When I got back to the dismal ticket office with the long wait, all the seats were taken. I looked at the board: 292. My face was still flush, but not leaking as much and the coughing was under control. I was planning on ignoring the daily limit on those throat lozenges, popping a new…
Category: Anecdotes
Conversations with few words, Part I: Spontaneous combustion
I was finally alone. After over a week of amazing travel, incredible people and fantastic, rambling conversations into all hours of the night, I sent my navigationally-challenged friend through the turnstile at Atocha to take a wrong train and I was on my own. Just me, my bags and my increasingly sore throat. I had…
There’s a moral in this story
When I boarded the train this morning inbound for Paris, I made a conscious decision to not stay in the same car with the overly anxious woman who’d been riding me in the ticket queue, and who was manically chainsmoking and pacing on the platform right up to the moment that the train arrived. So…
Becoming French
At the end of 2013 I submitted the paperwork to apply for French citizenship. Ten months later I received a letter telling me that my request had been granted, and in that very moment I became French. The following month I was invited to an official ceremony where I, and many other immigrants, received my certificate of nationality…
A long post about life, death and stuff
When I moved to France in 1998, it was hard to choose what to bring. I tried to keep it to a minimum, to those things that were most important to me, the ones I couldn’t live without (I actually got great mileage out of that cutting mat, even if I never used the set of…
Eating my way through Ireland
My former memories of Ireland are fleeting and stretch back over 15 years to a brief trip to Dublin via ferry to Cork. I remember waking up stiff after sleeping a few hours in a hallway with my rucksack serving as a pillow, and queuing up at the counter for some semblance of breakfast. While…
Hot dogs & Mac n’ cheese
In the summer of 2007, I took a long road trip in an old Chevy Blazer that I bought on the side of the road for $1500. The trip started in Wisconsin, just north of Madison, where I was struggling with decisions about what to do with my grandparents’ house, a place full of my…
The unfortunate incident with the turkey leg
My mother-in-law asks about lunch at breakfast, then about dinner at lunch. Often she’ll ask about the next day’s meals even before dinner. Her questions take the form of, “So what if we ate that smoked salmon tomorrow?” Her name is Andrée. She retired early after enduring a stroke that left her hemiplegic. She can…
