Donna and I just returned from a week in Paris – and it was spectacular. France hadn’t been on my bucket list. First off, there’s the whole foreign language thing. Not my forte, in the same range that brain surgery isn’t my forte. Then there's the reputation of French inhospitableness, particularly toward Americans. If I’m not wanted, don’t worry, I’ll stay away. Finally, I imagined it as a snooty, glitzy, high-end-fashion kind of place – you know, movie stars, swimming pools – out of my comfort zone. We ended up going to fulfill a dream of Donna’s: Not so much of seeing Paris (she had done so years ago on a high-school trip), but of seeing Yundi Li, a 40-year-old Chinese pianist, give a performance there. The language barrier turned out to be manageable. Donna took eight years of French in school and was using Pimsleur to bone up. I started using the online app too – though at the introductory level. In real life, I could have gotten by without Donna’s near fluency because mos
Nothing could have eclipsed my pleasure of seeing Donna enraptured by acres of beautiful tulips of every color. Well, actually…. On the day of the much-hyped eclipse, Donna and I took a day trip out to Nokesville, Virginia to visit Burnside Farms to pick tulips. Getting there from our home in Maryland requires driving through dreaded, crowded, heavily trafficked Northern Virginia. Shockingly, we made the 50-mile trek to Nokesville in an hour and a quarter, with no real slow-ups. And once we got off I-66, the landscape quickly morphed to suburban, then bucolic, with fields dotted with sheep and cows and a barn here and there. My heartrate slowed, my grip on the wheel loosened, and we eased through sanguine country lanes. The serenity was palpable. We arrived at just about noon at what we expected to be a quiet little tulip field. Ha! It seemed that a majority of the billions of people against whom we had been jostling on the screaming Northern Virginia interstate had been en route