TriumphAnt

Einstein once famously said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It’s a sentiment that, at its broadest stroke, was summarizing his belief in the rationality of the universe. At its simplest, it can be seen to mean that everything happens according to some logical order and rule set, not the Divine proclivity for reward and punishment around which many of the Bible’s messages are framed.

Maybe.

One thing is for sure, someOne up there has a sense of humour.

The red-shirt in this photo is me. (Oh yes, Star Trek fans; I was indeed wearing a “red shirt”! What the heck was I thinking?)

I look glum and grumpy because (a) I’M IN A FLIPPING WHEELCHAIR! and (b) it’s only about three days into the start of our planned three-week trip to Italy.

It’s the day after Leslie was able to find a wheelchair rental, and the day after I had experienced what at this writing seems – after the first two of what will be several visits to doctors and clinics back here in Ottawa – 99 per cent certain to have been an attack of sciatica. A first for me. Anyone who’s ever suffered one knows exactly what I’m talking about; but for anyone who hasn’t, I’ll spare you the wincing details – Google’s got them all described perfectly – and not wish it upon you... ever.

I’m mentioning this only for information purposes and rest assured I’m not about to go on and on about it once I get into my “Postcards from Italy” posts over the next several weeks that will really begin a few days after this prologue.

So why “someOne up there has a sense of humour”? Well picture this. The attack hit me in a city where no motor traffic travels the few streets that aren’t waterways – Venice, so the only “taxis” are boats and the only regular public transit service is a multi-passenger aquatic “bus” called a vaporetto. Getting back and forth across the canals requires, in pretty much all cases, a climb of several steps to get up to a bridge level, followed by a descent of the same number of steps on the other side. (Oh it may well be a magnificent work of art, but it’s still a footbridge that was not designed to be traversed on wheels.) The dry streets and sidewalks, meanwhile, while not the English-style cobblestone, are made up of large rectangular flagstones that begin to feel like the passage over a level rail crossing – just one that goes on forever.

So what’s not to make you laugh as you try to imagine a sillier set of circumstances in which to be slammed with a sciatic nerve hit?

That’s the whine.

On the upside, even before scoring a wheelchair, Leslie found a pharmacy where she purchased my one and only physical souvenir of Italy: an adjustable tubular steel “bastone da passeggio” (cane) that, even more than the wheelchair, was utterly invaluable in enabling me to get across pedestrian gaps like dock-to-boat; a stairway to the next level where no lift exists, and other such access “hiccups” where wheeling clearly wasn’t going to happen.

On another upside, Italy is insanely helpful and Italians are unbelievably generous and courteous when it comes to assisting people who obviously need assistance. So much so that my travelling companions, after a couple days of sticking close to me as we were let in the exits of busy tourist attractions, ushered around the lines at security scanners and sped to the front of lines waiting for taxis, etc, agreed that they were all going to remember to pack canes and rent wheelchairs the next time they travelled to Italy! (I’m pretty sure they were joking... right guys?)

That said, Leslie and I truncated our trip by a week. After several days at a magnificent Tuscan villa with its much-needed mental recovery time just doing not much of anything (and you will find no better place, short of a mountain-top monastery in Tibet, perhaps, to do nothing than at a villa offering a commanding vista of the Tuscan countryside) I simply was not up for yet another city. So Leslie and I opted for a return home a few days earlier than planned, leaving the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii for a future visit and leaving them, too, to our other two travelling companions to experience and share their stories when they got back.

That said, here’s the list of locations from which the many postcards to come... will come: Rome (pre-sciatica), Venice, Florence, Tuscany. Not bad for two weeks, is it?

And it was fabulous! Despite the limitations on my mobility, we still managed to experience a pretty good range of the tourists’ Italy and I loved it!

Finally (whoops, almost finally), it likely will also be a cold snowy day in high summer before I will say anything negative about Air Canada ever again. Their support services for people with mobility issues are utterly incredible! Thanks to those services and Leslie’s thorough planning, from the moment we arrived at the Rome airport to begin our early trip home, there was not one single travel process-related issue that we had to worry about. Like Disney’s Land or World, Air Canada seems to have a hidden pool of staff support people that spring seemingly out of nowhere to place you entirely into their care and make sure you get precisely where you need to be – on time and in comfort. Golf carts are frequently involved.

So here at the end of the prologue is the only other piece of information you might like to know about my sciatic hit: I’m already on the mend. (I must be. My painkiller and anti-inflammatory ingestion is already way down from what it was even a few days ago.) I’m also retired so I’m not faced with the stress of trying to hasten a recuperation in order to satisfy a need to get back to work.

The coming postcards will not be chronological; they’ll simply be about what and when I feel like rambling or ranting. Hope you enjoy the trip as much as I did.

Here’s a teaser.

See what I meant when I said “mental recovery time”?

Ciao for now!