April 2nd, 2005: I was 15 and standing in the middle of the mammoth St. Peter’s Square. It was incredibly hot. My shoulders were in the process of burning. And there were so many people. I had already stopped into a little shop to buy a miniature copy of the paintings in the sistine chapel so the bag was hanging lopsided from my wrist.
This was one of the last days of a school trip. A trip that was so very expensive; I don’t know how or why my parents afforded it. I had sat down at the dinner table and asked on a whim, not actually assuming they would say yes. Years later I would have to beg and plead to drive 560 miles to Virginia to visit a boyfriend. But a 10 day trip to Europe, no problem.
The square was beautiful, stunning, and yet I was feeling a little tired of it all. What felt much more interesting was the idea of a cold drink and somewhere to sit. But there is nowhere to sit. So I stood there and people watched. At some point two older students, Brad and Marc came to join me. Brad looked around a bit and then pointed up to a building to the right of us. He said the second window from the right was where the pope lived. But all I saw was a bunch of identical, nondescript windows.
I rolled my eyes and nodded as if to say I got the joke. Both of them were two grade levels ahead of me. While everyone else spent the trip drinking each night, I was still underage even in this part of the world. I was also incredibly shy and while they all crammed into one of the hotel rooms to party, I either spent my time going out for a quiet walk or reading in bed. So I just assumed it was a silly prank to pull on a sophomore. Besides, with all the beautiful spots in Vatican City, wouldn’t the pope’s living quarters be incredibly grand? It seemed foolish that his window would look identical to every other window in the building. So, I shook my head and turned to go find some shade.
It wasn’t until hours later when we all sat down to dinner that night that one of the teachers asked if we had all seen the pope’s window. And when everyone nodded yes, it dawned on me. When Brad had pointed to that plain window, second from the right, he actually had been pointing at the Pope’s living corridors. And I, in my self-righteousness, had ignored it and turned and walked away. I spent the rest of the night bemoaning my stupidity, thinking maybe, at some point in my life, I could come back here and see it again.
Our plane left early the next morning though, so after dinner we headed back to the hotel to begin packing our things. I shared a room with another girl, who threw on the little television in the corner to add some noise as we packed. We ended up watching a national news station because it was the only channel in English, which might normally have been uninteresting to two teenage girls, except that there was some pretty significant news this evening. The pope, the same pope who we had just been a mere feet from hours earlier, was dead. We stopped and sat where we were and watched in awe. Now I felt even more stupid for having missed that dumb window.
The only thing that could’ve made the situation worse was the look on my teacher’s face when I told him hours later, as millions of people began to descend on the city for the funeral, that I might have lost my plane ticket.