Charades

As a child we never played charades, mainly because why try to mimic something if you could just say the word? Call it lazy, but up until recently, there was no need for me either to learn to mimic words, animals, public figures or historic buildings to just name a few. A and I just recently discovered the fun that his most favorite childhood game provided us with. Needless to say that I loose every time…

I am a simple person, not fancy at all. I am easygoing and tend not to worry about details. I am horrible with details in general. For me, getting somewhere is important, how I get there does not bother me. So when I told my mom the day before the wedding, that I do not have a bouquet but will just get one single red rose, her face froze. She shuddered and instantly got really serious. A silent minute was followed by a lot of arguments as to why flowers during a wedding where super important, she used every trick in the book to convince me, that flowers were of the utter most importance.

The way I saw it, I had two choices. I could either insist on one single red rose and can hear for the rest of my life that a bouquet would have been so much better, or I could just let her get the bouquet for her only daughter’s wedding. Needless to say, that in my mom’s point of view I did not have any choice either way and that one way or another, I would get the bouquet of roses I never knew I wanted.

So, the evening before the wedding ended with my dad, my younger brother, my mom and me in a small flower-shop in a small town called Santa Agata somewhere in Southern Italy. Only a few hours before the big day. My mom pointed at red roses and then pointed towards the wrapping paper, which left the 78-year old lady behind the counter mumbling on and on in Italian about, who knows what. My dad and I exchanged some horrified looks. How where we supposed to translate what my mom wanted, to an old but sweet lady that only spoke Italian and if you did not know that about me before, now you know: I do not speak Italian. Not even a little bit.

As the lady ignored every way of communication that we offered, which was a combination of German, English, Norwegian, Tagalog and “grazie mille”, she decided that bounding the flowers the way she thought where beautiful, would be sufficient. However instead of a bouquet, her masterpiece ended up looking like the first price of a beauty pageant. So I resorted to the one thing, A and I have been practicing for weeks now: charades.

I pretended walking down the aisle, while my mom was humming the wedding march, and my dad pretended to throw rice, while my younger brother was cracking up. This went on for about seven minutes, before she started laughing up a storm and decided that I was tortured enough. In my half broken Spanish (because I know enough Spanish to be dangerous in Italian) I tried to explain I was getting married tomorrow and while shaking her head, she was laughing.

I am not quite sure, what she thought about the bride and her parents buying a bouquet of roses the day before the wedding, but either way, she was happy to present us with a beautiful wedding bouquet. And although I wouldn’t have admitted it to my mom, having a wedding bouquet made the big day even more special, who knew?