We held this month’s book club at the beach Saturday. Jules was driving, so I slugged down a couple of bloody Marys, and despite hat, sunscreen, and umbrella, I still ended up a little pink.
“This book has Jenn Bean written all over it,” said Jules, handing me a somber looking paperback. A Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks did not look like something I would read. Jules is a little highbrow in her reading choices and obviously mistook me for a kindred soul. For the record, Beans do not like historical novels about pestilence, gore, raving lunatics and death. There’s enough of that crap in college and graduate school. We like quirky, funny, zany. We like romantic comedies and light mysteries.
But I started reading the damn book anyway and got sucked in, which is why this week’s blog post still needs work and which is why I’m recycling this essay I wrote a few years ago. Next week we will return to our regularly scheduled Bean family history. I promise. Cheers! Jenny
1997
There I was going back to the same Mexican restaurant that I’d eaten at the night before… this time alone. I couldn’t get any of the girls to go back with me. What was really strange about it was that I was in Italy. Venice. I should have been eating pasta and drinking wine with new friends. Instead I was wolfing down nachos and drinking a beer solo… I love Mexican food. Warm velvety tortillas, yummy refried beans, gooey cheese, crisp salty tortilla chips, fresh tomatoes, and hot, hot peppers. I had found the best Mexican restaurant in all of Europe.
I was staying at a women’s boarding house run by nuns. The price was good; the accommodations, meager; the sisters, sweet and endearing, even the stern one who, when I asked her to pose in a picture with me, took off her glasses and gave an infectious smile.
I’d spent the year as a teaching assistant in a French university and now I was off for the summer, young and confused, wandering around in search of some kind of understanding that I looked for in Provence, San Sebastian, Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls, the Pyrenees, Sardenia, and then all the way over to the Adriatic Sea just so I could see the City of Water. And at the end of my travels, I was eating Mexican alone. Something was wrong with that.
It was dusk as I made my way back along the quay to my limp cot at the nunnery. An old woman sat alone on a park bench. She looked forlorn, and I wondered if she was homeless. And I prayed for her. I pray all the time. It’s sort of a habit with me, and I’m never sure whether anyone is listening, especially since all of my prayers are silent.
But then as I walked past her, she said, “Grazie.”
Who is she talking to, I wondered. And then—in a moment Hollywood would have depicted with parting heavens and a trumpet blast—I understood.
Comments on this entry are closed.