From Venice to Las Vegas in 39 years flat

Thirty-nine+ years ago I went with two teacher friends and a Japanese-American Army lieutenant on a 10-day northern Italian adventure during Easter vacation. We drove two cars from Pirmasens, Germany, where we worked, through Austria to Venice, Florence, Pisa and other lovely places. 

I loved Venice. Besides San Marco, the cathedral and square, and the big touristy things, we split up and I meandered through narrow alleys and over bridges for hours. However, I did raise a big stink about the tacky tourist tchotchkes, especially the plastic gondolas.

When one of their mothers came to visit that summer, my two teacher friends had her pick up a gondola in Venice and they gave it to me for my 23rd birthday. It was a beauty!

Far nicer than the cheap ones they make today, it had a music box as its base. You wound up the whole gondola, it slowly pivoted, played music and a little ballerina danced on the foredeck.

It was the 1970 pinnacle of a multimedia experience.

Back in those days I was acquiring “stuff” and it shipped back to the States with the rest of my growing collection. I can’t remember the first time I “regifted” it, but it was in the early 70s. I sent it to one of the women who had given it to me.

We haven’t kept track of how far or how often it has traveled but it has celebrated a couple of marriages, at least one divorce, the birth of two children, a law degree, getting a new dog, a cross-country move, and a number of house warmings.

Last week, those two women and I were together, all three of us at once, for the first time in 39 years. We were in Las Vegas at the Department of Defense Overseas Dependents Schools teachers reunion. We joined 5 others from Pirmasens and over a thousand more from all over the world, and Vickie . . . brought the gondola. 

The box was covered with multiple sets of postage but we were able to determine that she last got it from Jackie in 2003. Packing it in a contemporary local newspaper (in this case Charlotte, NC) is part of the strategy.

We considered, because the three of us don’t get together all that often (we live in NC, southern CA, and northern WA), burying it in Las Vegas. Then we started reminiscing. We spent an hour laughing, remembering things like how our children had been enchanted by it when they were little . . . trying to remember who got it when. We decided that something that had celebrated so many significant events in our lives deserved to be kept.

That night we had a banquet at the new Ceasars Palace Forum. Ours was the first event in the new facility and everything about it was elegant . . . the food, the venue, the servers, the carpet, the chandeliers, the bathrooms and . . . our table centerpiece:

It came home in my suitcase. I’m the one with the most changes in my life over the past few years . . . and I had room. It’s a little catty-whompus on its base. That makes the ballerina sort of gimp around rather than lilt . . . but none of us has the physical grace we had 40 years ago. 

We do, however, walk with far more gentleness and grace of character. Not a bad trade-off . . .

Tagged as: DoDDs, gondola, reunion, Venice