I am editing this from the car, in line for gas. There are at least 25 cars in front of me, down from 60 where I started about 45 minutes ago. The line snakes through a parking lot so it won’t block the base’s front gate. I mistakenly allowed daylight between my bumper and the car immediately in front of me and a man in a Fiat (it’s always a Fiat!) took it like a sign from God, 25 cars be damned.
I have let people cut me in Italy for seven months out of Christian charity and a reluctance to learn the swear words and gestures. Today the charity ran out before the gas did, and I used my horn…along with the famed mano a borsa. 🤌
The whole country is short on fuel, along with most of Europe, ever since Eni capped benzina at €1.99 a liter (the equivalent of $8.43 per gallon!) at the end of September, and the truckers went on strike over the uncapped diesel. Three days ago, the station I usually fill up at had a sheet of notebook paper taped over the pump that said Benzina finita, solo gasolio (out of gas, diesel only), and most every other station in the metropolitan area has a similar sign. We live 25 minutes from the boys’ school and 35 from my office, and petrol is the thread this household hangs from.
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Scarcity does something to people. Put 60 people in a gas line and one person will find a gap and take it while the other 59 will reach for the horn. Which is why I keep coming back to the widow in 1 Kings, the one in Zarephath during the famine. She has a handful of meal left and a little oil in the bottom of a jug, enough for one more meal for her and her son, and she is out gathering sticks to cook it when a stranger walks up and asks her to feed him first.
Him first?! It turns out to be the prophet Elijah, but she has no way of knowing that. He is a hungry man at the gate in a famine. Even though she has a kid, she feeds the stranger.
I have read that story numerous times and it still stops me, because I know exactly what I would have done, which is say sorry I have a child to feed. The widow skips the explanation and goes to make the bread. The meal and the oil hold out for her, her son, and the prophet until the rains come back, which is the part Sunday school likes.
I like the part before the miracle. A woman down to nothing, pouring anyway, and the pouring being what refilled the jar.
My spouse did the same thing this week with a suitcase and a ferry ticket…
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Last week my spouse’s youngest sibling died, mid-fifties, with more questions than anyone has answers for yet. My spouse and one of the sisters flew out to the Virgin Islands to stand in for the rest of the family, six thousand miles and two days on the move out of lives that were already full, because that is what you do when somebody dies. Grief is heavy over there, and so is everything else a family carries at a time like this.
There is no word for burying a sibling. I cannot picture it, and now my spouse is living it, with the one who was supposed to outlast everybody gone first and the whole family order scrambled.
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Work has been stressful since the end of February, for everybody on base, so the past few weeks we chaplains decided to visit every department with coffee and Munchkins. Caffè dei Cappellani, Coffee with the Chaplains. (The Italian version of the Munchkin, for the record, is an oversized cakey donut hole with jelly filling, pink icing, and sprinkles.)
Armed with a few carafes and dozens of donut holes, we visited two or three departments at a time. We planned to stay twenty or thirty minutes, longer if somebody wanted to talk, which somebody usually did. People will tell a chaplain with coffee things they would never put in an email.
We had to postpone it this week. Most base personnel are teleworking because of the gas shortage and protests.
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The boys still have to go to school. The buses run, thankfully, so they are up at 5:30, two hours a day on a bus, ten hours gone.
I am flying solo with my spouse away, and cooking is a thing other people do well. I had the week lined up with a group of Naples chefs who cook Indian and Thai and barbecue out of their homes, and now I cannot drive to get it and they cannot get to a grocery store with anything on the shelves. So it has been peanut butter and jelly. Mac and cheese. Maybe both together tonight, because after three days I am ready to branch out.
Yesterday, the first morning of this whole 5:30 circus of breakfast and lunches and the bus stop on the clock, the boys stopped, stood side by side in the kitchen, looked right at me and asked, “Mom, how can we help?”
I gave them the look I save for when something is broken or somebody wants something. Nope. They only wanted to know the next helpful thing they could do. The toilet paper and paper towels needed to be put away in the bathrooms, and off they went and did it.
We have been working for years to make them self-sufficient, and I am in no hurry for them to finish the job. But there it was, in the middle of a week with no gas, no spouse, no dinner plan, just two boys pouring out the little they had.
The jar is holding.
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