A Rivverderci Roma

Twenty five years ago my spouse, then a newly acquired boyfriend, was encouraged to buy a vacant studio for sale in the coop where I had a one bedroom.  This way, I explained, we would have living quarters in the one and a study (both of us were academics) in the other.  He, who had grown up in an impecunious circumstance, was a little nervous about committing himself to paying over the years what seemed like a lot of money, but I reassured him that this was the way of the world and rental left you with nothing at the end.  And so it came to pass, and the years rolled by, and the unit is now in the process of being sold, long after I sold mine, and we have moved successively to Massachusetts and now to Florida.  My husband could not get over the shock of the rise in price in the last years.  His gratitude to me was charming, the expression of it, dazzling: Tuesday he is flying me first class to Rome where we will be staying at the Hassler Hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps.  This trip has so much meaning for me.  Rome was almost my first experience of Europe, simple Iowa provincial that I was, in time it became my most profound as I lived there on two separate sabbatical years, thereby giving my children a chance to reside in a foreign land two years at different moments of their lives. We, my wife and I, were joined the first year by an English au pair, who went on to live and work in Rome for her entire life, and with whom I often stayed when in Rome to use the library of the American Academy.  I have walked the streets of Rome time and again, and to this day can see in my mind's  eye most of the consequential streets and plazas as though my brain were a Google map.  I certainly would find my way around Rome far more easily than almost any American city other than New York.  Richard for whom traveling has long since lost its charm, and who had the daring and enterprise as a young man to hitch hike all over Europe, and who speaks fluently all the major European languages, is doing this for me, and I am overwhelmed.  This, we both understand, is our farewell to Europe; more to the point, we realize that neither of us is physically able to walk very much, sometimes we both of us use canes.  From the Hassler to the Pincio for the view, or down the Via Sistina to the Palazzo Barberini museum.  The hotel provides a car to drive its clients to the base of the Spanish Steps so we will try to make it on foot to the Piazza del Popolo and take a look at the Caravaggios in the church there, sit at the open air restaurant that used to be so chic, maybe walk to the Piazza Navona, look at the Bernini Fountain, risk being knocked down by the tourist crowd around the Trevi Fountain--it will be like walking through Times Square before curtain time.  When I was in college and graduate school I was a young married man, and I never thought I would get to Europe.  I was too late!  But that is not how it turned out.  I am very, very lucky.  And now, yet again with an escort showering me with love.