That was all.
She knew exactly where the cards were, just past the front entrance on the right, which meant there was absolutely no reason for her to be standing twenty minutes later in an aisle labeled Travel & Adventure holding a book about Italy.
She wasn’t planning a trip to Italy.
She didn’t have airline reservations. She hadn’t checked hotels. She hadn’t researched the best time of year to go, and she certainly hadn’t created one of the spreadsheets she had been known to create when a trip became real enough to require one.
She was simply holding a book about Italy.
She flipped through several pages. Florence. Tuscany. A photograph of a little village she’d never heard of. She stopped at a picture of a long table outside somewhere, filled with people eating dinner beneath strings of lights. She smiled.
“Planning a trip?”
She looked up. A woman about her age was standing nearby with two travel books tucked under her arm.
“No.”
The woman looked at the book in her hand.
“Thinking about one?”
“No.”
There was a pause. She laughed. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Those are usually the best trips.” And with that, the woman walked away.
She looked back at the book. The funny thing was, Italy wasn’t even someplace she’d been dreaming about. It wasn’t on a bucket list. She wasn’t one of those people who had always wanted to see Tuscany or learn Italian or spend a month wandering through Europe. At least she didn’t think she was.
She put the book back. Then picked it up again.
Pasta sauce.
A pottery class.
The road she hadn’t intended to take.
Red shoes she didn’t need.
Chess played badly and happily.
Apparently, she had become a woman who picked things up, put them down and then picked them up again. She smiled.
Maybe indecision wasn’t always indecision. Maybe sometimes it was curiosity trying to get her attention. She carried the book with her while she went to find the birthday card.
On the way, she passed a display advertising events at the bookstore. Author talks. A book club. Something about gardening. A Saturday morning conversation class in Italian.
She stopped. “Oh, come on.” She laughed out loud. This was getting ridiculous. She had been holding a book about Italy for approximately seven minutes and apparently the universe had decided she should now become bilingual.
She kept walking. Found the birthday card. Then walked back. The little sign was still there.
Beginning Italian Conversation. Saturdays at 10:00. No experience necessary.
No experience necessary. She liked the sound of that. She took a picture of the sign. That was all.
No registration. No commitment. No declaration that she’d always secretly wanted to learn another language. Just a picture.
She bought the birthday card. And the book about Italy. At home, she left the travel book on the kitchen counter and went about her day.
Over the next several days, she picked it up occasionally. She read about places whose names she mispronounced. She looked at maps. She learned that some of the things she thought she knew about Italy were wrong and discovered things she hadn’t known enough to wonder about.
She wasn’t researching. That distinction mattered. Research had an objective. This didn’t. She was simply interested.
It had been a while since she had allowed herself to be interested in something without immediately deciding what she was supposed to do with the interest. That thought stayed with her.
For much of her life, curiosity had been useful. She had been curious about things that helped her become better at her work. Curious about problems that needed solving. Curious about her children and what they needed. Curious about decisions she had to make and subjects she needed to understand.
Her questions usually had somewhere to go. But lately, different questions had been showing up. Questions with no obvious purpose…
What would that be like?
Would I enjoy that?
Where does that road go?
Could I learn that?
Do I still like this?
Would I like something else better?
And perhaps the most interesting one of all:
Not ten years ago. Not when she was building a career or raising children or making choices based on what the next season required.
Now.
She didn’t immediately know the answer. Oddly, that didn’t bother her. A few years earlier, it might have. She was accustomed to knowing herself. She knew what she liked, what she was good at, what she believed, what she wanted and what she didn’t have time for. There was comfort in certainty.
But there was also something unexpectedly wonderful about realizing that perhaps she wasn’t finished discovering herself.
On Saturday morning, she woke up early. She made coffee, wandered into the kitchen and saw the book about Italy on the counter. Beside it was her phone. She picked it up. The picture of the bookstore sign was still there.
Beginning Italian Conversation. Saturdays at 10:00. No experience necessary.
She looked at the clock. 8:17. Plenty of time. She could go. She could also stay home. Nobody was expecting her. Nobody would know if she didn’t show up. And for some reason, that made the decision feel different.
There was no one to please. No one to disappoint. No one keeping score. No one asking whether learning Italian made sense. She didn’t need to explain how this fit into the rest of her life because, at the moment, it didn’t.
She was simply curious.
She finished her coffee. At 9:42, she was standing in her bedroom trying to decide what one wore to a beginner Italian conversation group where one knew exactly three Italian words, two of which were foods. She laughed.
Apparently, red shoes. Of course. She put them on. At the bookstore, there were nine chairs arranged in a loose circle. Eight were already occupied. For a moment, she stood at the edge of the room. She could leave. Then someone looked up.
“Are you here for Italian?”
She looked down at her red shoes. Then at the empty chair. “I think so.” She sat down. The instructor welcomed everyone and began with something simple.
“Why are you here?”
One person was preparing for a trip. Another had Italian grandparents. Someone else had studied the language years ago and wanted to remember it.
She almost said she was thinking about traveling to Italy. That would have been a perfectly reasonable answer. But it wasn’t true. Not yet.
She thought about the travel book The photograph of the long table beneath the lights. The little sign she’d almost walked past. All the questions that had been appearing lately without permission to become plans. She looked around the circle.
“I’m curious.”
The instructor smiled. “That’s a very good reason.” She thought so too.
When the class ended, she walked back through the bookstore toward the parking lot. She didn’t know whether she’d return the following Saturday. She didn’t know whether she’d ever become conversational in Italian. She didn’t know whether she’d go to Italy. And for once, she didn’t turn any of those unknowns into decisions that needed to be made.
She walked outside in the morning. Her red shoes clicked against the sidewalk. She looked down at them. And smiled.
Then she kept walking.