Strangers on a Train; Or How I Met Your Father

Looking back, I now see that trains and train stations have been a constant backdrop in my life — hours of commuting to high school, travelling to and from university, going to visit my parents when we lived in different regions of Italy.

It was on one of these trips from Pordenone, in the Friuli region of Northeast Italy, to Novellara, in Emilia Romagna in Central Italy, that I met the man I would later marry.

My plan was to catch the train at Pordenone, ride it to Mestre, just before Venice, and change to the Venice-Rome line, which would take me to the station closest to Novellara. And so, on a cold December morning (I think it was on a Friday or Saturday) I was waiting for the southbound train on the Pordenone platform.

There were many people waiting on the same platform, young and old, male and female, attractive and not; a cross-section of humanity.

Of all the people standing there, a young man chose to approach me and proceeded to ask in painfully constructed and badly pronounced Italian where he would find the train for Venice.

“Are you English speaking?” I asked (In English).

“Wow! And here I practiced for hours to get that question just right!” (he answered in English).

“In that case”, I snottily replied, “there are lots of other non-English speaking people here. Why don’t you pick one and practice some more?”

I have no idea why he didn’t choose to tell me where I could go and what I could do when I got there. Instead, he stayed with me on the Venice-bound platform, boarded the train and sat across from me.

The ride to Venice was perhaps a little more than an hour. We talked of inconsequential things, and he related how he had just arrived in Italy and couldn’t wait to see the sights, Venice in particular. I liked him very much and hoped he felt the same way.

As the train neared the Mestre station where I would disembark and go my separate way, I decided to give him my phone number (my work number; home phones were rare in Italy at the time, but that’s another story). As soon as I did so, I thought to myself, “he’s going to think I’m such a creepy pathetic loser, giving my number to a complete stranger on a train”. He pocketed the card with my information, looked a little strangely at me and said he would certainly call.

I thought “yeah, right, of course, he’s never going to call”. And I descended to the Mestre platform and despondently watched the train pull away taking this attractive stranger away with it.

Monday, no calls.

Tuesday, no calls.

Of course not.

Where I worked there was a central switchboard that directed all the incoming calls to the appropriate employee. On Wednesday afternoon the switchboard operator (Giancarlo, the world’s crankiest man) rang my line saying that there was some idiot (“cretino” was the word he used) on the line who didn’t speak Italian and might be asking for me. Should he put him through or just hang up?

No, don’t disconnect, please put him through.

And, more than 40 years later the connection is unbroken.