“The literal meaning of ciabatta in Italian is slipper, which identifies its shape.” Which would explain the square-toed shoes my wife brought me from Italy once. The ciabatta has achieved a not insubstantial level of popularity in Austria. On a snowy day when you have not eaten lunch because it was too nasty to go out and you’ve missed your fast train home by three minutes because you trudged more slowly than expected you can go to a bakery at the train station and purchase a “mozarella ciabatta” and they give you, in a smallish paper bag embellished with the bakery’s logo which is such a snug fit on the sandwich (a ciabatta sliced down the middle and filled with slices of mozarella, tomatoes and lettuce) that you’re tempted to just tear it to shreds like a Republican going to work on a national budget surplus except you might want it later to pack part of the sandwich if you don’t finish it before your train comes. You can then munch on this sandwich while waiting for the slow train which comes 11 minutes later, wondering why your mozarella ciabatta tastes like dirt until you realize, as your mouth is so oily, it’s not dirt, it’s olive oil. Not extra virgine, no doubt; more like the Christina Aguilera of olive oils wagging its thong-clad booty there in your sandwich.
To be polite, you discontinue your eating on the train as you’re wedged in next to some woman. Then the seat across the aisle clears out when a group of people disembark at the town where Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis and you scoot over there and unpack your mozarella ciabatta. A young man who had been rushing to take the empty seat but was too slow because he was coming from further back in the train but, after standing up, couldn’t return to his old seat without losing face sits down opposite you. You, unable to replace your sandwich without losing face either carefully munch. Carefully because a ciabatta has a crispy crust and you want to avoid appearing too gross and getting crumbs all over the floor or, even worse, down the front of your coat.
You finish and lo, crumbs down the front of your coat. The young man has a slightly unfriendly look on his face which is understandable because you beat him to the seat. You carefully brush crumbs off your coat.
[SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ NEXT PARAGRAPH UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY SEEN LORD OF THE RINGS SOMETHING-SOMETHING (PART THREE)] You know the scene towards the end of the third Lord of the Rings film, where the ring falls into the lava in slow motion? Your largest crumb does the same slowmo thing in a textbook arc from your coat, boing, onto the young man’s left thigh. You resist your first impulse, which would be to lean over and brush it off; and you resist your second, which would be to smile broadly and say, “I’m so blogging this, dude.” Instead, you say, “sorry ’bout that.” You make a motion with your shoulders that you hope could be an apologetic shrug, or it could be sort of a loosening-up thing because you’re a bit sore from your workout at the extreme full-contact dirty fighting club but, in retrospect, you fear probably looked more like a nervous twitch which, on second thought, would not be the worst interpretation in that particular situation because who’s going to hassle a crazy man with forty pounds on you just for getting a crumb on your leg that smells like dirt? The crumb, not your leg?
The young man mutters something which seems to mean something along the lines of “no problem,” because he gingerly flicks the crumb off his leg into the filthy slush on the black linoleum floor of the commuter train. The two of you sit there avoiding eye contact until the next stop, where he gets off.