The romance of reality

Splat!

Ah, the romantic sound of reality, as it smacks into your life’s windscreen, sticky and slimy and sludgy. Back to earth, as they say. Life stops, and for a moment, dresses itself in a shroud.

For those that get Splat!-ted, the dribbling glop of reality also announces the arrival of the uninvited, unwelcome harbinger of one of those periodic “life lessons” that are meant to make us wiser and stronger, but more often than not have the oddly counter-scientific effect of consuming vast amounts of energy while producing nary a splodge of movement.

Splat! kindly decorated our windscreens a couple of times these past few weeks.

It first oozed on to the scene in the form of our architect’s estimate of the renovations to our Italian house – 50% more than we paid for the place, and 134% more than our budget’s upper-upper limit. “Jarring” might be a good way to describe its effect. “Gob-smacking” might yet be more eloquent.

We, however, decided that all this wasn’t quite challenging enough, and contrived a Splat! all our own. Sometime back in early June, there was a considerable amount of self-back-patting (mostly on the part of yourstruly) at our resourcefulness in booking Claudia & Julius' departure for Europe on July 4th, a "low-travel day" on this side of the pond. On the duly appointed day, just as we had offloaded 6 suitcases, one violin, and a soccer ball on to the airport sidewalk for loading on to a trolley, we discovered that the auspicious emigration day was meant to start not from where we were standing, but some 300 miles away – we were in Raleigh, North Carolina, instead of Washington D.C., where the airplane seats with their names on them were waiting to be warmed. The reason for this slight oversight does not bear public repeating lest it jeopardize any possible future employment of either of us by a sane and rational person.

Splat!, as we learned very quickly – this learning being a rare foray for us of late into “successful studentry” – is the father of anguish, doubt, incrimination, recrimination, and wisdom-questioning, amongst many other things. Splat! is not pretty, it’s not compassionate, and it’s certainly not standing on the sideline cheering you on. It’s also the author of the phrase “back to the drawing board”.

And it’s at that very drawing board that Splat!’s other face is revealed – as the mother of rationale, and fortitude, and acceptance of the sharp angles that life tends to serve up along with the curves.

We’re finding that Splat! is, after all, a harbinger of some positive things.

In our case, the most immediate outcome of our airport catastrophe – or BAE (brain atrophy event) – was the time and opportunity to learn how best to get Mr. Young (our feline head of the household) from the proverbial point A to punto B. This was not an idle discovery, given the unwitting “holes” in the existing plan.

For example, if the feline in question is traveling unaccompanied (as was our plan), said pet has to be transferred as cargo, and be deposited at the flight’s origin. Needless to say, that excludes our local itty-bitty airport, and would require a drive of somewhere between two and nine hours to load him up. This, amongst other things, prompted a rethink on Mr. Young’s transport arrangements, and as a result he will get a bonus two-week trip to Germany with his subjects (Claudia & Julius), along with an extra-special 10-hour drive (from Germany to Italy). How thrilled he would be, if only he knew…

Along with this recent experience and new-found wisdom, comes confirmation of several tenets of airline communication that we intuitively know and yet frequently defy in the wan hope that they’re not true:

- When you call the airline multiple times with the same question, you will get as many different answers as the number of times you call (even if you speak to the same person)
- The closer you are to your departure date, the greater the impact on your travel plans that the new information you’re given will have
- When you get through to a live person within 5 minutes, it’s the wrong number

So much for Splat! # 2, and its concomitant benefits. All's well that ends well, as it turns out. Claudia & Julius left a week later (successfully this time, from Raleigh), we're being refunded over half of the cost of the original tickets, and Mr Young has extended his rule to a small household in Rottenbach, Bavaria. Tomorrow, however, he's facing that 10-hour drive to Italy, a consideration that I'm sure hasn't yet crossed his regal mind.

As for Splat! # 1, well, that’s a longer story for another time…