You know the version of travel that is about accumulation. Countries ticked, landmarks photographed, distances logged. Some people keep spreadsheets. The world is large, time is short, and a spreadsheet at least proves you were paying attention.

This is not that.

What is harder to document is the specific weight of a place. The way certain rooms stay with you. The meal you can still taste three years later. The afternoon light in a city you arrived in not knowing anyone and left knowing something about yourself you did not know before. These are the moments that do not make the highlight reel but turn out, later, to be the ones that mattered.

You have felt this, or you have not. If you have, you already know why any of this got written down.

These are the dispatches. They are not comprehensive. They are just the ones I was paying enough attention to remember.

The tunnel runs 3.2 kilometers and operates on a convoy system, one direction at a time, once an hour. Nick had found the schedule, which is the kind of thing Nick finds. We arrived at the French portal at 11:30 for the 12:30 convoy, which meant sitting in line watching a cement truck idle ahead of us while Tibo redistributed himself between my lap and my feet, unable to commit, and Harvey settled onto the ski bag in the back with the quiet authority of a dog who has been on enough of these to know when to conserve energy.

At 12:30 the light went green. We followed the cement truck into the mountain.

There is not much to say about 3.2 kilometers of single-lane darkness except that it concentrates the mind. You are in Italy before you are ready for it. The tunnel does not build toward anything. It just ends.

The road curves and the sky opens and there it is, that particular Alpine brightness, the kind that makes everything look freshly washed, the ski runs etched white into the granite above the town. Tibo came up onto my lap for this part. I don’t think he noticed the view but I noticed him noticing something had changed, the air different through the vents, some shift in the atmosphere that registered before any of us had processed it consciously. Harvey didn’t move. He already knew.

Limone Piemonte sits at what used to be a genuine frontier, the serrated edge between the Duchy of Savoy and the Republic of Genoa, a threshold town whose name comes from the Latin limen rather than the fruit, which disappoints tourists and funds an entire economy of lemon-printed aprons. The 14th-century church of San Pietro in Vincoli anchors the Gothic cluster of the old town, its bell tower built thick enough to survive the avalanches the town’s position was always going to invite. It is the architecture of a place that expected difficulty and planned accordingly.

We parked. We found Caffè Europa. We had not been there before but within four minutes it felt like we had, which is either a quality of the place or a quality of arriving somewhere after a tunnel and a mountain road with two dogs and the particular hunger that accumulates on a birthday trip. Wine. Piadine. The table still cold from outside. Nick already on his phone pulling up the snow reports.

The Fiocco di Neve sits fifty meters from the pedestrian zone, a five-star relais in fourteen rooms of wood and stone that manages to feel like a private chalet someone has generously agreed to share with you. The check-in was warm, efficient, and delivered with the particular Alpine hospitality that makes you feel the staff genuinely want you to have a good time rather than merely hoping you will leave a review. The room was exactly right: wood beams, mountain textures, a den of considered comfort that pulls you in and holds you there. I had one complaint. One. The bathroom, beautiful as it was, contained a rainfall shower and no bathtub. After a tunnel and a mountain road and a cement truck, a man has earned a bath. I noted the absence, filed it, and got over it within approximately four minutes. Some losses are relative.

My birthday was a few days behind us now. Forty-nine. Not the round number, not the one that announces itself. The one right before, which has its own particular charge, still on the approach, still in motion, the summit not yet underfoot. The snow was good. The dogs were settled. The lift tickets were already booked.

There was nowhere else to be.

The morning started with Super Mario Galaxy. Specifically, with Nick reading the entire Wikipedia plot summary of Super Mario Galaxy out loud while we waited for the first lift. This was, he explained, research for Tokyo. Tokyo is in March. We are in the Alps in February. The connection was not immediately clear but became clear by the third paragraph.

The snow was good. Not exceptional - mid-season packed powder, a little icy on the north-facing runs before eleven - but good enough. The kind of day where you find a rhythm and stay in it. Limone has one main advantage over the bigger resorts: it is not fashionable. There are no influencers on the terrace at Chalet La Grogia photographing their raclette. There are mostly Italian families and a handful of French day-trippers from the Côte d’Azur. The queues are short. The prices are honest.

We talked about the 50th. Not at length - it was not that kind of lunch - but enough to establish that it should feel different from this. Further. Something that has no previous version to compare against. A continent we haven’t touched, or a region where we’d have no default settings, no old waiter who knows our order.

The afternoon was better than the morning. Last run at four. La Giara for dinner - anchovy toast with a butter bucket that arrived before we’d ordered, as if the kitchen had made a unilateral decision about what we needed. They were right. Ratti Battaglione Barbera d’Alba. The label shows a soldier from the Battalion of Alba, 1793. Renato Ratti, who drew the modern map of the Langhe wine region in the 1970s, which is its own kind of cartography.

Ratti Battaglione Barbera d’Alba 2024 - La Giara Pizzeria, 28 Feb 2026. With Nick. The anchovy toast arrived before us. ★★★★

There are four of us on this trip, technically. Nick, who planned it. Me, who agreed to it. Harvey, who is fourteen years old and has strong opinions about altitude and does not care what either of us thinks. And Tibo, who is two and a half and treats every new environment as a personal invitation to investigate everything immediately.

Harvey came with Nick. That’s the correct way to say it - not that Nick has a dog, but that Harvey arrived as part of the package, already formed, already opinionated, already occupying the best corner of any room he entered. He is a poodle mix of uncertain origin and absolute certainty about his own importance. I belong to Harvey. This is not a metaphor.

Tibo is different. Tibo is two and a half and came from the Lot region of France, where his breed - the Lagotto Romagnolo - was developed to find truffles. He has not yet found any truffles. He has found approximately everything else. In Limone he finds snow, which he treats as a personal affront and also as the most interesting thing that has ever happened to him, simultaneously.

The skiing today was hazier than yesterday. The kind of day where you make the best of it - softer light, softer snow, the runs emptier because the fair-weather skiers stayed at the hotel. Lunch at the same spot on the mountain. The house white carafe again. There is something to be said for a place where you already know what you want.

Apéro at La Cantinetta, which is exactly what an apéro bar in a small Italian ski town should be - cozy, a little dark, good music at a volume that allows conversation. Nick had a Sbagliato. I found El Presidente, a local gin, which I had not encountered before and which I intend to track down again. These are the small discoveries that justify the trip as much as anything else.

Dinner at Il San Pietro, across from the hotel. Veal tenderloin. The same wine as the night before, which is either a failure of imagination or a sign of confidence - I am choosing confidence. The restaurant is the kind of place that has been exactly what it is for thirty years and has no interest in being anything else. In the Alps this is a virtue.

El Presidente gin - local, Limone Piemonte. La Cantinetta, 28 Feb 2026. With Nick. Track this down. ★★★★

Order the flaming shrimp.

Seven in the morning. Turtleneck. Dogs. The particular cold of a mountain town before the sun has cleared the ridge, which is a different cold from the cold of a ski run - quieter, more honest, not yet performing anything.

By seven-thirty I was on calls to Tokyo and Los Angeles. A film press junket, two and a half weeks away, which means it is no longer abstract. The build is not approved. Significant portions of the build do not yet exist. The calls had the specific texture of conversations where everyone is being professionally calm about something that is not professionally calm. I had these conversations on a mountain in Italy while Harvey investigated a snowbank and Tibo attempted to eat a pine cone.

The first day was blue skies and ideal. Yesterday was hazy, a day you make the best of. This morning, heading down to meet Nick at the base of the gondola at eleven-thirty, is a perfect middle - bright without being blinding, cold without being punishing. The mountain in its most honest register. A cheat start, which is what you call it when you arrive late and the conditions happen to be exactly right.

Three days. The threshold crossed in both directions now - through the Tende tunnel, into the mountain, and already back out the other side in some part of my head where Tokyo is loading. The birthday trip and the work trip occupying the same body, the same gondola, heading down to the same base where Nick is waiting.

He will have been there seven minutes early.

I quit my job at Disneyland to get to Paris two weeks early. This is the kind of decision that sounds impulsive and was completely rational. The study program was starting in San Sebastián. I was twenty-two and convinced, with the specific conviction of someone who has never been to Europe, that this might be my only chance. I was not going to waste it arriving on time.

Paris first, then the train south. The program was through the Landscape Architecture department at Cal Poly SLO - I was in Urban Design, which had no international program, so I had lobbied my dean to let me write my own thesis instead. He suggested Landscape Architecture. I said yes before he finished the sentence. There were two of us outside the program: me, and Connie, who was studying child psychology and had no more business being there than I did, which made us immediate allies.

The methodology was simple and perfect. Each city, we would spend a full day documenting the main plaza - or the most beautiful one, which was sometimes the same thing and sometimes not. I measured and sketched. Light angles, materiality, the geometry of the space, the way the stone held heat in the afternoon. Connie watched people. Who came when. Children in the morning, old men at noon, families at dusk. We would compare notes over coffee - always coffee in the mornings - and over wine in the afternoons, which was not strictly academic methodology but was absolutely the right call.

Porto was different from the beginning. The city climbs and descends in ways that feel deliberately unreasonable, as if the topography is making an argument. Professor Walt knew people there - he and his wife were both landscape architects, husband and wife, the kind of couple who finish each other’s sentences about gradient and planting and mean it. The people he knew had a restaurant. The restaurant was closed to the public that night.

The room was half carved out of the cliff above the Douro. Stone floor, stone walls on three sides, and then on the fourth - the river, almost level with where we sat, as if the water had simply decided to join us for dinner. I don’t remember what we ate. I remember the Port, which kept arriving, and the laughter, which kept escalating, and Walt at the head of the table looking entirely unsurprised that the evening had turned into this, because this was apparently what evenings with Walt turned into.

I had quit Disneyland for Paris, and Paris had led to San Sebastián, and San Sebastián had led to this room in a cliff above a river in Porto, surrounded by people I had known for five weeks and felt I had known for years. The person who was worried this might be his only chance to see Europe did not yet know that he would end up living in France. That he would drive through the Alps on his birthday thirty years later, coordinating a Tokyo press junket on his phone while a Lagotto Romagnolo ate a pine cone in the snow.

He just knew the room. The river. The Port. The laughter.
That was enough.

The bears are in the walls. Carved, painted, lurking in the woodwork with the particular contentment of animals who know the food is good. The specials are on a chalkboard. The servers are, in the local tradition, also bears. La Taverna degli Orsi is the kind of restaurant that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in being anything else. We were sold before we sat down.

Deer for me. Lamb chops for Nick. The Moncaretto Dolcetto d’Alba 2024 - Federico Giriodi, Alba - arrived first, which was the correct order of operations. Dolcetto is not a serious wine. It is a wine for Tuesday evenings and mountain dinners and for the specific purpose of making the world slightly more manageable than it was an hour ago.

The world needed managing. There is a war raging out there - bad news on the screens in our hands, the kind that arrives in small doses all day and accumulates into something heavier by evening. Limone has few screens. This is one of its virtues. You can try to ignore it here, suppress some of the fear and the anger, let the bears in the walls hold it at bay for the length of a meal. The Dolcetto helps. This is what the Dolcetto is for.

The deer was perfect. The bears outdid themselves.

Moncaretto Dolcetto d’Alba 2024 - Federico Giriodi, Alba. La Taverna degli Orsi, 1 Mar 2026. With Nick. Last dinner of the birthday trip. Lubrication for the angst. ★★★★

No stress on the way out. This is worth noting because it is not always the case. A relaxed checkout is its own small victory.

At the front desk, a network technician was toiling away at one of the terminals with the focused intensity of a medieval cobbler - bent over his work, unhurried, entirely indifferent to the concept of hospitality technology operating at speed. Eventually, while Nick was loading the skis into the car, the front desk man emerged from wherever he’d retreated to. Coke bottle glasses. Aloof in the particular way of someone who has been working a hotel desk in a small ski town long enough that checkout has lost all drama. He got me sorted. All very reasonable. He also mentioned, cheerfully and neutrally, as one mentions weather, that parking in Cuneo may be an issue today. Market day.

The tunnel dictates the route. The Tende only runs France-bound at certain hours, so we are taking the long way - SS 20 north through Cuneo, then west and south back to the coast. Limone threshold indeed. You enter through the mountain and you leave around it. The place insists on ceremony in both directions.

Cuneo sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Stura and the Gesso, at the foot of the Maritime Alps - a wedge of land, which is literally what cuneo means. It was founded as a free commune in 1198, endured seven sieges over the centuries, fell to the House of Savoy in the 14th century, and was rebuilt after Napoleon’s army demolished the city walls in the early 1800s. The main square, Piazza Galimberti - named for a local hero of the Italian Resistance - is a grand neoclassical space ringed by ten matching arcaded palaces, one of the largest in Piedmont. On Tuesdays it becomes one of the biggest open-air markets in northern Italy.

Today was Tuesday. We parked illegally in the local spirit. Nick surveyed the stalls and delivered his verdict immediately: schmatta. This was a new word for me. I now understand it. We made one circuit and headed for Café Arione.

The café itself is a listed historic site. Coffered wooden ceiling. Red vinyl Louis XIV armchairs on one side, green marble tables. Everything red and green and neon and bottles and crystal - wood and brass and stainless - bustling and loud in the best way. The baristas greet you with a ciao on the way in as if you’ve always been coming here.

My stepfather Dan used to make rum balls every Christmas. Rolled in sugar, stored in a tin, broken out throughout the season. These are the refined Italian version - the one that exists only if you have been perfecting it since 1923. They will knock your socks off. Nick bought the house amaro and more cuneesi in dark chocolate. He was ready to hit the road before I’d finished my espresso.

Tibo was asleep on my arms writing the first part of this. Harvey was over my shoulder, draped across the ski bag that divides Nick and me in the back seat - the great woolen boundary, snoring. The morning haze hadn’t burned off. The road curved through the valley. Now Cuneo is behind us too, and it’s the long run south and west, back to the coast, back to Nice, back to the Tokyo calls and the two and a half weeks until the next threshold.

The birthday trip. Done. More positive, apparently, than I’ve been in weeks. I’ll take it.

The morning was a masterclass in the blessed life. Nick is a dear. His 8:30 ritual is the engine that allows my day to start with grace.

While he checks Instagram and takes the dogs for their first walk, I am still in the quiet. By the time he feeds them, they migrate back to the bed to curl up with me while he goes for his run. It is a gift of time and comfort that I have never once taken for granted and occasionally forget to mention.

When I finally sit down to work, my command center is the kitchen table. This is a profound shift from my previous lives. At one point I was on the 28th floor in Universal City. Then the 8th floor of 30 Rock in New York. Now this kitchen table in France is my jam. Bridging the gap between the West Coast and Tokyo to coordinate the Super Mario Bros. Movie global press sync from here feels more authentic than any of those floors ever did. There is also a quiet, terrifying reality in being the one who sees clearly that, despite everyone’s considerable effort, it is not quite working yet. But it will.

This was Tibo’s sixth time in it. A routine established both before and after Limone. He sits between my legs on the red Vespa, leaning into the wicker vibes. He tries to lay down, and I find myself hovering in that particular space of the worried parent, wondering if it is too small or if we are simply early in the process. In the backpack era - both paws on my shoulder - he was a magnet for tour buses. Tucked into the basket, we are less of a spectacle and considerably safer in traffic. This is progress.

We did our 10,000-step dance along the Promenade. The path was originally built in 1822 by the English winter colony to keep their feet dry and the locals employed during the lean season. There is a certain symmetry in hitting your steps on a road born of productive leisure. I am aiming to lose twenty-five pounds. I am already down four-plus. Tonight’s dinner helped, though not in the way one hopes.

The pesto was catastrophic. I will never tell Nick. It was spectacularly, almost impressively unfortunate - the kind of meal that functions as its own deterrent to a second helping. We washed the tragedy away with a 2024 Chinon from the Val de Loire, a young Cabernet Franc that was earthy and direct and acted as a palate cleanser for the soul. The Loire has survived the Hundred Years’ War. It can certainly survive a questionable sauce.

I have traded the 28th floor for a kitchen table and the backpack for a basket. Is it emasculating? Only to those who do not understand that true power is the freedom to choose your own jam. To me it feels like the ultimate luxury. I will take the wicker vibes and the 10,000 steps over a rugged identity any day. The cliché audit concludes: guilty on all counts, zero regrets.

2024 Chinon, Val de Loire - Cabernet Franc. Home, Nice. 5 Mar 2026. Paired with a catastrophic pesto. Performed beautifully under pressure. ★★★★

The Siam sits on the Chao Phraya like a secret someone forgot to keep. Black lacquer and white stone, enormous tropical flowers filling every space that architecture left open, the river moving slowly outside in the heat. There is a grand piano in the library, Danish, 19th century, Hornung & Moller of Copenhagen, buried under a foot of vinyl records with a taxidermied leopard head resting on top of it, because of course there is. The hotel used to be a private estate. You can still feel that. It has the energy of somewhere that was never meant for you specifically, and has graciously decided to make an exception.

It is one of the best hotels I have ever stayed in. I say this as someone who has stayed in quite a few hotels and developed opinions about all of them. The Siam is in a category that has very few members. The black and white checkered garden. The glasshouse. The flowers that seem to be performing, slightly, for an audience. The river at the end of the dock at golden hour, Bangkok roaring away on the other side of the wall as if the two worlds had simply agreed not to acknowledge each other.

Nick found the tailor. This is important context. Nick did the research, which in Nick’s case means serious, methodical, cross-referenced research, the kind that produces a shortlist and a plan of attack. The shop was exactly what a Bangkok tailor should be: bolts of fabric stacked to the ceiling, a tailor who took measurements with the focused intensity of a man who has heard every compliment about his work and simply wishes you would stand still. The fabrics were extraordinary. We are talking about cloth that makes you understand, briefly, why people used to care so much about what they wore.

We walked, as we always do. Bangkok rewards walking and also punishes it. The heat is not theoretical. The tuk-tuks are everywhere and occasionally necessary. We did the Grand Palace on a heavy overcast day that turned out to be exactly right. The scale of it is genuinely difficult to process. You think you understand what you are going to see from photographs and then you are standing in front of it and the photographs were not even close. Gold and green and crimson against a white sky, a demon guardian twenty feet tall with a face like the most beautiful nightmare you have ever had, every surface doing something intricate and relentless and slightly overwhelming. We stood there longer than we had planned, which is the correct response.

Cambodia happened. Angkor. The coast. Kampot, which is its own story and deserves its own entry. And then back through Bangkok, back to the tailor, the shirts wrapped and ready. We admired them. Packed them with care. They had been made for us. We had been measured. The tailor had done his job impeccably.

The shirts were beautiful. They remain beautiful. They fit those other people perfectly, wherever those people are.

Nick’s reaction was the reaction of a man who did everything right and has made peace with the fact that doing everything right is not always sufficient. He is still, to this day, a person who does the research. Bangkok just has a different opinion about bodies than Los Angeles does, and nobody warned us, and now we know.

This was 2019. We did not know then what 2020 was going to be. The losses that were coming. The career that would be remade from the ground up. The entire world that would shut down and stay shut for long enough that it stopped feeling temporary and started feeling like the new permanent, until it wasn’t. The version of me who packed those shirts in Bangkok did not know any of that. He just knew the hotel was extraordinary and the fabric was beautiful and the tailor was talented and the plan had worked perfectly, right up until it didn’t.

That version of me had no idea that the losses coming in 2020 would eventually lead to Nice. To a kitchen table. To a red Vespa and a 9 euro wicker basket and a Lagotto who has not yet found any truffles. To a life that looks nothing like the one he was living and is, in the ways that matter, considerably better.

He would not have believed it. But he was wearing a shirt that fit at the time, so what did he know.

It started in Mexico City, where it always starts correctly. Pujol first - Enrique Olvera’s restaurant in Polanco, the mole madre that has been aging on the menu for years, each service adding a new ring to it like a tree. We took Nick’s parents, Tami and Jeff, for their anniversary. That meal is its own story and will get its own entry. What matters here is that it set the register for everything that followed: this trip was going to be at the level of paying attention.

From Mexico City, a propeller plane. Small enough that you could hear the pilots talking. The kind of flight that makes you feel the distance between where you were and where you are going in a way that a jet does not. Puerto Escondido from the air is a smear of coast and jungle, a small airstrip, a town that hasn’t entirely decided what it wants to be. We were met on the tarmac by a jeep. This is the correct way to arrive anywhere.

Hotel Escondido has sixteen bungalows. Sixteen. The pool runs almost to the cliff edge. The cacti along the path are spray-painted gold, which should be terrible and is instead completely correct for this place - a detail that only works because everything else is so considered. The jungle is loud at night. The ocean is loud in the morning. In between, in the thin hours before dawn, there is a silence that feels earned.

Casa Wabi is nearby. A foundation started by Bosco Sodi, the Mexican artist, on a stretch of undeveloped coast. Tadao Ando designed it: a single concrete wall 312 metres long, running parallel to the ocean, mediating between the Pacific and the jungle behind it. Nothing else. Just the wall, the light, the sound of the waves on the other side of the concrete. We stood there and said very little, which is the correct response to Ando.

The playlist was the thing I was not prepared for. Hotel Escondido pipes music to the pool and the common areas - music that felt specifically, impossibly curated for this place. Songs I knew and songs I didn’t, threaded together in a way that matched the gold cacti and the cliff pool and the propeller plane and the jeep on the tarmac. I was convinced, briefly and completely, that someone had made it for here. I spent weeks after we got home trying to find those songs. I tracked down maybe a third of them. The playlist only works at Escondido. Remove it from that context and it is just music. In that context it was a place.

I took a surf lesson near the port. This is the part of the story where I tell you I stood up, which is technically true. I stood up. I was vertical for a meaningful number of seconds. I then fell off the board in a way that felt like the ocean making a gentle but firm editorial comment. The instructor was kind about it. The plastic chair lunch afterward - ceviche, cold beer, the port doing its port things - was the meal of the trip in terms of pure satisfaction. Sometimes the right meal is the one you did not have to think about at all.

Nick’s incident. He fell off the bed. This is the entirety of the story I am authorised to tell. There was a heated moment. He was fine. The bed was fine. I was briefly less fine but recovered. We agreed, in the way of people who have been travelling together long enough, that some stories belong to the trip and stay there. This is one of those. He was fine.

The bungalow left a complimentary mezcal on arrival - a small bottle, local, nothing on the label. We drank it on the terrace watching the last light leave the Pacific. No occasion. No reason. Just the mezcal and the ocean and the gold cacti and the surfers below.

The surfers below, and me having briefly, heroically, been one of them.

Better dinner tonight. The morning weigh-in showed another pound down, which means the catastrophic pesto was, in the end, a net positive. This is either a triumph of metabolism or evidence that anxiety burns calories faster than exercise. I am choosing to believe it is the latter and filing it under wellness.

I turned on the VPN and pointed it at America. Love Story was waiting: the Ryan Murphy series on FX about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. It premiered February 12th. I had been saving it in the way you save things you are not sure you are ready for. I was right to be unsure. It is very good and it is a lot.

Alessandro Nivola plays Calvin Klein. There is a scene in his office that is so precisely right about that world in that decade that I had to pause for a moment. It captured the minimalist revolution of the 90s, a period when New York fashion was stripping away the excess and finding the thing underneath the thing. Nice was doing the same, literally, scrubbing the grime off its 17th-century facades to find the ochre and rose underneath. Two cities discovering themselves at the same time, neither aware of the other.

The person who replaced Carolyn Bessette at Calvin after the 1999 crash eventually moved to Los Angeles and started their own company. I knew them well for a while in the early part of my LA life.

That slender biographical thread, running from a crash over the Atlantic to a party in Silver Lake in 2003, is the kind of thing you only notice when you are sitting on a couch in a villa in Nice in 2026, watching a show with a VPN pointed at a country you no longer live in. The world is small and then it is not and then it is again.

Better Than Ezra came up on the shuffle while I was watching. They are the sound of San Luis Obispo in the mid-nineties, of early Los Angeles, of Erica. She was my best friend from that era, sharp and funny and constitutionally incapable of pretending anything was fine when it was not. We lost touch for a stretch and found each other again the way you do: slowly and then all at once.

I rode the Vespa to Cours Saleya in the afternoon, Tibo in the basket, parked under the loggia at the end of the market. We did the Promenade walk in both directions. The sea was angry and grey, the kind of Mediterranean that tourists do not put on postcards. I prefer it like this. The Promenade was built in 1822 by the English winter colony to keep their feet dry, and here I am in 2026, keeping mine dry on the same path, slightly more French than I was five years ago.

We stopped near the Jardin Albert I and met a Swedish woman and her mother. Tibo accepted their attention with the gravity of a diplomat receiving credentials. Later, two nineteen-year-olds from Connecticut approached in French to ask about Tibo’s breed. All Americans speaking French to each other for no discernible reason except that they were in Nice and it felt right. I told them to give it thirty years.

Back on the couch at Villa Diana. Harvey across my legs. Tibo in his corner with the gravity of an animal who has made his assessment of the room and found it acceptable. The VPN still pointing home. John and Carolyn still luminous on the screen.

Better Than Ezra still in the room somewhere. Erica would have laughed at the whole tableau: the Vespa, the basket, the villa in France, the VPN, the theory about Carolyn Bessette. She would have laughed and then asked the exact right question, the one that gets to the thing underneath the thing. She always did.

Walt saved Barcelona for last. This was not an accident. He knew what he was doing. San Sebastián, Bilbao, Santiago, Porto, Madrid - and then Barcelona, as a finale, the way a good teacher gives you the most difficult text at the end of the semester when you are finally ready for it. By the time we arrived I had been in Europe for months, my notebooks were full, and I was, without quite knowing it yet, a different person from the one who had quit Disneyland to get to Paris two weeks early.

There was a bird market on La Rambla. Cages stacked on cages, hundreds of birds - finches, canaries, parrots, things I could not identify - all going at once. The sound was woven into the city, not separate from it. You could hear it from half a block away, and then you were in it, and then you were past it and it faded behind you, and you carried it with you for the rest of the day without entirely realising it. The market ran for decades, a fixture of La Rambla the way the flower stalls and the human statues were fixtures. It closed in 2010, welfare concerns and permits and the general logic of cities deciding what they are no longer going to be. You cannot hear those birds now. The sound exists only in the people who were standing there when it was still happening.

I had found myself, which is the most embarrassing true thing I have ever written. I write it anyway because it is accurate. I was twenty-two and I had spent months walking through Iberian plazas with a notebook and a set of measurements and a growing conviction that I understood something about how cities worked, about what made a place feel inhabited rather than merely occupied. I did not understand everything. I understood more than I had in September. In Barcelona I understood that I wanted to keep understanding things in places. That this - the walking, the looking, the notebook, the wine at four in the afternoon with Connie comparing notes on who used the plaza and when - was not a study program. It was a life.

Professor Walt took the group to the Olympic waterfront on our last day. The 1992 Games were seven years past, but the Vila Olímpica still felt slightly separate from the rest of the city - too new, too deliberate, the way purpose-built places often feel for a decade or two before they settle into ordinariness. At the foot of the Hotel Arts, there was a fish. Frank Gehry’s El Peix: 56 metres long, 35 metres high, gilded steel strips that caught the afternoon light and redistributed it in ways that didn’t look entirely structural. It looked like something a city does when it wants to announce that it takes itself seriously.

What I didn’t know, standing there at twenty-two, was that this fish came first. The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997, but Gehry’s firm first used the computer modelling that made Bilbao possible here, on this fish, in Barcelona, earlier in the decade. The Bilbao effect - the idea that a single building could transform a city’s relationship with itself - started with this. I was looking at the origin of something and had no idea.

I have been back to Barcelona twice with Nick. We have not stayed at the Hotel Arts. The file remains open. I am no longer sure it needs to be closed. Some places deserve to keep one thing pending, one thing you have not yet done, so that the return stays necessary. Barcelona has the Sagrada Família, which is still unfinished, still scaffolded, still becoming whatever it is going to be. It has been becoming since 1882. It will be finished soon, they say. It will be the first time it has been finished. I am not sure what Barcelona does with itself after that.

The bird market is gone. The sound of it is not reproducible. Some sounds only exist once, in the specific configuration of cage and street and year and the particular version of you who happened to be walking past. I was twenty-two, in Barcelona for the first time, carrying a notebook full of measurements and a slowly forming theory about what cities were for.

I was standing there. I heard them. That is enough.

Visibility is poor today. An alleged haze from the Sahara has crossed the Mediterranean, coating the sky in a dull, displaced grey. The sun is low at 15:30 as Tibo and I begin our habit of trotting along the Promenade. The light is not gold. It is a strange, flat reflection on the Baie des Anges that turns the water into mercury glass, heavy and shimmering with a metallic edge, trying to mirror a sky that is not entirely there.

The friction of the day began early, with a silent “désolé” text. Our electrician, a man of a certain French vintage, was scheduled for his third attempt at a repair that has left the family room lights in a state of existential crisis. They shine for exactly sixty seconds before surrendering to the dark. He never travels alone. He is accompanied by his wife, a woman perhaps fifteen years his junior but not what one would call spry. Because we live in Mont Boron, the “blessed” life requires a physical toll: a clip of an uphill walk from the port, forty stairs shared with our patriotic neighbor, then another set of steps to the gated landing. She is the sherpa of the operation, trailing him with the gear in slow-motion ascent that seems to defy the laws of both physics and retirement. Today, with the Saharan dust rolling in, the climb must have felt like Everest. The appointment was canceled without ceremony. It is a reminder that in Nice, the infrastructure of the past is maintained by the weary of the present.

The headlines are dark. Escalation, the heavy pull of conflict, the feeling of a world being sucked into a vacuum. Yet within my wicker basket bubble, the work does not suffer. If anything, this project feels like an anchor. I am coordinating a team spread across the Pacific Coast, all of us connected by a global digital thread, soon to converge in Tokyo for the famous plumber brothers. The contrast is not lost on me: managing a multi-billion dollar cinematic universe from a red Vespa on the Côte d’Azur while the air carries the grit of another continent. I am aware of how lucky I am to be exactly where I am, even as the global map grows darker.

Tibo and I pass the giant Caterpillar trucks, those yellow titans of the shoreline. There is no sand here. The coast is a fortress of galets, smooth river stones that give the sea its deep azure identity. This rocky character has always been contested. In the early 1900s, gangs of men with horse-drawn carts would harvest these stones for construction, literally stealing the beach until the city had to ban the practice to keep the sea from reclaiming the Promenade. Since the 1970s, the ritual has inverted: Nice now nourishes the shore, moving thousands of cubic meters of stone each season to fight chronic erosion. Watching these machines manipulate the coast, I think about the European powers currently moving their own heavy machinery toward a battlefield, and how different the ambitions, and how similar the sound.

Near the Old Town, the last confetti from Carnival clings to the palm trees. The celebration has existed since 1294, and now it is just paper ghosts stuck in the bark. The party is over. The real work of the year has begun.

She is easy to miss on an ordinary day, small and almost modest, a replica from 1889 that carries a different weight than the grand version in the harbor an ocean away. I pass her daily. Most days she is simply part of the background. But under this Saharan haze, with the light stripped of its usual Mediterranean warmth, she stands out. A sentinel of a shared history that feels increasingly fragile.

What I think of, standing here, is what came before her. The original replica was destroyed during the World War II occupation, a time when the Promenade was lined with barbed wire and even the villas were painted in camouflage. This one had to be reborn. She carries that knowledge in her small bronze frame. Today, she seems to know something the rest of us are still working out.

As we approach the motorbike, I am acutely aware of the tableau. A middle-aged man in the South of France, shortly to be astride a red Vespa with a dog in a basket, managing a cinematic universe while the Saharan haze strips away the gloss. The Promenade built by the English, the Liberty that had to be reborn, the stones being moved by machines for the ten-thousandth time. History does not announce itself here. It just sits in the haze, waiting to be noticed.

Tonight, a belated birthday dinner with Tom and Hania. Tom teaches maths and science in Monaco, molding the minds of the billionaire class’ next in line. Hania leads the charge for women in business through her non-profit network. They are a grounded counterweight to the noise of this coast, and exactly the right people for this particular evening.

Lulu was there. Lulu, Tibo’s gorgeous miniature caniche girlfriend, attended in full, and somewhere between the appetizers and the main, a flirty waiter materialized with half a pound of ham, which she dispatched with the focused efficiency of someone who has no interest in the human drama unfolding around her. The champagne arrived on schedule. Hania could not partake, our table running about four minutes behind the news. We didn’t care.

They told us via a birthday card. Signed by Tom, Hania, Lulu… and then, at the bottom, a single mystery initial. Bx. No name yet. Not quite here yet. Just a letter and a kiss, announcing itself from three months out.

Outdoors on a deck, the Saharan sky still flat above us, Lulu conducting her own separate evening beneath the table, the best people telling us the best news. It was a Lady and the Tramp evening. It was exactly that.

I thought about the Liberty rebuilt from scratch after the war. The stones moved back into place each year. The confetti already becoming something else in the bark of the trees. The Saharan dust that will settle, eventually, and leave the light cleaner than before.

We raised a glass. To Bx.

Château Rouet Villa Esterèlle · Côtes de Provence · 2023

Sunday in Nice belongs to the French. The shutters stay closed, the boulangeries do a brisk morning trade and then retreat, and the city commits to the long family lunch with the kind of collective discipline that makes you feel faintly embarrassed for the rest of the world. Brunch, as a concept, would have been treated here with the same suspicion reserved for English mustard and ice in drinks.

We went anyway.

The Big Pickle sits in the kind of Nice neighborhood that still surprises you, a room that has decided, cheerfully and without apology, that it is not in France. Board games stacked on shelves. The 90s soundtrack doing the ambient work that any amount of French café jazz has never quite managed for me personally. Ninety-three percent of the room speaking English with accents from at least four different countries. Nick and I arrived first and took the table, which felt like a small act of territorial confidence, and Chloe was not far behind.

Chloe writes for the New York Times and navigates the hyper-glossy machinery of the yacht industry on this coast simultaneously, which means she occupies two entirely different realities at once and is extremely good company in both. She arrived, sat down, and ordered the chicken and waffles with jalapeño honey without apparent deliberation. The plate arrived shortly after mine. I watched it land. I had ordered the pancakes, which were tall and correct and exactly what I wanted. I want to be clear about that. I also want to be clear that the jalapeño honey caught the light in a specific way, and the waffles had a particular architecture, and I am currently attempting to lose twenty-five pounds, and the gap between what I ordered and what I wanted was approximately four inches of table.

It is not about the drink. It is about the shared fluency. The specific, uncomplicated comfort of a Sunday morning in a room full of people who also wanted a Bloody Mary on a Sunday morning. The recognition. The same internal clock, the same Sunday appetite, the same entirely irrational conviction that a celery stalk makes something a meal. American, British, Australian, it does not matter. Brunch is the common language. We were all speaking it.

The conversation found its own level, the way good table conversation does when the food is right and nobody has anywhere to be. Chloe is thinking about what AI is doing to the written word, which is the conversation happening at every table in every city where writers are having brunch right now, and we had our version of it here, over Bloody Marys and pancakes and the chicken and waffles I was not eating. No conclusions were reached. None were required.

Chloe left us at Place Garibaldi. The square was named for the man who unified Italy and was born three streets from here, which Nice has never entirely gotten over. Nick and I began the climb back through the park toward Mont Boron, uphill through the Sunday quiet, the Mediterranean somewhere below us doing what it always does. Two Americans walking home from brunch in a city that does not believe in brunch, feeling, for approximately the length of that hill, exactly like people who live here.

Which, it turns out, we do.

Bloody Marys · The Big Pickle, Nice · 08 Mar 2026 · With Nick and Chloe. The Sunday sacrament. ★★★★

There is a restaurant in Nice with twelve seats, bamboo surfaces, and a kitchen hidden behind a noren, the split fabric panel that Japanese restaurants have hung in their doorways since the Heian period, a thousand years of tradition that says: what happens in here is not your business yet. The noren is how you know a place is open. There is a saying that if the noren is dirty, the shop is doing good business. This one is clean, and the shop is doing very good business.

The ceramic is authentic. The fish is serious. It seats twelve people and has no interest in seating more.

We have been here four or five times now. You stop counting at a certain point and just call it yours.

But first you have to understand something about Los Angeles and sushi. It is not a preference. It is infrastructure. The social life of an Angelino is organized around a handful of tables at a handful of restaurants that become, over years, as load-bearing as any relationship. The right omakase for a first date. The counter where things got decided over toro. The standing order on a Friday that meant the week was over and everything was fine. You do not fully understand how much of your life has been built on this until you move to the south of France and discover that Nice, for all its considerable virtues, had not solved this particular problem. For two years it was the thing we did not discuss. Paris had it. We were not in Paris.

Then we found twelve seats and a noren on a side street and the question of Paris quietly closed.

Tonight was Michael, Nick, and me. Michael came over from LA last year, connected to us through friends back in Houston. The last time we saw the Houston crew was on our road trip, the one where America got a proper goodbye and France got whatever version of us arrived at the other end. Bulldog energy applied to property searches is a particular skill set and Nick has it completely.

The apartment sits just off Avenue Jean-Médecin, the main corridor of Nice, the road that runs from the train station down into the life of the city. The station itself is worth a sentence. Built between 1864 and 1867 by architect Louis-Jules Bouchot in the Louis XIII style, ornate balconies, a grand clock, stonework that has not moved since the Second Empire, it was constructed at the exact moment Nice stopped being Italian and started being French. Garibaldi, born here, watched his city change its nationality like a coat. Avenue Jean-Médecin was laid down to connect that station to a city still figuring out what it was, and every time Michael walks to dinner he is walking a road built to receive a new France. He landed well. This is what a life in a new city looks like when the right people are paying attention: one dinner at a time, one apartment at a time, the city filling in around you until it starts to feel like yours.

It was only when we got home that anyone noticed the date.

March 10. Mar10. Mario Day, the annual Nintendo holiday that exists entirely because a date, written a certain way, looks like the name of a plumber from the Mushroom Kingdom. I leave for Tokyo on Wednesday to produce an international press event built around that plumber. I have been asking myself, not entirely in jest, whether I am adequately equipped to serve him. The calendar, it turns out, had already weighed in.

The calendar did that. We just showed up for dinner.

House sake · Sushi Arson, Nice · 10 Mar 2026 · With Nick and Michael. Poured without ceremony. The correct decision. ★★★★★

The argument was small. The kind that arrives sideways, about something specific, which is never really about the specific thing. Nick is jealous of the time I have been spending with Tibo on training. What he is reading as a claim on the dog, I experience as joy. Both of these things can be true at the same time. Most things can.

So I left without the dog. This happens rarely enough that the city felt different without him. No basket. No one stopping me on the couloir vert to ask what breed. Just the scooter, Place Garibaldi, and the walk south toward the sea alone.

I stopped at Troc Azure. Went is a strong word for how you enter an antique store. You drift in. You let the smell of it take over, which is the smell of other people’s considered objects, their Rainers and their Deccas, the street names of lives that have been sorted and boxed and priced. I grew up with this smell. It is the smell of my grandmother’s house and my mother’s house, and here it was again on the Côte d’Azur, which should not have surprised me and did.

I left Los Angeles with the sentimental things. This was a choice made consciously and I stand by it. The fancy things, the heirlooms with retail value, the car I loved, the career path, the accumulated weight of a life that was completely lovely: left behind. I chose the 3 euro items. The objects that carry no price worth speaking of except the price they carry for me. Standing in Troc Azure, I understood that those objects will end up here eventually. In some version of this store. That is not a tragedy. That is what objects do. They outlive the meaning we assign them and find new rooms.

Adventure is a privilege but the cost was leaving so much behind. I knew this when I left. I know it differently now, standing in a room full of someone else’s left-behind things, which look exactly like mine.

There were Galileo thermometers. Five euros, eight euros, a few of them grouped together on a shelf. I stood there longer than I meant to. I had a Christmas job once, retail, and these were among my fascinations. We displayed them in groups because they are more beautiful that way.

Galileo Galilei did not actually invent the thermometer that bears his name. He built a rudimentary thermoscope around 1593, an open tube that responded to temperature but couldn’t be read precisely. The sealed glass version, the beautiful one, was developed by his students at the Accademia del Cimento in Florence in the 1600s. The Academy of Experiment. They named it for him as a tribute. The underlying principle is Archimedes: objects float or sink depending on whether they are denser or less dense than the surrounding liquid. As the liquid warms it expands and becomes less dense, and the heavier spheres sink. As it cools, they rise. Each sphere carries a small metal tag with a temperature. You read the lowest floating one. The one still holding on.

I did not buy them today. I will go back tomorrow.

I kept walking. There was a shoe store. French shoes, metallic, what the French call papa shoes, six hundred euros, the kind of purchase that in a former life would not have made me pause for a single moment. I tried them on. I wanted them. I held for a moment. Value is different now. Not worse. Just recalibrated in both directions at once: some things cheaper than they should be, some things heavier than they used to feel. I put the shoes back. I kept walking toward the sea.

I am not a dad. A guncle. A godfather. To Tibo and Harvey, in the way that counts. I am a person who chose something new when something lovely was already available. Escape and arrival, both at once. You can run toward something and away from something in the same motion. I have stopped trying to decide which one it was.

I chose the sentimental over the expensive when I left. I am apparently still choosing it. The thermometers will be there tomorrow. The spheres rise and fall according to their own logic, responding to the temperature of the room without drama, without announcement. The lowest floating one is the one that tells you where you are. You just have to be paying attention.

The postman came at six. I had been home all day for him, which in this case was worth it: a box of props for the Tokyo press junket. Noise-cancelling headphones, art kits, markers, game show buzzers. The kind of cheerful schlock that press coordinators request, producers approve, and cast celebrities regard with the quiet horror of people who did not get into this business to press a buzzer. A signature required. The French postal system has its priorities.

The interview cards I picked up separately, from a print shop I tracked down myself. Good quality. The kind of thing that makes you feel the logistics are actually working, which at this stage of a production is its own small victory. I answered emails at the Café de Lyon on Jean Médecin, collected myself, and walked to the Pathé with time to spare.

Vincenzo and Andy arrived just behind Nick, all separately and in good spirits. Two Scotsmen, one with an Italian surname that takes him back to visit his mother in the south, the other an architect who still practices in the UK. Both teach at the international school in Monaco, which is how they found Tom and Hania, and how Tom and Hania found us a couple worth knowing. Vincenzo is finishing his Masters. Andy has strong opinions about buildings and is not shy about them. They are excellent company.

The film was Pillion. Alexander Skarsgård. Colin is a man living quietly and unremarkably until he meets Ray, who is charismatic and bold and owns a motorcycle and takes up exactly the amount of space that Colin has been leaving available without realizing it. Colin becomes the passenger. Ray’s pillion. The film is about submission and power and the specific comedy of a person discovering, somewhat late, that they have been living at the wrong volume. It is very funny in places and uncomfortable in others and by the end the four of us had opinions that did not entirely agree, which is the mark of something worth watching.

Dinner was after. Pezza: less a restaurant than a window with ambitions, a few tables, pizza more than serviceable. The Nero d’Avola arrived and the conversation about the film did not stop for the first half of the meal. Four people, four readings, one increasingly excellent theory from Andy about the architecture of submission that the rest of us were not entirely prepared for. Vincenzo thought Colin was the more interesting character. Nick thought Ray was misunderstood. I thought this was a revealing thing for Nick to think and kept that to myself.

Today he took the car to shoot an Instagram post for his new project: a guide to navigating the American-to-French driving license transfer. It is a good idea. He is the right person for it. He has the research instincts and the absolute conviction that he knows the correct way to do things, which in this case he mostly does. The project is his. I am below the line on this one, which is a production term meaning I execute rather than create, and I am choosing to stay there because Nick has a hard time not being in charge and an even harder time with notes, and I would like him to succeed, and sometimes those two things require that I hold my opinions in my pocket and point the camera where it needs pointing.

I am good at this. I am not always happy about being good at this.

At dinner I did not mention any of my own work until we were paying the check, at which point Tokyo came up briefly, which felt like the right proportion. Four days. Two countries. One box of game show buzzers already signed for and waiting.

We pulled apart on the Boulevard Jean Médecin. Nice doing its nighttime thing. The Pathé still lit behind us. Tibo and Harvey waiting at the apartment.

Nick thought Ray was misunderstood. I find this very funny. I will not be sharing that with him.

Luma Sicilia · Nero d’Avola · Pezza, Nice · 13 Mar 2026

It started grey. The kind of grey that Nice does reluctantly, apologetically, as if the sky is aware it has a reputation to maintain. Tibo looked at me with the expression he reserves for moments when he has assessed the situation and found me to be the limiting factor. We went anyway.

Thirty minutes on the scooter from Villa Diana to the Plage Brigitte Bardot, which is the dog beach, and which is named for a woman who died ten weeks ago at ninety-one in Saint-Tropez. She retired from film at thirty-nine, sold her jewelry, auctioned her memorabilia, signed over her house, and gave the rest of her life to animals. She said: “I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.” She was also, by the end, a genuine piece of work: convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, contemptuous of the MeToo movement, complicated in all the ways that great monuments tend to be when you look at them up close. Cannes renamed a beach after her within the week. Nice named its animal shelter. Tibo accepted the honor on behalf of the species and tried to eat something unidentifiable near the waterline.

The clouds broke while we walked the Promenade. The light came back the way it always comes back here, suddenly and completely, as if it had simply been waiting for permission. We turned at the Quai Rauba Capeu and headed for Cours Saleya, Tibo moving at the pace of a dog who has nowhere to be and knows it.

What remains is the park, laid out in 1822 on the ruins, and the cascade: an artificial waterfall inaugurated on June 27, 1885, built on the foundations of one of the old keep’s towers, fed by water piped from the Vésubie river fifty kilometers north. Napoleon III stood at the summit in 1860 and announced it was the most beautiful landscape in the world. A noon cannon has been fired from the hill every day since 1861, originally at the request of a Scottish winter resident named Sir Thomas Coventry-More, who wanted to remind his wife when to come in for lunch. The French have been doing this ever since, for a Scottish man’s wife, who has been dead for over a century.

From the prime spot at Café Mimosa, front terrace, you look directly up at it. The cascade sits at the top like a destination, drawing the eye up through the ochre facades and the baroque rooflines and the pines that make the hill look ancient even though the park itself is younger than the Eiffel Tower. Walt Disney called this a weenie: the thing at the end of the sightline that makes you walk toward it. Main Street terminates in the castle. The castle is the weenie. Disney studied Haussmann for this, who had already done it to Paris: grands boulevards cut through the city not for traffic but for sightlines, each one terminating in something worth looking at. The Arc de Triomphe. The Opéra. The Sacré-Coeur. The whole city organized around the logic of what your eye needs to find at the end of a long street.

The Colline du Château does this for Nice without trying. It sits between the old town and the port, 92 meters above sea level, and everything below it arranges itself accordingly. You cannot stand anywhere in the eastern part of this city without the hill telling you where you are.

Nick called while Tibo and I were at the plage. He had been reshooting a social media video for the new business, the American-to-French driving license project, and was ready for lunch. We met at Café Mimosa. I had a walnut and apple salad with endive and Roquefort and a Perrier, which is the version of this meal that my current relationship with my own body requires. It was delicious. I did not covet anyone else’s pizza.

In two days I will be on a plane. The Colline du Château will still be there when I get back, the cascade running, the noon cannon ready, the pines doing their impression of something ancient. Tibo will be with Nick. Harvey will be with Nick. The thermometers I still have not bought will be at Troc Azure, waiting.

The weenie works because it promises something. You walk toward it because the city has told you it is worth the walk. Most of the time, it is.

I left Nice at 12:30 on a Wednesday with a carry-on, two suitcases, and two boxes of art department. The loose ends followed me to the airport via email and most of the way to Paris.

We came in just north of the city, port side, at magic hour. The angle of the sun was catching the glass atriums of the light wells just so, everything sparkling at once, as if the entire city had been hewn by a jeweler’s tool, cut and fashioned on purpose for this specific effect. Of course it is a happy accident of geometry and atmosphere and the particular seat you happened to be assigned. It did not feel like one.

Five hours in the Air France lounge at CDG, which is looking considerably more composed after its Olympic renovation. I worked on pitches. The kind of work where you go further than asked because you got excited, and then sit with the quiet concern that the room may not have been ready for that level of enthusiasm, and that there is a meaningful difference between vision and overzeal that is only visible from the other side of the presentation. Paris stayed outside where it belongs when you have a connection to make.

The Tokyo leg was thirteen hours. Dinner was Saint-Jacques, which I will say once and not revisit. I worked for a while. Then a whisky, then the kind of sleep that only happens at altitude when the body finally accepts that it has no say in the matter. I woke up somewhere over Siberia with the particular blankness of a person who has been lightly reset.

Haneda at night is quiet in a way that airports are not supposed to be. Orderly, considered, unhurried. The Japanese toilets were waiting, which after the Saint-Jacques situation was a relationship I was prepared to take seriously. A taxi absorbed me and the art department and moved us through the city toward the Prince Park Tower, which sits directly beside Tokyo Tower, which I did not fully appreciate until I got to my room.

The room is a vibe. The Prince Park Tower exists in at least two time periods simultaneously: 1985 and 2085, neither fully committed to the other. There is an aqua, a bowling alley, karaoke, excellent wifi. Handles in the bathtub and glass elevators rising through a Blade Runner central atrium. Orchids and glass block. The whole building reads as something that saw the future coming and decided to keep the past anyway, just in case. My room is one of the unrenovated ones, clean and kept and sincere in its original terms. The view, however, belongs to no decade. It is simply Tokyo Tower at close range, which at midnight is lit purple and white and amber.

Exactly like Super Mario Galaxy.

Stephan found me before I’d cleared the fog of arrival. He produces events and is working with us this week. We went to Kaimasa for sushi: a counter, a chef, what appeared to be the chef’s son ferrying sake and highballs between us with the gravity of someone who understands that his role is essential and invisible. The restaurant was otherwise empty. The sushi was good. I underestimated my appetite, which is information I am processing now alongside a plate of French fries at the 33rd floor bar.

Stephan’s father is Japanese. His mother German. He grew up in a town in Germany called Celle, moved to Japan in his twenties, has two children, and is at the beginning of an HRT journey. He offered all of this early and openly, the way some people do when they have decided that life is too short for the slow reveal. We talked through the meal and I mostly listened, which is not my natural setting but felt right. There is something in the parallel, even if the scales are different: we have both left the country we were in and rebuilt somewhere else, with the particular combination of loss and relief that entails.

I did not share as much as he did. I rarely do, the first night.

It is almost midnight. The tower is still lit. Below it the city does its thing, indifferent and magnificent, twenty-three floors down. I am grateful and a little emotional and not entirely sure I’ve eaten enough. The week starts tomorrow.

The room is sincere. The view is not trapped anywhere.

Suntory “The Yamazaki” Single Malt 12 Years · Prince Park Tower Bar, Tokyo · 17 Mar 2026

There is a knife shop in Kappabashi called Kama-Asa, founded in 1908, in the kitchenware district of Asakusa where the streets are lined entirely with shops selling things for professional kitchens. Their motto is: good tools have a reason. They have been saying this for a hundred and seventeen years and you believe it the moment you walk in.

Kappabashi is Tokyo’s Kitchen Town: block after block of restaurant supply stores, knife shops, ceramics, lacquerware, the plastic food models that sit in restaurant windows. Kama-Asa sits among them with the quiet authority of a place that has outlasted most of its neighbors by several generations. Two stores side by side, one for kitchen tools, one for knives. Inside the knife section, over a thousand blades sourced from across Japan, none of them branded, because the shop considers it disrespectful to put their name on work done by many different artisans in many different regions. The knives carry only the silence of where they came from.

They offer an engraving service with every purchase. For Latin script they use an electric hand grinder, one letter at a time. For Japanese characters they use chisels and hammers, by hand. I bought a vegetable knife and I chose the name Luigi. Vegetables are green. Luigi is green. The logic is airtight and I will not be taking questions.

The knife will live in Nick’s hands most of the time, which is correct. Nick deserves a knife with a name. Luigi deserves a kitchen in Nice. The fourth generation owner of Kama-Asa opened a Paris branch in 2018. There is a version of this story where Luigi eventually makes it back to France and that feels right.

After Kama-Asa I went to Hinoya Plus One for Japanese denim. Dark indigo selvedge, the kind that needs a year of wearing before it fully becomes yours. And white t-shirts, because Tokyo white t-shirts are a specific category of object that justifies the carry-on space they will require on the way home. Then a nap. A long, genuine, deeply committed nap of the kind that only happens when the body finally reconciles itself with the time zone. I woke up in the right timezone for the first time since Paris.

Outside the window the camellia trees are blooming pink. The old Toyota Crown station wagon in the parking lot below has not moved since I arrived, dark brown and immaculate, a 1970s artifact preserved in the particular Japanese way that treats old things as worth the trouble. I photographed it. It deserved to be photographed.

Mandy got into her room at around four. By dinner we were already laughing. Yakitori at the hotel counter, first two stools, chicken and skewers and sake and the particular ease of someone you can pick up with regardless of the time or distance that has been in between. Mandy is the kind of person who makes everyone around her funnier. She reads the joke two steps before it lands, which means the room is always slightly more alive for her being in it. Whip smart. The laughing is never effortful, it just happens, the way it does with people who share a frequency and know it.

We spent most of dinner talking around the storm. Literally and figuratively. The weather may not be cooperating for our outdoor activities and interviews next week, which means contingencies, which means the kind of logistical conversation that feels like work even when you’re having it over good chicken at a counter in Tokyo. We talked through it. We will talk through it again. This is the job.

Dry and sunny may be too much to ask for Tokyo in March. But I am asking anyway. Politely. With both hands.

An impeccable day. Also exhausting. Luigi is wrapped in tissue paper in the suitcase, the denim is folded on the chair, and the city is doing its midnight thing twenty-three floors down. The rain gods have not yet responded to my inquiry. I remain hopeful.

The arrival has started. You can feel it in the lobby, in the group chats, in the specific quality of attention that settles over a production team the night before the work begins. The well-seasoned and the well-travelled meeting the battle-hardened. Creative, camera, lighting, accounting, logistics. The spreadsheets made flesh.

Gonpachi Nishi-Azabu is a theme park of a restaurant: tall, loud, layered, the kind of space that requires stamina just to be inside. Several of the team came in straight from a shoot in Napa Valley, the jet lag not yet registering but the haze of travel sitting on everyone like a second skin. The Asahi was no doubt numbing the edges for those who had just landed. We were ten at the table. A Mario Party, in the most literal sense of the occasion.

This is where the riders of the talent contracts meet the storm of the event. Those two things carry different grammars. The riders represent what the talent requires: the temperature of the room, the approved questions, the specific brand of still water. The storm is everything that happens anyway. You cannot sit around a table like that and not feel the accumulated thread of decisions, projects, cities, and years that put each person in exactly that chair at exactly that moment. The sensory overload of the room was appropriate. It matched the interior weather.

Multiple friction points in a day like this. How could there not be. The language barrier working both ways, the effort of cultural sensitivity landing with varying degrees of grace, the comedy of everyone trying very hard to be appropriate in a country where the rules of appropriateness are different and unwritten and occasionally contradictory. Mandy and I had set out earlier in the day on the excellent Tokyo metro in search of hanko for her children. Souvenirs.

You press it into vermillion ink and then into paper and it means: I was here. I am accountable. This is mine. For over two thousand years, across empires and modernizations and a global pandemic, that small act has persisted. Mandy wanted them for her kids. This seems exactly right.

The store was closed when we arrived. Just as we reached it, a message came in requiring me back at the computer to create artwork for Kyoto. We turned around, took the metro back, and had a working lunch at the hotel. The hanko will have to wait.

Tomorrow: multiple venues across the city, each department bringing its eye and its judgment to the project. Then a Shinkansen to Kyoto for the first shoot. The bullet train covers the 450 kilometers in about two and a quarter hours. The countryside runs past the window at 320 kilometers per hour and looks, for the duration, like the most beautiful screensaver anyone has ever made.

Tonight at Gonpachi the plates arrived and the noise held and everyone was present and accounted for. It was hard to be around that table and not feel something. Gratitude, mostly. The specific privilege of being the person who gets to sit there.

The storm starts tomorrow. We are as ready as we are going to be.

Katya is small, blonde, Russian, and speaks Japanese and English with a severity of tone that transforms the most routine logistical exchange into something that sounds like a formal diplomatic warning. She is our local fixer. She has the meerkat quality of someone engaged in constant threat assessment: head appearing around corners at unexpected angles, eyes with the full iris exposed. Every schedule update, every venue direction, every instruction to stand over there and not here arrives as a Cold War communiqué. She was tasked today with ferrying ten spoiled Americans through six venues across Tokyo in two vans and a bullet train. She suffered no fools. There were no fools left by the end of it. She had processed them all.

The day began with bags dropped at the MESM and the team assembling for the scout. The order of operations: the Edition first, then the 1 Hotel, then the New Otani garden, then the rooftop of the Tokyo Prince, which is our actual junket platform sitting directly beneath Tokyo Tower. Each department bringing its eye to the space. Creative looking at light and sightlines. Camera looking at angles and movement. Logistics looking at load-in and the precise mathematics of how eleven hundred things arrive in the correct order. This is the work before the work.

The cherry blossoms are being shy this year. Technically present, buds visible, the suggestion of pink, the trees making their assessment of the situation and declining to commit. We may be one week too early for the full display, which in sakura terms is essentially a different season. Hanami, flower viewing, has been practiced in Japan since the eighth century, when the imperial court would gather beneath plum blossoms and write poetry. The entire country still stops for a week each spring. The timing is tracked obsessively by a national network of volunteer observers who report blossom percentages the way other countries report weather. The trees have their own schedule and it does not account for press junkets.

I have ordered faux sakura. Artificial cherry blossom branches to dress the garden shots and exterior camera positions if the real ones don’t cooperate. This is either brilliant contingency planning or the most elaborate hedge against nature I have ever been professionally responsible for. Possibly both. There is also a storm approaching. Ninety-six percent chance of rain on the shoot days. The rooftop junket platform, the New Otani garden, the outdoor interview stations: all of it watching the sky with the specific anxiety of a production that has already committed to the concept. If the storm wins, everything moves indoors into a hotel room that could just as well be in Beverly Hills, and the entire logic of being in Tokyo collapses into a backdrop we installed rather than a place we actually are.

In one of the elevators, a small padded triangular stool sat folded against the wall. The attendant, yes there was an attendant, explained it was there in case of earthquake. Last July a magnitude 8.8 struck off the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s far east, the sixth largest ever recorded by modern instruments, triggering Pacific-wide tsunami warnings from Japan to Hawaii to northern California. The aftershocks have been running ever since. The Kamchatka subduction zone sits directly north on the same tectonic system that produced the 2011 Tohoku disaster. The stool is not whimsy. It is infrastructure. Japan does not panic about these things. It puts a small padded stool in the corner and gets on with the day.

The New Otani was the surprise of the scout. The Edition and the 1 Hotel are new buildings doing what new buildings do: clean surfaces, considered lighting, the design language of somewhere that has been thoroughly thought about. Impressive. Expected. The New Otani has simply been. Layer over layer over decades, a traditional Japanese landscape garden at its center that predates every conversation about hotel aesthetics by several generations. You walk out of a lobby that could be 1974 and into a garden that could be 1624 and neither one apologizes to the other. Designing something to feel ancient is a different proposition from something that actually is. No amount of budget purchases that. It can only be inherited.

Trader Vic’s for dinner. Vic Bergeron opened his first bar in Oakland in 1934, called it Hinky Dinks, went to Cuba to study rum, came back obsessed with island culture, and in 1944 invented the Mai Tai by handing a friend a glass of 17-year-old Jamaican rum, lime, rock candy syrup, orange curaçao, and French orgeat over cracked ice. The friend exclaimed “Mai Tai Roa Ae” in Tahitian. Out of this world, the best. The Tokyo location has been on the fourth floor of the New Otani Garden Tower since 1974, the fourth-oldest surviving Trader Vic’s in the world. It is the only location still using Bergeron’s original recipes, served in original drinkware, surrounded by tiki decor that is now worth considerably more than anyone paid for it. A museum you can drink in. Essentially.

Sitting at that table, all of it came back at once: the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland. The tiki bar in Silver Lake in the early LA glory days. The Trader Vic’s at the Beverly Hilton during Golden Globes week, the Scorpion Bowl earned after a week of build. The cocktails arrived with flags and garnish stacked improbably high. The buffet was straight out of a 1970 menu and was completely correct. The Japanese are better custodians of certain American cultural touchstones than Americans have been. They preserved the 7-Eleven and improved it. Lawson’s. Dean and DeLuca. Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea. And this: a Polynesian fantasy from Oakland, intact and immaculate, fifty years in, more itself than any version of itself still operating in California.

Ten of us boarded the Shinkansen. Giggles when we got on, the specific slap-happy delirium of a group that has been running all day. By the time the train reached speed everyone had settled. Two hours. 320 kilometers per hour. The countryside was dark outside the window, theoretical, a screensaver someone had almost finished designing. Nobody needed to talk.

At Kyoto Station, stepping off the train onto the platform, I fell into step beside Katya. She glanced over with the precise intonation of someone whose sarcasm has been filtered through two additional languages and said: “Oh. Vee didn’t loose you.” The tone strongly implied she had been open to either outcome.

Katya got us all on the train. This was her final act of the day and it was not a small one. The faux sakura is in a van somewhere. The storm is still coming. The cherry blossoms are deciding, on their own schedule, whether this is their week or the next one. We will find out when we arrive.

When I opened the shades this morning I would normally have been disappointed. The view was a neighbor’s wall. Not the Kamo River. Not the rooftops of a thousand years of city. A wall. But it was a considered slate grey, textured just enough to look intentional, and planted directly in front of the window was a flowering pink camellia tree, close enough to touch the glass. An abstraction. Kyoto doing what Kyoto does: turning a constraint into a composition.

The Hyatt Place is not the Ritz-Carlton, where some of the team is staying, or the Four Seasons. This would be the wrong take. Five nights into the trip, two cities, the shoot not yet started, and what the body required was exactly what it got: the best pillows of the three hotels, a clean room, a down-to-business environment, and a deep sleep that felt genuinely restorative. The camellia against the grey wall was the correct thing to wake up to. Sometimes the gods of hotel rooms know what they are doing.

Mandy requires a Starbucks to start the day at this point in a trip and this is a completely understandable position. I met her in line. Julie and Michelle arrived and the day began. Julie has been a colleague since my first days at NBCUniversal, which means we have been finding our way through productions together for the better part of a working life. She is a force of nature in the specific way that makes everyone around her sharper. With Mandy and Julie running the ship they are unstoppable. I always want to be part of their crew no matter how violent the storm.

Breakfast was at Kyosaimi Nomura, obanzai style: a grid of small bowls, proteins and carbs in various forms and consistencies, hot tea, grilled fish, pickles, rice. An experiment in expanding the palate and the food horizon before a long day. It worked. I also had a list of errands, including replacement pajamas. Tibo, back in Nice, had apparently missed me enough to locate the bottoms of my favourite gauze pair and chew a hole through them. They are cozy and worth a trip to Japan just to replace. Mission accomplished, plus a robe.

Joe, another crew member, was persuaded by my advocacy to purchase a pair of pajamas as well. He attempted to try a pair on for himself but was met with a Japanese retail ritual requiring him to put a thin veil over his head before trying anything on, to keep the garments clean. The combination of jet lag, the language barrier, and an unexpected veil proved to be one obstacle too many. He did not get the pajamas. I got mine.

We walked through Gion. Gion began as a rest stop for pilgrims visiting Yasaka Shrine, developed into an entertainment district through the medieval period, and by the Meiji era had over 700 teahouses and more than 3,000 geiko and maiko working within its borders. The geiko of Kyoto do not call themselves geisha. Geiko means simply a woman of art. In 1974 the city designated Gion a special protection area. In 2024 specific alleys were closed entirely to tourists after years of disrespectful behavior. The district continues to operate on its own terms, which is the only way it has ever operated.

The Kamo River runs 31 kilometers through the spine of Kyoto, fed from the mountains to the north, flowing south toward Osaka. It has flooded the city catastrophically throughout its history, which is why old Kyoto was built slightly apart from it. The embankments were reinforced in the Edo period. The river feels tamed now but the city has not entirely forgotten. There is an unwritten social law in Kyoto that couples sitting on the riverbanks must be equally spaced from other couples along the entire length. Nobody enforces it. Everyone follows it.

We found a music instrument store called Watanabe. We were looking for microphone stands for a podcast shoot. A music store searched for its utility rather than its beauty, which is a sign of the times and also completely fine. We found what we needed.

Sunglasses repaired. Pajamas purchased. The day crossed items off lists in the unhurried Kyoto way, on foot, which is the only correct speed for this city.

Lunch was conveyor belt sushi at Sushiro in Gion. This is one of Japan’s great democratic pleasures: excellent fish at prices that do not require a second thought, delivered by belt or by bullet-train lane depending on the location, in a room where everyone is equally focused on the same small immediate happiness. We were very focused.

In the afternoon the van took us to Uji, just south of Kyoto, to the Nintendo Museum. The building is the old Uji Ogura Plant, the factory where Nintendo made its first products. Nintendo began in 1889 not as a video game company but as a manufacturer of Hanafuda playing cards. Then came toys, an indoor pitching machine, RC cars, a love tester, the Ultra Hand, the Game & Watch, the Famicom, the GameBoy, Mario, Zelda, the entire arc of a company becoming one of the most recognizable cultural forces in the world, one object at a time. There was a display of the early products, the ones from before the games, and I did not have time to stop for context. Tomorrow I will try.

We were not there as visitors. We were there to scout and pre-light four shoots for tomorrow’s first press day with the filmmakers. Walking through a museum built from the pieces of a childhood with a production eye rather than a visitor’s eye is a specific experience: you see the light, the angles, the sightlines, the logistics of moving talent through a space, and underneath all of that, sideways, the thing you actually feel, which is the specific nostalgia of a person who grew up with these objects in their hands and is now standing in a room that has decided they are worth preserving.

They are worth preserving. Tomorrow the press starts. Tonight the camellia is outside the window somewhere in the dark, still pink, still against the grey wall, still doing its job.

Breakfast: Kyosaimi Nomura · obanzai, small bowls, hot tea. Lunch: Sushiro, Gion · conveyor belt, deeply satisfying. Pre-scout: egg salad sando, Family Mart · the correct fuel for the occasion.

Suntory Highball · from a can · room, Hyatt Place Kyoto · 23 Mar 2026 · Waiting on ice. The nightcap the day deserved.

I woke before the alarm. Not sure if it was the jet lag or the anticipation. Probably both. Mandy had barely slept. We did the obligatory Starbucks run in the grey Kyoto morning, not as a luxury but as a system requirement, and loaded into the van. Sunny and crisp. The storm had moved to Wednesday night. Today was ours.

Nintendo was founded on September 23, 1889, in Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto, by a craftsman named Fusajiro Yamauchi. He made Hanafuda cards by hand from mulberry bark. Forty-eight cards per deck, divided into twelve suits representing the months of the year, each one painted with flowers, animals, the moon, the wind. The cards were beautiful and they were also technically illegal, because Japan had been banning playing cards intermittently for two centuries on account of their association with gambling. Other manufacturers had walked away from the market. Yamauchi stayed. He became the primary producer of Hanafuda in Kyoto within a few years. The name Nintendo is commonly translated as "leave luck to heaven." Nobody actually knows if that’s right. Even the descendants of Yamauchi don’t know.

In the museum there is a cabinet: floor to ceiling, warm wood, dozens of small drawers, each one labeled with a tiny card from one of the hundred or more varieties Nintendo produced over a century. It sits behind glass in the way that important things sit behind glass. I did not have time to stop for context the night before during the scout. Standing in front of it this morning with a few minutes before the talent arrived, it stopped me. The whole company, the whole empire, the whole improbable arc of it, compressed into a wall of small wooden drawers in a building that used to be the factory where the drawers were filled.

There is an original Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge in one of the cases. Grey plastic, the familiar label, Made in Japan stamped on the bottom. The game shipped in 1985 and sold forty million copies. I had one. Most people I know had one. Looking at it under glass in a museum in the city where it was made, forty years later, felt like looking at a first edition of something important through a bookshop window. The specific quality of recognizing a thing you knew before you knew anything.

Chris Pratt arrived and the show started happening. The art department had brought a truck of carefully considered props and approvals did not follow. The truck went back. The museum, as I had suspected the night before, needed almost nothing from us. It was already the set. The light was already right. The history was already present and doing its job. Our work was to get out of the way of it and point the camera correctly.

Pros do what pros do. Once rolling, the interviews were excellent. The talent understood exactly where they were and what the space meant. You cannot be in that building and not feel the weight of it: the cards, the toys, the Ultra Hand, the batting cage, the Game & Watch, the Famicom, the Game Boy, each object a decision someone made to pivot toward whatever was coming rather than defend what was already there. Nintendo has survived by understanding that the product is not the technology. The character is the asset. Mario will outlast every platform he has ever run on.

Outside the museum, in the courtyard, there are oversized green pipes and a question-mark block and a giant red mushroom, all to celebrate forty years of Super Mario Bros. Standing between the pipes with arms wide felt ridiculous and also completely correct. Sometimes you are just in the middle of something and you know it and the best response is to open your arms.

Nine and a half hours. Death by a thousand cuts and also alive the whole time. In the van back to the train station at 20:21, someone raised the weather. Whether the storm would actually arrive Wednesday or push to Thursday. Whether the outdoor shoots would hold. Johnny, Glass Engine director on the ground, considered this for a moment and said the argument wouldn’t hold water. The timing was perfect and the delivery was flat and everyone in the van laughed in the way you laugh at the end of a very long good day.

Nintendo began with Hanafuda cards in 1889 because playing cards were the edge of what was permissible and Yamauchi was willing to be there. Then toys, because the card market saturated. Then electronic toys, because a maintenance engineer built something amusing for himself and the president saw it and ordered it into production. Then arcade games, then home consoles, then portable consoles, then motion controls, then hybrid systems. Each time the horizon shifted they moved toward it. The question is always: what is the pleasure the person wants to feel, and what technology serves that pleasure now.

The pleasure of a world that is genuinely yours. That is probably the horizon we are all moving toward. What spatial computing is still awkwardly becoming. The screen disappearing. The character stepping off the platform and into the room.

Forty years of Mario. Leave luck to heaven. The Shinkansen home to Kyoto. The egg salad sando from yesterday still the correct call in retrospect.

Suntory Highball · from a can · Hyatt Place Kyoto · 24 Mar 2026 · Same ritual. Different exhaustion. Both correct.

I had left the blinds open and the sliding door as far as it would go so that the city could come in at sunrise. It did. Kyoto through glass at first light, the sky going from grey to pale gold, the room still quiet. This was the last morning of that particular luxury. The day had already decided what it was going to be.

I was dressed and moving before the alarm. Chisato was waiting.

Chisato is my local production assistant for the project, young and sharp and possessed of the kind of diplomatic fluency that takes most people decades to develop and some people never do. She navigated seven locations across the city with the grace of a seasoned United Nations diplomat. The language, the requests, the gentle steering required when an American is charging toward something that isn’t quite right. I was too loud. Too forward. Too certain that directness was a virtue. The Japanese I encountered would never tell me no. They would simply offer to help, or quietly suggest an alternative, or arrange themselves between me and the wrong outcome with a kind of practiced elegance that made my approach feel like a construction vehicle at a tea ceremony. I am grateful for Chisato. She protected everyone including me.

Our crew, independent and accustomed to handling their own equipment, was taken aback more than once by the Japanese insistence on helping. Someone would move to carry their own bag and four people would appear. Someone would reach for a door and it was already open. The hospitality is not performance. It is infrastructure. The crew did not know what to do with it, which is the correct response the first time.

The seven locations: 1 Hotel Sakura, the New Otani Garden, the Andaz, the Edition, Jisaku, and the Andaz rooftop. Multiple setups at each. I was ahead of the production at every stop, arriving, dressing, approving, and leaving before the talent came through. This is the job on a day like this: you build the world and then you leave it and go build the next one. You do not get to watch what happens in the rooms you made.

Jisaku was the exception, in the sense that it was the most beautiful location I have dressed in recent memory and I was gone before I could properly be inside it. The property surrounds an artificial pond, rock work and considered vegetation: ferns, bonsai, planting that has been arranged over years to look like it has always been exactly that way. And the koi. Gold, vermilion, white, red, practically jumping from the water there are so many of them, moving in the way koi move when they have been fed by the same hands for a long time and expect the world to be generous. The rooms are tatami mats, traditional construction, screens and light and the particular quiet of a space that has been designed to help you hear yourself think. I am sure the interviews were great. I was already in the van.

One meal a day for two days. Moving too fast to stop. This is not a complaint. It is a description of a particular state that production people know: the body running on attention rather than food, fully present because the margin for error is zero and presence is the only currency available.

The last stop was the rooftop of the Andaz as the sun was going down over the city. Benny Safdie and Keegan-Michael Key on high stools, Kyoto spread out behind them, the light doing what late afternoon light does when a city has this many rooftops and this much history underneath them. I sat down for the first time since sunrise. The day became legible from there, the way a long drive only makes sense when you finally stop and look back at the distance.

How much can you give of yourself to a day like this. The question arrived somewhere between the seventh location and the van back to the hotel. The answer appears to be: more than you thought, and the accounting comes later, in a bed in Tokyo, with the city outside the window doing its not-so-quiet nighttime thing.

Nintendo began in 1889 because one man was willing to make beautiful objects that everyone else had decided were too much trouble. One hundred and thirty-six years later, three actors on high stools on a Kyoto rooftop, talking about a movie built on the back of that decision. The name means leave luck to heaven. It is the only approach that makes sense for a day with seven locations and no time to eat.

I woke up at the MESM with the bags already waiting. The last day of a production has a specific texture: everything that was urgent yesterday is now administrative, and everything that felt permanent has already started to dissolve. Breakfast with Mandy in the lobby. Game plan for the morning. Then a taxi to Shibuya.

The objective was shopping: Mandy has boys at home and a list to check off. We moved through Shibuya with the energy of people who have been in production mode for two weeks and have now been asked to simply browse. It is a different skill set.

The Pokémon store was on the sixth floor of the mall. I was not emotionally prepared. And the store itself was a specific kind of sensory event that I have only experienced once before at the same intensity: Mont Saint-Michel, one way in, one way out, the crowd moving in a single direction like a slow liquid. Here it was vertical rather than medieval, but the claustrophobia and the agoraphobia arrived simultaneously and in equal measure, which is a combination that should not be physically possible and yet.

The only thought I had for most of it was how to get Mandy and myself out in an emergency, which we were sort of in. We got out. The list got checked off. The van absorbed the boxes and we moved on.

And then, at some point in the afternoon that I could not precisely locate if asked, the job ended. The team dispersed: LA, Portland, Kyoto, wherever their various flights were taking them. The launch is over. The next one is already loading, less international than this, the gears already shifted. I had planned the ticket to give myself time on the other side. Not an accident. A decision made months ago by a version of me who understood that Tokyo deserves more than a sprint through it.

Tomorrow morning I have an appointment at a barber in Shibuya called Wolf Man. I passed it today and stopped. Classic looking. The kind of shop that exists in Milan, Rome, Berlin, Paris, London, and apparently Tokyo, and notably not on the Côte d’Azur, where I have been unable to find one since moving to Nice. A great barber appointment in every city I spend real time in is one of my consistent pleasures. The chair, the mirror, the thirty minutes of enforced stillness. The person who knows every neighbourhood secret because everyone tells them everything. You can tell a great deal about a place from a good barbershop. I am looking forward to it with a specific and uncomplicated anticipation that has been in short supply this week.

I am at the ANA InterContinental now, alone. The BBC is on at a hum below intelligible, talking about impending conflict and fuel prices, which is the BBC’s natural register. I have put on the gauze robe I travelled to Kyoto to replace after Tibo chewed through the original in Nice, and I have opened the shades to describe what I see, which is: Manhattan and Paris and its own unintelligible world, all at once. The MESM had a balcony over the gardens and the bay, a sliding glass door and fresh air. This room is hermetically sealed, air conditioning, a building directly across from me at close range. And Tokyo Tower, inescapable, lit, following me from hotel to hotel across the city.

Except that at 21:32, I looked again and the tower is no longer lit in Mario colors. Just its own amber and white. The press junket is over. The tower has gone back to being Tokyo Tower, which was always what it was, before we arrived and needed it to be something else.

Maybe it’s over after all.

Slept in. The blackout blinds in the room are exceptional and I used them fully. Mandy and Julie left yesterday, the team dispersed to their various cities, and this morning belonged entirely to no schedule. Breakfast at the hotel: a western style healthy omelette, the kind of thing you order when the body has been running on egg salad sandos and conveyor belt sushi and needs something it recognizes. Then out into Tokyo alone.

Before the coffee shop, Wolf Man Barber. The full works: shave, haircut, two hours in the chair, a capable Japanese man very interested in hearing about the Nintendo project and Super Mario. He asked good questions. The barber always asks good questions. This is what I have learned from years of booking barber appointments in cities I want to understand: Milan, Rome, Berlin, Paris, London. You sit down, you stop moving, and the city tells you what it knows through the person holding the scissors. The Côte d’Azur has not produced a classic barber of this kind in all the time I’ve been looking. Tokyo has Wolf Man. Two hours of being fussed over by someone who was genuinely curious. It was the first time I had properly stopped since Nice.

Now I am sitting on Omotesando in front of the Bottega Veneta building, which is not technically a Bottega Veneta building. It was designed by Toyo Ito in 2004 for the Italian shoe brand Tod’s, and the concept was the zelkova trees that line this street: nine overlapping tree silhouettes translated into interlocking concrete and glass, structural, branching, no internal columns because the tree shape carries the floors. Ito wanted to make something with the organic logic of botany applied to architecture. The concrete is wider at the base, branches as it rises, tapers to nothing at the top. In the bare months when the actual trees on the street have dropped their leaves, the building and the trees become mirrors of each other. Bottega Veneta took the building over and made it theirs, but the trees are Toyo Ito’s and they were always the point.

Omotesando is Tokyo’s equivalent of the Champs-Élysées: a broad, zelkova-lined boulevard in the Aoyama district that became, in the early 2000s, the address for what critics called “luxutecture”: the era when luxury brands understood that the building was as important as what was sold inside it. Prada. Gucci. Tadao Ando’s Omotesando Hills. Herzog and de Meuron’s Miu Miu. The whole street is effectively an open-air architecture museum dressed as a shopping district. An Urban Design graduate’s idea of a very good afternoon.

Earlier I passed a store in Harajuku called Flamingo, neon pink birds in the window, garishly and perfectly named. I photographed it and sent the picture to Polly, who is my mother’s best friend and, with a wink and a smile, my aunt. The title is a nod to how close she was to my mother, how truly family she has always been. The flamingo is a running joke between them, or was, and now between us. Polly reached out today just to say hello, to check in, to mother me from California across an ocean and a continent. She has been going through chemotherapy rounds this year, on her own journey, and still she reached out. The last time I saw her in person was at my grandmother’s funeral in February 2020, the last gathering before the world changed.

Legacy knowledge. That is what Polly carries. The version of my mother that existed before I was old enough to know her properly. The stories that belong to that era, the friendship that ran parallel to our family life for decades. She is the archive and she is also still here, still curious, still sending warmth across impossible distances. A neon flamingo in a Harajuku window and suddenly she is in the conversation and my mother is too, and I am sitting alone in Tokyo in front of a building made of concrete trees thinking about what it means to be held by people who are far away.

On to Shiro after this, to get Nick some of the fancy detergent he loves. Then back to the hotel. A protest about agriculture is moving slowly past a street built for luxury. The zelkova trees are budding. The cherry blossoms are still deciding.

Tomorrow, Tokyo Disneyland. Wednesday, home.

The train to Urayasu runs on the Keisei line. The Keisei Electric Railway is the same company that founded the Oriental Land Company in 1960, which reclaimed the land from Tokyo Bay, which built the park on that land, which built the train to reach it. You arrive at Tokyo Disneyland via the infrastructure of the people who decided it should exist. There is something satisfying about that closed loop, the way a good design contains its own logic completely.

The park opened on April 15, 1983, on a rainy morning, on land that was Tokyo Bay within living memory. The site is slowly sinking, engineers have always known this, they built adjustment mechanisms into every attraction from the beginning. The OLC president said during construction: don’t compromise, create the real thing. They paid off $1.4 billion in debt in three years. Walt Disney himself never wanted a park in Japan. A near-identical copy called Nara Dreamland opened in 1961 without Disney’s permission after a licensing dispute, ran for forty-five years, and was demolished in 2017. The real thing, when it finally came, made the copy irrelevant within a season.

This is the Monday of spring break. The park was full of students, young and loud and delighted, their first day of freedom running at full voltage. The specific energy of a crowd that has nowhere to be except exactly here. I have not been in a crowd like this since the production dispersed. It was a different register entirely.

Beauty and the Beast first, because it is uniquely Tokyo: a trackless dark ride using technology that doesn’t exist in any other Disney park, the vehicles moving freely through the scenes without rails, each ride slightly different from the last. This is what the Oriental Land Company does when it has ownership and capital and the license to push beyond the blueprint. It finds the underlying pleasure of the original thing and delivers it more completely. The story is the same. The feeling is better.

Then the Tiki Room, which has been a thread running through this trip since Trader Vic’s at the New Otani: the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland in childhood, the tiki bar in Silver Lake, the scorpion bowls at the Beverly Hilton during Golden Globes build. I went in with history. Stitch has taken over the attraction and the classic song didn’t play. The thing I went in hoping for had been replaced by something newer. This is the small grief of a changed thing. You cannot always get back to the original experience. Sometimes the amber has been recast.

The Mark Twain exists in exactly the same form in Anaheim. It is one of the oldest attractions in any Disney park. It has not been significantly changed. Standing on the roof deck in Tokyo, it was indistinguishable from Anaheim, and that was the point, and that was the thing that arrived sideways when I wasn’t defending against it. Forty years collapsed. The production designer who reads the forced perspective and the seven-eighths scale and the sightlines went quiet for a moment, and the child who grew up with this stood on the deck in the Tokyo spring and felt simply that the world could be arranged this beautifully and was grateful that someone had arranged it.

Observer and participant at once. This is what earned means. You have to know enough to see the seams before you can be genuinely moved that the seams don’t matter.

A note on the design of this particular park. Main Street is called World Bazaar here and it is covered by a glass Victorian conservatory roof. The Imagineers understood that a small American midwestern town would read as an imposition to a Japanese audience. So they kept the bones: the central corridor, the shops, the castle at the end still the weenie, still doing its job. But they translated the entry sequence into a covered arcade, which is an indigenous Japanese retail form, something every city here already knows and trusts. They received the outside thing with complete attention, understood its underlying purpose, and delivered that purpose more completely. This is what Japan does. It has been doing it for two thousand years. Buddhism arrived from China and became more Japanese than Chinese. American popular culture arrived in 1945 and became the 7-Eleven, Trader Vic’s still serving the original recipe, and this park, which is the fullest expression of American optimism that exists anywhere on earth.

Ichigo ichie. One time, one meeting. This Monday will not come again. The students on their first day of spring break will not be exactly these students in exactly this light again. The steam from the Mark Twain stack will not catch the morning in quite this way again. Therefore everything you bring to it must be complete.

Back at the hotel club by evening. The bartender already knew the order. Hotel sushi, which is not a consolation prize in Tokyo. A highball. The last night still ahead.

The blackout shades worked. This is not a small thing. I had been sharing a bed with the logistics of ten people for two weeks and the particular intimacy of a production that never fully stops, and then suddenly: nothing. A cool hotel room. Excellent pillows. No dogs requesting breakfast with their entire bodies. No one keeping score.

I lay there for a while just to confirm it was real.

Today was the last day, and knowing that made it feel both sharper and slower at once. The specific quality of a day you are paying attention to because you understand it is almost over. I was ready to go home. I was not quite homesick yet. That is the perfect distance from which to spend a last day anywhere.

It was raining.

I got off the subway one stop early. This happens, in Tokyo, in the rain, on your last day: you misread the map and find yourself at Kyobashi instead of Nihombashi, standing on a platform in front of a station sign so beautiful you briefly consider whether you made a mistake at all. The Ginza line opened in 1927, the oldest subway in Asia, and this sign looks as though it has been there since the beginning: aged green patina, riveted frame, kanji rendered with the calm certainty of something that has never needed updating. I stood there for longer than strictly necessary. Then I got back on the train. One stop. The correct one.

The current stone bridge was built in 1911. The kirin on the lamp posts are the original bronze castings, part dragon part deer, a mythological creature that appears in Japanese tradition wherever good fortune is needed. They have been standing in the same rain for 115 years. Above them, cutting directly over the bridge, is the elevated expressway built for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics: a concrete slab that should not be there, that Tokyo has been quietly trying to remove since 2020, that is very much still there. A cherry blossom branch reached into the frame from the right, unbothered by any of it. I stood on the bridge in the rain knowing exactly where I was.

Lunch was gyukatsu in the Coredo basement: wagyu beef cutlet that you cook yourself on a small hot stone at the table. The stone arrives heated precisely. The meat arrives sliced. Rock salt and wasabi sit in small ceramic dishes. A highball appears. You cook it rare in the center, eat it, and then understand what the fuss is about. The whole transaction takes forty-five minutes and costs almost nothing. Japan is extremely good at this.

Then the original Mitsukoshi.

This is the oldest department store in Japan, founded 1673 as a kimono shop, expanded over three centuries into the institution that now stands in Nihombashi with the patient grandeur of something that has outlived every trend it has ever witnessed. Le Bon Marché in Paris is the closest comparison I can make, and it is not quite right. Le Bon Marché is Paris showing you what Paris thinks of itself. Mitsukoshi is something else: Japan showing you what it believes the world deserves.

The basement food hall is one of the great indoor experiences on earth. I moved through it slowly and purchased sakura petal chocolates from a confectionery called Hotel The Progress, which is not a hotel. The name is the kind of English that Japanese brands choose for its feeling rather than its meaning: forward motion, refinement, aspiration rendered in cocoa. The chocolates look like miniature paintings. Nick has a sweet tooth and I was paying attention. Then a furoshiki for each of us, the traditional wrapping cloth that turns the act of packaging into something worth looking at. The gift-wrapping counter folded the chocolates into Nick’s furoshiki with seven precise movements and a bow, and I stood there watching it with the focused appreciation of a man who has spent two weeks in a country that considers no detail beneath its attention.

On the housewares shelf: Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt. Made in the USA since the 1960s. Beloved in Japan. Sitting between Alpine rock salt and Kyoto sesame salt in the finest department store in the country, perfectly preserved, doing exactly what it was always supposed to do. I did not buy it. The argument it makes does not require purchase to be understood.

Then I looked up.

At the unveiling, a white sheet was dropped in a single line and the audience was reportedly stunned into silence. I was not surprised by this. Whatever you bring to her she receives with the same expression. I stood there for a while and felt no particular need to move.

Kyubey opened in 1935 in Ginza, founded by a chef who believed that sushi, then considered humble street food, deserved to be treated as high cuisine. Three generations of the Imada family have run it since. Somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, confronted with the problem of certain toppings being too wet and soft to sit on pressed nigiri rice, the founder wrapped a band of nori around the rice and piled the topping inside. He called it gunkan-maki. Every piece of gunkan-maki served anywhere in the world tonight is a descendant of that solution. I was about to eat it at the counter where it was invented.

The counter is correct. The chef stands four feet away and makes each piece while you watch, then places it in front of you and gauges when you have finished before making the next. The rice is seasoned with komezu, rice vinegar and sea salt, slightly lighter than you expect, intentionally airy. The ladies at the door were in kimono. There was cold beer. The room was livelier than I expected for somewhere of this standing, which turned out to be precisely right: the room understood that the food was the ceremony, and everything else could breathe.

The shrimp arrived mid-course. Live sweet shrimp, three of them, brought to the counter from the back in a small vessel of water. They were scheduled for the gunkan-maki. They had, apparently, not been informed of this. Two of them made a break for it across the counter with the focused determination of animals who have assessed their situation and found the assessment unacceptable. The itamae-san retrieved them with the same equanimity he had been bringing to every piece of fish all evening. This was not the first time. It would not be the last. The gunkan-maki, when it arrived, was extraordinary.

The Japanese family to my left were celebrating a birthday and had established this within four minutes. They had recently been to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Disneyland, and wanted to discuss all three. I told them about Nice, which they had visited recently and found beautiful, and about the Vespa and the dogs. We had come to Ginza for excellent sushi and ended up comparing notes on the Promenade des Anglais. I love this about travel. You go halfway around the world to sit next to someone who was just where you came from.

To my right: a mother and her college-age daughter, studying in Shanghai. The mother had flown from Minneapolis to Tokyo to meet her. Minneapolis has been carrying some weight recently. They carried it gently, as people do, and were very glad to be in Ginza eating sushi and not thinking about it for one evening.

When I stood to leave, an older man appeared at my side. The elder itamae-san, the previous generation, whose photograph I had been looking at on the wall all evening. He stopped me at the door. He rode down the elevator with me. On the street, in the rain, he pressed a newspaper clipping into my hands: himself in his youth, standing with Obama, the Clintons, Tom Cruise, others I did not immediately place. He had served them all at that counter. He shook my hand with both of his and invited me to return.

I stood on the street in the rain for a moment after he went back inside.

Michelin has not recognized Kyubey. This is a running joke in Tokyo food circles and a subject the restaurant appears entirely unbothered by. Having been to a few starred restaurants, I understand why. A star would change something. The absence of one has changed nothing. It is perfect the way it is.

Back at the perch. Nightcap. The Chita will wait for the airport tomorrow. The tower outside the window, no longer lit in Mario colors, just Tokyo Tower again, doing what it always does without needing to explain itself.

Ichigo ichie. One time, one meeting. This one is done.

Asahi · Draft · Kyubey, Ginza · 25 Mar 2026. Cold. The shrimp had opinions about theirs.

Air France first landed at Haneda in November 1952, three months after the Americans handed the airport back to Japan following seven years of military occupation. I did not know this at 5:30 this morning when I cleared security in the dark and found my gate. I know it now, somewhere over Russia, and it reframes the departure slightly. The same airline, the same airport, seventy-three years later. Some routes just keep running.

The wheels went up through grey Tokyo morning and the city revealed itself the way it only does from above: impossibly large, towers and skyline and density continuing in every direction past the point where the eye can follow, millions of lives arranged in a grid that has no visible edge. I pressed my face to the window like a child and thought: what does everyone do. How do they live. Those days and those loves.

I had just delivered the files for the next project. The Miniature Wife. The press junket will be built in Los Angeles on a schedule that does not yet exist. The last thing I had to do in Tokyo and I had done it, and now I was in the air, and the city was below me getting smaller, and the semi-colon feeling had arrived.

Not a full stop. Never a full stop. A pause that leans forward into whatever comes next.

I have spent a long time trying to push that feeling back. The addiction to adrenaline, the pull of the machine, the 4:30am alarms and the September-to-March red carpet cycle that ran for twenty years without asking whether I was keeping up. The move to France was a reaching out toward something quieter, something earned, something true. A desire for something, whatever that is, that felt missing. After the losses of 2020 I told myself I had changed. On this plane, looking back at two weeks in Tokyo, I think maybe I am more intact than I have felt in a long time.

The first time Nick and I came to Tokyo there was nothing to anticipate. No sense memory, no feeling of the place already in the body. This time was different. I knew the light, which is different here than in Nice or Los Angeles, softer and more diffuse, filtered through a sky defined by powerlines and poles that disappear into narrow streets. I knew the way the buildings compress the city vertically, the way the metro numbers make their own logic, the way the landscape is cared for with a seriousness that feels less like maintenance and more like devotion. I knew that I would tuck my detritus into my pockets because Tokyo asks that of you without asking. On the second visit, what I could not see while I was in it was that I would fall in love the second time.

Alone in Tokyo I am, almost comically, overly respectful. Bowing, stumbling through Japanese phrasing, performing a version of courtesy that goes slightly beyond what the situation requires. Yesterday I bowed to a woman on a street in Ginza who turned out to be from Nebraska. She did not bow back. I do not regret it.

What Tokyo asks for is your participation. What it demands is your curiosity. If you are here without an open heart and mind, you will hate it. I arrived with both and the city returned the favor at every turn: a barber who wanted to know about Nintendo, an elder itamae-san pressing his newspaper clipping into my hands in the rain, a Japanese family at a sushi counter electric about Disneyland, a craftsman’s goddess stopping me cold in a department store atrium. The city kept answering questions I had not finished asking.

Now consider the hold of this aircraft.

Two Lumas. In the game we have been here to celebrate, Lumas are the small star-shaped creatures that orbit Mario through the galaxy, glowing, occasionally helpful, possessed of strong opinions about their own importance. In physical form they are three-dimensional, softly lit, and emit phrases when squeezed. A magnet in their base connects to a plate that slips under clothing and holds them to the shoulder, so the wearer becomes, in effect, a landing pad for a small luminous character with something to say. I am bringing them home to Caesar and Mona, the young children of our neighbors Sophie and Thomas. Sophie is also hoping they will help with the children’s English. This seems optimistic. I am choosing to believe it is possible.

Also in the hold: a wooden artist’s easel, canvases, brushes, palettes, and a full set of paints. The kind of supplies that suggest either a new passion or a man who should not be permitted unsupervised access to Japanese art supply shops. I was not charged for any of it at the gate, which felt like an endorsement. Whether I can actually paint is a question the easel will answer in its own time.

The history of relations between France and Japan goes back to 1615, when a Japanese samurai and ambassador named Hasekura Tsunenaga, making his way to Rome, landed for a few days in Saint-Tropez. I live thirty kilometers from Saint-Tropez. A Japanese samurai washed up there four hundred years ago and created what the historical record describes as a sensation, which feels accurate. By the 1860s, ukiyo-e wood-block prints had become a source of inspiration for the French Impressionists. Degas and Monet, as they themselves acknowledged, owed a great deal to Hokusai and Hiroshige. Monet took Japanese aesthetics and made French painting. I am flying Air France out of Tokyo with a wooden easel and French paints, which is the exact reversal of that transaction and almost certainly less significant, but the impulse feels related. Two cultures that have been handing things back and forth for four centuries, each one finding in the other something it didn’t know it was looking for.

And now I get to bring it home. To Nick. To Harvey and Tibo and the villa and the Vespa and the Promenade and the thermometers still waiting at Troc Azure. The life I chose. When I left the career, and the country. On purpose, looking for adventure, for something new, for challenge and fun. Not yet ready for something quieter.

The semi-colon leans forward. Nice is on the other side of it.

I am ready.

Suntory Chita · Single Grain · 30,000 feet · 26 Mar 2026. Four bottles in the hold. One opened early. No regrets.

Tuesday began grey and burned off. This is the Nice version of the Los Angeles marine layer, which is to say it is the same meteorological phenomenon with a completely different relationship to itself. Both cities are Mediterranean climates, one of only five such zones on earth, a fact that climate scientists find remarkable and that residents of both cities use to justify moving there. The marine layer in Los Angeles has names. June Gloom. May Gray. No-sky July. Fogust. A particularly long season is officially called Summer Bummer, which tells you everything about how Los Angeles processes atmospheric inconvenience. Nice does not name its grey mornings. Nice does not dignify them with nomenclature. The grey arrives, burns off, and is never discussed again. By ten o’clock the Mediterranean was turquoise and the matter was closed.

I had given Tibo and Harvey their first home haircuts this morning with new clippers. There is a learning curve on my end. They are professionals. Harvey submitted to the process with the dignified tolerance of a fourteen year old who has seen everything and is no longer surprised by any of it. Tibo sat perfectly still, which was either trust or contempt, and I have learned not to push for clarification on that distinction. The results were uneven in places I prefer not to specify. When we reached Plage Brigitte Bardot he went directly into the sea, which I choose to believe was joy and not an attempt to wash off the evidence of my work.

The walk was later than usual. Three in the afternoon, the Easter tourists already staking their claims on the Promenade with the focused intensity of people who have booked this in advance. The influencers were out, arms extended, moving through the crowd with no regard for the people they were moving through, which is either a personality type or a job description depending on how charitable you are feeling. I was feeling moderately charitable. The sea was mild and breezy and not performing for anyone.

I had sent a proposal to my Glass Engine colleagues. A creative brief for something larger, something that matched the scale of what Tokyo had given back to me. I had reached for it because Tokyo had made reaching feel possible again, and then I had waited, and the waiting had done what waiting does. The fear underneath it was not about the project. It was about the cost of reaching wrong. These people, Julie and Mandy and Johnny, are not just colleagues. They are the architecture of this phase of my life. The work we do together is part of how I know who I am right now. The thought of having miscalculated, of having asked for something outside my lane and been quietly noted for it, was its own specific dread.

And then Julie’s email arrived. Not about the proposal. About another project, which is its own thing entirely, its own pleasure, its own proof that the door is open and the relationship is intact and the reaching did not cost anything. The relief was immediate and slightly embarrassing in its intensity. I had not realized how much I had been holding.

I will follow up today. Calmly. Once.

The Tina Trattoria date night was Nick’s doing, which is one of his better qualities. He had found it through Chloe, which is recommendation enough. Tina has the energy of a Jersey wedding reception in the most complimentary sense of the phrase: chandeliers one watt brighter than strictly necessary, a maître d’ in a grey suit with a black shirt and a matching tie, a local buzzy crowd that has clearly decided this is their place. The room committed to itself completely. Nice does not have enough of these. When it finds one it holds on.

We sat at the bar. The bartender was Argentine, cross-eyed, and did not drink alcohol, which he mentioned while making me a Boulevardier with the confidence of someone for whom this is not a contradiction. Bourbon, Campari, sweet vermouth. The darker, warmer cousin of the Negroni, the drink you order when you want a Negroni to take itself slightly more seriously. It was exactly right. The veal parm arrived better than expected, which under those chandeliers is not a given.

I drove us home on the Vespa. Nick does not pilot the scooter. This is a firm and correct policy. He sat behind me and Nice came through the handlebars in the dark, the city doing its nighttime thing, the sea somewhere to the left, the hill rising to the right toward the villa and the dogs. On the Vespa together is always a reminder that we had chosen correctly. Even if it’s a brief indulgence, a romantic’s version of the life. For a moment it is truly made real.

Nick leaves for Oslo on Wednesday. Svalbard. The northernmost city in Europe, or at least that is how it was explained to me, with padding on both sides. Wednesday to Wednesday. It will be me and the dogs holding the line against the Easter tourists, dodging the influencers, walking the Promenade in the afternoon light.

The thermometers are still at Troc Azure. Still teasing. I will get there when I get there.

Boulevardier · Tina Trattoria, Nice · Late March 2026. Made by an Argentine who doesn’t drink. Possibly the best argument for sobriety I have encountered.

What ends any relationship with someone you love?

I loved my city. I loved my career and my time at the Studio. I loved the 28th floor and the commute and the particular quality of light on the freeway in the early morning when the marine layer was still sitting on the basin and the day had not yet decided what it was going to be. I loved the garage and the car and knowing where everything was at the supermarket. I loved the suburban comfort of it, the endless possibility, the sense that nothing was out of reach if you were willing to drive to it.

And one day the love was gone.

It did not announce itself. That is the thing about this kind of ending. There is no argument, no incident, no moment you can point to and say: there, that is where it broke. There is only the morning you wake up and realize you have been looking at the horizon for a while now and cannot remember when you started.

Los Angeles and Orange County are the origin point. Born there, formed there, delivered into the entertainment industry by a city that runs on it. As a hungry young man, West Hollywood first. Second floor, balcony overlooking the building’s pool. Arthur had owned the building for decades, an elderly man who had purchased it long before the neighborhood became what it became. Bruce had moved in at some point before Joe, and in the ways that matter, had become the building’s true caretaker, tending to the property and eventually to Arthur himself, inheriting the building when Arthur passed. Joe had been there before me, a colleague who had by then already become family in the way that happens when you work closely enough with someone that the distinction stops meaning anything. When he found his house just off Melrose, which we promptly began redesigning together, he handed me his lease. A rent-controlled apartment in West Hollywood blessed by Arthur and Bruce for Joe to pass to me, each of us inheriting not just the unit but the version of the city that came with it. I got to be another character in the wonderful world that was that building in LA. Joe is a great friend to this day, even as time and distance have done what they do.

The building had its cast: the eclectic group of gays and old Russian ladies, men of a certain age, a married young actor with his first baby still trying to make the dream work, a Brazilian who believed in Speedos year-round and was not wrong to. The city felt like a giant resource and a puzzle to crack. As a young assistant, working to make the projects great, I understood that the systems existed, entrenched in all manner of production and relationships, and that it was simply a matter of cracking them. It felt like magic. It was magic.

Then mid-Wilshire near LACMA. Then NBC in Burbank. Then the 28th floor in Universal City, the studios, where the job was everything I had worked toward and the view confirmed it. The accumulation happened there: the career, the fancy things, the heirlooms. The cars. I had a black Jeep Wrangler once, early days, the car of the commute from San Luis Obispo to Orange County, summers driving from my parents’ place to Disneyland for work. I should have kept that one. What followed was a BMW X5 diesel that I hated how it ended, clogged and terrible for the environment, and then the BMW i3: suicide doors, carbon fiber body, 46 miles of electric range, terribly emasculating and so much fun to drive that I have never quite forgiven myself for not bringing it to France.

The restaurants were great. AOC especially. The brunch table with Nicole and Sara Jane, dinner dates with Nick, special occasions with Joe. The kind of restaurant that becomes load-bearing, that holds the architecture of a social life together without anyone deciding it would. Bloody Marys. Bacon wrapped dates. Not usually together, but also, on the right Sunday, together. The golden years in LA were great. I say this without qualification and I mean it.

What I actually miss: people, though we see the people we love in higher quality of time when they come stay with us in Nice. Knowing where everything is, though the whole point of the reset was the adventure of discovery rather than sitting in a cul-de-sac waiting in comfort and convenience for time to run out. The particular quality of Los Angeles construction: the 1920s boom, the mid-century modern tries and fails of the 1950s and 60s, the mix of ambition and accident that produced something that looks like nowhere else. And Mexican food. After everything, what I truly miss is great Mexican food. The Côte d’Azur has not solved this problem and shows no interest in trying.

The changes of 2020 crystallized everything. Not caused it, crystallized it. I was sitting masked on an empty soundstage at a folding table, alone, working through trust and estate documents while simultaneously designing a red carpet for a pandemic awards show. The room was built for noise and spectacle and light and people and it had none of those things. It had me, and a folding table, and the specific feeling of performing a gesture that the moment had made meaningless. Futility is the word. Not failure. Futility. There is a difference and it matters.

It hit me when the city couldn’t help the Korean homeless woman living on the sidewalk at the end of our street. It hit me when I understood that Nick and I and our dogs had a whole world we could embrace if we were willing to reach for it. Work doesn’t love you back. Family is who you have.

Once you ask the question about what is on the other side of the horizon, you have to either go find out or be okay with knowing you are the person who didn’t. When you are taking full account of your life, wouldn’t it be great to be the person who goes.

That is what happened. The love was real. The ending was real. The broken heart is real and occasionally visits, the way an old feeling does when it recognizes the light is right or a song arrives without warning. It does not stay. There is no regret that sits with me. No anxiety that comes from the knowledge of an unlived life pressing against the walls.

Some days it feels empowering to have been the person who went. Some days carry some weight. Both are allowed. Neither is the whole story.

Nice is on the other side of the horizon. It turns out the horizon was right.

Bloody Mary · AOC, Los Angeles · The golden years. Bacon wrapped dates on the side. Sometimes together. Always right.

The day had begun with a new project email arriving before I’d had to ask for anything, and then by afternoon a pitch brief for something considerably larger. A commercial and experiential campaign for the World Cup on American soil. Bet365 as the client, a company founded by a woman from Stoke-on-Trent who bought a domain name on eBay in 2000 and mortgaged her family’s betting shops against the internet and won. I spent most of the day ideating, even on the walk with Tibo, which is either a failure of presence or proof that the right problem finds you everywhere you go. More Peggy Olson than Don Draper.

The day had been full in the way that only certain days manage: Tibo’s walk, Harvey mildly betrayed by the absence of his usual company and accepting extra treats as partial reparations, Nick somewhere over the Arctic with Josh on a wet Svalbard runway that would, I was assured, get more scenic. Tired and invigorated simultaneously.

I arrived at Hotel Amour just ahead of Tay, which gave me a moment in the lobby to nose through a party being set up in a small ante room off the entrance. Snooping through other people’s parties is one of my favourite things. Glasses arranged, small plates waiting, the particular anticipatory stillness of a room that knows what it is about to become. A reception, I thought. I was right. By the time we left, the party was in full swing, the room full and quite stylish by any standard, which always surprises me in a beach city. Dressed up and ready to go. Nice does this and then pretends it doesn’t.

And a painting of a sailboat.

I stopped.

Loan, my broker in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, had been showing Jeannie today. A 38-foot Bavaria, captain’s quarters in the rear, found in Menton when I was still learning what kind of life I was building here. She is not sold. She is being considered, which is a different thing, the way a question is different from an answer. But the painting stopped me anyway, the way things do when the timing is too precise to be entirely accidental.

My mother used to take me to Shoreline Village in Long Beach. A waterfront district built on reclaimed harbor land in 1982, cobblestone paths, Cape Cod architecture on a California shore, the kind of place that commits cheerfully to its own fiction. We went almost every other weekend in the springs and summers when I was in grade school and middle school. We didn’t have much money then, before she remarried, and Shoreline Village was free and pleasant and there was ice cream and a kite shop stuffed floor to ceiling with color and wind socks and things that wanted to fly. She would point at the masts in the marina and tell me that each one represented someone’s dream. That if you worked hard and believed in yourself, that was possible.

She was teaching her son a lesson. She knew she couldn’t afford to give me a boat. She could give me the dream instead.

Jeannie’s name holds three women and my husband. Judy, my mother. Esther, my grandmother. Addie, my great-grandmother. And Nick. All of them making the dream possible, each in their own way, across three generations and two continents. I found her in Menton and brought her to Beaulieu and she has been mine in the way that certain things become yours before you entirely understand what they mean.

She never knew I got one. I have thought about what she would have said and I always arrive at the same place: a big smile, a specific tone, and “oh you, rascal!” which in her vocabulary meant I knew you would and I’m sure glad you did.

The painting at Hotel Amour was just a painting. I am aware of this. I stood in front of it anyway.

Tay arrived. Mezcal spritz with an espelette pepper rim: spicy, salty, smoky all at once, the kind of first drink that tells you the evening has decided to take itself seriously. We found a corner and the evening began.

Tay is from Asheville. She is a cinephile, a historic book binder and preservationist, a teacher of small children who is almost certainly better at her work than she knows. What book binding actually is: the careful, patient work of taking something fragile and irreplaceable and making sure it survives. She does this professionally and, it turns out, she is doing something similar with her own life right now, though she would not put it that way. She loves Babette, a dog who technically belongs to her ex and whose custody is one of the complications that endings leave behind. Babette is not yet hers to keep. This is its own kind of grief. She is thirty-two years old and has recently arrived at the end of something important, and is now standing in the particular open space that endings leave, looking at what comes next.

I did not know I would cry.

I remember what it felt like. To be at the end of something that mattered, something that had been real and good and was now finished, and to have to stand up alone and face whatever was on the other side. To know it was right and have that knowledge be no comfort at all. To weather it anyway because there was no other option and because, somewhere underneath the grief, you understood that the horizon was not punishment. It was invitation.

We moved to a bottle of Greek sauvignon. Tzatziki. A flatbread with honey that was better than it had any right to be. Small plates. The conversation found its level the way good conversation does when two people are being honest with each other across a difference in age that stops mattering after the first drink.

There is a specific privilege in being fifteen years further down a road than someone you care about. You cannot tell them what the road holds. You cannot promise them the outcome. What you can do is sit across from them in a room full of collected things and say, without quite saying it: I have been where you are standing. I know what it costs. I know what it becomes.

The evening ended with a digestif. A margarita for her. A Boulevardier for me, which keeps showing up at the moments that matter and I have stopped questioning this.

She has no idea what is coming. The good of it. The life that is assembling itself just outside her view, the way all lives do, quietly and without announcement, until one day you look up and realize you are already inside it.

The horizon is hers. I wanted her to know that.

She will.

At home, outside of the open windows, a slight breeze coming through with perfume from the first of the jasmine from the garden below, the city was doing its nighttime thing. Nick was somewhere above the Arctic, Josh beside him, both of them probably laughing at something with the particular ease of old friends who have not seen each other in too long. Harvey in his spot. Tibo in his. The grumpy grin waiting, one tooth out, half smile half snarl, all playful. The jasmine arriving, as it does, without announcement.

Mezcal spritz, espelette rim · then Greek sauvignon · then Boulevardier · Hotel Amour, Nice · Early April 2026. The Boulevardier keeps finding me. I have stopped being surprised.

Nick came bounding up the stairs from his office on the ground floor. I was at the dining table with the laptop. This is a recognizable posture in our house: him arriving with information, me about to be informed of something I am already going to agree to.

He had found an airfare. Turkish Airlines, Tokyo bound, with a promotion buried in the fine print: on the way back, take a longer layover in Istanbul. Two nights. The savings were, of course, designed to be spent in the city rather than bypassed above it. He knew this. He had done the math. He presented the math with the focused enthusiasm of a man who is trying to sell an idea to someone who has already bought it, which is a quality I find completely endearing.

I said yes before the pitch was finished. He probably finished it anyway.

A whim. A fare. A layover that became a chapter.

We stayed at Soho House. Nick has been quietly, methodically, lovingly lobbying the universe for a reason to be in Paris full time. He joined the membership before we had a Paris, on the entirely reasonable grounds that eventually we would. I gave mine back when I realized Nice didn’t have its own House. Neither of us was wrong. Either way, Istanbul has one, and it is extraordinary.

The building is the Palazzo Corpi. Ignazio Corpi was a Genoese shipbuilder who arrived in Istanbul in the 1870s following an agreement that allowed Italian citizens to purchase property in the Ottoman Empire. He commissioned an Italian architect, had Carrara marble shipped for the floors and Piemonte rosewood for the doors and window frames, and then died in 1882 before a single room was finished. Nine years of construction. Not one completed ceiling to look up at. In 1907 the United States government acquired it, making it the first American diplomatic property in Europe, which it remained as embassy and then consulate until 2003. Soho House arrived in 2015, restored the frescoed walls and marble staircases, and opened it to people who appreciate such things and are careful not to say so too directly.

We were told, with great conviction and a completely straight face, that the building had been lost in a card game. We nodded. We were in Istanbul. Of course it had been lost in a card game. It had not been lost in a card game. The United States government paid for it in 1907 in the ordinary bureaucratic way that governments acquire consulates. This is a less interesting story and we have chosen to remember the card game version.

A block or two away is the Pera Palace, built in 1892 specifically to house passengers arriving on the Orient Express. Agatha Christie stayed in room 411, possibly multiple times, and is said to have written Murder on the Orient Express there. This is disputed by historians. The hotel maintains the room as a memorial regardless. In 1979, a Hollywood medium conducted a séance and reported that Christie’s ghost had hidden a key under the floorboards of room 411, where the key was subsequently found. The diary the key supposedly opened was never located. The key sits in a bank vault somewhere in Istanbul. Christie herself never commented on any of it, which is the most Agatha Christie response possible. The hotel staff went on strike before a second séance could be conducted, which is the most Istanbul response possible.

The streets of Beyoğlu in the morning have the particular quality of a neighborhood that has been itself for a very long time and intends to continue. Cobblestone, pastel buildings in pink and green and ochre, the Turkish flag snapping against a hard blue sky. We walked everywhere. The city at street level is a different proposition from the city at the palace terrace or the hotel rooftop, more chaotic, more immediate, more alive in the way that places are alive when they are not performing for anyone. A cat regarded us from a windowsill with the practiced indifference of a longtime resident. In Istanbul the cats are not strays. They are citizens with longer tenure than most of the buildings and the full awareness of this fact.

We did not go to the Hagia Sophia. I want to be honest about this. It was always in the background of every walk, every turn, every sightline, its dome doing what it has been doing to the skyline since 537 AD without asking anyone’s permission. The intention was genuine. And then there was Topkapi.

Topkapi Palace has been many things since Sultan Mehmed II ordered its construction in 1459, six years after conquering Constantinople. Administrative centre, imperial residence, harem, treasury, and now museum. What it has always been is a city within a city.

The palace is organized as four consecutive courtyards, each one accessible to fewer people than the last. The first was open to anyone who arrived unarmed. The second to officials and diplomats who dismounted at the gate. The third to the sultan’s inner circle. The fourth to almost no one. Walking through them now as a visitor you are crossing lines that were once absolute, the democracy of the museum applied to the most hierarchical space ever conceived. The gates still have the weight of what they used to mean.

The architecture is the accumulated record of every sultan who renovated, expanded, and occasionally burned things down and started again: Byzantine tiles alongside Ottoman woodwork alongside European baroque alongside rooms that exist in no recognizable style at all. The domed ceilings are painted in deep reds and golds in geometric patterns that have no center because the pattern is the center. The Iznik tiles run floor to ceiling in the harem corridors, turquoise and cobalt, each one hand-painted, the repetition producing something that is neither wallpaper nor mosaic but a third thing the vocabulary doesn’t quite cover. The doorways are framed in calligraphic panels. The brass hardware is heavy and cast with geometric patterning at a scale that says: this door will still be here when you are not. The wooden lattice screens filter the light into the rooms behind them in the way that Ottoman architects understood light, as a material to be shaped rather than a condition to be accommodated.

In the treasury, a silk robe behind glass, deep red with gold embroidery. The person who wore it is suddenly real in a way that the history books don’t quite manage. The Topkapi Dagger sits nearby under its own glass, its hilt set with three enormous emeralds, made as a gift for a Persian shah who was assassinated before it arrived. The dagger has been waiting to be delivered for nearly three hundred years.

The harem alone has more than 400 rooms. It was home to as many as 300 concubines, the queen mother, the sultan’s children, the eunuchs who guarded them, and a hierarchy of power and ambition so intricate that entire careers were built on proximity to the right doorway. The robes and jewels on display are not decorative objects. They are arguments, made in emeralds and gold, about what power looks like when it has unlimited resources and several centuries to make its point.

The cats are residents. Not strays in the usual sense, not visitors, not a problem to be managed. They have longer tenure in this city than most of the buildings. One was sprawled on the ancient stone of the palace promontory, completely unbothered, in the precise posture of an animal that has assessed the situation and found it acceptable. Which it is.

The palace sits at the highest point of the promontory where the Bosphorus meets the Golden Horn, which means that from its terraces you can see most of the world that mattered to the Ottoman Empire for four hundred years. The formal gardens drop away below in terraced paths toward the water. The Bosphorus fills the middle distance, deep blue, ferries crossing between continents with the unhurried regularity of a city that has been doing this since before the word for it existed. Asia is visible across the strait, close enough to feel like a neighborhood, far enough to feel like another world. I stood there longer than I had planned to. I could not have told you exactly why, except that standing where thirty sultans stood and looking at the same water they looked at, understanding that the view has not fundamentally changed, does something to the sense of time that is difficult to name and easy to feel. Nick eventually came to find me.

We walked back through the bazaar afterward, which ate the remaining time for the Hagia Sophia. I regret this less than I should.

On the walk, the Blue Mosque appeared twice, at different angles, the cascade of domes descending from the central dome, the six minarets rising above the rooflines of Sultanahmet. I stopped for it both times. I did not go in. The city kept offering things and I kept accepting the wrong ones in the best possible way.

We were the only people eating lunch during Ramadan. The city was observing the fast. The restaurants in the area near the palace were therefore quiet in the specific way that restaurants are quiet when the entire city has agreed, for reasons of faith, not to eat. We found a Michelin-mentioned place on the walk back from Topkapi, wandered in, and were seated in a room of beautiful emptiness. The owner was cheerful in a way that crossed the language barrier completely: two foreigners who had arrived at his restaurant on the one day it could not be full, and he was going to feed them as if it were a full house. The food was extraordinary. The awkwardness of eating in a fasting city sat alongside us like a politely ignored third guest. We ate everything. It seemed rude not to.

Afterward, Turkish tea. The tulip glass is not a style choice. It is the correct vessel for this specific liquid at this specific temperature in this specific city, and once you have had tea from one you understand why every other receptacle is a compromise. We had it twice. We would have had it more.

The Galata Bridge spans the Golden Horn between Eminönü and Karaköy, connecting the historic peninsula to the modern European districts of Beyoğlu and Galata where we were staying. It is a bridge that has existed in one form or another since the 6th century. A writer once described crossing it as passing into a different civilisation and culture entirely. Leonardo da Vinci submitted a design for it in 1502. Sultan Bayezid II rejected it. The current bridge is the fifth on the same site, completed in 1994, and its lower level is lined with seafood restaurants and its upper level is lined with fishermen who are there at dawn and at dusk and apparently at every hour in between, standing patiently over the Golden Horn with their lines in the water as if catching fish from a bridge in the middle of one of the world’s great cities is a perfectly ordinary way to spend an afternoon. It is.

We had cocktails up there one evening as the sun was going down over the Asian shore, the sky turning orange above the strait, the ferries still crossing in both directions as if the light made no difference to the schedule. It didn’t. On one side of the bridge the minarets of the old city, on the other the modern European face of Beyoğlu. Both sides going about their business simultaneously with the specific ease of a city that has been at this intersection for fifteen hundred years and has stopped finding it remarkable.

Istanbul from the Beyoğlu side is not the Istanbul of the imagination. The imagination expects minarets and chaos and the density of a city that has been three empires’ capital. The chaos is there. So is the density. But there is also cobblestone and aperitivo and a rooftop from which you can see the Golden Horn in the late afternoon light, which turns out to be something worth watching. We watched it.

Nick and I were self-conscious in the way that you are when you are not sure whether the self-consciousness is yours or the city’s. What I had read about Istanbul suggested it might be warranted. What I found was warmth and curiosity and friendliness at every turn. The two things are not necessarily in contradiction. We were careful. We were fine. The city was magnificent.

That evening, dinner at Cecconi’s. The Soho House restaurant, identical to the one in West Hollywood, identical to the one in Amsterdam, familiar in the precise way you need familiar to be after several days of sensory overload: the wine, the pasta, the ease of a room that expects nothing of you except your presence. A Genoese palazzo built on a former graveyard, the first American diplomatic property in Europe, once housing the consulate of the most powerful country on earth, now serving hand-made pasta to tired travellers who had just come from a bridge where Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected five hundred years ago. Istanbul contains all of this simultaneously and makes it look effortless.

We will go back. There will be the Hagia Sophia, maybe a Turkish bath, Turkish Delight. Nick will have done the research by then. There will be a card game story he has found, a better one, and we will believe it completely.

Turkish tea · tulip glass · twice · somewhere near the palace · April 2025. Then cocktails on the Galata Bridge at sunset. Then Cecconi’s. Istanbul contains multitudes and so did the evening.

Tay arrived with her laundry and a mood that was visibly lighter than the last time I had seen her. Her new apartment, she said, is starting to feel like her own. It will be the first place she has ever lived entirely alone. I remember that feeling. Solitary but exciting. The key in the lock and nobody else’s anything on the other side of it. I have had my own place since college, outside of a studio in Silver Lake with Erica right when I moved back from New York, and then Nick. All the years in between, even going back and forth to Austin, always my own door. You don’t forget what that first one felt like. And you recognize it immediately when you see it arriving for someone else.

Her new place has a washing machine that works, technically, if you know about the interior basket. The basket requires tending in a very specific way that Tay has not yet decoded. This is the kind of detail that a landlord mentions once, quickly, while already walking toward the door. She arrived with a tote bag of clothes that needed washing and was visibly moved by the existence of our dryer, which she described as real, with the reverence usually reserved for something you thought was a myth.

The Tokyo easel made its Nice debut, the one Jack Black used. I should have had him sign it. It had been waiting in the corner of the dining room for a week, possibly two, radiating the quiet reproach of an object that has crossed the Pacific and would like to be used now please. The painting supplies that traveled in the hold of AF 187, through customs, up the stairs, and into that corner, finally had their afternoon. We set up at the table and started.

The music began with Hotel Costes. Then somewhere around the second glass of wine it became Coastal Grandmother. Coastal Grandmother is an aesthetic that romanticizes the sophisticated, unhurried life of a woman living gracefully by the sea. Think Nancy Meyers. We are in a villa in the south of France with a garden and a real dryer and wine open on a Sunday afternoon. We did not choose the Coastal Grandmother playlist. The Coastal Grandmother playlist chose us.

Two people painting in quiet company, stories and laughter arriving when they wanted to and not before.

Tay’s canvas went somewhere dark and bright and entirely its own: a teal tree with flame-tipped branches against a yellow sky, a red orb with an eye at the center, a crescent moon, something wild happening in the lower left. It looks like the inside of a specific dream. Mine was quieter, an abstracted exterior of the Cours Saleya market in perspective, warm terracotta and gold, waiting for the red and white of the market stall coverings to arrive, pencil lines still showing, unfinished in the way that first paintings often are. Two entirely different worlds made on the same afternoon around the same table. The Tokyo easel, finally earning its passage.

She left around five. The laundry was done. The canvases were not, which is the right outcome for a first session. Cleanup, a walk with Tibo, a bath, sushi called in. The Sunday evening doing exactly what it should.

Later, on the balcony.

Tibo was in the upper garden in pursuit of the hedgehog who lives in the lower. He has known about this hedgehog for some time. He can smell him, knows precisely where he is, circles the perimeter with the focused patience of an animal who has decided that closing the gap is less important than knowing he could. The hedgehog, for his part, remains unbothered. This is a dynamic that could continue indefinitely and probably will. From my perspective I could see the whole scene play out. The hedgehog rustling in the grass and leaves below.

The frogs were going. The garden below does what it does in April, which is announce itself without apology. Nick was somewhere above the Arctic with Josh, probably at dinner, probably laughing at something. Then his message arrived.

Orban conceded: Our new Norwegian friends next to us at dinner broke the news and we all are celebrating.

Péter Magyar’s Tisza party had won a supermajority in Hungary, ending sixteen years of Orbán. Seventy-eight percent turnout, the highest in Hungary’s post-Communist history. The European Commission president said: Hungary has chosen Europe. Europe has always chosen Hungary. JD Vance had been in Budapest earlier in the week rallying for Orbán. The Norwegian friends at dinner in Svalbard were celebrating anyway.

Someone in a bar at the edge of the Arctic cheered, and that is how the news arrived on a balcony in Nice on a Sunday night with frogsong and a hedgehog just out of reach.

The word that arrived with it was hopeful. Not certain, not triumphant. Just hopeful, which is the right amount.

The hedgehog knows one thing well. So does a Sunday that holds paint and laundry and sushi and a message from the top of the world. You don’t have to close the gap. You just have to keep circling.

Rosé at the dining table · Hotel Costes into Coastal Grandmother · then sushi on the balcony · Nice · April 2026. The frogsong was complimentary.

Harvey is at my feet. Nick is home from the north. The house has its people back in it and the particular quiet that settles when everyone is where they are supposed to be.

My eye keeps going to the fern in the corner.

It sits on a marble column pedestal, slender, simple, the kind of thing that holds whatever is placed on it without calling attention to itself. The pedestal belonged to my grandmother. In her house it lived in the corner of the dining room, where a railing divided that room from the family room, and on top of it sat a fern. Her fern was plastic. This was common at the time, I think, to have faux plants in a home, to want the green without the obligation of the living thing. Her fern needed nothing. No water. No light. No attention. It was just there, in that corner, every time I came through the door, from childhood all the way through the years I spent caring for her near the end.

I inherited real ferns in 2020 and then had to leave them behind. When we moved to Nice I left them with friends and family and came with nothing green.

The first September here, close to my mother’s birthday, the sixteenth, I walked down to a plant store near our apartment on Quai Papacino. It was sunny. It was not sad. I bought a fern and a new pot at the same store and brought them home and put the fern in the corner of the apartment, in the light, where it could be what my grandmother’s never had to be: alive.

The pedestal came later, with the rest of the things, when we moved to the villa. And the fern moved with it, into this corner, into this light, onto this column that spent decades in my grandmother’s dining room holding something that needed nothing.

This one needs the light. I make sure it gets it.

My mother never saw this city. She never saw this room or this corner or this particular quality of afternoon light that falls on a fern in the south of France in April. She never knew about the pedestal’s second life or what I put on top of it or why.

She would have understood immediately.

The morning started at the kitchen table. Nick with his crossword. Me tidying the counter from the night before, which my mother would have wanted clean before bed and which I have therefore wanted clean before bed for as long as I can remember. Some inheritances arrive in furniture. Some arrive in habits. Outside, the Promenade des Anglais was closed for the semi-marathon, its 34th edition, 22,000 runners moving through the city while we moved through the kitchen in the particular quiet of a Sunday that has not yet decided what it wants to be.

Tibo in the basket. The Vespa finding its way through the street closures the way it always does, which is to say by instinct and mild improvisation. Our friend Hanya was somewhere in those 22,000, running the half while I was threading through the detours. The same seven kilometers, different relationships to it.

Plage Brigitte Bardot is the dog beach. Named for a woman who retired at thirty-nine and gave everything she had to animals, which is either a cautionary tale or an aspiration depending on the day. Nick arrived before me. Tay came after, with Babette. The beach was grey and uncrowded and rocky, the way the Promenade beaches are in April before the season has fully committed. The dogs had their own agenda. Three of them, three agendas, none of them aligned at first. They sorted it out the way dogs do, which is to say eventually and without apology.

Then the sky cleared. The cumulus moved east over the hills and the afternoon sun arrived and the beach became what it had been promising to be all morning. We walked to Hôtel Amour Plage, which is more local than the alternatives, tolerant of dogs, and entirely comfortable with the proposition that a Sunday afternoon in Nice should end with a spritz, maybe two, under white parasols and no particular plan for what comes next. Limoncello felt right. It was.

The last of the heavy machines for moving the galets was being removed as we sat there. The season changing hands in real time. Fifteen private beach clubs along seven kilometers of coastline, built from nothing each spring and returned to nothing each autumn, the whole theatrical apparatus of a city’s relationship with the sea assembled and dismantled on a schedule as reliable as the tides. We happened to be sitting in the middle of it at the exact moment the last machine rolled away.

The visa arrived earlier in the week, quietly, in the background, the way the best things arrive. Ahead of the Sunday. Ahead of the beach and the dogs and the limoncello and the last machine rolling the last galet back into position. Ahead of the sky clearing to blue over the hills. It arrived first and then the Sunday came and confirmed it.

I had worried, in the way you worry about things you don’t say out loud, that I had reached the age where life stops giving things and starts taking them away. That the account was moving in one direction only. That the chapters still to come would be smaller than the ones already written.

The world, it turns out, had a few more things to give.

Limoncello spritz · Hôtel Amour Plage · Nice · April 19, 2026. Under white parasols. The season just starting. The visa just arrived. Both felt like permission.

Harvey jumped up on the chair in the afternoon and something on his head caught my eye. Small, dark, organic looking. The kind of thing that on a fourteen year old dog could be any number of things, most of them unremarkable, a few of them worth a second look. I carried him down to Nick for a second opinion.

Nick took one look and immediately became unavailable for further participation. He was clear about this. He found the first aid kit, located the hydrogen peroxide, and positioned himself at a supportive distance. His Claude diagnosed the situation by photo. Between the two of them they had contributed everything they were going to contribute.

There were three.

The largest two were the size of small beans. Fully engorged, foreign looking, thoroughly embedded in the coat of a small white fluffy dog who had apparently been hosting them long enough for them to get comfortable. I found the scissor tweezers. I laid a towel on the counter. Harvey jumped up and arranged himself with the patient dignity of an animal who has decided that whatever is happening is beneath his concern. Sage, as the French say. Wise, calm, entirely unbothered. Fourteen years old and he has seen everything.

I had not seen this.

We consulted artificial intelligence on the correct removal technique. Do not twist, it said. Grip firmly at the base and pull straight out. I followed these instructions with surgical precision across all three, applied the hydrogen peroxide, and considered the matter closed.

Hot Maxime set us straight the same afternoon. Nick, having contributed the hydrogen peroxide and a Claude diagnosis, put himself back to work on the computer. I was dispatched to the office alone, in real time, where his colleague, the other vet, the less decorative one, explained with the calm authority of someone who has had this conversation before that you should in fact twist. The AI was wrong. The ticks, she implied, may not have been fully removed. There was a bill. There was a scolding. There were anti-tick collars and a bottle of Advantix and 136 euros leaving the building.

I had done the Watutsi on my kitchen counter with engorged insects on the advice of a chatbot while my husband held the hydrogen peroxide from a safe distance, and I was wrong about the twist, and it cost 136 euros to find this out from someone I find significantly less attractive than her colleague.

Harvey was a champ throughout. Patient on the counter, patient at the vet, patient in the way that only very old dogs and very wise people manage to be when the humans around them are doing their best and getting it slightly wrong.

He is wearing his collar now. Tibo too. The garrigue, the hills, the undergrowth of the south of France: full of things that want to attach themselves to you and stay. This is true of the ticks. It is also true of the place itself, which gets under the skin quietly and thoroughly and does not let go. You learn to check. You stop wanting to.

Hydrogen peroxide · kitchen counter · Nice · April 2026. Not a drink. Some evenings are like that.

The grey days are numbered now. You can feel it in the way April is holding back, the way the sky arrived this morning with a particular quality of diffused light that won’t be available much longer. By June the sun will be absolute and unapologetic and the city will have committed fully to its summer self. But today was grey and cool and it called, with some authority, for a braise.

The Cours Saleya in the morning. The noix de joue de boeuf at the butcher, the central muscle, trimmed and clean, deep burgundy almost purple, dense with connective tissue. The cut that looks wrong raw and becomes exactly right after two hours in a covered pot. A generous bunch of carrots, two jobs in one bunch, some for the braise, some for glazing alongside. A head of céleri-rave, roughly cubed. Leeks, white and pale green only. A bouquet garni from the herb vendor, the right proportions already assembled. Two bottles of Côtes de Bourg, one for the pot and one for the table. Nothing precious. The wine becomes the sauce.

The dogs got their haircuts this morning. I am still learning the clippers. They are professionals about it, which helps. Harvey submitted with the dignified tolerance of a fourteen year old who has made peace with everything. Tibo sat still, which I have learned not to interrogate too closely, trust and contempt being difficult to distinguish in a Lagotto who has already been through the washing machine incident. The results were better than last time. Not by much, but enough.

The Le Creuset went on at half past two.

There is a moment in a braise, before the oven, that Louis-Camille Maillard discovered and codified and never fully understood. He was a French chemist working in the early twentieth century, studying protein synthesis, when he noticed what happens when amino acids meet reducing sugars under high heat. A cascade of chemical reactions producing hundreds of flavour compounds simultaneously. The deep mahogany crust that forms on the surface of meat left alone in a hot pan for three to four minutes. The thing that makes the difference between a piece of beef and a piece of beef that has been transformed at its surface into something irreversibly better.

He published his findings in 1912. He died in 1936. He never knew his name would end up in every serious kitchen in the world. He never tasted a beef cheek seared in a Le Creuset on a grey April morning in Nice with oil shimmering almost to smoke, left completely alone until the crust formed, flipped once, three to four minutes the other side, then set aside on a plate while the aromatics went in.

The Maillard reaction is visible and immediate and dramatic. You can smell it happening. You can hear it. That’s not the braise.

The braise is something else. Lid on tight, into the oven at 160 degrees, do not open for the first ninety minutes. What happens in there is invisible. Low heat, sustained, breaking down the collagen in the connective tissue and converting it slowly to gelatin, which is what makes the sauce unctuous and the meat yielding instead of tough. The transformation from the hardest cut to the most tender. Two and a half hours of slow invisible work that you cannot see and cannot rush and cannot improve by checking on it.

While the braise was in the oven, Rick called.

Rick is married to Nicole, has been for quite some time. They had a beautiful wedding in Los Angeles. Nicole and I had a falling out, for reasons I am both unclear about and entirely clear about, the way you can be simultaneously about certain things. Rick is planning a trip to Puglia and wanted recommendations, which I gave, and we talked for a while in the easy way of people who were adjacent to a friendship that complicated itself and found their own thread anyway. Some things break and the pieces rearrange into something different. Not better or worse. Different.

The oven did its work. I did mine at the table. Writing, which also takes what it takes and cannot be improved by checking on it too often.

Nick came to find me in the afternoon with three options for August. There is a family wedding in Boston. A fact. Non-negotiable. Everything around it is the question. He had done the research with the focused enthusiasm of a man who has already decided and is now presenting the evidence. Nice to Boston direct: clean, expensive, efficient. Drive to Milan, fly from there: cheaper on paper, more expensive in time and tolls and the particular tax of a four hour drive before an international flight. Copenhagen with a day at Tivoli: a real stop, genuinely me, a genuine schlep. And then the fourth option, which Nick left for last the way people leave for last the thing they actually want: Reykjavik. Iceland. The journal has no Iceland. He knows this.

The journal has no Iceland.

I said yes. Obviously I said yes. The braise was in the oven and the afternoon had the particular quality of a day in which patience is the operating principle and everything is still in process and nothing is fully decided and then suddenly it is.

The reduction took thirty minutes after the meat came out. Everything through a fine sieve, the aromatics pressed firmly and then discarded. They had given everything they had. The sauce back on medium heat, uncovered, active simmer, stirring occasionally, the spoon test: run your finger across the back of a dipped spoon, if the line holds clean it is ready. A splash of Worcestershire to cut the sweetness. A knob of cold butter swirled in at the end for shine.

The grenailles had been pressed flat and roasted at 220 degrees and were crackling and golden. The glazed carrots were copper at the edges, shining, fresh parsley over the top. The mushrooms in for the last thirty minutes, the celery leaves saved and scattered at the end, bright and slightly bitter against the dark sauce. The bread already on the table.

We ate at eight. The way you always eat at eight.

Rich is the word. Rich in the specific way that only comes from patience, from low heat sustained over time, from leaving things alone long enough for the transformation to complete itself. The toughest cut becoming the most yielding. The wine becoming the sauce. The grey day becoming this.

There is a version of a life that does not include learning how to braise on a Tuesday in April in Nice while the dogs dry their fresh haircuts by the radiator and a friend calls about Puglia and your husband arrives with Iceland in his hand like a question he already knows the answer to. That version existed. It ran for a long time. It produced things worth producing and it cost what it cost and it ended the way things end when you have been in the wrong shape for long enough.

This version took longer to become itself. The collagen breaking down slowly, invisibly, with the lid on. Not ready to be checked on. Not ready to be rushed.

At eight o’clock it came out rich.

Louis-Camille Maillard never knew his name would end up here. In a kitchen in the south of France, on a grey April day, in a dish made for two on what might be one of the last cool evenings of the season, by someone still learning the clippers and still finding his way into a life that keeps, quietly and without announcement, becoming more itself.

He discovered it by accident. That’s how the best things arrive.

Jean-Luc Colombo Saint-Joseph Rouge · Northern Rhône · Syrah · opened thirty minutes before the table · pepper and dark fruit and a little smoke · correct · April 2026. One bottle for the pot. One for the table. Both earned it.

Nick is building a consultancy. The format is short videos, posted often, about how an American moves to France without losing his mind or his driving privileges. It is a good format. He is good at it. The socials are working. A post goes up and a number goes up and the English lesbian actress from the terrible comedy about retirees in India has started following him. Nick is delighted. Nick tells me about this at the kitchen table.

My thing does not work that way.

I sent an essay to a magazine today. I will not hear back for two weeks, at the earliest. If it works out I will get a byline in roughly nine months and a cheque that represents approximately two hours of what my time used to be worth in Los Angeles. France will take half of that. It is completely worth it. If it does not work out I will send the next one. There is a calendar of these. Four more between June and September. Then a decision in the fall. Then, if everything breaks right, an agent in the winter. Then, if everything continues to break right, a book deal in 2027 that pays out across three years. The French attorney who processed my talent visa was so happy and surprised that I wanted to participate in France’s economic activity that I chose not to show him the timeline.

Nick’s clock is ticking in minutes. Mine is ticking in seasons.

I keep thinking about the ferns.

The plastic one in my grandmother’s dining room did not need anything. It sat on the pedestal and performed its function and asked nothing of the room. My fern in the corner of the villa needs the light. It needs to be turned. It needs to be paid attention to or it begins to tell you, quietly, that it is being neglected. The reward is that it grows. The plastic one did not grow. That was the whole bargain.

Nick is running the fast clock because that is what his project needs. His format rewards daily attention and returns weekly evidence. He checks the metrics and the metrics respond. This is not shallow. It is how the work of his work is done.

Mine is slower because that is what a book needs. A book requires a kind of patience that does not feel like virtue while you are inside it. It feels like silence. You send the piece and then you wait, and while you wait you write the next piece, and the next, and the next, and eventually the silence resolves into something or it doesn’t, and either way the work continues. The reward is not weekly. The reward is eventual.

We meet at the kitchen table. He tells me the English actress has liked three of his posts. I tell him the pitch went out. He asks if I have heard back, which I have not, which I will not, for a while. He nods. He goes back to his crossword. Eleven across. He gets it immediately. He is very good at crosswords.

There is a version of this where the asymmetry would bother me. Where his Dame would read as proof that my approach is too slow, or his momentum as proof that mine is invisible. I have considered that version. I have also considered that Nick does not know any of this is happening. He is on fourteen down.

The version I am in understands that he chose the clock his project needs and I chose the clock mine needs, and that the clocks are not competing. They are running in the same house, at the same kitchen table, toward different kinds of completion. His thing will do what his thing does. Mine will do what mine does. The villa holds both.

The fern is still in the corner. It needs the light. I make sure it gets it.

Whatever was open · the kitchen table · Nice · April 2026. He got fourteen down. I sent the pitch. Both felt like progress.

My mother cut hair in her twenties. She rented a chair at the salon in the Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles, the largest hotel west of Chicago when it opened in 1923, the place where a man named Cedric Gibbons reportedly grabbed a linen napkin at a banquet in the Crystal Ballroom in 1927 and sketched the design for the Oscar statue on it. She worked there for a while and then had her own shop. I don’t remember the name of the shop. This bothers me in the way that certain gaps do, quietly, persistently, the knowledge that the name existed and is now simply gone.

She and my grandmother went to beauty school together on a lark because they thought it would be fun. The school was Marinello, part of a national chain established in 1905 that by its peak in the 1920s had between 25,000 and 30,000 trained beauticians operating across the United States. Judy and Esther took the Red Car from Compton up to the school in downtown Los Angeles. The Pacific Electric Railway, nicknamed the Red Cars, was the largest electric railway system in the world in the 1920s, nearly 1,100 miles of track connecting Los Angeles to almost every corner of Southern California. By the mid-1950s the lines were being shut down one by one, converted to buses, dismantled, forgotten. But when my mother and grandmother were riding it to beauty school, the Red Car was the city.

She said her favorite part was her ladies. The ones who came back. The stories that came out of the chair.

I have been doing a version of this for twenty years without knowing where it came from.

Every city, a barbershop. Not always the classic one, the one with the leather chairs and the striped pole and the smell of bay rum undiluted by time. Sometimes that. But always the chair. Always the cape around the shoulders, which feels like a first date and a performance and a small prayer for a good outcome simultaneously. The intimacy of it. Putting yourself in someone else’s hands, literally, and hoping they are good at what they do, and also hoping they will talk to you.

The one in Cannes on a Monday afternoon was not the old school shop I usually seek. It was a little bawdy, a little loud, very Cannes in 2026. The visual was 2026 and the smells were 1926. The products smelled classic and perfect. The barber was born and raised here, has been cutting hair his whole life, and watched the city change around him while staying exactly where he started. More tourists, he said. A victim of its own fame. The double edged sword of time, even if you are a barber on the sea in Cannes.

I was getting shaggy around the ears since Wolfman in Tokyo. He fixed this. He remarked afterward on how good he thought he did. I agreed. He was right.

The chair dance goes like this. Where are you from. What do you do. What brings you here. I answer, and then I ask. Are you from here. Do you like being creative and talking to new people each day. How long have you been doing this craft. Is there a good place to go for a meal. What is something worth taking home.

For twenty minutes you are the most interesting version of yourself. A passing stranger in someone else’s city, curious without obligation, putting yourself out there and getting the city back in return. Discovery and pampering at the same time. The travel indulgence that costs forty euros and gives you more than most museums.

He was born here and stayed. I was born somewhere else and kept leaving. We had twenty minutes in common and a conversation that neither of us will remember precisely and both of us will carry in some form.

The reason for Cannes in the first place was Christina. A new connection through Nicolas B, a stylist and decorator who is going to help get the roof terrace ready for the welcome cocktail party we are hosting for Nick’s high school reunion in May. She is bringing her eye and her contact list, which is another way of saying she is part therapist and part decorator, which is exactly what a roof terrace in need of a party requires. We met at the Armani Café on the terrace overlooking a lovely lawn and the Croisette, which is why the prices are eyewatering and why nobody mentions the prices. You are paying for the view and the view knows it.

The terrace before pictures have been taken. Christina has been briefed. Whatever comes next will be her doing.

The evening was Loeiz and Greg at La Cave de Peixes. Two bottles between four people, one funky and one Beaujolais, neither captured to memory with any precision and both entirely worth it. Loeiz we met during our first year in France, during the apartment hunt that preceded the villa. She was an independent agent who showed us several properties and the three of us decided immediately that the friendship was stronger than any of the flats. Greg is her husband. He is part of the first generation of French academics to come up in the field of environmental law in France and is, at this exact moment in April 2026, literally writing the book, the manuscript due at the end of the week.

There was cause to celebrate him. There was also cause to celebrate Loeiz, who was just awarded a position representing two of her brands at Milan Men’s Fashion Week. Which is a very big deal. The baby pictures came out, as they always do. Noé and Mao. Five and one, approximately. Mao is so gorgeous she puts the Gerber baby to shame, which I realize nobody reading this may remember as a reference, much in the same way that we had just finished talking about Mad Men and I was briefly optimistic the Gerber baby might land in context. It did not land in context. The baby pictures landed anyway.

My mother loved her ladies for the stories. She gave me the conversation without giving me the scissors. I have been sitting in other people’s chairs in other people’s cities for twenty years, doing the thing she loved, without ever quite knowing it came from her and Esther on the Red Car from Compton to downtown Los Angeles, going to beauty school on a lark because they thought it would be fun.

I got a very good haircut. The rest was the inheritance.

Armani Café · terrace · Cannes · Monday afternoon. Then La Cave de Peixes with Loeiz and Greg · a funky bottle and a Beaujolais · cause to celebrate on both sides of the table. The baby pictures did not disappoint.

There is a type here. She exists throughout the city, in the butcher, at the pharmacy, on the street, in the queue at the market. Une femme d’un certain âge, a woman of a certain age. The French expression does not mean what the English equivalent suggests. In America, a woman of a certain age is a euphemism, a polite way of not saying old. In France it means something else entirely. It alludes to wisdom, experience, and the kind of self-assurance that arrives only after you have stopped caring what other people think, which the French achieve considerably earlier than most. She is well-dressed, always. Self-possessed, completely. And if you are out of your lane, she will tell you with a single manicured nail tipped in your direction, a slight tilt of the head, and the absolute absence of apology.

The wag. I know it well. I have been getting it for several years now.

Through the lens of the best little boy from California, the one raised to be polite, to accommodate, to not make a scene, it is killing me softly every time. I go out of my way to put myself in the position of receiving it, which either means I am a glutton for punishment or I am slowly, without quite admitting it, becoming someone who finds it funny.

Today it was La Corne d’Or, our butcher on the hill. I was there for an épaule d’agneau, a lamb shoulder, for a slow dinner built around the spice jars Virginie brought us. Virginie is Moroccan, an expat in Nice, and she arrived at the villa some time ago with several jars of her own blends, épices d’agneau among them. A gift that has been waiting for the right afternoon. Today was the afternoon.

The archetype was already there when I arrived, standing in front of me at the counter, engaged in what appeared to be a disagreement about pricing with the butcher, or possibly just asking for a discount, which in France is the same conversation conducted at the same volume. The butcher was receiving it with the professional resignation of a man who has been receiving it for years.

And then she saw Tibo.

In approximately thirty seconds, une femme d’un certain âge became a woman with a soft voice asking about breeders. Her caniche noir, her black poodle, had recently passed. She was heartbroken. She was looking for a new love. I opened the farm website on my phone, the farm in the Lot where Tibo came from, and attempted to explain the QR code, which was a comedy masterclass in both directions. She scanned it. She looked at the litter page. I told her there was one male remaining. Le frère de Tibo, Tibo’s brother. She said she would call when she got home.

The wag never came. Tibo had seen to that.

The one-way street outside our villa is a different matter. The retaining wall on the hillside collapsed in November. The mairie promised repairs by February. It is April. The street changed direction during the works, two-way becoming uphill only, which rerouted the natural flow of traffic in a way that I find unreasonable and refuse to comply with. I am French scolded two or three times a week for this. My response is either a very polite merci de m’avoir prévenu, thank you for letting me know, or the vehicular equivalent of je m’en fiche, which translates most honestly as I simply do not care, depending on the day. Neither has changed the situation. I continue to drive the wrong way. The city continues to disapprove. We have reached an understanding.

Nick’s clock ticks in minutes. The United States Embassy in France followed him today and reached out for his email. The consultancy about how Americans move to France is now apparently of official diplomatic interest. He is on a list. He finds this delightful. I find it extremely funny in the specific way that things are funny when they are also slightly alarming.

My clock ticks in seasons. France takes half. The mairie said February and meant April. The street changed direction and I refused to change with it. The wag arrives two or three times a week and I am learning, slowly, to receive it differently. Not as judgment. As authority. Une femme d’un certain âge, a woman of a certain age, is not trying to diminish you. She is simply operating from a position of complete self-assurance that has nothing to do with you whatsoever. You are not the subject. You are just in the room.

Virginie’s spices on the lamb shoulder, low and slow, the tian alongside, courgette and tomato and pepper in overlapping circles. A late plate because Nick had a call. The best little boy from California, dining in the south of France at ten in the evening, having driven the wrong way down his own street again.

Somewhere tonight, a woman who melted at the sight of a Lagotto Romagnolo at a butcher on the hill is perhaps making a phone call to a farm in the Lot region about the last remaining male from Tibo’s litter.

That’s the wag too. Just the other side of it.

Virginie’s épices d’agneau · lamb shoulder · tian · the villa · Nice · April 2026. A late plate. The city outside doing what it does. The best little boy eating at ten and calling it dinner.

The white linen shirt had a hole in the sleeve. It was from last summer’s sales and had seen better days and was now too big anyway, which is either a complaint or a compliment depending on how you look at it. Either way, it was time. I needed a new one before the road trip. I went to CAP3000.

In American English this is CAP THREE THOUSAND, which sounds like a military drone or a printer model. In French it is CAP trois mille, which sounds like somewhere you might actually want to spend an afternoon. The French are not wrong about this.

CAP3000 opened on October 21, 1969, the first major shopping centre in France, built on a vast marshy wetland on the banks of the Var, US-inspired, modern, ahead of its time. The first promotional brochure said: a living center where dreams and relaxation mingle with the necessities of everyday life. An American idea, imported to the French Riviera, now voted the world’s best shopping centre in 2022, serving the American who crossed the Atlantic to live here and needed a white linen shirt before Saturday.

I hate shopping now. This is a recent development. For most of my life I found it pleasurable, even therapeutic. Somewhere between Los Angeles and Nice the patience for it left. I go in, I find the thing, I leave. The shirt was found. Several other things also found me on the way out, as things do.

The Vans were in the window.

Marilyn lived across the street from my grandmother. She was fluffy and buxom and wore big 1980s glasses and Vans sneakers in every color and pattern she could find, as loud as possible, all of them. Her husband worked for Lockheed, developing lenses for satellites in the seventies and eighties. He used to tell her not to water the backyard in her robe unless she was comfortable with the Soviets seeing her in her lacies. He was allegedly developing the lenses going into the reconnaissance satellites. He told her they could read the headlines on a newspaper from space. She watered the backyard in her robe anyway.

Anytime someone complimented her shoes, Marilyn would say: takes a lot of money to dress like this.

I bought three pairs. White slip-ons, navy blue classic lace-ups, pink checkerboard slip-ons. The rhinestone checkerboard model in the window was only available in women’s sizes. This was the greatest injustice of the afternoon. Marilyn would have bought those too. Marilyn would have bought all of them and worn them simultaneously if the geometry allowed.

The white linen shirt was also purchased. The errand was technically completed. Nobody needs to know the order in which things happened.

CAP3000 on a Friday afternoon before a road trip. Dreams and relaxation mingling with the necessities of everyday life, exactly as promised in 1969. The American in France, replacing the worn-out shirt, coming home with the ghost of a woman in loud Vans and big glasses who had a philosophy about money and dressing and a husband who worried about the Soviets while she watered the garden.

Takes a lot of money to dress like this.

It does. Worth every euro.

Nothing. It was a mall on a Friday. Some things are exactly what they are.

The Halles de Béziers were voted the most beautiful market in France in 2025. Built in 1891 in the Baltard style, the same iron and glass architecture as the original Les Halles in Paris, they sit in the center of the old city on Place Pierre Sémard and contain the kind of stalls that remind you why the French take lunch seriously. During the renovation works in 2024 they found a Roman mosaic beneath the floor dating from the second century AD. Nobody mentioned this while I was eating the ribs. The ribs were excellent. French beef, a decent barbecue sauce, presented over soggy fries that received none of my attention. I have spent enough time in Texas to know a good rib from a performative one. These were the real thing. The fries were not.

Béziers itself is one of the oldest cities in France, founded by the Greeks around 575 BC, which is the kind of fact that rearranges your sense of time. In 1209, during the Albigensian Crusade, a papal legate was asked how to distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics when the city was about to be sacked. His reported answer: kill them all, God will recognize his own. The city was burned. Nearly the entire population massacred. The Cross of Toulouse, red field and gold cross, the flag of the region that has been here the longest of all, was flying from the battlements of Château Mercuès by the time we arrived that evening, alongside the flags of Germany, Spain, Luxembourg, the EU, Italy, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Eight hundred years of complicated history, twelve flags in the late afternoon light.

We arrived at the château as a hot mess. This is the honest account.

Six and a half hours in the car. Tibo, who had been patient for most of the drive, arrived at full energy. We stopped on the front lawn for a walk before entering, which felt civilized and correct, the castle on the cliff above us, the Lot valley below, the gravel drive doing its job of making you feel like you have arrived somewhere worth arriving. Then through the entrance and across the threshold and into the lobby of a Relais & Châteaux that has been receiving guests in various forms since the bishops of Cahors called it home.

The 800 year old door slammed shut behind us.

Tibo, whose aversion to loud sounds is well documented, achieved a form of locomotion I had not previously witnessed. Rocket mode. In his trajectory across the medieval stone floor he became entangled with a small wrought iron side table placed next to a tailored settee, which upon hitting the stone produced a sound exactly like a gong, which did not help. The five staff members behind reception did their absolute best to mask their displeasure. I picked my terrified dog up off the floor and swept him back over the moat to the front lawn for one more try at a dignified entrance.

The second attempt was better. Nobody mentioned the first.

Room 23. La Tourelle. A suite in one of the turrets, curved stone walls, a bathroom with a freestanding tub and double marble sinks, a window that looks directly out over the Lot valley where the vineyards have been growing Malbec since before anyone thought to name the grape. On the wall of the turret, a Latin inscription carved in stone. In 1830 a severe winter damaged the crown of the tower. In 1871, Bishop Grimard of Cahors, moved by pious grief for what was lost, had it restored. The castle is speaking in the first person. The building remembers its own winters.

There is a small wooden stool in the corner of the room that looks like it has been there for four hundred years. It has been there for four hundred years. There is a passage off the suite, a narrow external walkway, that once existed for defensive purposes. Pouring hot oil onto raiding armies. I do hope it won’t come to that.

Dinner at La Table de Mercuès. Chef Clément Costes. A single multi-course tasting menu, Michelin recognized, built on the produce of the Quercy: black truffle, saffron, Rocamadour cheese, the Cahors Malbec from the estate’s own vines. The wine we chose was not from the estate. La Roque, Marne Brune Miocène, Malbec 2023 by Fabien Jouves, biodynamic, from the limestone plateau above the valley. Light, against all expectations. Cahors Malbec has a reputation as the black wine, dark and tannic, built for decades in a cellar. This one had lift and precision and the kind of mineral quality that ancient limestone gives to things grown in it. The pistachio on the menu suggested the evening was not entirely going to work as I have recently discovered a new aversion. The chef sent something special to the table after a mild protest and turned it around completely. The foie gras in its dark reduction with broad beans and wild strawberries. The beef cheeks with lobster sauce and kumquat, a dish I have been trying to perfect on cold evenings in Nice and which is a completely different question when asked by a Michelin kitchen in a medieval turret. The rhubarb dessert, a quenelle of sorbet in that specific dusty pink, precise and seasonal and exactly right.

We ended the evening on the phone with Tami in Delray Beach. She had received the Mother’s Day pillows. They had been left outside by the delivery service, which is its own kind of c’est la vie. The pillow that was supposed to read C’est la vie had arrived reading Le Sigh instead, which is either a catastrophic ordering error or an improvement on the original idea. Both, possibly. The second pillow, You Are My Sunshine, made it intact and correct. That’s the one that mattered. She was already into an Aperol spritz. She sounded happy.

Le Sigh. Close enough. Maybe better.

La Roque Malbec 2023 · Fabien Jouves · Terroir du Causse · biodynamique · lighter than expected · correct · La Table de Mercuès · Château Mercuès · May 2026. The beef cheeks were a different question entirely.

Nick brought the elongée up to the turret. There was no coffee maker in the room, which is either an oversight or a philosophy, and either way he solved it. With the dark clouds in the distance we should have re-read the Latin inscription on the wall one more time before leaving. In 1830 severe weather damaged the crown. In 1871 a bishop, moved by pious grief, had it restored. The building remembers its own storms. We crossed back over the moat and hit the road.

The tabac first. Another elongée for the drive, the coffee that in French becomes something slightly more serious than what it is in English, just by being named differently. The grey hairs at the counter gave us the side eye when we ordered. It could have been Tibo’s nose finding the baguette basket immediately, and doing his best with the tongue to get one for the road. With our best bon jours, we were tolerated.

The back roads of the Dordogne do something to the sense of memory. Texas hill country but greener. Ojai but older. A landscape that feels familiar without being a place you have actually been, which means you have been given it before arriving, in a book, in a film, in a hundred different versions of the French countryside that used this specific valley as their source material. The red roses growing up the sides of the medieval stone village row houses confirmed that you are not, after all, somewhere you have been before. There is nothing in America quite like this. The Dordogne is the original. America got the copy.

And yet it tips, occasionally, into something that feels too perfect. Too correct. A cartoon of itself, in the best possible sense, the way a place that has been exactly what it is for eight hundred years without interruption eventually becomes its own myth.

A commercial strip on the edge of town: a gas station, a supermarket, a menuiserie. Twenty seconds of the honest infrastructure any living place requires reminds you that real lives are lived here after all. Their banal ugliness that the modern French are as good at as any other nation. Then you’re through it, and the stone houses arrive again, and the roses that are still clinging to the mind’s eye rightness.

Sarlat-la-Canéda in cloud. The honey limestone under a heavy sky catching up to us as we move through the valley. The sun doing its best to get through and occasionally winning, which turns out to be the right conditions for it. The Lanterne des Morts, the Lantern of the Dead, a 12th century tower built to hold a lamp lit for the souls of the departed, one of only a handful remaining in France, standing in the square as if it never considered not being there. A trio of bronze ducks in the city center, permanent and unapologetic, because the duck built this city and the city knows it. No one has told them about the foie gras. The barrel vaults cutting the corners, slicing into the stone, ancient drainage channels running beneath, moss on the walls, Jennifer walking through in her white trainers toward us looking like she belongs here.

Lunch at La Table d’Ezra. The four of us. Duck confit. The right thing in the right place.

Julien de Cerval was a magistrate and judge in Sarlat, the same city we walked through that morning. He inherited Marqueyssac in 1861, fell in love with it, and spent the last thirty years of his life turning a limestone cliff above the Dordogne into something that would outlast him by a century and a half. A judge by vocation and a gardener by devotion. We walked through his city in the morning and his garden in the afternoon.

Vinx’s studio is at number 25, a Sarlat street address with www.vinx.com in red neon on the glass door and a Sting Drum Rhythm Festival poster from Amsterdam 1992 in the window. David Byrne on the bill. Vinx on the bill. A medieval limestone building on a medieval limestone street containing this particular history. Inside, his paintings on the walls, thick impasto in blues and greens and white, his signature in red in the lower corner of each one. African instruments on a velvet stand. In the bathroom, pinned behind perspex, a sheet of handwritten musical notation. At the top: Mission Impossible. Then the signatures. John Williams. Bill Conti. Jerry Goldsmith. Henry Mancini. John Barry. Ennio Morricone. The men who scored the twentieth century, on a single page, in a bathroom in Sarlat. We watched a clip of To Sir With Love together because it came up in conversation. He wears his experience with genuine humility. He wants to share. He is an artist.

Leaving the studio, Jennifer led us to Les Jardins Suspendus de Marqueyssac. The New York Times named it one of the 25 essential gardens in the world. 150,000 boxwood shrubs, hand-clipped every year by the same method since de Cerval devoted thirty years of his life to planting them. The boxwood rolls across the hillside above the Dordogne valley like a green sea frozen mid-wave. In the garden, peacocks move freely between the clipped forms. They belong to it the way the boxwood does. Inside one of the pavilions: a nearly complete Allosaurus skeleton. In the château, a full-size Bibendum, the Michelin Man, standing in the hall. Nunc est Bibendum, which is Latin for now is the time to drink, repurposed in 1898 to sell tires.

The Bibendum is not a collector’s whim. Kléber Rossillon, the current owner of Marqueyssac, is the great-grandson of Marius Rossillon, known as O’Galop, the French cartoonist who drew the first Michelin Man in 1898. With the proceeds from his Michelin contract, O’Galop bought a house in Beynac, a few kilometres down the Dordogne valley, and painted watercolours of the surrounding landscape until his death in 1946. The family never quite left. Kléber now owns the gardens. The Bibendum standing in the hall of the château is not memorabilia. It is a great-grandfather.

On the drive back the news arrived. Zac and Jeremy had lost their dog Amelia. We know this particular grief, the specific weight of it, the way it arrives. From the front seat I did my best to give them some words I wished someone had given me when we lost our Hogan.

Dogs live their whole lives inside a chapter of ours, and then we lose them and have to keep going. They are so loved. They love us so much. And it matters every single day.

Back at the château, the scheduled wine tour. The cellar. The bottle of the château is 6666 and we were asked by our Azerbaijani guide, who speaks eight languages and sometimes sounds like she is speaking all of them at once, whether we knew why it was named this way. I guessed something about the devil or the church. It is wine after all. Six mille six cent soixante-six. Six thousand six hundred and sixty-six vines per hectare, sixty-five percent more than the local average, the density that concentrates everything the soil has to give into a smaller and more intense yield. Produced only in top years. The 2020 is still young, structured, the fruit present beneath the tannin, a wine that knows it has time. Then the next bottle: Les Évêques, the Bishops, named for the men who slept in our turret before us. Bolder, more immediate, more ready. Maybe like the bishops also. On Tibo’s behalf, we chose a bottle to take to the farm tomorrow.

Back in the turret room before dinner, I flip on the TV hidden behind a gold-framed mirror, a luxury the drunk bishops certainly did not have. A concert on Arte: Boléro on two grand pianos. Through the open door to the turret passage, thunder rings outside over the Lot valley. The Latin inscription still on the wall. The bottle of Les Évêques on the table.

Ravel builds the piece and builds and builds and then it ends. By the end it is a storm of hair and fingers on keys, the two talents beating the notes out on the screen. That is all it does and it is enough and perfect and thunderous.

We leave for dinner at Le Bistro de l’Isa in Cahors, one of the few places open on a Sunday, reached just in time. The sky, which had held the mostly sunny day for us as long as it could, finally released. Thunder, lightning, and a move from the terrace to the interior. At the table behind us, two men in football kit sharing a bottle of Cahors Malbec. These Americans in Europe are still delighted by this very un-American sight. It would be beer, draft, and a different vibe. Nick had a burger. I had pizza, for the tender stomach from yesterday’s rich meal. A Fabien Jouves Côt de Fruit on the table, the same producer as the night before in a different register, the everyday Malbec to La Roque’s more serious expression. Jouves found us twice without trying.

The day had been full. A day about reuniting and loss and exploring and remembering and tasting. Five words for a Sunday in the Dordogne that held all of them at once, none of them canceling the others out.

Six mille six cent soixante-six. The density that makes the difference.

6666 2020 · Les Évêques 2020 · both Château Mercuès · then Fabien Jouves Côt de Fruit · Le Bistro de l’Isa · Cahors · Sunday May 2026. Jouves twice in two days. The Lot knows what it’s doing.

On the way to the farm I had a long talk with Tibo.

He came up to me in the back seat and put his front legs on my chest and looked me in the eye. I told him about the day we picked him up. About how there were butterflies and daisies. About how he was a dark brown underneath his sunbleached orange hair, darker than he is now, than he has become in the years of Mediterranean light. About how he slept in my arms in the passenger seat the whole way home, all the way from Peyrilles to Nice, while I made promises to him that I have done my best to keep. That we would love him. That we would make sure he was a happy boy.

He looked me in the eye the entire time. He caught the tone if not the words.

I told Nick as we left the château that I thought this was going to be more of a homecoming for us than for him.

This was our fourth visit to Des Landes du Frau. The first was when France was still new and the losses were recent and we arrived hollowed out, unable to fully process that we were here to possibly take home a new member of the family so soon after losing Hogan. There were so many puppies. Tibo was the one away from the pack. Not asking for attention. Calm. He didn’t back away when we approached him. Harvey sniffed and appeared to approve, a position he has since had ample time to reconsider. I am certain he regrets his non-objection. We drove home with Tibo asleep in my arms and the cracks in us, not healed exactly, but holding.

The second visit came months later, after Rome, after settling further into the architecture of the life we were building in Nice. The third was last year, a return to say thank you. This visit arrived as familiar. As ours.

The Lot in May smells buzzy. That is the word and there is no better one. Damp and organic and verdant, the fast-moving downpours breaking the sun and then releasing it again, everything in between going into full growth mode, the plants and the insects and the air itself powering up. The valley smelling like it is becoming more completely itself by the hour.

Sandrine and Didier. The farm modest and working and real, limestone and terracotta and the particular quiet of a place where animals are bred and truffles are found and life is lived close to the ground. There is a new addition to the family, a puppy belly-up on the dog bed, white and dark brown, a distant cousin of Tibo, sleeping the absolute sleep of something that has never had a reason not to. A sister of Tibo’s named Tammy sat beside me on the sofa. Scared at first and then, slowly, not. I accepted this as the gift it was.

We brought a bottle of wine. They served a cup of coffee. We left full of fluffy love.

Tibo moved through the farm without recognition. The smells, the ground, the other dogs, the air his first weeks were made of. Nothing registered as familiar. He was present in the way he is always present, which is entirely and without reservation and without reference to anything that came before.

I had prepared myself for this. I watched him anyway, looking for the thing I knew wasn’t going to be there.

This is what it is to love a dog. They live completely inside the present tense. No past to grieve, no future to fear, just the next smell and the next thing and the warmth of whoever is beside them. We carry the whole story. They carry only now.

Three years ago I came here hollowed out and chose a puppy who stood apart from the others and didn’t back away. The cracks were visible then. They are still there now. But this trip has been the gold going in, slowly, the way it does when you are not watching for it. The valley buzzing with everything becoming itself. The window open in the turret room. The whisky. The valley below.

Wabi-sabi. The beauty in the broken places. The repair that doesn’t hide the damage but makes it the most luminous part of the object.

He was catching the tone.

Les Évêques 2020 · Château Mercuès · left at the farm · on Tibo’s behalf · Peyrilles · Lot · May 2026. The right bottle for the right moment. The bishops would have approved.

The city changes block by block. That is the thing about Montpellier no one tells you until you are walking through it with a Lagotto Romagnolo on your arm and a vague sense of direction. The vintage shops give way to vinyl et vin; the vinyl et vin gives way to halal and falafel, the air changing register as it fills with cardamom, cumin, and the hiss of something frying. You overshoot the cool kids and land somewhere considerably more interesting.

The storefront was clean, the interior occupied by four men who were only mildly intimidating despite the fact that I arrived with a poodle on my arm and another on my head after a day of travel through the Lot. I entered the sacred male space and hooked the dog to the seating with a confidence I didn’t actually possess. The opening question, avez-vous un rendez-vous, do you have an appointment, was met with the most hardcore ouah I could muster. It was the only acceptable currency. A beat followed, then a final vape taken out of doors by the master barber, and I was summoned to the ancient chair.

His name was Brian, though nothing about his dress or his energy suggested a Brian. He was from Réunion, by way of Paris and Montpellier, and he lived with an aging chihuahua named Blue Ivy. We began with the usual effort in French before the pretense collapsed and we spent eighty minutes in English. Brian was a man of intense, global certainties. He had views on the lasers that caused the California fires, views on Chinese property development, and views on the trickling out of classified files. He referred to these theories, consistently and with great gravity, as constipation. The French word is conspiration; he was only a few letters short of the target. He told me it was getting harder and harder to tell reality from constipation these days, which was the most honest thing anyone had said to me on the entire trip.

The haircut was one of the best I have had. Tokyo. Cannes. Now Brian from Réunion in Montpellier, found past the halal and falafel shops, with a photograph of Blue Ivy the chihuahua on his phone and the constipation of our times humming quietly in the background. I sat in his chair and listened to the lasers and the files, the shifting borders of what is known and what is merely felt. The chair dance finds the right room even when it is not the room you booked. You set out for the historical record, and you end up in a strip of Montpellier with a man who has replaced the truth with something more interesting.

The Promenade du Peyrou was conceived in 1689 as a monument to royal ambition. The triumphal arch, fifteen meters high, built in 1691 to commemorate Louis XIV’s victories. The equestrian statue of the Sun King, erected in 1718. At the far end, the Château d’Eau, the water tower completed in 1768, built to conceal the end of the Saint-Clément Aqueduct and turn a piece of infrastructure into a neoclassical monument. The practical made monumental. The aqueduct itself stretches fourteen kilometers, 53 large arches, 183 smaller ones, built between 1753 and 1765 by the hydraulic engineer Henri Pitot. On the day it was inaugurated, four to six thousand people gathered to watch. Gossips had said it would never work. The water rose to the tower. The city cheered.

It carried water for 170 years. Then it stopped and started carrying beauty instead, which it has done ever since. It became a monument while it was still working, which is the highest possible compliment a city can pay to its infrastructure. True of anything.

The whole ensemble is sized for people. The arch is fifteen meters, not fifty. The water tower is intimate, not overwhelming. The aqueduct moves through a neighborhood named after its arches, Les Arceaux, where a market happens on Tuesdays and Saturdays underneath it. The grandeur is enormous. The scale remains human. This is what I meant, standing on the Promenade du Peyrou in the late afternoon, when I felt that the city had found the precise measurement where monumentality and humanity meet. Educated. Sentimental. Both at once, without apology.

And then the Place de la Canourgue.

The Fontaine des Licornes was inaugurated in 1776. The year the American Declaration of Independence was signed. The year the unicorn went up in this square in the south of France, where it has been standing ever since, gold horn catching the afternoon light, completely unbothered by the passage of time or the significance of the date or the gay American man who stood in front of it on a Tuesday in May and felt, without entirely being able to explain why, seen.

The unicorn is so pretty. That is also true and does not need to be more than that.

The square at apéro. Nick had run upstairs to fetch his headphones so he could edit his latest social media post without disturbing the vibe, having asked first whether it was okay. It was okay. We sat in the Place de la Canourgue, Nick with his headphones, me with this, a verre de blonde between us, the unicorn in our peripheral vision, two people working on their passion projects over a glass of wine without needing to talk. I asked Nick what it felt like, this particular kind of comfort. He said: safe. He feels it as security.

The unicorn made me feel seen. Nick makes me feel safe. Two different kinds of being known, arrived on the same Tuesday evening in a square in Montpellier where a fountain has been standing since 1776.

Dinner was at Hôtel Pinard, which is not a hotel. It is a wine bar on the Rue des Trésoriers de la Bourse named after pinard, the cheap table wine that kept the French army moving through two world wars, which is either an act of deep humility or deep irony and is probably both. It opened in 2023 and has already won best wine list in France twice. The owners are Ben and Szabi. Benjamin the chef, Szabolcs the sommelier. They met traveling, spent time in Hong Kong, brought their wine list back from everywhere they had been. Two hundred references. Two thousand bottles. Mandarin banquettes, varnished tables, a wall of mirrors, the particular warmth of a room run by people who have decided exactly what they want to do and are doing it.

They were good to us. The magret de canard. The sucrine. The feta. The courgette. The truite, warm, with endive and walnut and gorgonzola, exactly as described and better than expected. A Breton Beaux Monts, Vosne-Romanée, at table 5, which is either an extravagance or the correct choice for the evening and felt like both. The ganache with the picual oil and fleur de sel. Forty-five euros and fifty cents each, which is what a perfect meal costs in a wine bar named after bad wine in Montpellier on a Tuesday night in May.

They told us about Hong Kong. We told them about Nice. The mirrors reflected the room back at itself, which was the right room to reflect.

One knows when one is reaching a certain age when classical music starts sounding like new music. We drove here from the Lot with the radio on, the landscape rolling green and endless under fast-moving clouds that looked like a painting someone had decided not to finish. One of those clouds was traveling faster than we were. We made it first.

Verre de blonde · Café l’Attitude · Place de la Canourgue · aperitif. Then Breton Beaux Monts, Vosne-Romanée · Hôtel Pinard · table 5 · Montpellier · Tuesday May 2026. The wine bar named after bad wine. The right bottle. The right room.

France kept the bones of the Catholic calendar and stripped out the flesh. The Revolution of 1789 tried to go further, to erase the church entirely and replace its rhythm with something new. A poet named Fabre d’Églantine was given the task of renaming the months. What he produced is one of the great lost beauties of the modern world.

Twelve months of thirty days each, named not after Roman gods and emperors but after what was actually happening outside. Vendémiaire, the month of the grape harvest. Brumaire, the month of fog. Frimaire, frost. Nivôse, snow. Pluviôse, rain. Ventôse, wind. Germinal, germination. Floréal, flowers. Prairial, meadows. Messidor, harvest. Thermidor, heat. Fructidor, fruit.

The weeks were replaced by ten-day décades. Every day was named after a plant, an animal or a tool rather than a saint. The extra days at the end of the year, five or six of them, belonged to no month at all. They were called the sans-culottides and dedicated to revolutionary virtues.

It lasted twelve years. Napoleon abolished it in 1806 and brought back the Gregorian calendar because the country needed to do business with the rest of Europe and the rest of Europe had not followed France into this particular experiment. Fabre d’Églantine did not live to see its end. He was guillotined during the Terror, in the month of Germinal, the month of things beginning to grow underground. Zola used that word as the title of his great novel about coal miners rising. He knew what he was doing.

Thermidor survived in the language through a butter sauce. Lobster thermidor takes its name from a play set during that month, the heat of high summer caught in cream and tarragon. The rest of the calendar dissolved back into January and its Roman gods.

Today is Ascension Thursday on the Gregorian calendar. In the Revolutionary calendar it would be somewhere in Floréal. The month of flowers. From the window the hills above Nice are doing exactly what Fabre d’Églantine would have expected of them. The church bells are ringing down the hill, which he would not have approved of at all. But the rosemary on the lamb smells right regardless of what you call the month.

We came home yesterday from the Lot valley, from Peyrilles and Sarlat and Montpellier and a turret room with a Latin inscription and a farm where Tibo was born and a unicorn inaugurated in 1776. We came home having dreamed, briefly and seriously, of a different French life. A river house in Saint-Martin-Labouval, the Lot at the garden’s edge, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie visible from the lawn. A stone cottage on a large piece of land with a pool and the hills and the particular quiet of a place that has not yet decided it needs to be anything other than what it is. We left both with the suitcase metaphorically packed and the conversation unresolved.

And then we came home to this.

The windy sunny morning. Tibo on the lead through the park and the neighborhood streets. The shoulder bag with the carabiner, Harvey or Tibo clipped to it so my hands stay free. The grabber attached. This last item is not my idea. It belongs to David Sedaris, whose books I have loved and whose sister I have had the pleasure of meeting. He picks up litter on the roads around his home in West Sussex and has become so associated with it that the local council named one of their rubbish collection lorries after him. Pig Pen. He has said that picking up litter is the thing that made him feel most at home in England.

I am picking up trash in the park where I walk my dogs in Nice, France, with a grabber attached to a shoulder bag with a carabiner, and as I am writing this I notice that I am almost fifty.

This house has not quite felt like home. It still may not, entirely. But it is starting to feel defensible, which is its own kind of progress. There are things we want to change. A south-facing window on the terrace. A new wall to be good neighbors. The grabber is a recent development.

The gratin dauphinois is in the oven. The asparagus is ready. The mushrooms are waiting. The lamb is resting with the rosemary. The church bells rang this morning and the hills above Nice are in full flower and the first guests of the season arrive this weekend, when the city will start to belong to everyone again.

For now it is ours. The windy sunny morning. The grabber. The park. Tibo on the lead.

Floréal. The month of flowers. The month of things becoming more themselves.

Whatever opens with the lamb tonight. The rosemary will decide.

Cannes during the festival is not glamorous. This is the thing people who have not been here during festival week do not understand, and the thing people who have been here cannot quite bring themselves to say out loud because the myth is too useful. Cannes is an industry town. Like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, these are places purpose-built to make conversations that begin with “what do you do” socially acceptable. The festival is a trade show with better weather and a red carpet. The same conversations that happen at a convention center in any other city happen here, except the lanyards are replaced by badges and the slot machines are replaced by screenings. The people watching is extraordinary. The content is largely the same.

We ate outside on the street at Bobo Bistro. At the next table, a group of fashion gays, self-possessed and decorative, having a very comfortable conversation about sex work and a slightly less comfortable one about French cinema. Behind us, Spanish-adjacent actors and possibly a director, thirsting for martinis and attention in the specific way of people who have decided that being seen is its own form of achievement. Cannes during festival week holds all of these people simultaneously and charges them accordingly.

There were four of us. Richard, Nick’s friend, a film critic who covered this festival for Vanity Fair for years before the magazine and he parted ways. That is the polite version of what happened to journalism this decade. He is now writing on his own platform, podcasting, supported by a startup, and making twice what Vanity Fair paid him. He was at the festival regardless, because the work continues after the masthead. The masthead was always the smaller part of the arrangement.

Javier is a college friend, a fraternity brother, a man from Fresno who arrived via Sarajevo and is using Madrid as a home base while he figures out what comes next. He is on what I have been calling his midlife rumspringa, saying yes to everything Europe is offering, spreading seeds across the continent with the focused energy of someone who has realized there is still time. He has a quality that is difficult to name until you have been on the receiving end of it. He giggles as he listens. Not performatively, not nervously, but in a way that tells you the thing you just said has landed and he wants more of it. It greases the wheels of every conversation he enters. He may think of it as a tic. It is a superpower. By the end of the first glass he had the table running at a frequency it would not otherwise have found.

Nick. In the morning he had been on his hands and knees cleaning the black-and-white checkerboard tiles of our rooftop terrace, getting it ready for the welcome party he is hosting for his high school reunion this weekend. By evening he was on the Croisette and a fan stopped him and wanted a photograph. He handled it with grace, as he handles most things. This has happened before. The work is reaching people. The clock ticks in minutes and the minutes are getting louder.

I ordered the dorade. It was unfashionable, which at a table surrounded by the fashion gays felt like the correct choice. The tomatoes alongside were a little early, a week or two from being what they were going to be. Overall very good. An honest fish on an honest plate on a street in a city that was performing something more elaborate at every other table.

Javi and I broke off for a bit of conversation on what comes next. I told him about this writing practice, how meaningful it has become, how much I respected his watercolor renderings when we were in school together. I told him to say yes to everything that comes his way and to record it with meaning. This advice did not come from nowhere. It came from having spent the better part of two decades doing exactly that, from the sketchbook and the camera and now the journal. It came from becoming confident enough in the work and in the skin to understand that the recording is not vanity. It is the practice. It is the whole thing. It is the thing that I want Javi to do and also that I want Nick to as well.

Richard let go by the institution that defined him, making twice the money outside it. Javier between lives, saying yes to Europe. Nick recognized on the Croisette, handling it with grace. Me with the dorade and the early tomatoes and the advice I gave Javier that was also the advice I had given myself, quietly, over many years, before I knew that was what I was doing.

Four corners. Four different states. One table.

The fashion gays never looked over. They were having a much more interesting conversation about themselves.

Whatever rosé was on the table at Bobo Bistro · Cannes · May 2026. The dorade was unfashionable and correct. The tomatoes are almost ready.

The Universal backlot has a street they call Europe. Village, square, whatever the production name was that week. It is the place where The Good Place was filmed, the television show about what happens after you die, set in a neighborhood designed to look like a perfect European village. Cobblestones. A boulangerie. Shutters on the windows. The whole grammar of a place that exists somewhere else, built here so you don’t have to go there.

During the pandemic the lot was empty. Walled off behind a gate from the rest of the city. A skeleton crew keeping the machine going, keeping the thing alive until it could be a thing again. When I went in I stopped at Europe Street. Not every day. Some days. The days that needed it.

At the bottom of the space there was a building designed to look like a shop, a boulangerie or something adjacent, and it housed a restroom. It had open windows. This mattered because I was driving in from visits to the people I loved who were sick, and I was terrified of bringing something else into a room that already had enough in it. The open window was the precaution I could take. The urinal with the air moving through it. Then I would drive the electric car down to the soundstage and go inside and work.

I walked through that empty imagined village many times. Undressed. Nobody around. The cobblestones that weren’t cobblestones and the boulangerie that wasn’t a boulangerie and the shutters that had never opened onto anything. It was designed to look like heaven and during those months it was the closest thing available. Not because it was beautiful. Because it was quiet and it held the shape of somewhere else and somewhere else was what I needed.

The people I loved who were sick. I will not say more than that. Everyone reading this lost someone to that rope, that lead pulling toward the inevitable. What I can say is that you do what you can. You use the bathroom with the open window. You preserve the thing that made them proud. You protect them the next time you see them, and the time after that, for as long as there is a next time.

I remember walking through the empty Europe Street thinking about how absurd it was. Finding comfort in a fiction of a place. The fake village built to look like heaven. And the thought that arrived, quiet and persistent: why not just go find the real one.

It took a few more years. The losses came first, the way they do, and then the other side of them, and then Nice. The real boulangerie. The real cobblestones. The real shutters that open every morning onto the actual light.

The Good Place was filmed on Europe Street. I used to walk through it to use the bathroom before going into a hermetically sealed soundstage to work, during the worst of it, in the city I had lived in my whole life, which was also the city that was not the one I was supposed to be in.

I know that now. I didn’t know it then. I just knew about the window.

Nothing. It was a backlot in a pandemic. Some periods do not have a bottle. They have a window with air moving through it and a reason to be careful.

She was in ivory. Sitting on one of the benches facing the sea, alone, the way people sit when they have decided the sea is enough company. Seventies, or a blue zone eighty, it was hard to tell and beside the point.

The headphones were the first thing. Large, over-ear, the kind her grandson picked for Mother’s Day because he wanted her to have the best sound and possibly because he thought it would be funny. Generationally incorrect in the most generous possible sense. The kind of headphones that belong in a recording studio or on a teenager on a flight, not on a woman in ivory on a bench in Nice on a Monday morning in May.

And then the arms.

Raised. Both of them, slightly, the wrists doing something precise that the fingers were following. A conducting gesture, not performed for anyone, not aware of itself. Private. The beat was hers. The music was hers. Mozart or Beethoven or Williams or something her grandson had also put on the playlist that she had decided, against all expectation, was magnificent. It didn’t matter which. The arms knew exactly what they were doing.

I used Tibo as cover. I have treats in the shoulder bag and he is always willing to sit for one, so I made a small theatre of it. The treat held up, the command given, the good boy rewarded, while I stood there for a moment longer than was strictly necessary and took her in.

Three speeds on the Promenade this morning. The runner passing at their own frequency. Tibo and me at ours. And the maestro on the bench, entirely still except for the arms, conducting something the rest of us couldn’t hear, which may be the fastest speed of all.

Afterward, the Monday market. Then Javier for a glass of wine on the balcony. The house white, the conversation easy. Then the thunderstorm that arrived without announcement and ended the afternoon the way the best things end, suddenly and completely. Tibo and I rode home unprepared and happy for it. The right way to be caught in the rain in May in a city that was in full flower and knew it.

Chablis, four glasses · Babel Babel · 2 Cours Jacques Chirac · Nice · Monday 18 May 2026. The Mediterranean hummus was excellent. The Caesar came dressed with a one-minute egg that tasted a little off. The Chablis made no such mistakes.

There are places you return to because they are perfect and places you return to because they are yours. Fondation Maeght is both. I have been here multiple times. I will go again. I bring people here when I want them to understand what the Côte d’Azur actually is underneath the noise of it, the traffic and the rosé and the performance. This is what it is underneath. A hill above a medieval village, umbrella pines against a blue sky, white concrete vaults collecting rainwater, the Mediterranean visible in the distance through the trees. Residential in its scale. Institutional in its ambition. The two things together, held in balance, which is what this part of France does better than anywhere else and what is almost impossible to explain to someone who has not stood here.

The foundation was built by Aimé and Marguerite Maeght, Parisian art dealers who lost a son. Bernard died of leukemia aged eleven. On the advice of their friend Fernand Léger, they traveled to America and visited the great foundations, Barnes, Phillips, Guggenheim, and came home with the idea of building something equivalent. Grief became a building. The building became a place where Miró spent months every year working in the engraving and ceramics studios, where Giacometti made the courtyard that now bears his name, where Chagall placed mosaics into the walls, where Braque designed the pool and the stained glass in the chapel. The chapel itself is dedicated to Bernard.

The architect was Josep Lluís Sert, a Catalan who had fled Franco and gone to America, who talked of a meridional architecture where loggias and terraces and awnings and screens, the vernacular devices of the Mediterranean, would be reinterpreted in modernist form. He built full-size models that he moved around the site for a year to test the orientation. The white vaults that define the roofline collect rainwater to feed the Miró Labyrinth’s pools. The walls open onto the gardens so that you are never quite certain whether you are inside or outside. André Malraux inaugurated it in 1964 and said: here, an attempt is being made to do something that has never been attempted before, to create a universe in which modern art can find both its place and that background once called the supernatural.

The background wins today. It usually does.

I was standing in the white gravel with the valley below me, the green hills and the blue sea and the birds in the pines and the oaks, when Javier found the bench.

It sits on the roof above the Giacometti courtyard. An ordinary green Parisian park bench. The ideal of a park bench, the platonic form of the thing that exists on every boulevard and in every square in France, the one nobody looks at twice. On the roof of a monument. Unreachable. The plexiglass plaque below it printed with what looks, at first, like a signage oversight, vinyl lettering slightly too casual for the setting. The kind of thing a curator loved too much to fix.

Per quelli che volano. For those who fly.

The work was made by the Italian sculptor Luigi Mainolfi and given to the foundation by the collector Giuliano Gori. It is dedicated to the memory of Pina Gori, his wife. The bench you cannot sit on, for the person who is no longer here to sit on it, placed above everything in a place built by people who had already learned what it is to lose someone and decided to build something anyway.

The whole foundation is load-bearing grief. The chapel for Bernard. The bench for Pina. The Maeghts who lost a son and made this. Giuliano Gori who lost a wife and gave this. The art that surrounds it, Miró and Giacometti and Chagall and Braque, made by people who knew the Maeghts not as patrons but as friends, who built this place together because friendship and loss and making things are, in the end, the same gesture.

Ariadne’s Thread. You enter the labyrinth of the gallery and the thread leads you outside to the view and then up to the roof and then to the bench and then to the plaque and then to the understanding that every beautiful thing in this place was made in response to something that couldn’t be fixed any other way.

The Mediterranean was blue below. The pines did what pines do. Javier was quiet beside me, which is not his usual register, and I understood why.

The view · Fondation Maeght · Saint-Paul-de-Vence · May 2026. Some afternoons do not need a bottle. They have a bench on a roof and a valley below and a name you cannot reach.

There is a drain on the rooftop terrace that prevents it from becoming a very expensive hot tub. The first rule of purchasing a house is never buy one with a flat roof, is what my grandmother would say. Her neighbor across the street had a flat roof. Nothing but issues. Well. My flat roof. The thing that really sold me on the house, is intended for a party on Saturday night. One that I was initially not keen on. One of the reasons is that the terrace and furniture up there were a mess from the winter and of course, the drain is currently blocked. The cause is unknown. We have had a surly French plumber here who was happy to snake it and then promptly said he needed some tech, a camera to fish down, to see what the blockage was. I don’t think my Carte Vitale, the universal healthcare, as good as it is, will cover this. The price to determine the cause is, in my opinion, not something we need to discuss in polite company. What we needed to discuss was Saturday. Twenty people. A party. The filthy rooftop.

With a case of champagne delivered yesterday, I decided the inevitable was hurling towards me so, realizing a change of venue was not going to happen despite my suggestions, I put on my gloves and grabbed the gear.

The cadence, once established, was as follows: pressure wash, liquid backup, shop vac, bail overboard to the planter below, repeat. This is the kind of seamanship nobody tells you about when you move to the south of France. The brochure does not mention the blocked drain or the bricolage run or the hours of bailing. The brochure shows the bougainvillea and the crescent moon and stops there.

Nick came out periodically to express his discomfort. Discomfort is the right word. He is not good with change, and today had produced rather a lot of it. You see, when guests arrive, the seasonal migration begins: I move out of the lower floor bathroom, which I have claimed as mine on account of the bathtub and my deep and abiding love of a good soak, and into our smaller en suite. This is a recurring negotiation in our marriage. The smaller bathroom has no drawers. I require drawers. I like things neat and folded and tidy. My husband grew up with domestic help, which sometimes leads me to wonder whether I have become the domestic help, which is a thought I immediately set aside and which returns immediately.

The no drawer situation in the en suite was the real crisis underneath the drain crisis. Nick loves a miniature. Hotel samples. The tiny bottle of shampoo, the even tinier conditioner, the thumbnail of shower gel, collected from every hotel we have ever stayed in and deposited into a drawer that had no room left for my things. I had reached the point, day one of the season, that I could not face the disorganized future ahead of me without doing something about it. So I did something about it. I relocated his cosmetic minutia to a dresser drawer in the bathroom keeping only what he would need in front of him in the mirror in the mornings. The drawer was organized. Empties: discarded. Room for me. Nick came out to express his discomfort.

Then we switched gears.

Several hours of bailing later, the rooftop is ship shape. Scrubbed. Pressure washed. Café lit. The bougainvillea doing what bougainvillea does in May, which is everything. New throw pillows on the furniture. WiFi live for the guests. Twenty people arriving Saturday evening.

Tanner and Amy, my brother-in-law and his new wife, having arrived yesterday are living their best first night and day in France and then off for her cousin’s wedding in Provence, then returning sometime next week. Tanner, needing to pick up the car and being the good husband to his pregnant wife, is blocking the jet lag. He has made sure to wall Amy away downstairs in the bedroom and she has found the right guest room at the right moment of her life. We walked them through Vieux Nice and along the Promenade to the port in the evening, the light doing what the light here does in May, and they went quiet at the right moments. Dinner at Bistrot d’Antoine. Nice received them correctly.

Tomorrow Karen and Louis arrive. Louis, I am told, is not the French Lou-ee but the American Lew-iss. The reunion is assembling itself. Nick’s high school class, international school in Washington, people from everywhere converging on our rooftop, which is ready for them whether the drain is fully resolved or not.

I am writing this from the rooftop. There is a crescent moon above a city still lit in that amber warmth that Los Angeles used to have before everything went to LED. The bougainvillea is exactly where it should be. The hedgehog is back in the lower garden, or a new hedgehog, which is either a continuity or a fresh start and either way is fine. Tibo and Harvey somewhere nearby. The glass of wine is doing its job.

I have spent weeks finding faults with this place. The smaller bathroom, the blocked drain, the rooftop that required a full morning of seamanship before it could receive twenty people. And yet, sitting here in the amber light with the crescent moon and the hedgehog and the bougainvillea and the sound of the city below and a husband who loves me and two dogs I belong to, it occurs to me that there may be something wrong with me for finding faults at all.

The life is already fun.

Stephen Colbert is recording his final Late Show tonight in New York. It is a strange thing, to sit on a rooftop in Nice and feel the end of something happening in a studio in Manhattan. Nicole DeMasi, writer, mother, one of my great friendships, introduced me to Strangers with Candy years ago, which led to Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello and eventually to Colbert. He has been one of the ways I received sanity from across the ocean. The late night show as a thread back to the life before this one. Nicole in it at the beginning. The comedy as a shared language. She is the real thing. I haven’t told her she’s one of the reasons I started writing. Tonight, on a rooftop in Nice, watching something end in New York, it feels like the right time to say so.

Things end. The drain gets cleared. The rooftop gets scrubbed. The moon comes up.

The life is already fun.

Whatever was in the glass · the rooftop · Nice · May 2026. The bougainvillea. The crescent moon. The hedgehog. All present and accounted for.

Washington International School was founded in 1966 by Dorothy Goodman, who began with three preschool students in the basement of her Washington DC house. Her vision was children who would become functionally multilingual, well informed about world history, geography, literature and cultures. Global citizens, in the language of the time. The class of 1996 graduated thirty years ago and scattered, the way WIS graduates scatter, across every continent and timezone, carrying three languages and a particular ease with the unfamiliar. Tonight they came to our rooftop.

On paper it seems easy. Hamburgers grilled. Twenty people. A rooftop that was pressure washed forty-eight hours ago by a man who had serious reservations about the whole enterprise and has since changed his position. The stairs add a lot. There is no elevator between the street and the terrace. Every plate, every glass, every bottle of champagne sent ahead by a thoughtful classmate, every folding chair borrowed for the occasion, traveled the same staircase. I was privately embarrassed about this. I had suggested alternative venues more than once. The alternatives were declined. The stairs were climbed. I am choosing not to calculate how many times.

Karen and Louis arrived yesterday. Louis is a trademark, copyright and patent attorney and a professor at Harvard, which makes him excellent conversation and also, it turns out, excellent at making sure the room is taken care of. He vacuumed. This is the highest form of party preparation and I will not hear otherwise.

The rooftop fills slowly. Rooftop parties always do. And then they pay off, the way they always pay off, in the sunset and the breeze and the smell of jasmine and hamburgers and the sound of palm fronds moving in the warm air. Twelve chairs pulled around a table meant for eight. The conversation found its frequency and stayed there.

Duck and chicken farming in France, from an alum who bought a property ten years ago and has been working it ever since. A woman from London with a new puppy named Oreo who is having a hard time with house training, her husband connected to Dishoom, the beloved Indian restaurant group. A German who had done residency or studies at Cedars-Sinai, who grew up in Germany, loved Los Angeles, loved the weather, and now lives in Switzerland where he is having a hard time finding his people. We talked about LA. His wife is engaged in an ongoing dispute with the local grumpy school watchman over parking. They are fine. They are more than fine. He had found the right table. He just didn’t know yet that was what had happened.

The Cyclops was on the gas box when we came up the stairs this afternoon. Someone had tagged the panel in black and blue marker with the eye of Polyphemus, the single stylized eye of the Cyclops that Odysseus blinded on his way home. Nick said: your first piece of graffiti. He meant it as a complaint. The eye of Odysseus on the threshold of a home that is slowly, stubbornly, becoming ours.

Nick went to WIS. I did not. I married into this reunion, which gives me a particular vantage point: the person who can see the room clearly because he is not in the memory of it. What I saw was a man who has always been the smartest person in any room he enters getting to be, for one evening on a rooftop in Nice, the cool kid. The host. The one who made it happen. The adorable nerdy husband who pulled it off.

I was a little vain about the rooftop. I will admit that here and not elsewhere.

I am writing this from the small balcony. There is a half moon just above the horizon. Below, on the street, young men in conversation, French slang rising to where I sit, laughter and argument, the same frequency as the terrace earlier. The city doing what it does after midnight.

The stairs were worth it.

Champagne delivered ahead by a classmate · the rooftop · Nice · May 2026. The stairs were worth it. They always are.

I bring people here when I want them to understand what this part of France actually is. Not the performance of it, not the traffic on the Promenade or the rosé on a terrace or the festival badges at Cannes. The thing underneath all of that. A hill above a medieval village, umbrella pines, the Mediterranean in the distance, a foundation built by people who lost a child and decided to make something instead. I have been to Fondation Maeght more times than I can count. Each time it shows me something I missed.

Today it was the bird.

The white marble sculpture hidden in the labyrinth of the garden that I have been smugly calling a Minotaur for however many visits is actually a bird. The private tour guide, a Frenchman with kind eyes and a boisterous tenor voice named Benjamin, corrected me with the calm authority of someone who has done this before. He had been hired by one of the alumni from the Washington International School group we were traveling with to guide the twenty of us who found our way to the museum after a late night on our villa’s rooftop.

He looked at me and asked what I saw.

I said: A Minotaur. He shook his head, outsized disappointment performed for the group for an easy laugh at my expense. A bird. The form that I read as horns is in fact all wings and beak. The figure is caught in that specific Miró ambiguity where the animal is always becoming something else, always in the process of being one thing and arriving at another. I had been wrong about it for years and I was delighted to be corrected. Benjamin, wearing loose-fitting dungarees in taupe with some kind of plaid shirt underneath, a scruffy reddish beard and a pulled-back ponytail, had the wire of someone anxious to go back to his own studio to get another few hours of paint applied to his own masterpiece.

In a place with as many textures and colors on the inside and outside, it is hard to not see something new each time. Along with the Minotaur story, today my eye was drawn to the brise-soleil on the tower. Terracotta lattice in a triangular pattern, set into the stone, a fixed external screen designed to filter the Côte d’Azur sun while allowing air to move through. Sert used them throughout the foundation as part of what he called meridional architecture, the vernacular devices of the Mediterranean reinterpreted in modernist form. One of the better things Le Corbusier gave the century and Sert knew how to use. There is a small plant growing out of the top of one of them, unbothered, which is not part of the design but is a reasonable improvement.

We moved on. The Giacometti base in the courtyard, that impossibly thin leg rising from the oval plinth, the bronze surface rough and considered at once, casts a shadow on the hexagonal terracotta floor that is more legible as a person than the sculpture itself. Benjamin explained, apologetically for the perhaps outdated sensibility of the intention, it as a representation of the difference between Giacometti’s understanding of man and woman’s place in life. He explained that the woman, her form represented with outsized and heavy feet like moon boots, was meant to convey that a woman should be rooted and placed, never changing and solid. The man, in mid-stride, has a rear heel that appears to be peeling away from this tension. All very, as the French say, compliqué.

Benjamin loved a little audience interaction. He turned back to me, testing the American who had missed the bird.

Vous voyez ça? he asked.

I didn’t answer him out loud this time. I just looked at the shadow. I had seen a male form, yes. But with my lens, he is wearing a six-inch Louboutin.

Times change and I think both readings are correct. That is what great sculpture does.

After the foundation, a short hike down the forested hillside that smelled of pines, nettles crunching below our feet. Several of the less adventurous took their rental cars, which is a reasonable position when you are wearing the wrong shoes in a pine forest, which several people were. To Fondation CAB. Opened in 2021 inside a renovated 1950s building redesigned by the architect Charles Zana, it sits between Maeght and La Colombe d’Or on the hill above the village. Sol LeWitt on the walls. Charlotte Perriand’s furniture in the rooms. Jean Proué’s Maison Démontable in the garden. As you walk up the garden stairs, there is the prefabricated house he designed in 1944 during the German occupation so that it could be assembled without skilled labor. Now it is a place you can stay in. A lovely suite with a fountain outside, lotus flowers growing in a reflecting pond. Tadpoles and fish, the permanent residents. In the otherwise austere Provençal-adjacent architecture, the rusty army barrack makes the most visual impact. Which was not the plan but is perhaps the point. The most radical architecture begins always with the question of how one chooses to inhabit space. We ate at the SOL café on their patio. A pulled chicken burger, shoestring fries, a mâche salad, rosé. I was in a sunbeam. I left more bronzed and a little buzzed.

A walk up the hill into Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The village doing what it always does in May, full of people looking for the thing it offers and finding it before they can name what they were looking for. An ice cream cone, the first of the summer. I finished it at the Place de la Grande Fontaine, the former market square at the heart of the village, redesigned in the seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth, the monumental fountain built in 1850 in the Provençal style. From dawn until dusk for centuries, villagers came to fetch water, donkeys and mules drank, washerwomen scrubbed and beat their laundry at the washhouse. Now the WIS class of 1996 finished their ice cream cones here. Twenty people who grew up speaking three languages standing at the oldest market square in the village, which received them without comment, as it receives everyone. For the first time since we have been coming to this little village, there were miniature vignettes installed at the key moments of the walk through. Hay bales and seasonal flowers and farming bric-a-brac arranged just so. The city has become a set. A place to make a photo in front of where laundry was scrubbed and fish were sold. The village itself, dressed just so.

Then the cemetery.

A mint green arrow, painted and stenciled, mounted on a short iron post among the graves: CHAGALL. The most practical possible monument to one of the great painters of the twentieth century. Follow the arrow. Marc Chagall 1887–1985. Vava Chagall 1905–1993. The grave surrounded by stones left by visitors from everywhere. Korean, Italian, French, Spanish, dated this year, this month. A stone painted yellow, solid and round, sitting among the others like a small sun. The Jewish tradition of leaving a stone rather than flowers. Flowers fade. Stones remain.

The Maeght family is buried here too. The people who built the foundation on the hill, who lost their beloved Bernard at eleven and converted the grief into one of the great art spaces in the world, resting in the same cemetery as Chagall, whose mosaics are on the walls of the chapel built in Bernard’s name. The whole hill is one continuous conversation between the living and the dead.

The WIS group had climbed the rampart wall above the cemetery. They were waving down at us from the top, which is either irreverent or exactly right and is probably both.

I left a small pebble on Chagall’s grave. I was thinking about the breadth of his beautiful life. Born in Vitebsk in 1887. Fled the pogroms. Survived two world wars. Painted the whole of it in color. Died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1985 at ninety-seven. The mosaics he made are fifty meters from where he is buried. The breadth of a beautiful life is that it contains all of it and keeps making things anyway.

I was also thinking about my hometown in California. Where my mother is buried. And my grandparents. And my great-grandparents. That cemetery just blocks away from their former homes.

My family didn’t build a modernist foundation on a hill to survive their losses. They didn’t leave behind chapels or mosaics. But it is the same load-bearing grief. The same conversion. The same gesture, the same impulse, the same stone.

Rosé at Fondation CAB in a sunbeam · Saint-Paul-de-Vence · May 2026. Then the cemetery. Then the pebble. Then home to the dogs.

The traditional fourth anniversary gift is fruit and flowers. The bearing of what you planted. I found four Galileo thermometers at Troc Azure in March, stood in front of them longer than I meant to, did not buy them, went back. Four of them. One for each year. The spheres inside are weighted glass, different densities, suspended in liquid. As the room warms the liquid expands and the heavier spheres sink. As it cools they rise. You read the temperature from the lowest sphere still floating. The one still holding on.

I wrote this on the card: the spheres are weighted fruit suspended, they rise and fall with the warmth of the room. One for each year with you. I love you. Happy anniversary.

Nick received them like a lead balloon. I think he saw them as a gift I was giving myself. What I intended was the fulfillment of a beautiful thought, something I truly wanted to share with him. A perfect analogy, as it turns out, for the way a gift sometimes travels and the way it sometimes doesn’t. The spheres rise and fall with the warmth of the room. The room has to be warm enough first.

Tanner and Amy treated us to dinner at Cave de Peixes. Tanner is Nick’s youngest brother. Amy is his new wife and is expecting in December, which means the sharing plates and the tapas format of the Cave, the way the menu organizes itself into families: carnée, iodée, affinée, cultivée, sucrée, was exactly right for an evening when one person at the table is eating for two and Nick and I wanted to drink well around her without waste. The Coravin system at Cave de Peixes serves wine by the glass from bottles that never technically open, preserving everything. Over 600 references selected by Loïs Guenzati, who already runs Peixes Opéra and Peixes Bonaparte, the third address tucked under the stone vaulted arches of the rue Catherine Ségurane at the port. Fish is peixes in Portuguese. The name arrived before the concept and the concept became something much wider.

They treated us. On our anniversary. On their honeymoon. That generosity is not a small thing and I will not pretend otherwise. Two newlyweds across the table, expecting a baby, navigating the uncomplicated momentum of their future, while I toasted four years of marriage with a box of Victorian weather instruments. Nick bore it with his usual, long-suffering grace. It cannot be easy to be married to a man who refuses to buy you a normal sweater and instead demands you emotionally connect with the fluid dynamics of weighted glass.

Walking home up the hillside to Villa Diana, the anniversary still not quite resolved, the thermometers sitting in their new home on the shelf and the card sitting in its new home in a drawer, we saw them. Two of them. On the hillside. Small pulses of cold green light in the dark between the trees.

Lucioles. Fireflies, in French, though the French word is prettier and more accurate: little lights. The Luciola genus is native to this exact stretch of Mediterranean coastline: Portugal, the area around Nice, Italy, the Balkans. They live in wooded hillsides above the sea and they are becoming rarer every year, light pollution and pesticides taking them quietly from the places they have always been. Five or six years ago the woods on the Côte d’Azur would have been sparkling every night. Now it is only an occasional twinkle.

Two lucioles on the hillside above Mont Boron. The first I have seen in France. I did not know they were here. I did not know they were native to this exact place. I stopped walking for a moment and took them in, which is what you do when a place gives you something you didn’t know to ask for.

The next morning I went back to Troc Azure. The white urn was still there, the one I had been thinking about for the lemon tree. I brought it home and set it on the checkerboard tiles beside the grandmother’s enamel pots, which are already planted and looking like they have always been there. A kitchen needs lights; I also came home with the lamps, a cabinet for the bathroom, a new chair for the foyer, and terracotta wine storage. Nick approved the terracotta. He is consistent.

The lemon tree goes in tomorrow. She needs a name. We have a farewell dinner on Sunday for Vincenzo and Andy, who are leaving Nice in July for Italy and then Scotland. The rooftop will be full again. Perhaps the name arrives then.

The thermometers are on the shelf. The urn is waiting on the tiles. The rooftop is assembling itself, slowly. The two little lights on the hillside blinked twice and went on with their evening.

The room is getting warmer. The spheres will know when.

Château Cambon Beaujolais Nouveau 2025 · Cave de Peixes · rue Catherine Ségurane · Nice · May 2026. Tanner and Amy treating, on their honeymoon, on our anniversary. A natural Gamay made by the Lapierre and Chanudet families on vines planted by women in 1914 while the men were at the front. The nouveau is the wine you drink at once and never keep. This one kept.

The best stories arrive when you have no way to write them down. We were taking Tanner and Amy back to the airport on the last morning of their visit, and their luggage had filled the entire back of the car with the seats folded flat, which left no room for a fourth body. So Nick drove his brother and the bags, and Amy climbed onto the back of my red Vespa, and we took the long pretty way, equal parts necessity and pure pleasure. Down off Mont Boron, past the port, around the foot of the castle hill, through the edge of the old town, and out onto the Promenade des Anglais with the whole Baie des Anges opening silver beside us. Somewhere in there, her gloved hands gripping the chrome bars to her side, Amy said she had to tell me about her mother.

Tanner is Nick’s youngest brother, which makes Amy the sister-in-law I did not expect to love this quickly. She had been saving the story. The back of a moving Vespa turns out to be exactly the place to spend it.

Her mother is Gail. Sun-bleached blonde, articulate, a woman who suffers no fools and has the laugh of someone who earned it. Her sister is Meg, who looks nothing like Amy: dark and olive where Amy is fair and blue-eyed, the one who calls herself the adopted child at family dinners and means it as a joke that is also a little close to the bone. Gail and Meg had just spent a week in Provence and were riding the train back up to Paris, which is where the story lives.

By the time the train was pulling into the station, Gail needed a bathroom the way you need one only at the end of a long journey, which is to say with the full attention of the body. She is not a woman who panics. She is a woman who solves. So as the train slowed she took out her phone, opened the MapQuest she has used faithfully since roughly the day the internet was invented and has never once been tempted to replace, and set it for the nearest public restroom she knew she could count on. A free one. A reliable one. A bathroom she had used before and trusted, which is its own kind of wisdom on the road.

The train stopped. The doors opened onto the platform, the quai, already thick with people. Gail stepped down, raised the phone, and let it lead. And the phone, in the loud confident voice these devices use when they have decided to help you, announced to the entire platform: “Four minutes to the closest McDonald’s.”

Meg was directly behind her. Meg, who knew in a single second exactly what had happened, who had spent a lifetime watching her mother and that phone, who understood that the trusted bathroom, the free and reliable one, the one Gail had used before, was the McDonald’s, and that there was no way on earth to explain any of it to the ring of Parisian faces now turning toward the sound. Because the faces had already decided. An ideal and well-earned “very French” week of Provence, the markets and the light and the rosé, and the first thing the American announces on a Paris platform is the location of the nearest Big Mac. The stereotype did not need to be argued. It had been delivered, at volume, by the woman’s own telephone. A betrayal.

Gail did not notice. This is the part I love. Gail was magnificent. A woman who suffers no fools does not register a platform full of them, and she set off toward her four-minute bathroom with the serene momentum of a person on a mission that concerns no one else alive, while Meg absorbed the entire blast behind her, dying, as you only die for the people you love most.

And here is what the platform could not know. Gail was not being a barbarian. She was being a professional. Every seasoned traveler on this continent learns the same secret eventually, that the one guaranteed clean, free, no-questions-asked bathroom in any European city is inside the nearest McDonald’s. It is tradecraft. It is the move of someone who has done this before and intends to do it with dignity. The platform mistook competence for crassness, which is the most reliable mistake a place ever makes about a stranger.

What Gail also could not know, what almost no one hurrying through that station ever knows, is what was sitting one staircase above her head. The station was the Gare de Lyon, and on the floor directly above the platforms, above the tracks where the trains still pull out for Nice, there is a room called Le Train Bleu. It was the grand buffet built for the World’s Fair of 1900, where the wealthy ate before boarding the night train to the Riviera, and it took its name, eventually, from that train, the blue one, the one that ran south to the coast. Forty-one painted murals across its ceilings, a gold map of the whole journey down to the Mediterranean. Chandeliers. Frescoes you have to tip your head back to take in. A waiter who will wheel a leg of lamb to your table and carve it in front of you, and another who will set crêpes alight in Grand Marnier on a trolley while you watch. The civilized way of an older world, kept under glass, one flight up from where a telephone was shouting about hamburgers.

I know the room because I have been in it. Nick and I stopped there for lunch once, on our own way home to Nice, because Nick is forever trying to curate the best of things for us and had decided, correctly, that we belonged in a room like that. We had the dogs. We always have the dogs, Harvey and Tibo, which is the whole reason we take the train, so that they can come.

And there, before a single thing had gone wrong, was a tableau every bit as complete as the one the platform pinned on Gail. Two gentlemen and their two poodle-adjacent dogs, settling in beneath the chandeliers. We were not subverting the stereotype. We were the stereotype, framed and hung with the rest of the art, before a single fork was lifted.

What Nick had not fully accounted for is that Harvey, who is fourteen and down to roughly half his teeth, becomes a different animal around food, and that the animal he becomes is a wolf. Somewhere between the foie gras and the charcuterie, Harvey and his brother went at each other under the table with a sound far too large for two small dogs, a snarling, gummy, ancient sound, and in the most beautiful dining room in France, beneath the gold map of the road south, the flambé could not drown out the noise of my dogs trying to kill each other. We had been so sure we belonged there. We settled into the wine anyway, and eventually we made our way down to the train.

So I had no standing to laugh at Gail, which is precisely why I could. The same station had pinned a verdict on her that she did not deserve, and on another day had watched me walk in already wearing mine. Hers was unjust. Mine fit perfectly. Two clichés in one building, one imposed and one upholstered, and underneath both the same ordinary truth, that nobody is actually trying to be the cliché. Gail was trying to find a bathroom. I was trying to give my husband a beautiful lunch. Everybody on that platform and everybody in that gilded room was doing the same single thing, which is trying to get home with a little dignity intact. A clean toilet. A good meal. The dogs. The train south.

Amy finished the story as the airport came into view, and I was laughing too hard to take the last roundabout cleanly. Then the goodbyes, the usual kind, all at once and a few minutes early. They will be three by Christmas, so the next time they come the math will be different. I rode back up the hill alone, the story still going off in my chest like a small firework, and thought about the thing nobody warns you about having people stay. You feed them and you walk them through your life and you carry them to the airport, and the last thing they hand you, on the back of a moving Vespa with no way to write it down, is the best gift of the entire visit.

None · Villa Diana · Nice · May 2026. Every entry here ends with a bottle, and this one cannot, because the two people it belongs to do not drink. Tanner and Amy, the both of them, are the most alive company at any table they sit at, no cork required. A whole week under our roof and not one poured in their name, however many cheers made with mocktails, and the house was fuller for it. I am prouder of them than this line was built to hold.