A Year in Provence

April 1997. Avignon, France. A small boutique hotel steps away from the Pope's Palace.

After a a belly full of red wine and French cuisine, I called it a night. My first night in Provence. My little guest room. Everything was so very French - the faucets, the duvet, the large, French door-like windows. I loved it.

4 am. I rolled over. I heard a sound. I opened my eyes and saw light flickering through the heavy curtains and a man's silhouette. I heard two blood curdling screams as his feet hit the pavement, two stories down.

Bolting out of my room, eyeglasses in hand, I frantically knocked on my colleague's door, calling her name 'Martha. Martha, it's me. Open up.'

It was a tiny hotel - 20 rooms, 3 floors - more like a big house. Yet no one opened their door. Except Martha. She turned on all the lights in her bedroom. She said something about thinking the screams were outside, not next door; something about my having good set of lungs.

The front desk clerk came upstairs to her room. He hadn't seen the thief, though my room was directly above the lobby. He asked me to go back into my room with him, to see if anything was taken. Lights on, bright as daylight, it still scared me. I realized my small purse was gone. I had left it on a table by the window. The night visitor had nabbed it on his way out. Luckily that's all he got - and what was in it was my house/car key, a nail file, a contact lens case. My passport, wallet, airline tickets were, luckily, across the room in my tote.

We went to the big windows in my room, leaning out and locking down at the ground below. The hotel's exterior was flat, smooth. Spiderman had climbed a pipe, in the shadow of the Papal Palace.

Unfortunately the swap with Spidey wasn't a fair shake. He took my empty purse, and left me with miserable anxiety. During the week-long trip, falling asleep became nearly impossible. Faced with a whacked out digestive system, sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion, I worried that this fear would overcome me, that I wouldn't ever want to travel again. But first I had to make it through the three remaining hours till daylight, not to mention the rest of a weeklong business trip.

I developed a few coping skills in addition to living a year's worth of worry in a week. I was fortunate that the only thing the thief took was my purse - keys to a Mazda and an apartment somewhere wouldn't do him an ounce of good.