Sitting uncomfortably in the coach seat of my Continental flight, I was gawking across the aisle at some bambina sandwiched cozily between her parents. She was singing along to her "Winnie the Pooh" video, sailing over the Atlantic on her way home.
I have never been a baby person. This summer whenever my uncle, a newly minted father, tried to pass me my youngest cousin, my grandmother would loudly intervene on my behalf: "Oh you know, Hilary is not our baby girl," and quickly whisk William III into the welcoming arms of any other female.
But this baby on the plane was enough, or almost enough, to distract me from the grotesque rubber chicken staring up from a bed of foreboding "rice pilaf." Knowing that she too was heading into the grid of the foreign city I approached provided me some comfort, even over the ocean and across an uncomfortable armrest.
Eventually the plane raced east above French cities, multi-colored oases in a sea of black -- or so I scribble in the back of the novel I'm reading, a poor substitute for the mandatory "travel journal" buried with my stowed luggage. But not even the glorious reel of images to my left could distract me from that baby, now trotting happily up and down the aisles.
Now in Rome, I feel just like that little girl beaming at every miraculous oddity -- in her case, airline passengers; in mine, living art.
Maybe it has to do with my recently turning 20 and confronting the threat of impending adulthood, but in Rome I've continued the staring at children that began when I was airborne: the boy leaping off the base of Bernini's elephant in the Piazza Minerva into the wide wingspan of his laughing grandfather; the cackling toddler running laps around the tables of the Cafe della Pace, pausing briefly beneath a windowsill, outstretched palms waiting for the jacket his mama drops from above. Captivated, I'm relating and reverting to their wide-eyed innocence.
Try hard as I may to appear a sophisticated Roman resident, I am ever the wide-eyed bambina behind my oversized eyewear, longing to ga-ga (not a bad estimation of what I actually sound like in Italian) over each passing ruin, each cobblestoned walkway, every altar. Like the little girls who sit in the Borghese gardens, swinging their legs off the ledge of the amphitheater, shrieking with delight at each mounted carabinero and every mangy dog, I am in a state of perpetual glee. I've been wandering down alleys, sipping wine from two-euro bottles, standing before statues unable to breathe. I furtively fold my map into ever smaller pieces, wondering why I don't swallow my vanity and unfold -- so I know where I'm going, or even where I came from -- but then, I don't wonder at all. I wander.
Walking together to class on Thursday (in the Musei Montemartini in Testaccio, that day), we took the wrong path over the Tiber and found ourselves, sixteen girls, wandering through deserted rows of mobile homes. In spite of our mumblings about "a trailer park in Rome?" and "this isn't right," no one was willing to question the navigatress. We must have been a sight -- a surreal tour group ogling piles of trash and graffiti-covered walls. We finally reassessed our direction when a vagrant with a gas mask told us we must turn around. In spite of our halting Italian, this we understood.
It's like being a freshmen all over again, knowing nothing and being constantly attached to a parade of innocents, each more desperate than the next to be free from her juvenile association. Little here has pleased me more than being mistaken for a Roman. But inevitably I must break it to whatever fellow tourist could make such a mistake that, "No, sono Americana" -- the FSP equivalent of "No, I'm an '11."
I crave the validation that comes with solitude. So do all my fellow art history students, I've learned. Still, like toddlers and freshmen, we flock together, reluctant to be without the safety of our numbers. We've roamed wide-eyed through ruins and cram ourselves 'shmob-like into the tram to get home.
If this time in Rome is like a concentrated four years at Dartmouth, freshmen fall is barely over, it's Christmas break. If this term abroad is my hundred years of life, maybe ten have past. I do want, after all, to be grown up.
