Bhutan princess

    Italian trains are clean, modern, and very fast. Unfortunately, they are not always on time. Lasse and I were dismayed to discover, when we arrived at the train station in Verona for a train to Venice, that a delayed train would cut short our day in Venice by an hour and a half. Resigned to the wait, we whiled away some time at the very inadequate station cafe, where coffee was to be drunk at stand-up tables. Then we found some chairs in a passageway and sat down to read (me) and do whatever it is that people do on their smart phones (Lasse).

                      (Later, 20 more minutes were added to "ritardo delay.)

    Among the many people hurrying through the passageway appeared a startling apparition: a young Asian woman in a yellow dress as bright as sunshine itself, cadmium paint straight from the tube, full-skirted and midi-length. She wore a large red necklace. Two red bows on top of her head pinned back her sleek black hair. Lasse said later he thought she might be dressed in an anime costume or that she was a part of a theater performance. But no. She was just a young woman in a yellow dress traveling in Italy.
    Lasse was sitting in the end chair in the row of chairs. I sat next to him, and the young woman in the yellow dress sat down in the empty chair next to me. We chatted a bit – that is to say, she chatted. She was dimpled and twittery, like a yellow canary, in a constant movement of excited little gestures. She told me, and Lasse on the other side of me, that she was from Bhutan and was taking the train to Munich to meet her husband. Then she jumped up and twirled – or, no; I think she just seemed to be twirling  – and, by-passing me entirely, asked Lasse if he would take a picture of her with her phone. Lasse was pleased to comply (to say the least). She walked a few steps to the center of the passageway, set down her bag, and posed prettily for her photograph, her bright yellow dress and red ribbons looking as out of place in the dingy Italian train station as a vase of roses set on the floor there. She cast an aura of control over her own dominion in the space around her, a princess commanding her space. People gave her a wide berth, maybe for that reason or maybe because she was having her picture made. Lasse took two pictures, then handed her phone back to her, and they sat down, one on either side of me.
    Lasse returned to Facebook, and the black-haired young woman in the yellow dress looked at her phone to see how the pictures turned out. She wasn’t satisfied. Would Lasse take another picture, this time without her bag at her feet? Again she posed, smiled, looked utterly charming and bizarre, and again Lasse snapped the picture and returned the phone to her. She sat down to look at the picture. Satisfied with this one, she jumped up, thanked Lasse with a dimpled smile, and sped off to her train.
    Lasse has regretted a thousand times over that he didn’t say, when he handed her phone back to her, “Now may I take a picture of you with my camera?” But the best picture, the one the camera of my mind has captured for me, is of Lasse being so pleased to take a picture of the Bhutan princess posing so prettily in her yellow dress in the Verona train station as streams of people hurried by without taking notice.