It felt like we were extras in a scene from a science fiction movie, the kind where all the people are gone and only the buildings remain. As my wife Paula and I crossed Venice’s Piazza San Marco – St. Mark’s Square, one of the most iconic bucket-list destinations in the world –...
Isolation revelation: more love, more friendship, more kindness
“You know, everybody dies,” Jenny Fields tells her son T.S. Garp in John Irving’s The World According to Garp. “My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die, too. So will you. “The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a...
Abusing utensils and striving for gratitude in a troubled season
The other day, I burned a grilled cheese sandwich that I was making for my lunch. It’s my go-to noon meal in France, and over the years that we’ve been here, I’ve been perfecting it, probably because in France it’s natural to want to make a good impression on your food. For the...
Searching for small miracles in the pandemic’s perpetual present
“FYI: It’s possible I’ve got COVID-19.” The text message, via Signal, arrived a while back from my son Brendan, huddled in his apartment in Phnom Penh, 6,200 miles away from our home in the rural French countryside. As my heart skipped a few beats and I tried to beat back the panic, he...
COVID-19 takes the harsh measure of a once-great nation
To what extent is a nation the sum of its people? It’s a question I ask myself when I look at the America that is just now starting to come to grips with the worst global crisis since World War II. On the one hand, every day there is another example on social...
Life in the time of Corona: Riding out the storm in the French countryside
“It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over such a small thing.” – Boromir The Lord of the Rings When the plague reached Paris in 1348, anyone who could afford to flee the city to the safety of the countryside did so immediately. It was with...
Is coronavirus killing compassion, or just exposing selfishness?
Greetings from Europe – where the viruses come from! I went to sleep at home in France thinking that the coronavirus was a global public health problem we all needed to attack together. I woke up to discover that it was a problem caused by those damn Europeans – people like me –...
This is not a drill: Europe in the time of coronavirus
“Where is your next trip?” By a huge margin, that is the question we are asked most often by our village neighbors and friends. Our reputation precedes us, of course, and it is well-deserved. We are often on the move, eager to see as much of the world as we can afford to...
Walk the Earth: Discovering a life on foot
We were on a path we had never walked before, in a dense, unfamiliar forest, on a warm but very windy day. As the path veered left, we walked hand-in-hand under a canopy of multi-shade green. The soft grass underfoot cushioned our footfalls, and the wind hissed loudly through the branches above. Suddenly,...
