Nothing shows your age more than how you travel. Plus, the number of sounds one makes when standing. When I was younger and didn’t look so much like every school comedy’s representation of a history teacher, I travelled on a shoestring. I lived on street food, grocery store wine, and end of day discounted bakery goods. I’d go for hostels, rooms in flats, couches. One time that couch was behind a building. My motto used to be “Why pay for the Best Western, you don’t travel to sit in a hotel room.”
I was wrong. One of the best parts of this recent trip to Italy was the hotels. Nothing can squash the exhaustion and low grade misery of walking around in the Roman heat, but knowing that I was returning to an air conditioned hotel room with clean sheets and an episode of CHiPs dubbed into Italian sure helped. (It’s somehow better when dubbed into Italian, a language whose only vocabulary I know are those words needed to order gelato.) Each day a cleaning fairy came and dropped off new towels and more toilet paper. The bed was huge. The TV was bigger than the bed. The water pressure was set to elephant cleaner, the heat to Louisiana in August. Glorious.
We talked about our hotel rooms as if it was an attraction in a guide book. We admired the Art Deco Best Western in Rome as much as the Coliseum, we talked about the air conditioning in the B&B in Monopoli as much as the Adriatic Sea. In my thank you note to the cleaning staff of the Hotel Aria, I told them to say goodbye to the breakfasts for me. A note, by the way, I wrote while wiping away a tear with perfumed tissues provided by the hotel.
I’m just going to say it: I’m old. That’s right. It’s true. Not only did I gather this by my change in attitude towards hotels, but there were other clues. The initial clue was in my bags. I packed an entire Ziploc bag dedicated to the various creams that make my body’s life easier. I excitedly told the soccer player next to me on the plane that Ryanair is a phonetic palindrome. I complained about my feet and knees every day. Whenever I caught the eye of a fellow old person, we gave each other the eye roll whose subtext was ‘Man I miss my knees.’ I called a waitress ‘young lady.’ I called a waiter ‘good sir.’ All of the waiters and waitresses called me sir. The six compartments in my pill box had 1. Vitamins A and D, 2. Aspirin and ibuprofen, 3. Benadryl, and 4. Tums. The box came home empty. Compartments 2-4 were empty by day 10.
It was in the town of Monopoli that I realized the true lengths of my oldness. Monopoli is an ancient city on the Adriatic Sea. Narrow cobblestone streets meander between white buildings in the old town. An old stone path has run alongside the sea for centuries. Our first day, we ate at a restaurant on the sea. This place is the first of which we would refer to as ‘a hipster place.’ In our estimation, a hipster place is a restaurant which is trendy and hip and employed by people who are trendy and hip, but neither the place nor those employed there are good at producing food. In this hipster place, we dined on lightly breaded cod pieces with vegetables (i.e. fish sticks on lettuce). The only reason I know the food at hipster places is good is because they tell me it is. Enjoy a moderate of rich parma ham with thinly sliced cheese on crusty artisan bread and wash it down with in-house effervescent oxygenized hydrogen (i.e. a ham and cheese sandwich on old white bread and water). What’s more, everyone else just seems to go along with it, basically because (like me) they don’t have the energy to argue, we just don’t go back to the hipster places. It is the culinary world’s greatest quiet conspiracy. It was while first writing the phrase ‘hipster place’ that I recognized that I am now old. I fretted mildly, but then took an Aleve and that helped.
My suspicions were confirmed on our first morning in Monopoli. I awoke at 6 am and without a Denny’s early bird special to take advantage of, I instead worked out. After exercising, I decided that the best way to cool off was to go to the local old town swimming cove. I put on my trunks, took my vitamins, and walked down there. The swimming cove is part of the old town and generations of Monopolians have swum there and started their day there. I was eager to join in that tradition.
When I arrived (at about 6:45 am) I was not alone. There were probably ten others. All of them were solidly in their 60s. The cove was a soup of old people, floating, breast stroking, and remembering their knees. I got in with them and swam around the broth, bringing my own recollections of a time before hipster places.
They accepted me. Each early morning I went to the cove and swam. I back stroked to the rocks across the way. I breast stroked back. Each day garnered me a few more nods and smiles. I felt a little like Jane Goodall. It was on the third day that I realized they weren’t accepting me as an outsider chimp, they were accepting me as a fellow old person. It was my right as an old person to swim along with all the other seniors who wake up at 5 am and groan as they get out of bed. I drank at lunch that day. Followed by two Aleves and a Tums. I suffered, but at least I suffered in an air conditioned hotel room with Chips in Italian to keep me company.
