Reality Check

    Went down to buy my newspaper this morning from the loveliest paper vendor I've ever met...and got the biggest reality check of my life. It gives me goose bumps thinking about it. 

     I've always loved the woman who runs the newspaper stand in my little town here. Even if she's run out of the paper I want, which often happens since she only gets two copies a day, she's always there with a big wide smile and a welcoming ciao.

    Not all Italian shopkeepers are like that. As a foreigner -- even an Italian foreigner like me (not from this town), it can take years for an Italian shopkeeper to warm to you, to even acknowledge you. 

    But this woman has always been different.  

    Because she's so "simpatica",  I'm always looking for ways to crack that cute smile and get her laughing. So today, I started on about whether Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marriage was on the rocks. (Yesterday, it was Berlusconi's marriage that had us chuckling over my newspaper). 

    "She'll be fine Angelina no matter what happens, huh?," she said to me. "She's not changing all those shitty diapers, is she?" We laughed, two mothers having a giggle together. 

    And then, because I've always wanted to know more about this special woman (and because I'm a nosy reporter -- okay, ex-reporter), I asked: "How many children do you have?" I knew it was her son who ran the stand for her when she wasn't there.

    "Only the one now," she said, suddenly serious, suddenly looking down. "I've lost two of them."

     "My god, what do you mean?" I asked.

     "I had three sons," she said. "Lost the second one just a few months ago. Of a pulmonary embolism. I've lost two sons in the last ten years."

     Oh my god. Oh no. How does she keep smiling at her customers every day?

     "He died suddenly on February 16," she said. "He was 30." 

     That was the day my husband and I arrived in London to start our new life, the day I started to miss my boys so much I thought I might crack.

     But my sons are alive and well; they're just in the States. And I picked this life. 

     Tears sprang to my eyes. Tears sprang to her eyes. We hugged.

     And then I took my paper and walked back up the hill in shock.