I’m just back from three weeks in Italy with the family. We started in Rome, where Violence, on the taxi ride from the airport, shouted, “Wait… Rome has RUINS!?” as if we’d been hiding this from him. (Thank you, Rick Riordan, for making ruins interesting to twelve-year-olds.)

From Rome, we went to Siena, then Venice, and finally to Lake Garda.

Travelling reminds me that even when the surroundings are different — shopkeepers are speaking another language and I can’t figure out the street signs and I may have just eaten a mushroom or it could have been pork and it’s rather disconcerting not to know which — people are in many ways the same.

When two little boys are poking at one another in the restaurant, and their mother raises her eyebrows, I know exactly what she’s thinking. When they keep going, and she scolds them in Italian, I know exactly what she’s saying. Because people are people are people.

This particular people is a little jet lagged at the moment, but slowly easing back into the writing routine!

I hope your own summers have been fabulous so far!

My son goes to an elementary school that’s more than a hundred years old. There was an open house this week, and I was helping at a table of memorabilia. We had Parent-Teacher Association notes from 1916, class photos from the 1940s, and — most popular with our visitors — a principal’s record of punishments, displayed alongside the strap.

Visitors found names in the punishment book of someone who’d gone to prison, someone who’d become head of maintenance at the Vancouver School Board (in the book for “repeated misbehaviour”), and a lot of little boys who couldn’t sit still. Some seniors remembered very clearly what it felt like to get the strap!

Here are a few other scenes my fellow volunteers and I witnessed…

“Johnny”

One man, dressed in a suit and tie, came along and looked at the punishment book. “I’m on this page four times, and I was only nine,” he said.

A few minutes later, a group of three men looked at the same page. “There’s Johnny,” one of them said. “Most likely to become a criminal.”

The suit-and-tie man wandered back over. The group of three looked up.

“JOHNNY!” they said.

Eleanor and Daphne

Eleanor was signing in at the guest book when she noticed the name above hers.

“I know Daphne,” she said. “We were in school at the same time. Is she still here?”

The volunteer looked around the room and spotted Daphne.

“Daphne!” the first woman called. “It’s Eleanor!”

And they had their own mini-reunion in front of the guest book.

The Strap

A older woman wandered by and glanced at the principal’s punishment records.

“Are you in there?” we asked.

“No, not me,” she said.

A few minutes later, she was back. This time, she was with a middle-aged woman who was scanning the pages carefully.

“This is my daughter,” the older woman said. “She refuses to believe me.”