Iceland

July 24, 2017. Tarmac of the Reykjavik Airport.

    I told Stephanie I shouldn’t start writing my blog after the forty minute random security check because my writing would be too poisoned by the frustration, but maybe it’s time for a venomous blog entry. Maybe what I want, right now, is exactly, to capture the tang of aggravation at the end of a luxurious long holiday in Europe, on a flight traveling backwards in time, such that we will arrive in Seattle only 45 minutes on the clock after we’ve left Iceland, and the anger, too, will be forgotten.
    Amelia is ten rows behind me, in the center seat, alone, and she is sweating with the anxieties of this airport, which included being guided to a self-serve baggage check-in that didn’t move because the computers were all stalled, and the attendants didn’t communicate or, it seemed, do anything to get things moving. Eventually a line worked and we put our bags through it. I think. It mostly included the random security check after security and after passport control that started with what seemed to be a simple malfunction scanning our boarding passes through a turnstile; but one person after the next asking for help was shuffled to a long line and told, You’ve been randomly selected for a security check. I yelled out across the crowd to Maisie, and she wasn’t sure what to do. When Stephanie was also selected, we shouted for the girls to go ahead to the gate. Forty minutes later, and 12 minutes before our plane was supposed to depart (the engines are revving just now, twenty minutes late), Stephanie and I joined our daughters, but only after being in a long line with little explanation, and then given a bakery ticket, and then herded into another room, and then getting tickets called, and, in my case, culled into another room where order didn’t matter anymore. By the time two young dudes emptied my pockets and patted my hands and feet and hips and rifled through my bag without really looking and then sent me down an unsigned corridor, I still didn’t know where I was headed. But a few minutes later, and I was in line for boarding with my family, Amelia’s skin still jumping.
    It doesn’t help that we haven’t eaten a full meal since lunch driving to Munich. The costs of things in Iceland is remarkable, starting with our $230 bus ride from the airport to the city (round trip), but reaffirmed continuously with $40 paperbacks and $20 bowls of soup. We thought the food on Icelandair was exploitative, but it turns out to be just costs. The end result is that I reflected more on how it is that poverty and obesity correlate in our country that subsidizes corn and wheat such that processed foods end up cheaper than fresh fruits and whole grains: while in Iceland, we ate burgers and fries ($85), hotdogs, a bag of peanuts, and prepackaged sandwiches ($60), and I can feel the bloat in my stomach. Splurging can’t happen always.
    Surely with more time and experience, we could negotiate costs and resources better. But in the meantime, I remember again and again that one of my joys in traveling is the adventure of other cultures and architectures and people that doesn’t strain my resources, because it allows me to feel expansive in my movements and spirit and feel able to prolong and return a trip. Costs oppressed me.
    And we never once handled the local currency, using plastic for everything, including visits to public toilets.
    For Amelia, the airport was a concentration of absurdities. For myself, Iceland in general was the hardest visit.
    But yesterday was spectacular day. I rented a car and we drove the Golden Circle. The greens of Iceland are such a deep contrast to the volcanic reds and basalts, and everywhere we drove, there was some new shape and color and sweep of green and mountain to marvel at. We stopped at a national park that features the dramatic separation of tectonic plates through which we walked. Hordes of people walked the boardwalks through the rock and over streams, the ocean just beyond that.
     And we visited the geyser from which all other geysers are named, and found so much wonder in what I thought was just going to be a blow-and-leave encounter: the eerie geothermal blues and skinned-knee rusted mud around them, the steaming, breathing earth up and down the hill, and Strokkur, sending out its shocking violent burst into the sky every 4 to 8 minutes.
    The waterfall Gullfloss also drew a big crowd, but we didn’t hear the water and couldn’t see it from the visitor center above, and everyone emerging from the stairs looked hot, and I joked, disapppointed. No one’s got the kite-in-a-windstorm expression they had at Geysir, I said. But that turned our to be crazy. Because as soon as we saw its wide, layered mouth, it was stunning, and then every step brought further awe, as one set of falls turned into two, the deeper tier more dramatic than the first, and then a rainbow flew from one end, and then the whole bow, 180 degrees was visible over the falls, and the greens on either side, and the mountains and glaciers behind them, made the falls still more bright, and then the colors of the rainbow deepened until it was the crispest, most palpable rainbow of my life, and then a double rainbow, and then something I didn’t even think possible: in the mists and dewy grass right before me, the bow of rainbow nearly completed a circle, a 320 degrees of shimmering color, and the waterfalls, as we got closer and closer, more textured and ferocious. Good one, water!
    We were out in the wilds of Iceland and it was getting late, but I wasn’t worried about driving in the dark as the sun would never set. By 9:00 pm, we had one last thing to do, which is to swim in one of the hot spring pools of the secret lagoon. The floor of the pool was pebbled, and little burbling geysers spilled into the pool on its outer edges, the boardwalk around it all a welcome way to cool down and behold the sharp greens and rusted pockets of geothermal water away from the swim noodles and sweating glasses of wine and cameras encased in plastic.
    We saw many sheep. We waited for some rustlers to herd their dozens of horses across the bridge and down the road and finally off it. We mused at the unearthly colors and plumes of steam.
    And now we are on a plane home.

Italian Anniversary

July 20, 2017. Trento, Italy.

    Twenty years ago, I married a woman I knew to be kind, smart, thoughtful, wise, beautiful and tender. We travelled to Italy--after giving a couple boys rides from our wedding to the ferry, or something like that--Stephanie remembers we didn't get to just get married and find ourselves alone in each other’s company--and in Italy, we adventured and ate and considered the kinds of lifestyle we wanted for ourselves, and also what we loved in Seattle. Within seven years, we would have three children and a minivan; and twenty years later, we would return to Northern Italy to celebrate the resonance of our marriage, and we’d do it not as partners, but as a family, in the multiplying loves of our two lives become five, the gelato and piazzas and evening promenades something together in which we rejoice.
    Stephanie and I have different memories of our visit to Verona. We both experienced the opera Macbeth in the first century arena, and walks through the old city and by the river, and the strange youth hostel that was a monastery for hundreds of years and now, as a hostel, continues a code of silence and separation and shame; but I didn’t do well in the heat.
    In neighboring Padua, our daughters likewise thirsted and melted. The cathedrals and history were magnificent, but we weren’t truly happy until we settled into the restaurant our B&B host, Filippe, recommended, with its eclectic and in places raunchy decor and its terrific lasagnes. We came into close contact with the bones of saints, so claimed, and with towers once inhabited by Galileo and Copernicus and I wondered at Shakespeare setting his Shrew here in the old university city studded by ancient Roman history; but as a family, our two best moments were meeting Filippe at the B&B (and re-discovering close-talking and the intimacy and generosity of Italy), and finally sitting and laughing in the Enoteca dei Tadi, the restaurant. And perhaps, with Stephanie, the less-visited but soaring Cathedral of St. Giustina posed a special meditation for us on art, history, architecture, saints.
    Trento, meanwhile, is a mountain town, theoretically cooler, with many more calm, shaded places for the girls to feel what it is to be in Italy. Maisie says, if she had to move to one country just for the food, it would be Italy. Or France. Either way, in Trento, after a hair-raising turn around the block a couple of times to get into a parking garage, we arrived through three locked doors to a beautiful, spacious apartment with three bedrooms, each devoted to a different European painter, three bathrooms--two with bidets--a living room and large kitchen; and this has been a welcome base for the kids who immediately went to work playing hide and seek To provide a sense of the apartment, Sophie only found Amelia after ten minutes, Amelia popping out of a cupboard.
    But then, here are the streets, with their hidden alleys opening up into corridors of restaurants and many centuries old churches, and the medieval apartments stacked high in different lively colors, but also faded Tyrolese murals on the outside of many of them, and in one shocking opening, a grand piazza with every direction a wonder, centering around a powerful fountain of Neptune and his trident--from which Trento gets its name--a cathedral, a palace, and towers here and there steepled in Zolnai tile, which reminds us that Trento was once bucking under the Austro-Hungarian empire.
    In our apartment, the host left us a Sacher torte with a fondant ribbon and the message, “Hoppy 20th Anniversary!” It made me tearful to see it. Later on, it was just tasty. With the Buonconsiglio Castle two blocks away and charming streets and the Dolomites all around us and restaurants proving Maisie right over and over, our family together, our love indulged and its harmonies and expansiveness stirred, Trento was a fine place to spend this day.
    In the morning, we spent a long time viewing the archaeological exhibits and frescoes in the castle. A highlight was a tower with 12 panels designed like tapestries capturing the life of Trento for each month, with a fantasy about how aristocrats and peasants should live aside each other as the peasants happily served their masters. But we also saw artifacts from the town over two thousand years old, and older artifacts from Egypt that noblemen collected to show their love of culture. I tried to view the artwork shown with appreciation and new understandings, but I ended up appreciating it even more in the most disrespectful way possible, laughing at medieval baby Jesuses with sculpted abs or baby Jesus airing out his genitals or the bishop princes with gossamer armor and pointed nipples and sultry poses and come hither eyes.
    I had already gone running, with the mausoleum on the hill facing us closed to the public until nine, and missing that mountain trail already, had already purchased a beautiful bouquet of flowers and some artificially painted ones from a man who kept insisting I was German in the Piazza Duomo, and had time to prepare scrambled eggs, pastries and yoghurt before anyone else was up, but the best moment of the day was yet to come, and it was simple and affirming:
    In the afternoon, Stephanie and I went to the big square and sat with two large, minted drinks and wrote each other anniversary letters. It not only ended in writing honoring our marriage, the very act captured who we are and what we love in each other, taking moments to hold hands and take each other in, and radiating in and through and capturing, the way writing can do, the sharply yapping dogs at the table beside us just a moment, the singing of Italian, the palace and cathedral above us, the mountains around it all, our marriage and our future around us too, and the minted drinks intoxicating and sweet.

July 20, 2017. Trento, Italy.

    Twenty years ago, I married a woman I knew to be kind, smart, thoughtful, wise, beautiful and tender. We travelled to Italy--after giving a couple boys rides from our wedding to the ferry, or something like that--Stephanie remembers we didn't get to just get married and find ourselves alone in each other’s company--and in Italy, we adventured and ate and considered the kinds of lifestyle we wanted for ourselves, and also what we loved in Seattle. Within seven years, we would have three children and a minivan; and twenty years later, we would return to Northern Italy to celebrate the resonance of our marriage, and we’d do it not as partners, but as a family, in the multiplying loves of our two lives become five, the gelato and piazzas and evening promenades something together in which we rejoice.

    Stephanie and I have different memories of our visit to Verona. We both experienced the opera Macbeth in the first century arena, and walks through the old city and by the river, and the strange youth hostel that was a monastery for hundreds of years and now, as a hostel, continues a code of silence and separation and shame; but I didn’t do well in the heat.

    In neighboring Padua, our daughters likewise thirsted and melted. The cathedrals and history were magnificent, but we weren’t truly happy until we settled into the restaurant our B&B host, Filippe, recommended, with its eclectic and in places raunchy decor and its terrific lasagnes. We came into close contact with the bones of saints, so claimed, and with towers once inhabited by Galileo and Copernicus and I wondered at Shakespeare setting his Shrew here in the old university city studded by ancient Roman history; but as a family, our two best moments were meeting Filippe at the B&B (and re-discovering close-talking and the intimacy and generosity of Italy), and finally sitting and laughing in the Enoteca dei Tadi, the restaurant. And perhaps, with Stephanie, the less-visited but soaring Cathedral of St. Giustina posed a special meditation for us on art, history, architecture, saints.

    Trento, meanwhile, is a mountain town, theoretically cooler, with many more calm, shaded places for the girls to feel what it is to be in Italy. Maisie says, if she had to move to one country just for the food, it would be Italy. Or France. Either way, in Trento, after a hair-raising turn around the block a couple of times to get into a parking garage, we arrived through three locked doors to a beautiful, spacious apartment with three bedrooms, each devoted to a different European painter, three bathrooms--two with bidets--a living room and large kitchen; and this has been a welcome base for the kids who immediately went to work playing hide and seek To provide a sense of the apartment, Sophie only found Amelia after ten minutes, Amelia popping out of a cupboard.

    But then, here are the streets, with their hidden alleys opening up into corridors of restaurants and many centuries old churches, and the medieval apartments stacked high in different lively colors, but also faded Tyrolese murals on the outside of many of them, and in one shocking opening, a grand piazza with every direction a wonder, centering around a powerful fountain of Neptune and his trident--from which Trento gets its name--a cathedral, a palace, and towers here and there steepled in Zolnai tile, which reminds us that Trento was once bucking under the Austro-Hungarian empire.

    In our apartment, the host left us a Sacher torte with a fondant ribbon and the message, “Hoppy 20th Anniversary!” It made me tearful to see it. Later on, it was just tasty. With the Buonconsiglio Castle two blocks away and charming streets and the Dolomites all around us and restaurants proving Maisie right over and over, our family together, our love indulged and its harmonies and expansiveness stirred, Trento was a fine place to spend this day.

    In the morning, we spent a long time viewing the archaeological exhibits and frescoes in the castle. A highlight was a tower with 12 panels designed like tapestries capturing the life of Trento for each month, with a fantasy about how aristocrats and peasants should live aside each other as the peasants happily served their masters. But we also saw artifacts from the town over two thousand years old, and older artifacts from Egypt that noblemen collected to show their love of culture. I tried to view the artwork shown with appreciation and new understandings, but I ended up appreciating it even more in the most disrespectful way possible, laughing at medieval baby Jesuses with sculpted abs or baby Jesus airing out his genitals or the bishop princes with gossamer armor and pointed nipples and sultry poses and come hither eyes.

    I had already gone running, with the mausoleum on the hill facing us closed to the public until nine, and missing that mountain trail already, had already purchased a beautiful bouquet of flowers and some artificially painted ones from a man who kept insisting I was German in the Piazza Duomo, and had time to prepare scrambled eggs, pastries and yoghurt before anyone else was up, but the best moment of the day was yet to come, and it was simple and affirming:

    In the afternoon, Stephanie and I went to the big square and sat with two large, minted drinks and wrote each other anniversary letters. It not only ended in writing honoring our marriage, the very act captured who we are and what we love in each other, taking moments to hold hands and take each other in, and radiating in and through and capturing, the way writing can do, the sharply yapping dogs at the table beside us just a moment, the singing of Italian, the palace and cathedral above us, the mountains around it all, our marriage and our future around us too, and the minted drinks intoxicating and sweet.

Piran, Slovenia

July 18, 2017. Piran, Slovenia.

    I am looking over the Adriatic Sea and over two brightly colored pier bell boxes, a green and a red one, to the glow of a sunrise on a church at the sharp end of Piran, and across that, at Italy, and to my left, Croatia, a cappuccino warming my throat. It is no worse than Sophie had done last night, typing at a table for two late at night in the grand Tartini Square, children riding by on scooters and skateboards with flashing wheels, the raunch and rhythm of a Rocky Horror Picture Show on a stage energizing her writing despite the barrier of the Slovenian language.
    Piran has been an enchanting city for the past two nights. We leave for Padua today, and to Trento the day after that, where Stephanie and I will celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary; but the romance has been bright for us here, in the coastal town whose charm is visible up close in the narrow Venetian alleys and balconies and from its hills and towers, where the houses crowding tightly together resemble the red bow of a ship jutting out into the sea.
    Piran is small enough that any of us can go where we want without fear--Sophie and Maisie wandered off from the very beginning, to explore the town and eat ice cream--losing only for a moment our apartment up an almost invisible alley to the right of one large blue planter, one small one, and then a cozy alley up the hill, and then a sharp right--while Amelia, Stephanie and I went swimming on a busy strand of beach.
    Every moment seemed more full and joyful than the next. In our first evening, we ate in the row of restaurants leading to end of the peninsula, two men singing La Cucaracha behind Stephanie who helplessly grinned. The girls left us to chase the sunset that turned everything a deep orange. And then we discovered a show, though a Sunday night, dedicated to an international folk festival, in the center of the Tartini Square, and we watched Slovenian, Latvian, Spanish and Italian dances beneath the the shadow of a magically lit clock campanile over the left and right arms of majestic buildings bordering the plaza. We would never get up that tower, though it seemed an obvious attraction.
    Monday looked like this: going running up to the town walls and then through the cobbled streets, pastries by the water, a walk over the hill and down the coastal path towards the lake, bathing and wading in the ocean, walking back on the rocks of the beach but taking the stairs back up to the path when people got too naked, swimming and sitting on the shore at the start of town instead, finally getting dressed, returning to the square for fancy drinks, buying bread at the bakery, cheese at the market, chocolate at the chocolatier, returning to the apartment and eating Tünde's salami with the cheese and bread and drinking the wine our host left for us and playing hearts and bullshit during which no one could tell my lies or my truth as I became progressively loopier with sweet white wine, standing in the breeze in the yard of St. George’s Church and its high clock and bell tower, feeling the sun lower as we affectionately held each other and stood close to each other and watched the sunset paint the town its deeper hues, returning again to the square for burgers, gyros and salad and a show--Janet and Brett’s sexual awakening on their wedding night with the sweet Transylvanian transsexual.
    At some point, I was deliriously happy. Here’s when it was most pronounced: Deciding we didn’t need a full meal and that we could sit at a table with fruity drinks, and could go to the chocolatier, select truffles, and point to the edible tablets capturing key scenes from the Kama Sutra, and could go back and fill up on salami at the apartment, and laugh through the streets. It was the freedom, the beauty, the adventure, and all of us together, filling ourselves up with it and each other.

March back into Barcs

July 11, 2017. Barcs, Hungary.

    Two hours ago, we arrived at Tünde’s house in Barcs. She and her daughter, Maca, fed us soup and plum rolls as we caught up on news, about Dráva Völge, about her father and their dog passing, about people who have moved on or stayed. We have not yet ventured out into the old territories because it’s so hot, but in a moment, we will walk into town and feel that shadow of nostalgia on a layer of memory. I’ve been back most recently, so I’m more curious to watch Stephanie and the girls re-encounter this town and our romantic year again.

    It’s been a whirlwind since we all gathered together. From Esslingen and some anxiety about the train and meeting up with Stephanie, we successfully met her but then waited for an hour to rent a car and then drove a beast of a vehicle through traffic once we figured out how to make it go, and made our way to Salzburg, where the older two girls were having their final dinner with their orchestra buddies.

    We wandered streets and ate dinner in a place Stephanie and Maisie recognized once we were inside. And on a walk towards the restaurant where we knew Sophie and Amelia were eating their farewell dinner, Maisie requested a picture of her in Mama, which I discovered later to be the exact spot of their photograph seven years before. We didn't find daughters in the restaurant, though I heard some fun local music before coming back down to Stephanie and Maisie; but the next morning, we reunited in their hotel and got to ride the energy of their tour, teenagers on the move in their final ease with one another and their shared stories.

    Sophie and Amelia were in a space of confidence and joy that was delightful to see, and watching the three daughters together with that mix was utterly gratifying. Later in the morning, we returned to a playground they had loved when they were children seven years ago, and they recreated moments, feeling themselves older and happy.

    We found Barna and Zsofi, friends who'd left teaching at DVK to earn enough money to raise their new family in Vienna, and it was so good to see their new baby and their bright lives there in Austria. Zsofi is taking twenty months of government leave to take care of Péter, and Barna is commuting two hours each way to get to his job at the airport. Soon they will be moving back from the suburbs to Vienna proper, which will be more affordable than this tiny town, surprisingly, and closer to Barna’s brother and Zsofi’s sister; but in the meantime, they must lean a great deal on each other, not Austrian in Austria, no longer freely Hungarian in Hungary, and too busy for new friends. They are so devoted to Péter. The love was an immigrant’s love, made of sacrifice and some loneliness, I think, but big love.

    After another six hours, we marched back to Barcs, skirting around the back to arrive directly at the house of our host, Tünde; and later, we walked through a third of the town and cut the rest for a walk by the river. For me, everything felt perfectly familiar, and I found gratifying my sense of space and direction, how at home I was on the blocks of the town, like I’d just stepped away. It’s certainly not the same with the language, which needs a lot of warming up, but the streets, the smells, the textures: I could anticipate the next corner, and there’s something wishful and proud in that.

    The girls remembered experiences as we walked--running into their new teacher, Victor by the river, for example, or the approximate space of their music school; but I’m curious to know more of what it’s like inside them as they re-inhabit these special spaces.

July 12, 2017. Barcs.

    Tünde continued her generous hosting with a spread of meats, cheeses and pastries that wouldn’t all fit on the table in the morning, which, yesterday, we spent leisurely--reading, writing, talking, playing games. Maca and the girls played board games they’d once played at Tünde’s house in Lake Balaton, and here they were again, deriving more pleasure, Maca now almost 20, the others now in their teens.

       Stephanie and I admired Tünde’s lush garden and again we thought we could be more thoughtful and active with our own in Seattle--but I remembered this was one of the things we energetically thought we’d do differently when we returned from our year in Hungary, one of the things we never really did. Others: We thought we’d travel Washington State more, and on an importantly related belief, I thought we could try to keep our weekends more sacrosanct for family time. With weekend violin and viola lessons and my dance class and Maisie’s soccer games, that last piece falls apart, and so did all the other hopes and learnings from our year in Hungary. But Tünde’s flowers and fruit trees and grapevines and berry bushes are lush and maybe will inspire us once more. Barcs, for whatever anyone here might say against it, is incredibly fecund.

       The Grosskopfs walked into town just in time for lunch to shut down most of the shops; and also, when we last experienced Barcs at this time in the summer, we were so busy taking in our new world, perhaps we didn’t notice the emptiness of the town without its young students: Barcs presented itself as smaller and quieter than we remembered. But we had sodas in Old Gold, and Amelia tried out the new trampoline in the playground by the shopping plaza, and we looked for a bathing suit for Maisie in one of the several Chinese clothing stores, which took a very long time, and long enough that Sophie and I finally had to get out, and Sophie turned the corner while I saw a car that looked like the car that took us to Italy, Bosnia, Montenegro, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, Serbia, Romania, Germany, even across the Mediterranean to Greece--the license plate sounded right, too--and when I turned the corner to look for Sophie, there were Kata Göcsei and Kata Dévai with my daughter!

        I was hoping to bump into people I knew in town--but here were such good friends and people I was so anticipating, these two Katas, gathering at Old Gold to plan the dinner party we were going to attend that very night. Stephanie, Maisie and Amelia emerged from the store without a bathing suit. I loved watching the faces, watching Stephanie reunite, watching Kata and Kata see our daughters again after years. And a small part of me was also thinking about the fun drinks with fruit stuffed into the glasses that the Katas had before them on the table.

        I was sorry to hear about Dévai Kata’s father, for her sake, but also for ours: her parents came over often when we lived in their house, and Erzsebet and Lazlo invited us to their house several times, too--they were both so warm and tender, and showed so much humor and expression, communicating well without English (though perhaps our Hungarian was much better, too). Lazlo plied me with his pálinka, made it part of a joke. He was a good and sweet man.

        I was also excited for Dévai Kata, whose PhD was in the mail and who has published four articles now, and though she won’t be putting her degree to its fullest use, will teach in one context and maybe also another.

         And for Göcsei Kata, and the most brilliant smile in the world, I was so looking forward to meeting her boy and seeing once again her indomitable daughter, Zoé, who went to the village school with our girls and was their very best companion.

       And I liked being in the company of this friendship between the Katas, who bring out such teasing and joy and respect and love in each other.

       And there it was again last night, but with plates and plates of food they prepared, along with Horvath Kata--my mentor and our guide over that year. And Tibor, whom I quickly told had angered friends in Seattle over his Facebook posts promoting religious freedom over what he considers overweening North American protectiveness of transgender or gay rights, was there with a big Tibor smile, and Gábor, such a good friend over our year, who was always so willing with a big laugh and unembarrassed English.

       Tibor and I caught up with news from each school. I learned a little more from HKata about going more fully into teaching. Dévai Kata’s brother, Lackó, came over and spoke a fast Hungarian at me, but we talked about Victor Orban and Donald Trump, and then about Lacko’s father.

       And we ate quiche, a deer pörkölt, some other deer in a creamy fruit sauce, pasta salad, potato pancakes, salad greens, chicken wings, fat blackberries, and then several kinds of delectable cakes.

        We had a boisterous and easy time.

        But the most notable thing in the house that night (oh, and to be in that house that was our home for a year--this felt very good, too) besides young Barnabas, the fearless Göcsei imp with his toy car and little boy desire, was seeing all the girls again: The Dévai girls, Kata and Lili, are now taller than any of us Grosskopfs, and Kata is a young woman. Zoé is equally tall (why is everyone so tall?); and all the energy she had, all the charm, all the face-forward joy of her, it’s here again and feels perfectly natural in a vibrant teenager.

         The adults, the teenagers, we did a lot of laughing, and there was also some dancing and karaoke (with Let’s Dance and something else on the video box), and it felt like the party should never stop.

July 13, 2017. Barcs.

    Yesterday, after reading books and after Maca brought out the original German Settlers of Cataan to play with the girls, and after comparing Stephanie’s sweet version of French toast with Tünde’s salty version, and after we still later made and ate Caesar and Greek salads, we took the car ten kilometers out of town to Dráva Völge’s forestry campus in Középrigóc, to visit adored friends, Péter and Kriszta.

    Péter (and Kristza over his shoulder) has been my best correspondent, and they always seem to know exactly what we are up to (and these very words, I think, will be read by my father, my stepmother, and Péter and Kriszta, and I have no hope beyond that). Besides this, I value their humor, their intensity, their honesty, their charm and their friendship very much. I can laugh at the world with them. And they are so good with the kids, once little, now older: Kriszta and Péter engage with them and put them at ease.

    We ate and drank and took a good walk through the woods, ending at Lake 9, a familiar spot for the family.

    Later, we would leave Kriszta and Péter and go to Tibor and Kata’s house, where we would join Gábor and Zoé, and the girls would all play some creepy-looking game on the trampoline while Barnabás would play with his toy car in the dirt and the adults sat and talked and later, the girls would all get out their instruments--three violins, two violas--and they would play a couple Christmas songs when Kata and Lili could be urged past their intimidation because Sophie and Amelia are much more advanced and not only warmed up but played a few of the recent pieces from the concert tour and so sounded gorgeous, but finally they would all play together, and we would say goodbye to the old living room, and this good family.

    But for now, we were saying goodbye to Péter and Kristza. It felt abrupt, somehow, somehow wrong. There was an aching in it. But we got in the car, Péter helped me back out without driving into the ditch, and we went away.

July 15, 2017. Barcs.

    We returned to the dazzling city of Pécs yesterday, walking the picturesque plazas and avenues of the old city with Zsolnai-tiled roofs and decoratively tiled pedestrian walks by chlorinated fountains and such majestic buildings.

    Sophie, Amelia and Stephanie visited the third century crypts beneath the city while Maisie and I sat by a fountain regretting the separation, and then, when the others emerged thoughtful and jubilant, regretting missing the experience also. On the way, we examined the many Pécs lovers’ locks near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, because once upon a time, I etched our names--maybe it said something like, “David szeret Stephaniet”--into the metal of a gold lock and clasped it to the gate and threw away the key. I must assume not finding the lock again is just as romantic as throwing away the key: our love is even more unlockable.

    We visited a Fulbright teacher, Dori, who exchanged with Keith in Connecticut. In the main square with Dori, we were drinking big fruity drinks out of enormous mason jars and then later trying a little cake and ice cream in a shop she recommended. Dori also strongly recommended we visit the Zsolnai factory, which I had done with her in the last visit here, but instead she helped us locate the kürtőskalács--a festival sweet dough wrapped around a dowel and roasted over ashes and then rolled in cinnamon sugar or walnut--we had thought about for half a decade and didn’t know how to replicate, just in case fruity drinks, cake and ice cream weren’t enough sweets for the palate.

    In the evening, we said goodbye to Horvath Kata and her husband, Kornél, or rather, she said goodbye to us, with a dinner she had prepared all day and that tasted as wonderfully as if it had: a cold apricot soup, paprika chicken, and Gundel palacsintak--pancakes wrapped around and covered by nuts, chocolate and vanilla. Today, in a wine region east of Pécs, Kornél will be in a race dedicated to rosé wines, and will wear pink with all the other runners and will drink wine at all the water stations. Maybe I’m a little jealous of this. For now, it’s good enough to be fed well by good friends.

    There is no shortage of this. Every morning, Tünde has walked to the bakery and other places where she has picked up fresh pastries, breads, cheeses and meats, and has served magnificent breakfasts with her homemade jams and local butter, and I’ve only had to be careful about the way I handle the hot peppers, in case later I accidentally rub my eyes and suffer the brightness of the Hungarian earth.

Esslingen am Neckar

July 9, 2017. Esslingen am Neckar.

    In Hamburg the last few days, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have been making news in the G-20 summit, with Rex Tillerson narrating what the cameras were not allowed to record. Meanwhile, Maisie and I have joined our president here in Germany, though a safe distance away from his shenanigans.

    I am currently writing from the Esslingen track number five. We’re going to go to Munich today, where we will reunite with Stephanie. Stephanie! We’re coming for you! The train will come soon enough.

    Maisie was not impressed when we first arrived. Train station, sidewalk paralleling rail line and busy road. This was no Strasbourg. But it turned out we were only two blocks from where we were staying and two blocks from a park where two separate bands were playing American rock tunes and kids were in a bouncy house bouncing and adults were drinking noontime beer in tented pavilions. And two blocks back, towards the rail station but up, the old town, with its own timber-framed, multi-colored houses and beautiful narrow streets. You can’t really judge a town by the neighborhood of its train depot.

    Esslingen is charming indeed. I knew I must have chosen this spot for some reason! Just like books appear on hold for me at the library and I check them out and they’re great even though I have no memory of why I placed them on hold or anything about them, we are arriving to an itinerary that seems to have been arranged by someone else. Someone thoughtful and savvy, fortunately.

    What I’m quite sure I didn’t know when I made reservations from this town, though, was that it would be hosting a festival today, which accounts for the bands and the bouncy house (but not the beer). Once in town, crowds swarmed the old streets, listening to the many bands and watching the dances and eating what every vendor seemed to have on offer: gyros. Do you want a gyro, Maisie? Not really. Um. I was very excited about the giant party we’d stumbled into. Maisie was less sanguine about it, because it was also very hot, and all those gyros generate a lot of meat-smoke, too.

    So we left town, in pursuit of a big gothic church nearby--Maisie wasn’t surprised by nor resistant to my interest--though I walked right by it when we got there, into the neighborhoods, and then towards stairway roofed in wood shingles that ascended up and up the vineyard-covered hill rolling over the town and its river Neckar.

    We encountered a bride and her photographer (and incidentally, her groom) on the way up the stairs. It was an understandable location. The sweep of green and peaceful town below us were certainly romantic. And then we walked into the park at the top of the hill, where there was another bride and her photographer (and incidentally, her groom), and some other photographers responsible for lighting (in the middle of the day?) and her long, flowing train.

    We sat by a fountain for a while. I counted brides.

    In the evening, Maisie stayed in our lovely apartment--a room in a beautiful couple’s excellent, well-appointed flat--the kind of place beautiful people would live--and I returned to town to listen to music and hopefully to finally get some dancing on.

    At night, the streets were even more crowded and smoky, and the bands were louder. I walked by a few, stopped for a moment by a group just playing American fifties standards, like “In the Jungle” and “Barbara Ann.” But some people were dancing. One couple was swinging. If other people started to swing, maybe I could go join them. That didn’t happen, but I did get closer until I was dancing, too. The piano man was hopping on his seat, lifting his legs, banging like he was Buddy Holly. The singer knew his business, was very dynamic, high stepping and pulling the crowd in. The bass player occasionally would turn his big blue bass and play it like a guitar (don’t know how), and at some point, the sax climbed up the bass and played with one foot on the--I don’t know what you call it--the inlet and one foot on the top of the--I don’t know what you call it--the top, and the bass player popped his head through the sax player’s legs to see. They were really juicing it, and I was having a great time. When they took a break, I went and found music I probably preferred, but I returned for the energy and for dancing and was happy to be a part of it, in Esslingen.

    We’re on the train now. It disappeared from the board and so I was super nervous, but it turned out to be five minutes late. We have a 12 minute connection in Ulm and we have Stephanie but no way to reach her waiting for us on the other side in Munich, so those five late minutes are itchy. The conductor says the other train is running 20 minutes late. Let it be so! And I hope Stephanie doesn’t catch what I’ve got during those 20 minutes we don’t arrive.

      Stephanie! We're coming for you!

Strasbourg

July 8, 2017. Strasbourg.

    We arrived in Strasbourg in the middle of the day, the sun high in the air. Although starting from the industrial and commercial mess of a train station, every direction was ridiculous with timber-framed, bright-colored, lush-flowered charm. I look back at the first wildly amazed photographs I took and know we were still in the medieval wastelands. Give us ten more blocks.

    And there. Even though we wouldn’t have access to our apartment for a few hours yet (my hand is still aching from dragging the monster duffle on its little wheels across the cobbled streets for four hours), we headed to where we’d be staying--in a secluded plaza with a fountain at its center--in the heart of the old town with pretty much guaranteed world heritage site status. From our apartment, we walked a pedestrian street and stopped to gape at the extraordinary pastries in windows, glazed and iced and layered and arranged, art in miniature, a visual delight I could understand if it was constructed for permanent display rather than as the daily offering these actually were. Meanwhile, the walls of the four, five story buildings on either side of us were intimate, not confining, and in a moment, we would emerge from the alley and encounter the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame, a towering red sandstone, gothic-arched, gargoyle-laced heart-stopper.

    Three more times on this trip would this cathedral give me an experience with the sublime, and that’s four more times than almost everything on Earth.

    We took in the cathedral, backing up to the outer edges of the square so the camera’s eye might fully take in the height of the building, if not the length of it. The square was never big enough to achieve this. Maisie and I wandered (and, hello, suitcase! lugged) alleys and found gorgeous timber-framed houses from centuries past, in an absurd, never-ending charm. I kept asking, What is this place? And another old church. And another cathedral. And there’s the slowly turning river once more, crossed by flowered bridges. Eventually, we rested in a bar for orangina and a local dark beer, watching the tourists file by below the leaded glass windows and flower-boxed doll-house buildings everywhere around us.

    Our apartment was a hothouse and I ended up sleeping on the floor that night, but that’s all I want to say about misery.

    When Maisie and I returned from putting our bags away, we were able to enter the Strasbourg Cathedral, and that was the second moment of sublime astonishment. The air was cold and high, and the stained glass was rich, dark-bright and dramatic in theme and red and blue; and here again is magnificence, a stunning carved plinth and an astronomical clock; and once again, the paradoxical meeting of unimagined ambition and devotion to an experience of deep humility.

    Then we climbed the cathedral’s tower, and climbed and climbed, catching up to panting twenty year olds, and came out to all of red-roofed Strasbourg below us, where I encountered a second moment of the sublime, in the light wind, in Maisie’s absorption, in the beauty of a human world for a moment contained. This probably isn’t true for Maisie, but for myself, I enjoyed the view and the experience more than the clearly anticipated Eiffel Tower.

    Once down, I followed a Lonely Planet app through an interactive map and a GPS that I’ve discovered works without cellular data to a lock in the river and lovely restaurants perched above and what was maybe a fish ladder below several apartment buildings and the pedestrian path cutting through it all, and finally to an islet playground parallel to an islet park, connected by a bridge and four 15th century towers. We were able to take in these towers and the cathedral in the distance from the top of an elevated, covered pedestrian bridge, and I took the same picture I’ve seen in guide books, what’s essentially the Strasbourg cover photo.

    We ate spaghetti bolognese on the way back, the cloud cover disappearing until we discovered half our table under a spotlight of sun, sapping our strength. But also we needed to eat. On this trip, we haven’t starved, but we’ve also averaged only one solid meal a day, one pastry, and one something else. We just haven’t been hungry more than once a day.

    Maisie stayed in the apartment that evening while I went out; but I brought her back for what was looking like an event on the side of the cathedral. People were gathering. Police were posting themselves at what became an entrance and two exits. Music was being tested. And different lights were being rehearsed on the plaza and surrounding walls. Maisie came with me to join in the crowd’s anticipation. It was now ten pm. Was it going to start soon? Maisie didn’t want to stay long. Finally it didn’t start and it didn’t start, and Maisie said it didn’t look like the kind of thing she’d be interested in even if it did start, can we go back. I rushed her through the crowds and back to our place because I knew it would start as soon as I left, and I wanted to miss as little as possible. But I was wrong. There was plenty of time after I returned before anything happened.

    By the time it did, there was an enormous crowd. The bell tolled a great beckoning cry and the town answered. In front of me, a group of young men made a spectacle of themselves, and I guess we needed a spectacle, but one man in particular was paying out in frat bro homoerotic gold, climbing over friends prone on the ground and humping their faces, slapping butts, making loud pronouncements to the almost as loud delight of his friends.

    It began. On the wall of the cathedral appeared tall yellow grasses, waving in a breeze, and birdsong came out of the enormous speakers. We quieted. The grasses waved; birds chirped. Someone pointed nearby and a group of heads swiveled. I didn’t see anything. Grass, birds. Oh my God was Maisie right. Is this like Norway’s slow TV movement, where people will watch a boat sailing for seven days, or a fire blazing for several hours, or a woman knitting? Stage one response: Anticipation. Stage two response: A waft of cigarette smoke surrounded the plaza as many lit up; voices more audible. Stage three response: Some people started to leave; voices became more audible. I started writing this very paragraph in my head, thinking about the stages, and composing--stage four, many people leave; stage five, I don’t know, because I was part of stage four.

    So I got up. People were laughing and making a lot of noise now, swarming the exits. I was halfway there when something changed.

    The birds stopped and the grass disappeared, and they were replaced by swaths of color on the cathedral, and a figure -- it looked like a rounded figurine, like a Matisse shape -- was climbing a ladder that appeared on the tower, climbing and slipping. Exiting people stopped, turned, went back. The figure jumped off the ladder, and seemed to jump from one flying buttress to the next.

    And that was when a feeling started to rise in me. The next scene was rain, starting in drops that seemed to fall from one level to the next, glancing in different directions at the angles of the building. Then the water fell in torrents. Then, once bathed in white, the scene turned to something else. The light and sound show was exquisitely, carefully designed, and for only this one venue. The structure of the building was outlined until it seemed not light at all but simply the building, but then the lights collapsed to the left, and the sanctuary was crushed, and opened up again into something bright and bold. Spotlights trained on the saints and popes on the parapet, and then their shadows appeared on the walls all around us. I was utterly transported. And then the leaded windows were outlined in sharp yellows, and they turned a rich blue inside, yellows and reds, the glory and richness of stained glass. I caught myself gasping. Here was a state of a wonder. Finally, against a techno beat that was more fireworks than finesse, the closing moved from stained glass blues and leaded outlines to the swaths of light bursting and back to lines and panes, and finally, the Matisse figurine, climbing down.

Paris

July 3, 2017, SeaTac Airport.

    Maisie and I have been roaming the SeaTac airport, me with my head bowed to a phone call with Aunt Donna, who, thirty years ahead of me and Stephanie, is celebrating her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Maisie patiently walks beside me while my neck is starting to strain because of some weird imbalance with the tiny phone at my ear and the backpack I’m bringing on the plane, which, though it’s light, is stuffed with two strangely large neck pillows Stephanie and I bought the day before with the hope that this will be the thing that allows us to sleep on an overnight flight. Maisie is patient. Maisie is texting unknown friends and also playing some game on her iPhone.

    We are about to take a couple planes to Paris, where the two of us will spend three unplanned nights and two full days exploring one of the most romantic cities of the world, and our hearts and minds are open to it. Are we going to learn what it means to eat in Paris? A little bit. Are we going to walk narrow streets and wind up in beautiful boulevards with flowers overhanging the windows? Are we going to see the Seine in art and cross it on gorgeous old bridges? Maybe yes.

    I always thought I’d experience this city with Stephanie, who learned French, won French prizes, had a yearning to return to a place she hadn’t been since before all that. But Stephanie has a new job that is called two-weeks-of-vacation job, and those two weeks start in one week. After Paris.

    Sophie and Amelia are in Europe already. Traveling with their orchestra, they have returned to the homes of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, have celebrated the 500th year anniversary of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses at the very church where he posted them, and most of all, Sophie and Amelia are out there adventuring like full citizens of the earth.

    The five of us will meet up at the end of the orchestra trip, in Mozart’s Salzburg, and from there we will a) return to Hungary and Hungarian friends after seven years and b) return to the grounds of our honeymoon in Northern Italy, twenty years later.

    It’s time to March back to Barcs.

July 4, 2017. Paris.

    Maisie and I arrived in Paris after following the sun over the northern polar ice caps, eating only the dried fruit and nuts we brought and staying awake on airplane movies and straining backs. Because we arrived in Paris at two or three in the morning Seattle time, we weren’t hungry exactly, though we hadn’t eaten, and the three hot crowded trains to which we transferred in airless, perfumed subterranean heat finally made Maisie swoon with fatigue and nausea. I watched with increasing dread the crease of her brow deepen.

    But finally we found our apartment, a second floor walk up, and Maisie got horizontal, and soon I was able to feed her half a salad before we got her back to the bed. It’s currently 6:34 pm. I should probably wake her.

    I’m not going to be the best guide. I know this because of the weird place we ended up patronizing when she was so hungry, which is probably a great place to get a beer or cappuccino or Coca Cola but not the best French cuisine, our tub of meat and lettuce; and as we sat there not saying much because Maisie still looked green, I also wondered what kind of guide I might be to a city I was totally willing to discover by accident.

    I left her in the bed and walked north, climbing stairs parallel to the funicular leading to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur, and then I caught the stream of tourists visiting inside its naves and domes; and on the outside once again, I followed the lawns and winding stairs down past the Indian men selling cold water and cold beer, past the carousels and then into the tourist-only street with vendors selling berets Eiffel Tower scarves for 3 Euros apiece. And this led to a boulevard bound on one side by a gravel pedestrian path and on the other by a high fenced ball court, a typical 7-story apartment with its cornices and flowered windows beside it -- and then gardens, and two playgrounds, and little girls and boys kicking identical balls in every direction (including mine: look out). And then the bicycles and the people slowly drinking sodas and wine and coffee at all the cafes and the pedestrians promenading and talking: I was grinning with the energy of it all, and all of the things that people said about this city, because here it was: less hurried, more animated, much better indulged, at least as far as I could tell on a walk by myself on no sleep for a day and a half.

July 5, 2017. Paris.

    Maisie was supremely patient with me today, four times. This was after a five a.m. run I could do while she slept, a run that gave me Paris all to myself all the way to the Eiffel Tower, and gave me to a candle of golden light off the glass and metal statues and buildings as the sun came up over the Seine. I returned and showered and fell asleep finally, Maisie half awake herself.

    The first and second time Maisie was patient with me was when I got lost after she had a pain au chocolat and I tried something called drops, which I thought was filled with poppy seeds or fig but was, happily, also chocolate. I wanted to go to churches and museums today, so Maisie patiently demurred when I asked her to trade her short jean shorts for a dress, and she was patient again when I got us lost for fifteen minutes.

    On our way towards the Seine, we visited the first church I wanted to see -- the L’église Saint-Eustache, a stunning cathedral near the Louvre. Why was I so happy in there? It was the second cathedral I’ve visited in as many days. That smell of cold columns and the Delacroix murals in two of the transepts were part of it, but also the unexpected magnificence of every angle and of sheer enormity in a church I’d never heard or thought of but was on the way to somewhere else. I told Maisie I was very happy. And that was before we double-taked on a video screen in the center of a much larger, surely quite old mahogany wooden mantel in one of the central transepts: and on the video, an electric red beating heart. Make it work, Catholics!

    Right beside this church is a library and mall and train entrance in a swooping giant shell of a roof.

    We crossed the bridge to the Notre Dame Cathedral, and Maisie did not have to be patient that time because she was not in any way tempted by the lines that went around and around in front of the grand entrance, and I acceded. We were given the reward of ten minutes of noontime pealing, which is my biggest association with the church anyway -- well, after flying buttresses and gargoyles, I suppose: bell ringers who also might be tragic love-addled hunchbacks.

    Lunch in the Latin Quarter near the surprisingly compact Sorbonne was a desperation lunch again, where Maisie said, Sure, to my multiple meaningless and frustrating questions (Do you want to try this place? Do you want to try this place across the street? Do you want to sit inside? Do you want to sit outside?). I used my three words of French to quickly unlock our host’s English (which earlier led Maisie to ask a question that baffled me -- when did I learn all that French -- because beyond those three words to get in the door, I do understand a lot of what I read around me, and maybe that’s what surprised her; I explained about Romance languages, and being a reader, and visiting Rachel in Montreal a few different times). Maisie had penne with chicken. I had roasted chicken, green beans and potatoes. But it was so good -- presented with care and simple sauces.

    The third time Maisie was patient with me was a block away at Shakespeare & Company bookstore, where I roamed every room (didn’t look at every book), and Maisie showed absolutely no interest in any of it; so I made sure not to be jealous of the readers lounging in the quirky nooks provided all around the store, nor of the many better books in English than the small tradeback classics I’d brought for disposability and space. I didn’t make her wait long. This was more window-shopping than browsing.

    In the Luxembourg Gardens, not only did we see more of the gendarmes with holstered pistols and automatic rifles (guarding flowers? -- maybe this is related to Aunt Donna’s shocked nervousness that I was taking Maisie to a hotbed of anti-Semitic terrorism?) and not only did we see also a row of vines carefully turned and drooping beside a row of long cultivated trees on either side of a shaded fountain and reflecting pool, but we saw an interactive art exhibit inside one of the buildings -- a great industrial space in whites with a pink-pebbled floor, covered sparingly with artwork and wooden pinwheels and wood puzzles and many signs saying in French, Please Touch. This was going to be Maisie’s best experience with art for the day. Not for me. I was about to go nuts with joy while Maisie tagged along.

    On our way to the Musée d'Orsay, we ran into the Church of Saint Sulpice, used badly by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, where he inserted pagan history and violence. Seattle’s churches don’t have pagan history, but they also don’t have half a millennium history either, which means when we have something with vaulted ceilings, however close to the ground, we get a little excited. How strange to turn a corner and see another hundreds-plus years-built church-testimonial of devotion to God to cathedral-humble humanity and then to just walk by it!

    The Musée d'Orsay was crowded with Impressionist super star paintings -- ones I’d studied, three I have up on my classroom wall, others I knew from books, puzzles, and movies. There was the Van Gogh self-portrait I have in my classroom, and also his skewed yellow and red bed painting -- I have that one too, and some stars and hay. There’s Manet’s crazy men picnicking with naked lady picture, and all those dough-eyed Renoirs, and forty to sixty seasonally-pastelled fields, ponds and city-scapes by Monet. There’s Latrec’s strangely squatting women and leering men. And here’s a whole exhibit devoted to Cezanne’s portraits, room after room after room, and some fruit too. Here are Degas’s dancers and his photograph-mimicking subjects off-frame. No Cassatt? And here is Degas’s little dancer, aged fourteen. I read an entire trashy book based on this very sculpture -- The Painted Girls, by Cathy Marie Buchanan. (Look at that smug little girl! That's because her mother was terrible and selfish and they were so poor. Absinthe, whoring, ballet, laundry.) And there’s Whistler’s Mother, whom I know best because Amelia freaked out when Mr. Bean sneezed on her and got snot on the face and tried to wipe it off but wiped her head off instead and replaced it with something like that nun did to some medieval painting of Mary a few decades ago.

    Maisie was patient through all of it, following closely behind me, looking, but not investing. I tried explaining a couple things but realized I didn’t have enough good material in my head to articulate -- plus there were four more floors to get to. I said she might get more from the paintings by reading the histories and criticism provided in English, and she said she doubted they would make it better. But the whole thing, my whole excitement, came from the one Art History class I took in college, focusing on French 19th century art. If I didn’t learn it, I don’t see it; but I learned a little about how to look, what to see.

    And when I look at Maisie, what I see is someone ready to go back to our apartment and rest.

July 6, 2017. Paris. Waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower.

     We are standing in line, waiting to get into the Eiffel Tower. Maisie says this is one line she's willing to face. But its mysterious and slow queuing says, Go ahead. Work on your blog. You write it on your phone anyway.

      Maisie was feeling a bit queasy again this morning, and again it was on the hot crowded subway smelling of perfume and urine and, Maisie says, cigarettes. We stood a few seconds in the rain to behold the Arc de Triomphe, got beneath it and rejected paying to get to the top, and instead took another subway to Eiffel’s Tower but stopped at a hotel for their obsequious help settling Maisie (we sat at nice couches, got water).

      Now she's doing okay, but this mysterious line is only now beginning to move.

      I tried going out last night, and succeeded, to the extent that I went out. For a few hours. I investigated dancing in Paris, or music scenes, and was directed to a neighborhood where I didn't find it. I did find a very lively student night life, but they were very busy drinking wine and coffee in cafés. Eventually, I got on a subway to get a good view of the Eiffel Tower at night, which I heard was absolutely magical. It was a beautiful clear night under a nearly full moon, and with the glittering facade and the swiveling spotlight hitting that moon every couple minutes, and a woman bent over her phone under the lights of the bridge over the Seine, I preserved a little magic in a photo.

      We are now on our third security line, third time emptying our pockets and presenting our bags and walking through metal detectors. That's the mystery, I suppose, related to the police with assault weapons. Score another one for Aunt Donna. I've not once felt any sense of risk. But I have now three times sensed some aggravation. It's just an elevator, people!

       Fortunately, Maisie seems to be feeling better.

July 6, continued. Paris.

    We’re back at our apartment finally. Now as the day’s events have closed, I can take stock of this, our second and last full day here in Paris: We had only two things we wanted to do for sure, and because we knew there’d be more interest and crowds involved, we weren’t counting on anything else in particular: 1) Eiffel Tower. 2) The Catacombs -- a macabre gift to quietly twisted Maisie for being so patient yesterday. Of those two things, we accomplished one.

    The Eiffel Tower provided stunning views of a limitless city. People spent a great deal of their time and a chunk of change to get far away from the familiar world on the ground and then spend a little more to view that far away world from close-up (actually, people mostly ignored the telescopes). I tied my hat to my belt because I knew it would blow off at such heights, but in fact, the air was muggy and close there, too. While I was squirming a bit in the jostling crowds on the observation deck (And is it helplessness that made me so mad coming down the stairs of the tower behind the French woman slowly eating a granola bar? She was slow, and she was eating so slowly, but she wasn’t descending any more slowly than her friend in front of her; yet that slow eating while I was stuck behind her was making me crazy), while I was squirming a bit, Maisie was loving the views, asking questions about what we were seeing, finding a new vantage point and enjoying it again. Much improved from the green-faced girl of the subway.

    I anticipated long lines at The Catacombs, too. The line was shorter. Maybe 400 people. But it never moved at all, and the American in front of us went and asked the front office and was told the wait was four plus hours. He and his family shrugged and settled in. I wanted this experience for Maisie, because I knew it would appeal to her and I knew it would be long memorable and a good story. But neither of us was ready for four hours.

    Instead of quantity of dead bodies and bones, we could go down the street for quality of dead body and bones: The Pantheon was open for business, with some of the best dead bodies in France.

    At first, the only thing I was ready to be excited about in The Pantheon was Foucault’s Pendulum. To explain what was so cool about it, I first had to explain that no one has yet built a perpetual motion machine, and then the history of this particular pendulum (though a replica), and then, best of all, the science of it, moving to the spinning of our planet rather than against any force acted upon it.

    So did we just get these broad, representational sculptures to represent the famous people I read were buried below the building? Were all those people in line to see a pendulum? But then we found the stairs to the crypts. And I got my body next to the dried bodies of some incredibly important thinkers and heroes. The best one for me -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose book, Emile, was one of the first I’d read on theories of education and childhood, and whose ideas and words on the Social Contract I teach in my philosophy and monsters class (is evil more free than goodness or what do we mean by freedom, and can we really just do what we want, and is one free when a neighbor gets to do whatever she wants too, like take your cabbage, and are you going to be paranoid now and start building fences around your cabbage, and will that make you more free, and what do we learn about Rousseau’s social contract from Dr. Jekyll and his invention of Mr. Hyde, and is that really Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s body in that box ?). But here were others, like Dumas, Hugo, Madame Curie, Braille, Voltaire. Oh, so many outstanding dead bodies! You could feel the cold wash up with the cool of their crypts, and here they were, shelved in rooms for storage and our delight!

    Maisie was not delighted but was feeling jet-lagged and smell-sensitive again.

    Wish I could throw her a bone.

July 7, 2017. Paris train to Strasbourg.

    We’re on our way to Strasbourg, on the top deck of a comfortable train. Because we never met our host, and he didn’t answer my last text, we piled up sheets and left our key under a mat and said no goodbyes but left, me hauling a grotesquely large duffel suitcase down three flights of stairs and down narrow sidewalks to a subway, a couple of mystery fruit loaves we bought with morning pastures in my pack.

    Last night I tried going dancing again, this time more certain of my success, because I was chasing a specific event that I’d researched and followed on Facebook, and it had unlikely but very promising early hours.

    The bus I caught was many minutes late, and when it arrived and I watched it at work for a while, I understood why: the bus was so jammed with bodies that the bus had to wait several minutes at each stop in order to allow a disembarking person to squeeze out amidst the four or five who would also temporarily step onto the sidewalk to allow passage. I was feeling hot and faint and the air seemed to thicken. First I contemplated whether I should just abort and get off. Then I thought I had no choice but to do so. I was just a joy rider. And my fellow passengers were not so fortunate. I twisted out and jumped onto a full but not suffocating subway and made my way to Belleville.

    The club midway up the hill was a charming and thoughtful construction of beach decorations and creative social arrangements, including four bars, high counter-tables and shorter, more intimate ones, private astroturfed grottos bounded by potted trees, a ping pong table and shuffleboard, and the stage for the hip hop artists. It looked like a terrific venue to be with friends. But the music was not loud and there was no dance floor yet. I missed it again! Either I am arriving way too early and don’t know how to access what I’m looking for, or dancing means something different in Paris.

    On the way back, my arms and legs were shaking as I contorted on the subway to hang onto a rail with a finger while twisting hips and swiveling feet to avoid intimacy and in revolt against one unavoidable protuberant bottom.

    Maisie and I went out for one last dessert when I returned, and I regret now I didn't photograph the beautiful waitress who served us with such warmth for a second night. Maisie wanted the same thing she had last time, and our waitress remembered the creme brûlée we adored on the first night. I ate a slice of fig pie.

    I ran early this morning, mopping up some of the places I missed but hoped to see if not visit: the Louvre, Hôtel de Ville, Place des Vosges, and the site of the Bastille (now the site of a shopping mall, I think). My terminus was Promenade Plantée, an elevated track that’s been converted into a tree-lined walking path. Unfortunately, its steps and entrance were gated and locked because it was only six in the morning. But that was my only loss.

    Outside, the French countryside flies by in vivid yellows and greens.