Summer 2010
The driver was talking to the reflections of my Mother and I in the rear-view
mirror of his mid-90s Samsung sedan.
“It’s a quick trip to Syria. We can make a day trip out of it if you want to go
to Damascus.”
It was a tempting idea. Mom and I had come up from Petra to Amman, Jordan to
meet the family of one of my Father’s friends. We planned on staying another
day in Amman but we were having trouble finding the local centers of urban
culture that seemed to leap out at us in Istanbul and East Jerusalem. I knew
that Damascus was beautiful and safe for travelers and I imagined we’d have
more fun there than we would in dusty Amman. We didn’t go and I regret it.
Summer 2014
I was excited and nervous to go to a barbecue at my PI’s
house, just outside of Washington DC. I was just getting settled working in his
lab and I wanted to make a good impression so I spent an hour or two laboring
over a particularly arteriosclerotic batch of pimento cheese. Everyone who
worked in the lab and many of my PI’s friends and family were in attendance. It
was a wonderfully cosmopolitan crowd: I overheard conversations in French,
Romanian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Somebody was demoing a DNA sequencing device and
companion iPhone app in the kitchen. I started talking to the fiancé of one of
the postdocs in the lab on the back porch. She had just flown in from Paris and we
started talking about her work. We both studied the same field (metagenomics)
but her particular area of expertise was in the bacterial populations that
grow on different kinds of exotic cheeses. Our conversation was memorable for
being as intellectually stimulating as it was French. I wanted to introduce her
to the southern concoction I brought along, but to my pleasant surprise my casserole
dish had been scraped clean.
Summer 2015
My Father and I stood in the middle of the Champs-Élysées looking west towards
the sun setting behind the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs was bustling with all
kinds of people shopping, eating, drinking, and walking around for no reason,
like we were. We used our last billets taking the metro from FDR to Hôtel de
Ville. We walked from the metro to our hotel and Dad commented how the cafes in
Paris always seemed to be packed, no matter the time of day or the day of the
week. The entire time we had been in Paris it seemed you couldn’t go wrong
picking a place to eat - the food was always unique and delicious. (Parmentier
de canard? Sure, why not?) We washed up a little in the room and then went out
and started walking north on Rue Vieille du Temple (which I constantly confused
with Rue du Temple). We walked for a while because I wanted to scope out a
bakery I had read
about years before in The New Yorker. It was a gorgeous August evening and everyone
was out. We walked to the Bastille down Boulevard Beaumarchais, so at some point
we must have been a block away from Bataclan. We made a right on Rue Saint-Antoine.
“I forgot how much I like it here,” Dad said, “I hope we can come back.”
Summer 2010
The driver was talking to the reflections of my Mother and I in the rear-view
mirror of his mid-90s Samsung sedan.
“It’s a quick trip to Syria. We can make a day trip out of it if you want to go
to Damascus.”
It was a tempting idea. Mom and I had come up from Petra to Amman, Jordan to
meet the family of one of my Father’s friends. We planned on staying another
day in Amman but we were having trouble finding the local centers of urban
culture that seemed to leap out at us in Istanbul and East Jerusalem. I knew
that Damascus was beautiful and safe for travelers and I imagined we’d have
more fun there than we would in dusty Amman. We didn’t go and I regret it.
Summer 2014
I was excited and nervous to go to a barbecue at my PI’s
house, just outside of Washington DC. I was just getting settled working in his
lab and I wanted to make a good impression so I spent an hour or two laboring
over a particularly arteriosclerotic batch of pimento cheese. Everyone who
worked in the lab and many of my PI’s friends and family were in attendance. It
was a wonderfully cosmopolitan crowd: I overheard conversations in French,
Romanian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Somebody was demoing a DNA sequencing device and
companion iPhone app in the kitchen. I started talking to the fiancé of one of
the postdocs in the lab on the back porch. She had just flown in from Paris and we
started talking about her work. We both studied the same field (metagenomics)
but her particular area of expertise was in the bacterial populations that
grow on different kinds of exotic cheeses. Our conversation was memorable for
being as intellectually stimulating as it was French. I wanted to introduce her
to the southern concoction I brought along, but to my pleasant surprise my casserole
dish had been scraped clean.
Summer 2015
My Father and I stood in the middle of the Champs-Élysées looking west towards
the sun setting behind the Arc de Triomphe. The Champs was bustling with all
kinds of people shopping, eating, drinking, and walking around for no reason,
like we were. We used our last billets taking the metro from FDR to Hôtel de
Ville. We walked from the metro to our hotel and Dad commented how the cafes in
Paris always seemed to be packed, no matter the time of day or the day of the
week. The entire time we had been in Paris it seemed you couldn’t go wrong
picking a place to eat - the food was always unique and delicious. (Parmentier
de canard? Sure, why not?) We washed up a little in the room and then went out
and started walking north on Rue Vieille du Temple (which I constantly confused
with Rue du Temple). We walked for a while because I wanted to scope out a
bakery I had read
about years before in The New Yorker. It was a gorgeous August evening and everyone
was out. We walked to the Bastille down Boulevard Beaumarchais, so at some point
we must have been a block away from Bataclan. We made a right on Rue Saint-Antoine.
“I forgot how much I like it here,” Dad said, “I hope we can come back.”
