. But then suddenly, all of that nice flow of warm air came to a halt:trouble in paradise!     Of course I figured it was all my fault. But I had done the same thing every morning without incident for the past few weeks, so for once it didn't seem like a case of mea culpa.     I hadn't yet eaten anything, but fortunately for me, someone had left the fruit salad out of the fridge, so there was no need to open it and jeopardize all the stuff jam-packed within. But then N got a hankering for some of those delicious Slovene beans perfumed with the neighbor's sausage, left over from yesterday. He pulled them out of the dark fridge quickly, ready to cho...

I call before the holiday weekend to tell the gas people that our meter is down to 15. “Non c’e problema, signora. Plenty of time. We will come tomorrow.” The Xmas holiday comes and goes, and nobody shows. When we next look at the gas meter a few days before New Year’s, it reads ZERO! Uh-oh! I am not great at being demanding in any language. I like to leave that to my husband. But in his Italian classes, he hasn’t yet gotten to the lesson that teaches how to be indignant—not that that would ever work in Italy, anyway. So unless our son is here, who knows just the right noises to make to get the natives to do what he wants, that job falls to me. Usually it works, since I manage to say things that are more comical than offensive;for example, I told the gas company “we are at ZERO, e zero non e buono!” Apparently that line was memorably funny, and they said they would send someone right away.  When it started getting dark with no sign of any gas, I was unanimously elected to call b...