The Time Vesuvius Erupted and My Mom Was Painfully Bourgeois

Last night I dreamt that I led a group of high school and college special education students to Naples for a conference on helping teenagers and adults with developmental disabilities. My mom came too, because she cares for an adult son with autism, but also because it was an excuse to visit Italy.

Our group visited a home where some Nepalese adults with disabilities lived in unstimulating and crowded conditions (I read this article about disabled Romanian orphans before bed last night), and then we went for a tour of the old city. Our guide pointed out nearby Mt. Vesuvius and showed us that the older part of the city is built on top of even older parts of the city, so the whole seismically active area is just a very bad place to be in the event of an earthquake or volcanic eruption.

#ifeelsafenow #hashtagsarcasm

Finally it was time for the huge final conference. My mom wore a turquoise t-shirt with little silvery appliqués around the square neck. I don't remember a lot about the actual conference, but when we left the large Renaissance hall around six and went down the wide, shallow stairway to the medieval street, my mom was separated from the group. I hadn't noticed at first because a dark-haired college student in the group was wearing a turquoise t-shirt with white appliqués around the V-neck. (When I realized she wasn't my mom, I felt a little silly for thinking someone so young and so average height could have been my mom in the first place.) My stomach tied in knots, and I left the group to find my mother.

The Centro Storico, whatever that is. Imagine it's yellowish and has steps.

It turns out that turquoise had been a hot color in Milan a few years ago, so plenty of the not-very-fashion-obsessed Americans and Britons were wearing shirts in that color (like that cerulean discussion that really stuck with me from The Devil Wears Prada). Appliqués around the collar were also hot for the not-hot. I had a whole mental conversation with myself about the bourgeoisie thinking a t-shirt with appliqués was business-casual, and I was ashamed that my mother was bourgeois.

Milan Fashion Week, 2011. Dream-me nailed it.

Anyway, I finally climbed up some stairs to a more modern part of Naples where there were asphalt roads, turned, and saw my mom in a plaza near an ancient passageway through an ancient dark-red building. Just then, the earth rumbled and shook. I was afraid that I was going to watch my own mother be crushed by the building she was near, but the shaking ceased after about three seconds. Phew, but it could be a foreshock to a larger earthquake or a volcanic eruption! Everyone around me was screaming and running around, yet I somehow managed to get all the way down to my mother without getting elbowed in the face, trampled, or carried backwards by the crowd that so wanted to get to the newer part of the city.

Dream-me always seems to have a slightly more elevated perspective than real-me. I'm pretty sure dream-me is quite a bit taller.

I'm not sure why my mom had stayed in the plaza. It was probably just convenient to the plot that she stayed where she was once I'd spotted her. "Mom, we've got to get out of here!" I said when I reached her. I grabbed her wrist like she used to grab mine and realized we'd have to go under the building that crossed the passageway to get out of the plaza and closer to the new part of the city. "We'll have to run really fast!" I said, tugging on her arm. The earth rumbled and shook again, and a large plume of ash rose in the distance above the new part of the city. "Ohhhhhh, craaaaaaap," I said, and then I woke up.