3 Life Lessons I Learned From a Terrified Italian Waiter
Or…A simple question for an easier life.
Last night, Mark and I sat starved and exhausted in an Italian restaurant. (I don’t mean a restaurant that serves Italian food. I mean a restaurant in Italy.) Off and on for the past twenty years, and every year for the past ten, we have driven a few thousand miles every summer to arrive in this same town in Italy. That’s excluding a Covid year because, as you know, we were (rightfully) chained to the radiator in our house by the Scottish government.
Right now, I’ll swallow my type A, nerdy, over-achiever pride and admit something embarrassingly horrific (no, it’s not that I put pineapple on my pizza. I’m not a monster.) It’s that…I still don’t speak Italian. I’d like to say that I’ve worn out my Italian dictionary with my constant thumbing, but that would be a lie. I won’t make excuses for this travesty. It’s my fault. I don’t practice. I don’t study. I suck.
Back to the restaurant. The gorgeous, dark-skin, curly-haired, younger-than-my-child Italian waiter comes over to take our order (yes, they are all dark-skinned and curly-haired and gorgeous and younger than my child). I will call him Oliver due to his olive skin. There is some confusion. I am a celiac, and although Italians are amazing at understanding the requirements of a non-gluten eater (fun fact: Italy has the highest rates of celiac disease in the world), they have some very strict requirements for their restaurants.
Oliver, who is kind but overly concerned about poisoning me to death, is firing a barrage of questions at my very tired and rusty husband. Mark is usually semi-fluent, but on the night arrival, he is less than. He does his best, but the conversation extends for longer than either of us (make that the three of us, poor Oliver) have the patience for, and as Oliver walks back to the kitchen to assure the chef I’m not about to keel over because he stores his shrink-wrapped polenta next to fresh pasta in the fridge, Mark and I share a head-shake and a “poor us,” “poor Oliver” exchange of unspoken communication. If you’ve been married for over ten years, you know how that works.
About five minutes later, a couple and an irresistibly smiley baby enter the restaurant. They speak accented English to each other (they must be Nordic; they are so uncomfortably good-looking). They take a seat at the table next to us. I make goo-goo eyes at the baby while Mark rolls his (I roll mine when he makes his goo-goo eyes at every cat he sees), and Oliver wanders over to take their drinks order. PEOPLE, and sorry for shouting, but PEOPLE! Oliver speaks perfect, and I mean better than the King’s English. What? I’m sitting here starving, and we had to have a fifteen-minute conversation in stilted Italian and theatrical sign language about the possibility of my corn polenta trying to make babies with your wheat pasta when you spoke perfect English?
Did I say anything? Of course, I said something. I said, “What the Hell, Oliver? You speak English?”
Oliver said, “Yes, I’m actually studying English at University.”
“So why didn’t you speak English to us?” I said.
Oliver dropped his head a little and admitted, “I’m sorry. I would have spoken English, but I was nervous because I heard you speak English and couldn’t understand his Scottish accent.”
There are three lessons here:
Clearly, I should learn Italian so I can speak to poor Oliver in his own language and not stress him out with Scottish people.
Oliver can’t recognize the difference between Mark’s Scottish and my funky English with an American twang accent.
The most important one. Don’t always assume things are going to be hard. What if we all agreed that before we assumed something was going to be hard, we instead assumed it was going to be easy. What if we just assumed (on this night when we were tired and not Italian-ready) that Oliver spoke English and asked the simple question: “Oliver. Do you speak English by any chance?”
I got lucky with Oliver (not that kind of lucky, I told you I’m not a monster). I meant I got lucky because my polenta was blessedly, virginally, gluten-free.
See? Easy.
JOURNAL PROMPT:
Is there anything in your life that feels extremely complicated? What would make it easy? Is there a belief you need to let go of, an opinion you need to ignore, or a perfectionism streak you need to break? Make it easy.
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