We have a lunch guest at my aunt’s today, I will call him Carlo. I have met him before, on an earlier trip, and I look forward to seeing him.
His significance is this—and it’s from another world: he is my uncle’s friend from prison camp. They were imprisoned together in Germany in World War II. Thankfully they both returned, and while my uncle has passed away, Carlo has reached the age of 87, he is a widower, and he is here having lunch with us.
When I will tell my parents I had lunch with him, they will say, “Oh, yes, that’s your uncle’s friend from prison camp.” Of course. Everyone has one, right?
Interestingly, as an engineer, he also knows my father and his brother professionally, completely unrelated to this other family connection.
We eat outside. He is a lovely man, very proper and thoughtful. We talk about Obama, about Carlo’s new car, about my own rental car which I scraped this morning in the parking garage at the Coop. I show him my rental contract to get his opinion on whether I will get hit with any repair costs. He assesses, accurately as it will turn out, that I will not have to pay the damanges.
We talk about his family and how busy they are, we talk about his summer home here in Liguria—his full time home is in Milan. He wonders if his children will take care of the house when he’s gone, something my aunt also worries about—grown children they all are. She wants to leave the house to her sons in the best possible shape. She contrasts that with other people she knows show plan to leave all the repairs to their heirs. There is no right answer, I don’t think.
We talk about his grandson, an engineering student, and about the new specialties that exist in engineering, and how the kid likes theoretical studies.
My aunt suspects that Carlo would like to be a matchmaker between his grandson and her granddaughter, but if he does, he’s very subtle.
