Small crises, surely. I cut my finger-- not a large crisis at all, but a sadly normal course of events. Almost half the people who said they were coming didn't. Unfortunately, these were the people I was expecting to egg-on those who are not naturally partiers and need a bit of encouragement.

Result: when a couple couples left at half past eleven, citing the need to catch the trams before they stopped running, the rest followed, sheeplike. No darts, no debauchery, no generous sampling of assorted nightcaps, no waking the neighbors, such as they are.

No fun, really.

And my liquor farm is hardly diminished.

On the other hand, the margaritas were fabulous.

Not that there was any doubt on that point.

Oh, and I broke a wineglass. It's just not a party until Dilettante breaks a wineglass, you know.

"Ah, to be back in the city," says Elvis, "where you can smell the air."

We are walking home from Cadorna station on Sunday night, and you can smell the air: exhaust, greasy food, ozone, dog shit, and and a type of dirt smell that has nothing to do with the wholesome humus of black tilled fields or moist green forests. The air smells singed and brown, if brown can be said to have a smell.

"The trouble with country air," Elvis continues, "is that is smells of nothing. How can you possibly tell what's in it? You could be breathing anything."

On Saturday, we had headed north, up into the foothills of the Alps, for dinner with Giorgio (the man so nice he needs no pseudonym) and his family, on Sunday we rode the train west to dine with Guiseppe (ditto, but he's been nicknamed Bond) and his family.

I won't go into it here, for the simple reason that I intend to write these meals and families when I have the time and inclination to do them justice, whether it be in an essay, a diary entry or (more likely) an article. I wil say a few things though, for the simple reason that I can never just leave anything at that.

One, both dinners were in the "country": that is, village houses with large gardens and long, white-white clothed tables set out among the greenery. The type of meals, in other words, that you might see in movies and mistake for the average life of an average Italian. Indeed, it might be.

It's not our average life, however. In fact, it happens all too seldom.

Two, the second meal featured the archetypal Italian Nonna, or Grandmother. She has the face of a kitchen witch and is, unfortunately, a bit batty. She loved my friends' two sons, who have sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and appear deceptively angelic.

She loved them a lot. In fact, she wanted to hug them. Repeatedly.

Unfortunately, she also scared the shit out of them.

To make matters worse for all involved, she kept lapsing into Calabrian, her first language. She tried to stick to Italian, but she grew up speaking dialect and the distant past is far closer to her these days than anything else. I did my best to translate, to explain, but the under-four crowd doesn't particularly trust me, either.

And no matter how much she tried to chase them around, she was not match for their short but sturdy legs.

No hugs for Nonna.

Three, I met the Trophy Wife.

Her husband is older, has an improbable accent, and, to put it mildly, is quite the character. He wears a gold hoop in one ear, his shirts open just a bit too far revealing a gold chain that's just a bit to thick, a scraggly beard that he probably thinks is a goatee and rather hip, and his thinning, receding hair scraped back into a ponytail.

I'll call him Dieter. I've always wanted to call someone Dieter, and for some reason Dieter seems to fit.

Hmm. Was there a "Wild and Crazy Guy" named Dieter? Does anyone even remember Saturday Night Live way back when, when it was good? Well, if so, you probably have a good concept of Dieter. (Wait, come to think of it, was Dieter a weight-lifting guy, but also from SNL? Whatever...)

Yeah, well, let's call him Dieter and move on.

Trophy Wife, on the other hand, is unbelievably gorgeous. She looks, we all agreed, like Iman. Supermodel all the way, with one exception, or possibly two, depending on

how you look at things. And it goes beyond the finger nails, which are impractically long and rather frightening, albeit painted creatively, complete with glittery appliques. But that's not what I'm talking about.

Trophy Wife has impressive breasts. Enormous Hooters. Bodacious Ta-Tas. Built like a brick shithouse.

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure they're real.

She's nice, if a bit vacuous.

Which is good, because Trophy Wife lives in Lisbon.

She knows where to get your hair done, your nails, your clothes, where to work out and where to satisfy your depilation needs. She will also share this knowlege with me.

Which is good.

I need that kind of help, especially after getting a good look at Trophy Wife.

What bothers me about TW is her attitude about children; or rather, her lack of attitude about children.

She and Dieter have some, you see. They didn't come along to play with the Golden Children that The Nonna adored, because they were back in Lisbon with the maid.

TW doesn't work, which is hardly something I can hold against her given that I don't either. And I don't (hold it against her). It's what comes next that rankles.

She doesn't have time, you see.

She explained it to me. She sees the kiddies for an hour before school, and, since they don't get home until six, for two hours between when they gett home and bedtime. (The youngest being 18 months-- she checked it out with Dieter to make sure she'd gotten the math right-- they must be educational slave-drivers in Portugal.) Then there's the gym, the hair, the nails, the depilation. She comes to see Dieter here in Italy on Thursday night or Friday morning, and returns to Portugal on Monday mornings or afternoons.

Oh, sure, she'd move here to Italy, to be with Dieter full-time, but what of the maid? Who would watch the children on the weekends when they weren't at school-- and even though she and Dieter would also be here in Italy, they would no doubt wish to travel about the country on weekends since they were starting out in the same place?

Tricky question, no?

Dieter, by the way, does not seem to ever go back to Portugal to see their children.

I'll check on that, though, although I'm pretty certain I've gotten a good grasp on the situation.

I find this appalling, to say the least.

Yes, perhaps my dubious position as a childless woman who, from all indications, will remain that way despite all best efforts, has clouded my judgment.

But, somehow, I don't think so.

I'm hoping, however, that I've got it wrong. That there's been some fundamental misunderstanding on my part. I'll check into it, verify things, reserve judgement.

But, deep down, I'm pretty sure that I've gotten it right.

I'm not the one that's gotten things wrong.

And I wish I was.

It seems to me that I' ve been using an inordinate number of commas today.

I don't particularly like commas.

Oh, they're all right. Useful and necessary, even.

But I usually don't overuse their grammatical possibilities, much less abuse them.

They're just not my style, I suppose.

Which means, since I've been on a comma-kick all day, that I've got a whole lot of editing to do.

I've got a song that's trapped in my head.

This is hardly unusual. Happens every day. I wonder if there are statistics on this? How many people are, in fact, highly susceptible to "sticky music"?

I think there are lots of us.

A hidden epidemic.

But Bye, Bye, Black Sheep?

Where the hell did that come from?