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Letter 22 — A Travel Diary
Under the Tuscan Sun and Above the Portuguese Rain — Happy 2025
Happy New Year, if it’s still appropriate to say that. Until what day in January can we wish someone a Happy New Year? What are the unwritten rules of these interpersonal codes? Do we wish a Happy New Year to anyone we cross paths with for the first time since the previous year? Well, I tend to believe the latter is the most polite approach. At least, I’ve been following it.
Just yesterday, amid the vegetables at the supermarket, I bumped into Fátima, a former secretary who worked for my parents back in the long-gone 1990s. I remember her perfectly: long hair, a slender figure, and a wide, beautiful smile.
She also drove a yellowish-orange van, a fact I only corrected yesterday.
“I remember your yellow car,” I told her, demonstrating how I remembered well even at just four years old.
“It was a van,” she said, “not a car,” still with that same smile, though now at fifty-two, her figure fuller, her hair graying and resting on her shoulders, and the weight of a lifetime apparent in her voice.
It only occurred to me yesterday that our age difference isn’t so overwhelming. Only seventeen years separate us. And yet, when I was four, sneaking into the office, I felt as if…
