The Great Silvio Gaffe

A ski trip to remember on my first Substack anniversary

Photo by Kipras Štreimikis on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

This is my fifty-second essay. I can’t believe it’s been a year already (yep, haven’t skipped a week). Usually, when we hit a milestone, we write something about it, a meta piece on the journey there. How transformational it has been and all that. But I’m going to spare you the tedium here (I’ve written enough about this in a number of essays). Instead, I’ll write about that time that I sat down for dinner at the wrong house.

A group of people in my hometown used to put together these ski trips. They did that because they and their families were nuts about skiing. Now, you should know that my hometown is nowhere near a ski resort. It’s in central Italy, on the Adriatic coast, about seven hundred kilometers from the Alps. Which might not seem much by US standards, but by Italy standards it is (it’s almost like driving from Milan to Paris, something I’ve done a few times in my early twenties, when I had a French girlfriend -- but this is a story for another essay). And so these people would choose a resort on the Alps, gather a bunch of ski enthusiasts to fill a coach, rent the coach, hire a driver, book some accomodation, get there, ski for a week, and get back. 

The drive there and back by coach was nothing short of an endurance test: a packed cabin with cramped seats, curvy and impervious mountain roads, and a gazillion pit stops in obscure places every time anyone had to pee (coaches didn’t have restrooms back then). But at fifteen, I was one of the ski enthusiasts. It wasn’t as if my life depended on it, I wasn’t a freak. But I enjoyed skiing. Plus, I didn’t suck. So I’d always sign up to go.

That year, they decided on Courchevel, a picturesque town in the French Alps nestled at the heart of Les Trois Vallées, the largest ski resort in the world (maybe it still is, who knows). If you have a soft spot for skiing, Courchevel is pretty much the promised land: a multitude of slopes for all skill levels, awesome powder, a basin so extended you never have to do the same slope twice. 

These trips were organized by three families of ski die-hards, their kids roughly my age. A ‘ski die-hard’ is someone who treats the ski slopes like the inauguration of a Black Friday sale -- they’re there at the opening, right after sunrise, ready to pounce on the pristine snow before anyone else does. They relentlessly ski all day with little or no break until the facilities close, their lunch consisting of a sandwich consumed on a chairlift. At night, they crash on the bed exhausted at nine, nine-thirty tops, longing to do it all over again the next day.  

Me, I’m the opposite of a ski die-hard. I like to get to the slopes when the sun’s already high, take lots of breaks, stop to admire the view, take photos, and have lunch at a good chalet. And I’m willing to ski alone to avoid inconveniencing a group with my preferences and desires. Actually, I think that skiing alone is terrific. On that particular trip, I couldn’t ski alone. And I couldn’t be on my schedule. But that was fine: once a year, I liked skiing with that bunch of die-hards in a great resort. It was demanding, but I liked it. 

Apart from the three chief organizers and their families, our contingent included a couple of extra sets of parents and their offspring, as well as a band of tag-alongers with no familial affiliations whatsoever. I fell into the latter category. My folks were friends with the organizers, so they merrily dispatched me, under the strictest of promises to toe the line, follow orders, and treat their families as if they were my own. In return, those families adopted me with open arms, treating me as an honorary extra kid of theirs. This meant that they kept a close eye on me while skiing, and that I had dinner at their place.

Each evening, just before dinner, I'd gather with the other 'youngsters' of the group outside our condo. We'd share jokes, tease each other, and reminisce about the day on the slopes. Then, someone from my adoptive family would open their window and call out that dinner was ready. Their apartment was on the third floor of a four-story building, and by the time I’d start to run up the stairs to join them, everyone would already be seated. I was chronically late. There was a long table with only one vacant seat: mine. Right at the head of the table. The seat closest to the entrance door.

And so one evening, while running up the stairs in the hope of somehow mitigating my lateness, I lost count of the floors and got into another apartment. Same door, different floor. Those doors all looked the same; those floors all looked the same. And those condo apartments all looked the same -- the one I burst into had the same long table, with the same number of people already seated around it, and only one vacant seat at the head, the one closest to the entrance door. Out of breath, with an apologetic stance, and without even looking around (like every evening, after all), I sat down, my plate already filled with steamy food. 

It tasted kind of weird. I mean, different. It wasn’t the same type of food my adoptive family prepared for dinner the prior nights. But I was starving. And while I was eating voraciously, head down, a thick silence fell into the room. That felt strange, as every evening people around the table would be loudly joking and laughing and talking about the ski day. Suddenly, a voice from the other end of the table said something in a language I didn’t understand. A few others joined in. I didn’t pay attention right there and then, intent as I was to finish my food. I could only make sense of what happened when I thought back and talked about it, long after the fact. They were wondering who I was and whether anyone had invited me over and what I was doing there. But they were saying all that -- I gathered later -- in Swedish. Hence, my inability to tell idiom from noise. 

So, overwhelmed by a dreadful doubt, once I emptied the plate, I lifted my head and timidly glanced around. A collection of unknown and silent and staring faces of seated people -- except one -- made me hear myself asking aloud Hey, but where’s Marina? And Stefano? What about Gianluca? And Mr. and Mrs. Rossi? Where are they? Then it immediately dawned on me. 

I stood and profusely apologized. In my language. Or maybe in English. Probably not in French. And before anybody opened their mouth, I was out the door, running to the right apartment. When I opened the door and made my appearance, once again out of breath and a little embarrassed, I tried to explain my being so late. The room burst into laughter, pretty much in sync with the laughter we heard from the floor below in a muffled, camouflaged sound. Thankfully, the Swedish bunch were a good sport about my involuntary self-invitation. When we ran into them on the slopes, they admitted they hadn’t laughed so hard in years. We became friends, even though I’ve never seen them again in my entire life. 

Good memories are therapeutic, they make you feel good. I wrote about this in another essay, but I guess after the narration of what over the years has been dubbed as The Great Silvio Gaffe it’s worth reiterating it. I was fifteen (maybe fourteen), but I laugh at the memory of that cringey evening to this day. Seriously -- sometimes I happen to think about it when I’m alone, and I catch myself laughing hard. Times were different, probably today I wouldn’t be able to unknowingly burst into someone else’s place (hard to even find an entrance door unlocked, for one), sit down, and eat dinner without being cursed at, jumped over, and hurt. Granted, I was a kid then. But still.

So, protect your good memories, keep them in a safe place. Don’t let them vanish. When you least expect it, they’ll come to your rescue and heal you. They’re like broccoli -- they’re good for you. Actually, they’re not really like broccoli, as my friend Oscar rightly pointed out to me when reading a draft of this piece. Broccoli is good for you but doesn't taste good, he said. Good memories are good for you and always taste good. Like your broccoli pasta, suggested my friend Yehudis (a recipe I’d almost forgotten about).

As I close this fifty-second piece, I’m listening to Changes, by David Bowie. Still don’t know what I was waiting for, it says at the start. 

And I’m thinking that I still don’t know what I ate that evening.

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