Sergio

'It's your ego routine,' my psychologist explains.  'It's all mishmashed.'

I want to tell her that there is nothing routine about my ego.  It is, in fact, extraordinary.  I want to tell her this, but I don't have the energy.  That's because I'm thinking of the new mobilephone on my desk, the one from AT&T that arrived in the small carton with the big manual.  Just looking at the thing, its tiny buttons and inexplicable screen, places where cords go in, or, perhaps, plugs insert.  I don't like it.  I must have it.  I must not only have it, but have it operational, because as everyone knows, the chances of Sergio actually turning up at Florence Airport with our hired van are virtually nil.  My nonroutine ego can see this, can see it here from my desk in California.  And yes, it is bad enough that I don't speak a word of Italian and will only be able to plead and wave receipts around at various officials when we find ourselves stranded.  And like a Beckett play, there is another act, but it will probably run in reverse.  Staged entirely in my head, humidity blowing off the Tuscan plain, authentic Italian smog massing overhead, taxis honking, Marlou despairing, while the great play of van rental runs backwards in my mind, from the moment the deal was closed to the second I saw something on the web about wheelchairs and minivans and San Marino...at that point, I will attempt to leap aboard the great European mobilephone wave and have a word with Sergio.

Do our aging minds really imitate our cartilage, losing flexibility, requiring more and more manual working and stretching to function at all?  My mobilephone is no longer functioning.  I learned that just hours ago in the course of buying some shoes.  Why buy shoes?  Really, I make it a practice to never buy shoes, a fact which became evident when the clerk at Nordstrom's eyed my current pair.  I assured him that this is where I had bought them, right here in Stanford Shopping Center.  Well, he said, glancing about the racks, he had worked there for years and never seen my brand.  Years.  I didn't want to get into it.  Instead, I got into some slip ons.  Okay, so they are simply enormous, adding on inches at the front to accommodate my plastic leg brace which requires width, the very lateral dimension that these shoes, the only ones in the orthopedic ballpark, totally lacked.  Sorry, only one width.

Anyway, having exhausted the possibilities at Nordstrom's, I rolled back to my van, stopping off to buy Marlou a sandwich, then hurtling aboard the wheelchair lift, up and into the Ford.  I pulled out my phone to alert Marlou regarding lunch and....  It wasn't my mobilephone battery, and it wasn't not paying my bill.  It was the new phone.  The one I just bought and haven't yet activated.  The one that's sitting on my desk at home.  That is what we call in the high-tech world 'the new phone' -- as opposed to this, the old phone.

Screw it.  Good thing I'd just bought new shoes.  Nothing like new shoes to make a new man, I always say.  What I said to the Nordstrom salesman was thanks for having one pair of shoes I can get my plastic brace into.  The ones I am wearing now, and the ones...that are so big to accommodate the massive orthotic that I literally cannot drive.  Nevermind.  I change back into the old shoes.  Just like I'm going to change into the new phone.  

Sergio, soon driving down from Trieste, will be one of those cool Italian or former-Yugoslav-Eurotrash hipsters who drives with one finger, smoking and talking on his mobile phone at the same time.  He dials with the flick of a fingernail, texts his friends in Riyadh with a spare thumb, while catching a little porn on the Internet.  He is cool.  He is a mobilephone meister.  I am a stupid old schlump, and everyone is going to realize this when I arrive at Florence and fumble around trying to call within Europe, using my AT&T Within Europe Plan, the instructions to which, although printed, will require a return to graduate school.  For which it's too late.

That's why, once home and back at my desk, the box and the manual and the only real mobilephone in my possession, the one currently in Styrofoam, remain dormant.  After all, I'm getting ready for a trip.  First thing: deal with Middlemarch.  No sense in taking a book version of a book, when you can get an iPod version.  I am loading the entire thing, all the spoken files, into my favorite MP3 player.  Of course, I do have the print version.  Or will have it, checking the prices of these things.  Middlemarch turns up, in successive web searches, as Middlesex.  March becomes 'The March,' by E.L. Doctorow, a great Jewish writer whose take on the Civil War I have never read.  Which is something to think about, right now, and the silly mobile phone in the Styrofoam awaits my attention.  No, it's got my attention.  And like it or not, ego routines notwithstanding, mobilephone or no, I am on my way.