Serendipitous!: Adj. 1. come upon or found by accident; fortuitous

Sometimes, serendipity is where you intended to be when you set out, but mostly, it's not.  For example, last summer I headed north to Kansas where I was actually headed to Serendipity, Judy's ranch, for a visit with some siblings.  By contrast, I had two pretty cool serendipitous experiences within 24 hours of each other in Rome in 2004. And that doesn't include hearing President George H.W.Bush speak about the Iraq war and his pride in his son.


Liz and I had come to Rome with different agendas: Hers was all business while mine was decidedly otherwise.  At the end of a week of meetings, Liz and I had decided to hang around Rome for a few days to see some sights and to let her soak in some of the things that normal business people (fly in Monday morning, fly out Friday aftenoon) simply don't get a chance to see or do.  One of Liz's employees had decided to stay along with us and we set out to explore Rome together.  On Saturday afternoon, we asked the concierge at the InterContinental for a good restaurant recommendation and she obliged by hooking us up with a taxi driver who gave us a knowing "tourist" sigh and then shooed us into his car where he proceeded down the hill at la dolce vita speeds into a warren of back allies and little side streets where he then, somewhat unceremoneously, dumped us at the front door to our restaurant, Alfredo alla Scrofa.


We were escorted into the room and to our table by a friendly guy in his 50's whose Italian shone with a patina of New York that he happily admitted he had acquired in the 20 years he had lived in the Big Apple.  As these things go, we proceeded to have a nice pre-dinner cocktail and then we were ready to order.  Steve fell victim to our waiter first, although in fairness it could have been any one of us..


"I think that I'll have the Seafood Risotto, please."


"I, however, think that you want the fettucini Alfredo," retorts the waiter. 


Steve is from Chicago.  No wimpy Italian waiter is going to push him around, "No," he protests, somewhat less politely  than before.  "I'll have the Seafood Risotto."


"Alas," says the waiter "but you are having the fettucini Alfredo."


Even Steve can see through the purplish haze developing behind his eyes that there's something strange going on here, so he agrees, reluctantly, but fortuitously.  


"Ahhh," says the waiter, "you have seen the name of our restaurant by now, and know that the fettucini alfredo was invented on this spot, yes?"  This whole charade with Steve was so that the waiter could expound on his story of the invention of the original "heart attack on a plate" on this very spot.  All four of us ate the fettucini and were delighted with the restaurant's signature dish (enough so that Liz and I returned the following evening for seconds!)


The next day, Sunday, found the four of us looking for something to do other than talking about our incredible dinner of the evening before..  Since all four of us were cradle Catholics, it seemed reasonable to go to see the Vatican.  And being a horrible cynic and worse iconoclast, I was looking forward to trying out my various jokes and routines as we shuffled across those ancient marble floors.

Of the four, I was the only one to have previously seen the Vatican and its treats: St. Peter's, The Sistine Chapel, the Pieta, the Vatican Museum, etc.  So, with this as our plan, we proceeded to the front of the hotel to snag a taxi to St. Peter's Square before all the tourists got them! In fairness (no pun intended) my little sister Joy saw the Pieta at the New York World's Fair in 1964 so I guess that doesn't make me the first in my family.


As we got into the taxi and I told the driver where we were headed, he did a visible double-take, gave us a withering "once over," shook his head and drove out into traffic - clearly he thought we were nuts, but it wasn't clear why he thought that.  We didn't notice anything unusual until we got closer to the Square and realized that we could hear chanting and music.  Duh! Sunday morning, St. Peter's Square, a ton of Catholics on the loose - where better to have a Mass celebrating something? But then, we noticed that St. Peter's Basilica itself was covered with four enormous banners with the pictures of four people painted on them.  And as we got out of the taxi at the foot of the Square, we realized that there weren't thousands of people in the square, but hundreds of thousands.  We had stumbled into the beatification ceremony for these four future saints, and we weren't getting out any time soon.


As I have said, and those who know me even vaguely can readily attest, I'm a cynic when it comes to things spiritual.  But even I was startled and felt a little buzz up my spine as I realized that the chanting voice was that of the Pope!  As a well equipped tourist, I had a video camera with a X225 digital zoom, and I held the camera up, zoomed in on the alter, then cranked up the magnification until I could see the cantor - sure enough, it was Pope John-Paul II, not yet subito santo,  but impressive nonetheless.  We were left speechless, however, when a pathway opened for us to go to the front of the communion line to receive from a papal stand-in of some sort.  Once there, however, we seemed to have a pretty good vantage point so we hung around and sure enough here comes the famous Popemobile down a little street right in front of us...and it's carrying the Pope.  He wasn't there for long, but Liz and I were within arm's length of this guy for a few seconds. I've no doubt that some people whom I know and love would've lost their cookies right then and there, but it was too short.  In seconds he was gone, waving at the crowd as though he really loved them - which I'm convinced he did.  I have a short videotape of this encounter somewhere but it doesn't bring out the same feelings or emotions that Liz and I felt.  Kelly, Steve, Liz and I spent the remainder of the day being tourists, buying rosary boxes from the museum, but we didn't talk much about our serendipitous encounter with the pope in St. Perter's Square.