The Sicilian Mushroom Farmer & Life When Nothing Happens

Can't sleep. It's 1 am, Toronto time, and after a hot bath (but not hot enough) and a few hours of sleep, I woke up suddenly at midnight and lay around on my bed and played the "can I fall asleep again" game, and then when I lost at that, started to "measure" the width and length of my bed by trying to see if I could reach my arms and my feet , one to each side and end of the bed. If you know what I mean. Essentially what that means is that I have to see if I can reach my left arm to the left side of the bed, my right arm to the top of the bed, my right foot to the right side of the bed and my left foot to the bottom of the bed. If I can manage to do that, then I have "won" and then must think of something else to do before getting up to check a minor fact about St Petersburg in my guide book. Something about a tower. So I lie in bed for a bit longer and watch a circle of orange light pulsating on the ceiling just above the desk; it's the reflection of the orange hibernation light on my laptop, and eventually I am lulled into getting about and telling you about the Sicilian mushroom farmer.

He was sitting in my aisle seat on the flight from Milan, the flight that I booked six months ago to ensure that I would get an aisle seat so that I could stretch out my legs from time to time and ensure that I don't get swollen ankles. So, he's sitting in my seat when I get on the plane, and when I point this out to him, and his long greasy grey hair, he moves into his best "look how generous I'm being to you and letting you have the window seat" mode, and insists that I take the window seat.

No. I say, pointing to my boarding pass. I get the aisle seat.

No. He says, pretending not to understand that he is in the wrong seat. I get the aisle seat.

No. I say. You window, me aisle.

One of the flight attendants notices the imbroglio and appears and the two of them start to speak in Italian.

Madame, the flight attendant says to me. This gentleman would like to sit at the aisle seat. Would you mind changing places?

Yes, I say. I would mind. (A month practicing proactive and reactive aggression in Russia has served me well).

Another rapid conversation in Italian and the gentleman in my seat, the one with pants whose waist is too small to fit around his real waist and is therefore cinched around his hips with a tight belt, into which is stuffed a generic cotton short sleeved shirt, he gets up and pouting, I kid you not, he was pouting, goes to the back of the plane where he sat in another aisle seat, also not his own, yelling many words, none of which I could understand except for one which sounded suspiciously like "tourist". In my imagination I constructed his anger something like this: this is Alitalia, I am Italian, I should get what I want on my national airline, but instead the better seat goes to the tourist...

Hm. If you can call row 34 a good seat.

To add to this commotion, there was a family of 5: two parents and three children who had been engaged in armed combat since before getting in the boarding line in the terminal, whose seating assignments would have ensured a continuation of: the two boys arguing about which one of them wanted or didn't wanted to get along with the other; one of the boys grabbing on to his youngest sister's long unkempt hair and pulling it over her head and giving her a "hairdo" by tying the strands into knots; the other boy grabbing on to the suduku puzzle between his brother's teeth and flapping it until it tore, then denying he had done anything wrong; the littlest sister, of course, as the youngest in the group, was doing nothing wrong. Ha ha. Oh, I forgot to mention the parents, a couple in their late thirties, perhaps, good parents, Torontonians, probably make a lot of money, tired from their three weeks with three children in Italy and trying really hard to keep it all together: you know, polite to one another, making logical "corrections" to their children's behavior, smiling at one another, talking about their plans for tomorrow, when, apparently, all three children were heading off to summer camp (hm, I wonder why?).

So anyway, this family of five was to be separated from one another, and while I could see in the parents' eyes some sense of relief at the prospect of not having to sit with these three children (who, by the way, were actually quite funny), combined with the knowledge that really, they could not in good conscience impose these three on the kindness of strangers. So, when they got on the plane, while one flight attendant was managing me and the mushroom farmer, another was trying to rearrange things so that this family of 5 could all sit in closer proximity to one another.

MEANWHILE, in another part of the plane, a couple from somewhere had sat together in two seats that were together, husband and wife, and seemed to think it was logical to expect that that was okay, since the two seats that they HAD been assigned, in completely different parts of the plane from where they were sitting, were not together, and they wanted to be together. This meant that the two women who were assigned to those seats had on their own decided to sit in two seats that were empty when they got on and found their seats full.

MEANWHILE, in yet another part of the plane a man is yelling at a woman with whom he had agreed to switch seats, because when he got to the seat that he had agreed to switch into, he found that the seat back was broken and could not recline, and he did not want to sit in a broken seat, and wanted his original seat back. She did not.

AND, towards the front the plane, another man who was separated from his wife by seat assignment but not by emotion, was lobbying yet another flight attendant to get his seat switched to beside his wife, but the person on one side of his wife did not want to switch, and the person on the other side agreed to switch, but not to the middle seat in the middle aisle, which is where said man wanted to switch from.

In short, what we had on Alitalia 652 from Milan to Toronto was one great big logic puzzle and so the amusement for the hour, while I sat in my aisle seat and wondered if the seat next to me would remain empty, was to watch the flight attendants work this all out with diplomacy and without losing their tempers.

We left about 30 minutes later than scheduled, and by the time the plane took off (and by this time I was thinking, "please don't let me die with this group of people"), sitting beside me was an Italian man who refused to look at me (somehow I had been presented to him as evil and uncooperative, but how could I have explained to him I had just been in Russia for a month?) as we taxied down the runway and who made several hundred signs of the cross in rapid succession, concluding each by kissing his fingertips and bending his head ever so slightly towards the seat back in front of him.

Half an hour later my man with the long hair wanders back to the aisle beside me, the stub of a partly smoked cigar stuck into his mouth. Unlit, of course. He gestures to the guy who has been stuck beside me and indicates that he wants his seat back, so guy beside me jumps up and leaps over me (he is small and agile) and I get up to let pouty back in where he sits with this cigar butt in his mouth and looks sideways at me from time to time. I ignore him, using my best cool aloofness face.

But you know, the guy is a character. I can see that.

I had ordered a "vegetarian" meal which on Alitalia means that you get a lot of vegetables, both in salad form and cooked. On Air Canada it just means you don't get anything at all, same as the omnivores. Vegetarian and other specialty meals come first, and the flight attendants run up and down the aisles with these meals, trying to match food preference to seat occupant, a task made much more difficult by the seating changes at the beginning of the flight. But I am one of the earlier matches, since my seat has not been changed and I am easy to find. I eat my boiled spinach, boiled carrots, and boiled rice. Mushroom farmer beside me checks his watch. I eat my pickled carrot, pickled radish, pickled asparagus tips. Mushroom farmer checks his watch. I drink my water. Checks his watch again, and lifts slightly out of his seat to look around to see why I have food and he does not. I eat my cheese and cracker. Mushroom farmer calls out to flight attendant, demanding to know why I and others around me have food and he does not. I eat my bun dipped in olive oil. I look at him. He is checking his watch as I look (and continues to check his watch every ten minutes during the 8 1/2 hour flight), and then looks back at me, rolls his eyes, and makes a motion with his right hand than I can only describe what you would do if you wanted in a charades game to indicate that you were pantomiming a movie. So, he does that, and I come to realize over the course of the flight that he does that to express his reaction to things he does not like. So, he did it that first time to indicate that he thought this whole business of distributing food was stupid.

He did it again when they put his meal in front of him, at which time he took the cigar stub out of his mouth and put it into a cigarette box which he kept in a small kitten decortaed paper gift bag on the floor by his feet. And every time he did this motion with his right arm, he would look at me and roll his eyes.

It wasn't long before I realized why he needed an aisle seat. He is restless. Every20 minutes or so he would need to get up and walk up and down the aisle. As soon as he finished his meal, he was impatient to get rid of his tray and so jumped up and grabbed both his tray and mine and took them to the back. Without asking me, by the way. He just took it. I hadn't even had my yogourt, and pouf! Off with the tray!

Three hours into the flight he asks me in Italenglish where I am going and where I have been. I respond in Englitalian and so we begin our relationship, an abashed truce, wherein I discover that he is a Sicilian Porcino farmer on his way to Toronto to help some Canadian mushroom farmer be a better one. A mushroom consultant?

I find out that he is divorced, had one daughter who died, and that Sicily is 300 kilometres across. His name is Tore, short for Salvatore. We communicate using the maps provided in the Alitalia travel book, drawing lines, question marks, happy faces, exclamation marks, and stick figures.

Just over the halfway mark in the flight, I offer to trade seats with him. He is driving me crazy by getting up and down so often, and although it is not a bad thing for me to get up out of my seat so many times as it will help to prevent my ankle from swelling up to the size of an avocado, I really want to sleep so that jet lag won't interfere with my time in Ottawa. So I offer to switch seats, and he is so happy that after we make the switch, he grabs my left hand and I expect him to kiss it, but no, he flips it over and reads my palm.

Five hours into the flight, after having "smoked" his cigar a few times in between putting it into the cigarette box, he once more removes the cigar stub and puts it into the cigarette box, but this time he pulls another short and stubby cigar out, this one in a wrapper, and unwraps it, and puts it in his mouth. I'm just not sure what to think or say about this.

Six hours into the flight he sees my iPod, and asks if it is a phone. No, I tell him.

Seven hours into the flight he asks me if he needs a phone card to make a phone call.

No, I say. You probably just need a couple of coins.

Do you have a cellphone, he asks.

Yes.

May I use it.

....um, yes, okay.

He wants to use my cellphone as soon as we get off the plane, but I'm not really wanting to hang back in the corridor while he chats away on my cellphone. No, I say. Wait.

We get to the immigration line up, and he wants to use my phone there. No, I say, as I have heard a security guard yell at someone for using their cellphone in the line. Wait until you get through customs, she says. So, I tell him no. I don't want to get yelled at, especially not at customs.

So, he sticks to me through customs. Almost walks up to the the customs officer with me, and so I have to yell at him to stay behind the red line. And it feels good, that, to yell.

We walk a bit further, and as a Canadian I am allowed through a short line, but as a non-Canadian he must go through immigration. Another direction. He tries to follow me through the Canadian line. No, I yell. Go there. And I point. Looking firm and pissed off.

He goes where he is supposed to and I go where I am supposed to and while standing finally on Canadian indoor-outdoor-carpet-covered concrete by the luggage carousel, I phone Steve.

After 15 minutes of waiting, my Sicilian Mushroom Farmer arrives, disheveled and frantic looking, and I hand him my phone. His luggage tumbles onto the carousel while he is on the phone; mine still hasn't come. He talks. Hands me the phone. Asks me if I want money. No. I say. Please go now. I think. Please just go.

He grabs my hand again, I think to shake it, but no, he kisses my hand and turns away and is gone. I spend another hour frittering around trying to find the free shuttle to my hotel only to discover it doesn't run on weekends (??). Grab a taxi, get to the hotel, and eventually lie on my bed and think about the times during my trip when I just lay on my bed, or sat in a chair, and when nothing happened and how I don't write about the periods of time when nothing happens, and so my trip sounds like a series of non-stop events. Most of the time, time just passes by, and I do stuff that is ordinary and mundane, uneventful. Nothing really happens. Then, every once in a while something does happen. But when nothing is happening, I can do mundane things like make wallpaper patterns move, or watch light shows on the insides of my eyelids.