A few months ago, I read a novel by Francisco Goldman, which is actually his memoir of his life with his late wife, Aura. Aura was a young Mexican student and writer, who in every sense had her whole life ahead of her before she died tragically in a freak accident at the age of thirty. There…

Much as I enjoy Paris, I am also an eye-rolling cynic with regards to anything even remotely suggestive of romantic love. There is some strange new tradition in Europe that has couples writing their names on padlocks, then attaching them to chain link fences (preferably over a bridge) and throwing the key away. I cannot buy this as a…

We were walking down Rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais neighbourhood, when we noticed a couple of little boys grappling in the window of a ground floor business. David said, “What’s with the weird white pants, and why are they both wearing them?” I jokingly suggested that he was a Philistine for failing to recognize that the boys…

The nurses reading this will know what I mean when I say that jet lag feels like the end of a 12-hour night shift for which you did not sleep during the day. When we arrived in Paris yesterday morning, we made our way directly to the apartment that we rented, then slept for 3 hours,…