native                                                                       

The tiny, immaculate shoe store is on the corner of Via Gregoriana and Via Francesco Crispi in the Spanish Steps district of Rome. Light spills golden from all sides and I enter gingerly: feet dustied from walking in flip flops, black cotton dress damp and clingy, well worn and unwashed. We are in Rome without warning and I have not packed appropriately. We have dinner reservations in a few hours and I have to my name a see through sun dress, short cotton shorts, bikinis and flip flops. I do not even have purse, using instead a cotton mesh bag that looks as if I might be employing it to carrying fish. If reservations are required, so certainly then are shoes. 

Andy sits on the supple leather couch while I pick through the choices, working in stilted dialect with the petitely glowing sales girl who picks up the shoes and lays them out before me. I try on each, walking the narrow perimeter of the floor plan. We are in a part of the city that is most like Madison Avenue and while these little shoe boxes are set off a bit from Prada and Bulgari we are still in very deep and the numbers on the bottom of each shoe reflects it. 

Andy asks me which ones I like most, these, I say, but they are crazy expensive. He says, well do you like them? Yes, I nod but shrug my shoulders and say but these are cheaper pointing to an uglier pair that don't do quite so much for my draft horse ankles. But those look better, he affirms, you should get them. I wiggle nervously and bite my lip. I walk back and forth in them two more times, a small parade for an audience of two. Get them, they look fantastic, he says, hands me a silver card and walks into the back to look at a pair of Italian sneakers. I don't have my wallet on me. I don't even have a purse to put a wallet into. I take his card and hand it to the sales girl who smiles at me.

Most American women are too stubborn, she says, grinning like a cat. Most American woman want to do it all themselves, they think they are too big for a man, too important, they can do everything. They would never let a man buy them shoes, say. That is what they think, American woman. But not you, she smiles at me again, swiping the card through the reader. I can tell, you are more like us. You are more like Italian woman. She holds out her hand, palm up, fingers curled, as if she were holding a fruit that is ripe. Italian women, we think instead that we are in control of our men completely she tightens her hand ever so slightly and that we keep them around to do as we choose. Italian woman, she can always choose. She hands me the slip to sign. I stammer something about just not having a bag to carry my wallet in and it's not that it's just that I don't have a purse and and and.

She smiles again, her green eyes alight, takes the slip from my fingers and places the receipt into the crisp paper bag. I think you are like Italian woman, I think you could live here in Roma, no? 

lonely planet

Until recently I never travelled. Abroad or even domestically. My mother rarely travelled (though I suspect it was on her list of things she was fated to miss out on in life), airfare from Hawaii was expensive, hotels and rental cars were often insurmountable. I left for college without even visiting. It did not matter. I had a scholarship. It was where I was going. 

Until recently I had spent a miserable month in the home of Dutch family who despised me in Amsterdam, had travelled to Thailand on a lark and with the modest blessing of a tiny "inheritance" and had been to Greece. I slept in hostels and rationed food money, took trains and buses and carried the weight of my belongings strapped to my hips and back. I came back with empty bank accounts and filled up credit cards and had to wait to get my pictures developed until I had enough money. I was still using cameras with film, digital seemed too far from reach.

Until recently I could barely rent a car domestically, none the less in Costa Rica, India or Italy. Until recently there was money only to go home every few years and even then with the help of my parents. Until recently time there would pass without me, each part of my family aging in huge chunks, our lives changing without one another. 

Much has changed and for it I will be forever grateful. Much has changed, the least of which being I am now some kind of professional and for once in my life am conceivably solvent. Much has changed and I pause to acknowledge it, standing at the window, looking out onto the city of Rome, in a clean bright hotel room with luggage I don't have to carry. Much has changed and it amazes me, still.