This is the third installment of a six part series that posts M-W-F afternoons.
January in Lucca, 2022
Post #3 of 6
And on the 9th day she rested for her bag was delivered unto her, and she saw that it was good.
The bag with its tags seemed to tell the story not of an adventure: no tan lines, no obnoxious souvenir bar T-shirts of Margaritaville nor greasy coconut smelling lotion marks, but of a bag that dawdled around Charles de Gaulle airport.
What the tags couldn’t tell me was what happened between the time the bag was found and when it finally arrived at our apartment. You see, my bag was found by the airline after only six days at CDG, that is, if the word ‘only’ can fairly be used here. But compared to the total of nine days I was not in possession of my leather belt and ‘momma’s little helpers’ after the addition of the three day excursion it took with the courier from the time of pick up to time of delivery, six sounds like an ‘only.’
The policy of AirFrance is delivery of your bag within 24-48 hours after it’s been located. They pass it to a courier along with your phone number, and the courier makes the trek to your door. Twenty-four hours came and went and I began to feel uneasy. We made sure one of us was always in the apartment, and the occasional unmistakable sound of rolling baggage on the cobble stones on Via dell’Anfiteatro punctuated the day. This is not an unusual clu-clu-clu-clunking in the touristical part of historical centro, and although the courier is supposed to call ahead, nothing so far had been normal and I hoped maybe my bag was rolling to me unannounced. By the end of day two, still no call and no bag, that uneasy feeling escalated when I saw a man standing outside our gated entryway, smartphone in hand, looking around, rolling bag at his side:
‘Buongiorno, AirFrance?’ I yelled down from three floors up.
‘Bag for Elliott/Brown?’ I bayed as I hung precariously over the laundry line outside our window, flailing my arms around to no avail. Nobody looks up anymore and crickets as the man walked away.
Day three dawned and with it a realization. Simple problems usually have simple answers. I’ll just end this story by saying maybe the buzzer to the apartment wasn’t working. And maybe, just maybe, someone had the wrong SIM card in their phone, and the courier thought it odd he was calling the US.
Next installment of the series, “Back and Forth Adventures Part 4 – Class Clown” will appear Monday afternoon. Click here to view “Part 2 – Losing the Things that Matter” and here to read “Part 1 – My Italian Closet is Displeased.”
