Single Serving Friend 3

It’s amazing how a single encounter with a person can linger in your memory for ages after a brief but significant exchange of pleasantries. I have had a decent number of these in my life, each of which has taught me a lesson I keep safely tucked deep inside, but I want to share three of these stories. This is the second in a series of three.It’s amazing how a single encounter with a person can linger in your memory for ages after a brief but significant exchange of pleasantries. I have had a decent number of these in my life, each of which has taught me a lesson I keep safely tucked deep inside, but I want to share three of these stories. This is the third in a series of three.
This one was also in the town of Guarda la vaca. A couple of my friends and I had taken to strolling casually through the town without our flash lights. We’d been warned about sudden power outages but were skeptical at how dark it could possibly get. So there we were in the middle of nowhere just the three of us when every single light in the entire town went down. We froze for a good 10 minutes thinking the generators would kick in sooner or later but nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was funny actually because the darkness silenced us. We were paralyzed and didn’t know how to react. We couldn’t keep walking because we couldn’t see a single thing. It was so dark we had to flail our arms in the air to find each other. So we sat down on the floor holding hands and almost started hyperventilating when we heard the stray dogs barking. Seconds later we hear a calming voice. A man who must have been in his 60’s and had sensed how scared we were. I guess he took it upon himself to “protect” us as it were. This man talked for an equivalent of 30 minutes in Italian to us about all sorts of things like the revolution, napoleon, and the first aircrafts. The fact that we understood a big chunk of what he was talking about when none of us had ever spoken a single word of Italian in our lives is a testament to humanities ability to identify and empathize with each other. A testament to the notion that the existence of a language barrier is irrelevant when it comes to emotion. We were distressed, he offered us comfort and we accepted and on that basis as people, irrelevant to race, creed, or gender we connected. When the lights came back on we thanked him and walked off to which he responded “ciao Bella”.