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came to get me, she would frighten him off.
    Today I was watching three adolescent gulls on the terrace next to ours. They were practicing flying. The biggest one tried first. Running across the tiles precariously near the edge, he lifted his wings and immediately was transformed from an ungainly creature in the wrong element to a thing of beauty. Flap, flap and he rises a foot above the roof, then subsides and folds his wings. His siblings try next. The wind comes up, blowing sharply from the East. I turn to put down our terrace umbrella. It tends to fall over in a strong wind even without a storm. Once, at the beginning of summer, it blew over and smashed into our bonsai tree. The pot cracked right down the middle and the tree toppled over, exposing its tangled roots. It could have hurt anyone sitting there.
    That’s how things work. You can’t anticipate them. I turn the crank and the umbrella folds down. The smallest gull, the one I’ve noticed is always last when its parent comes with food, always standing at a respectful distance, is starting out quite near the edge, stumbling along and then—if he’d been a boy I’d say he feels a need to prove himself—flaps boldly and without warning tumbles over the edge. Wasn’t ready, poor creature. I go in and tell Hannah that a gull has fallen.
    â€œDon’t go down, you’ll just upset yourself,” she says.
    â€œDon’t patronize me,” I say and head for the front door. Making sure not to fall, I go cautiously down the steps to the creaky old lift. I hate using it by myself because it sometimes gets stuck between floors, and once we had to wait for over an hour for the mechanic. But at least Hannah knows where I am. If it takes too long she’ll worry and check. Inside the lift I reprimand myself for my anxiety. I used to be confident. Now every potential disaster frightens me, from the collapse of the economy and the victory of that clown Berlusconi to the blister on my little toe that might turn into a life-threatening infection.
    I walk—shamble would be more accurate—out the big front door that is getting almost too heavy to open—and see the gull, seemingly not injured at all, standing on the sidewalk in front of our palazzo. Like all young gulls he is a sort of fawn white. He cocks his head and looks at me with his red eye, then looks upward, as if wondering how he can get back. Our friend Arianne who lives on Campo di Fiori says that the fish man she uses on the square has a gull that comes every noon when the market is breaking up to collect his scraps.
    I wish I’d brought something to offer him but I’m quite sure he wouldn’t let me pick him up. He starts rushing at the wall flapping his wings, but only lifts a few feet. Then he waddles disconsolately down the street towards the café. Maybe he’ll pick up some stale
cornetti.
Every few steps he tries another assault on the wall—a little the way an adolescent boy, powered by testosterone, might try to go against gravity. There was nothing more to do.
    â€œWell?” Hannah asked when I came into the living room. I felt flooded by a sense of shame, as if I were the one running at the wall and failing to rise. Life is made up of so many tests.
    â€œHis wings look powerful,” I said. “But he has always been a little smaller than his siblings. I guess he just wasn’t ready. Maybe he was just trying to impress his mother.” Hannah didn’t laugh. She patted my hand, then sighed, and glanced down at her Olivetti. It was clear she wanted to get back to her work.
    There was no point in going to my room and riffling through my aborted poems. I went back to the terrace and leaned over the wall. Our remaining gulls were napping between the red roof tiles, the mother sitting serenely on a chimney surveying the sky for threats to her offspring. After brushing off the tiny red spiders that ran along the edge and had