Itchhiker

We left Florence the day after Easter. We'd been at a friend's party for Easter, eating fabulous food and reconnecting with people who barely remembered us. The kids ran around outside in the olive groves for hours on end.

The next day, we headed south to Naples, checking into the Palazzo Decumani and then heading out for Neapolitan pizza. At bedtime, William came across the hall and asked me to take a look at his back. "Mom, what's this? Petey said I have something on my back." He lifted up his pajama top.

I apologize, because, in about 10 seconds, you're going to start itching. I wish I could arrange for you all to read this simultaneously, because then you'd all itch at exactly the same time, and that would be kind of cool. If it makes you feel better, I'm itching, too, as I write that there, in the middle of his back, was the butt-end of a gluttonous tick. Done itching? Okay.

Apparently, William had picked up more than eggs in the fields the day before. He took it pretty well, considering. I'd read somewhere that if you roll a tick around and around in a circle for a few minutes, it will get dizzy and back out of its own accord. Apparently, Italian ticks are made of hearty stuff, because when I stopped, it just sat there with its head firmly dug into my son's flesh as if it rides the Tilt-a-Whirl every day.

So then I remembered reading that you should grab a tick firmly with tweezers and pull slowly and gently, so you don't separate the head from the body (though decapitation was too good for it, in my opinion).

Five minutes later, the tweezers were in the garbage along with half of a tick.

Luckily, a friend's husband is a cardiologist in Naples. She told us to go to a specific, distant pharmacy and drop his name. So the next morning, we took a long taxi ride to the farmacia (pharmacy, dummy), rushed in, and breathlessly dropped the name that would deliver us from the buzz-kill in William's back. The blank, disdainful look on the pharmacist's face said it all: She'd never heard of any Dario Leosco, and she was not going to pull a tick out of William's back. In any case, she told us we had to go to Loreto Crispi, a small clinic nearby. We did, in the same taxi, as the driver had become deeply involved in our drama and was waiting for us outside the farmacia.

Three doctors (or one and two nurses, or three nurses, or three guys who came in for some shade; they all wore white and smoked) confabbed about the removal of a zecca from a little boy's back. All three of them worked over William, and as far as I can tell, the only difference between the clinic and our hotel room the night before was a swab of alcohol and the velocity of the Italian spoken.

First they dug in with tweezers, then they broke the needle off a syringe and used that to pick it out. William was a trooper, but did whimper a bit. We have it on video for his rehearsal dinner.

The most doctor-like of the bunch wrote a prescription for a cream, then another, grudgingly, for an internal antibiotic. He told me that one should never pull out a tick, but pour a little alcohol on it. One of the nurse-doctors added his own pantomime of a drunk tick stumbling out of the Williamville saloon. Then he called us two taxis (there were seven of us). When William got up off the table, the nursemen game him a high five and a "bravo."

After some "grazie mille's" and no payment of any kind, we headed down to the port to catch the hydrofoil to Capri. It was a surreal transition from "My son has a tick in his back and three Italian men are pulling it out - I think" to "I'm wandering the narrow streets of Capri in sandals and a jaunty scarf," but I quickly got my mind around it.

Italian phrase of the day: "Cerca di non fare un prurito quando dico: Zecca." (Try not to itch when I say: Tick.)