 These days, we all have to pitch in to keep each other safe and sane. Here, longtime amigos Pete and Kathi drop by with homemade pizza and humor therapy to boost our spirits. So this pheasant flies into a pub, smacks headfirst into the wall, stuns itself silly, and falls onto the floor. As Good Samaritan r/CasualUK explained on Reddit, “My husband decided we should try and take it to a more ‘pheasant appropriate’ place in the car ... The plan was to wrap the pheasant up in his jacket and I was to have the pheasant on my lap.” All went well until her husband’s next kindly impulse: turning on the car’s heating system. The sudden blast of air drove the pheasant berserk. “It was flying around the car, I was screaming and my husband was still trying to drive. It was flapping all over the car … pooping as it went. My husband pulled over … and we opened the door to get the pheasant out ... well, that was another 20 minute job.” I can only imagine the pheasant’s side of the story: assaulted by the pub wall, kidnapped by giants, escaped by the skin of its beak. It’s always a matter of perspective.  "It was a nightmare, I tell you," the pheasant keeps saying to its mates down at the pub. On the same Reddit thread, biscuitboy89 told about sitting on a train and having a baby seagull wander in and settle on his feet. The conductor suggested the guard at the next station would “take care of it,” but that sounded ominous to biscuitboy89 (and doubtless to the baby seagull as well). So he took the youngster home, where he discovered it loved hot dogs, baked beans, and Cheerios. (Who doesn't?) Eventually he took the bird to a rescue center run by “a pretty kind but very eccentric lady. Amongst all the cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, llamas, rabbits, guinea pigs and god knows what else, this lady had about 15 baby seagulls in a barn. They had a big safe area full of straw, with a heat lamp and loads of cat food to eat. She said she just feeds them and when they want to leave, they make their own way and fly off.”  A baby sea gull finds comfort and safety in a Minnesota rescue center. I love the randomness of this rescue story, and the selflessness of bisciutboy89 and the eccentric lady. They remind us that we never know when or where we’re likely to have a chance to do something kind for a fellow creature. These are moments of grace, offering us the opportunity to be our best selves, to rise to the occasion with generosity and Cheerios. I have the good fortune to have one such opportunity 24/7 in my California neighborhood: a community fridge.  San Anselomo's community fridge displays a poster by local school children with the motto, "Take what you need, leave what you can." Tucked away in a hidden corner of a church’s side porch, the refrigerator holds donated fruits, vegetables, milk, and other fresh food; next to it is a metal locker full of pantry goods: rice, beans, pasta, hamburger buns. Everyone’s invited to contribute. Anyone can help themselves to anything they need. No strings attached, no questions asked. Ever. “If you see your neighbor taking five cartons of eggs,” said Sabrina Socorro, one of the founders of Marin Community Fridges, “you don’t ask why. There is no hierarchy and no policing of each other.” The concept of community foodsharing sites took off about ten years ago in Germany then Spain. The first one I saw was the Kindness Wall in Kalamata, Greece in 2019. A Kalamata woman told me, “The important thing is that it’s anonymous, so neighbors in need aren’t shamed in front of the community.” Sometimes called “freedges,” or “(N)ICE Boxes,” hundreds of community fridges popped up across America during the pandemic, mostly on private property. The Love Fridge Chicago — launched in 2020 using the slogan, “We all gotta eat, we’re all gonna eat” — now maintains 23 fridges throughout the city. New York has over 100. LA and San Francisco each have 16. My county, Marin, hosts a handful; my town, San Anselmo, is home to one.  Tatiana Smith organizes the community fridge outside her house in Jersey City during the pandemic. Photo: Ismail Ferdous/The Guardian Because my town is not poor or urban, early on people questioned whether a fridge was even needed here. But constant usage demonstrates that these days hunger can happen anywhere, to anyone. Food insecurity — not having the financial resources to put three square meals on the table every day — affects 47 million Americans, including 14 million kids. “To truly address hunger at this scale,” wrote MIT Urban Studies professor Ezra Glenn, “would require food banks the size of supermarkets and a distribution network comparable to Amazon’s.” Instead, there’s a patchwork of charities and government food programs, many of which are on the chopping block right now. Beyond that, it’s up to us.  Lisa (left) and Sue explain how they organize the community fridge and pantry. For overflow, there's extra storage in the church kitchen. Supplies rarely get depleted, but if they do, donated funds are available to restock. This week I met with Lisa and Sue, who lead the handful of volunteers keeping San Anselmo’s refrigerator and pantry clean and tidy, weeding out the stuff they can’t accept, such as expired canned goods and opened packages. Both women are members of First Presbyterian Church, which bought the refrigerator, provides space for it on the porch, and covers the cost of electricity, about $30 a month. An electrician from the congregation helped with the wiring. Neighbors, businesses, and community organizations donate groceries. “How many people take food every week?” I inquired. “We get asked that a lot,” said Lisa. “We have no idea. We don’t keep track of anything like that.” What? No controls? No CCTV? That’s a shockingly loosey-goosey attitude! And yet it works, benefitting those who give as much as those who receive. Nowadays when I shop, I often pick up extra rice or olive oil to donate, and this week the unopened portion of my latest Costco impulse buy — a massive supply of Quaker Oats — is heading over there. Stepping onto that porch is always a feel-good moment for me. I have learned that when madness roams the earth and threatens to overwhelm my soul, the surest way to dispel the gloom is doing something for others. Our acts of kindness are how we maintain “islands of sanity,” according to poet Margaret J. Wheatly. “It is now too late to solve global issues globally to try to save the world,” she says. “We can only work locally to create islands of sanity that will preserve the best of the human spirit.” I thought about the Irish monks who spent the Dark Ages copying books, so the collective wisdom acquired over thousands of years would not be wholly lost. Today Wayback Machine archivists are copying endangered digital material; they've saved 835 billion webpages so far. The rest of us are entrusted with an equally vital task: preserving such intangibles as human decency and compassion.  Not all our efforts have ideal endings. I suspect r/CasualUK won’t be relocating another dazed pheasant any time soon. But often the results exceed our expectations. Think of all the cats, dogs, chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, llamas, rabbits, guinea pigs, and baby seagulls that owe their lives to that eccentric woman at the rescue barn. It's comforting to know our small acts of kindness are not just helping those around us, they’re contributing to the preservation of the human spirit through dark and perilous times, as so many have done before us, keeping alive hopes of seeing brighter days ahead.  A young volunteer inspects a community fridge in the UK. Photo: Lucy Young Learn more and find a community fridge near you. Curious about what it takes to start one? Got a story about a community fridge or other acts of kindness? Let me know in the comments below. FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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 Joel Eis in his Rebound Bookstore, reading from Fahrenheit 451 during Banned Books Week 2024. This morning a podcast host sent me a list of questions we’ll be discussing next week, starting with this one about my move to Seville: “What were some of the most surprising challenges you faced — and what helped you adapt successfully?” My mind instantly filled with a montage of memories — early attempts to order tea in a bar, Spanish lessons with condescending 20-somethings, the intervention about my hair… I recalled with a shudder one of the biggest shockers: getting banished from Seville’s public library.  Seville's main public library, Biblioteca Infanta Elena, scene of my banishment Early on I’d discovered the library’s tiny collection of English-language books: dog-eared Agatha Christies I’d already read, popular novels several generations out of date, and fawning biographies. I began slowly working my way through this underwhelming assortment until one day I returned a book late. And instead of being fined (something with which I am abundantly familiar) I was banned from the library for three weeks. Oh, the horror! It felt like hearing they were cutting off my oxygen supply for three weeks. I slunk away in disgrace and soon afterwards bought my first e-reader.  My first e-reader was this 2012 Kindle with a keyboard and a miniature lamp you pulled from the spine. No backlighting, no touch screen. You turned the page via a button. Positively primitive! Of course, I will always love print editions, and whenever I’m in California, I haunt local booksellers. My favorite is the cozy second-hand Rebound Bookstore — aka "the Biggest Little Bookstore in the Universe" — in the nearby city of San Rafael. Owners Toni and Joel Eis are my kind of book people: passionate, quirky, and dedicated to sharing ideas. “Community is everything,” said Joel, when I sat down with him this week. “That’s why we’re here.” He and Toni host poetry readings, jazz nights, stand-up comedy, occasional pot luck gatherings, and book clubs — including the newly formed Outlaw Bookworms devoted to reading banned books. (Yes, I've joined it. )  I'm re-reading this for the first time since high school to prep for the inaugural meeting of Outlaw Bookworms. Right now I'm in the middle of the big courtroom scene. The story has lost none of its punch. Joel fell in love with the bookshop twenty years ago, when he came out from Colorado because he’d heard the owner was ready to sell. “As I came into the store, this young girl, probably a high school kid, came out. I can see her now. She was wearing a lovely summer dress and she had a book in her arms and she spun around out in front of the store, like ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got something really cool.’ And I said, ‘You know, that’s what I want to do. I want to make people feel like that.’” Unfortunately, not all American teenagers are dancing in the streets for the sheer love of reading. In fact, 33% of eighth graders and 40% of fourth graders fail to meet basic literacy benchmarks in school. “A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate,” wrote David Brooks in the NY Times. “Literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world.”  Without the ability to figure out what’s going on, weigh options, and calculate consequences, it’s tough to make smart moves in life. It’s no coincidence that 75% of those who wind up in prison are illiterate. In the general population “thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child,” Andreas Schleicher, head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times. “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.” Actually, that explains a lot. Have you seen the headlines lately? It’s pretty clear that current events are more like knuckleheaded bullying on a fourth-grade playground than decisions based on evidence, reason, or wisdom — let alone compassion. Let's face it, making sense of the world is never easy; that’s why books were invented.  Americans typically read about 12 books a year. The average adult spends 19 minutes a day reading, usually before bed. Reading a book takes about eight to twelve hours, and spending that much time inside someone else’s mindscape broadens our experience and enriches our perspective — sometimes in ways that transform us forever. Here are a couple of wonderful examples from Tobias Carroll’s 28 Authors on the Books that Changed Their Lives. “The first massive Rock My World book,” wrote Maria Dahvana Headley, author of Magonia, “was Beloved, which I read when I was 17. Not only was I clueless about race in America at that point, coming from where I came from, I was also clueless about living female genius writers. I didn’t know there were any. Up to that point, I’d read almost entirely white men. KA-BAM. I got blasted out of the universe of dead white boys, and into something much more magnificent. Toni Morrison’s way of flawlessly entwining her haunting with her history left me dazzled, sobbing, and bewildered.”  “Although I read Far From the Tree about two and a half years ago,” wrote Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Eligible, “I still think of it all the time — its exploration of a wide range of disabilities, its examination of what a disability is, its extraordinary compassion. I truly feel that if our civilization was destroyed and Far From the Tree was the only book that survived, it could convey to future alien races nearly everything there is to know about 21st-century earthlings.” Wow. You don’t hear that kind of praise for posts on Facebook or TikTok. You can see why Pat Conroy, author of Prince of Tides, once said, “I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.”  We need all kinds of bookstores: retailers with new releases from what’s-happening-now authors and little independent shops like Rebound that carry hard-to-find second-hand editions, the ones that are loved enough to be kept around long past their sell-by dates. Having a wide range of books is vital to our civilization. Because as Haruki Murakami, author of Norwegian Wood, pointed out, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” And if there was ever a time to up our thinking game, it’s now. We’re watching a new world order being carved out in real time; life as we know it is being upended. We’re all feeling much as I did in my early days in Seville, as if we’ve woken up in a foreign land with unknown rules and no guarantees about how it’s all going to work out. But others have gone down similar paths before us, and they have left us plenty of guideposts to help us find our way. Since Gutenberg’s time, we humans have written hundreds of millions of books, and while not all of them are life-changing works of profound genius, there are plenty offering us fresh ideas and new avenues of hope and comfort. So how about it? Can we really get through these dark times? As Nelson Mandela wrote, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” I take those encouraging words as a resounding yes.  For years, Joel and Toni have been talking about selling the bookstore and retiring. But for now, they remain stalwart guardians of our civilization's intellectual treasures. Thanks for your service, guys! WHAT BOOK CHANGED YOUR LIFE? Let me know in the comments section below! FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POST ANNOUNCEMENTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Humor isn't in AI's repertoire. When a journalist asked artificial intelligence to create a New Yorker-style cartoon, this was the result. Drawing: 10 points. Caption: Huh? Ya gotta love AI. Its brainpower is (I checked) 6 billion times as large as mine, and yet this morning, when I was searching for a quote about surprising outcomes, this was the best it could come up with: “The unexpected is the only thing that can surprise you.” Well, duh! My modest human brain was looking for a nifty way to describe the way small stuff can bloom into extraordinary experiences. Like the woman I knew in Ohio who couldn’t resist adopting a stray dog. And a second. Then more. When she found my future puppy, Eskimo Pie, by the side of the road, she was tempted to keep her, too. At nine weeks, Pie had that extra dollop of adorability that made even the most hardened cynic coo, “Awww, look at that little face!”  Pie was a tiny, adorable puppy — and she milked it for all it was worth. “I love her already,” the woman said. “But I don’t really need another dog.” “How many do you have now?” I asked. “Twenty-seven.” Gadzooks! “Where do you keep them all?” I imagined some rambling country farm with dogs gamboling about the hayfields. “We live in a little house with a small yard. But my husband built an extra room for the dogs.” I pictured a heaving mass of bored canines draped over shabby furniture, stained rugs, and one another. When I took the puppy home I very nearly named her “Lucky” because she had clearly dodged a bullet.  This is how I imagined that woman's house. And speaking of projects taking on a life of their own, there was the time that Rich had his Brilliant Idea about the dead oak in our front yard. “I was going to hire someone to haul it away, but instead I’m going to get that Amish guy to help me cut it into planks we can use in home improvement projects. It’ll pay for itself!” You see where this is going? The ancient tree produced ten 15-foot logs, each weighing 2000 pounds. An Amish miller arrived with a complicated system of claws, pulleys, and terrifying blades to saw the logs into rough planks. After shifting the planks to the barn for a year of drying, Rich hired haulers to take them to a kiln, and 90 days later hired another crew to transport them to a craftsman who produced finished tongue-in groove boards.  The tree on the left is the century-old red oak that Rich turned into useful (but not inexpensive) flooring. “How much do you figure that tree cost us?” I asked Rich this morning at breakfast. He shrugged and changed the subject. But for simple jobs that grow beyond our wildest expectations, I have to hand it to our friend Joe Kinsella. One day he heard about a Marine fresh from Afghanistan named Adrian Kinsella (no relation, but it caught Joe's attention) who was trying to help his former field interpreter and family resettle in the US. The translator was 18 when he began serving with the military. “The troops nicknamed him Yoda, like the Star Wars character, because he didn’t say very much,” Joe told me. “His mother and seven younger siblings did not know what he did when he disappeared during the day. It was kind of ‘loose lips sink ships.’ But he did ask for permission from his father.” “My dad, he was glad,” Yoda recalled in a 2014 interview with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. “He was really excited, he was like ‘This is a great opportunity, you’re going to be helping your country and supporting the US troops; they are here for your country, to rebuild your country.’”  John Oliver interviews Yoda in November 2014. The Taliban took a dimmer view; they saw collaboration as a death penalty offense for the whole family. First, they kidnapped and killed Yoda’s father. Next they abducted Yoda’s youngest brother, a toddler. Then they thought, “Hey, why not turn a profit?” They told Yoda, “Your brother will be laid on the grave of your father unless you give us all your money.” “They got hurt because of me, because of my job,” said Yoda. He paid every penny the family had — almost $35,000 — to get his brother back, then they all fled to Pakistan. As fugitives with dubious legal standing, they spent five years rarely leaving the house, foregoing school and medical care to stay out of sight. Luckily, the USA takes care of those who have risked their lives for us; a Special Interest Visa was available for the whole family. Unfortunately, the red tape involved was insane. After three and a half years, Yoda got his visa but his family remained stuck in Pakistan. Then John Oliver did a show called Translators, holding up stacks of paperwork and sharing some of its many absurdities.  Oliver shows an actual question from the US State Department's DS260 Form. "To which I'm guessing your answer is, 'To be honest, my main plan was to not get killed by the Taliban. I haven't really worked out a plan of attack for my sex life yet." “By now the ghost of Franz Kafka is thinking ‘Don’t you dare call this Kafkaesque, I don’t want my name anywhere near this,’” Oliver said. “‘Compared to this, waking up as a cockroach is normal.’” He showed a stray donkey befriended by American troops that was transported to America in just eight months while Yoda’s family spent half a decade in hiding. How embarrassed was the State Department? It brought Yoda’s family to America the month after Oliver’s show aired. And Joe — in one of those small impulses that change your life — offered to help them find housing. He soon found himself in charge of “Team Yoda,” volunteers from the NextDoor community and a nearby Catholic congregation who helped the family get settled.  (From left) Joe, Yoda, and Adrian Meanwhile Adrian Kinsella did paperwork to pave the way for their green card applications. This was complicated by the fact that on all legal documents, Yoda, whose first name is Mohammed, was erroneously listed as Mohammed, FNU (first name unknown), so he became embedded in the American system as Fnu Mohammed. Then there were the cultural issues. The Afghans were astounded when Joe explained you don’t bargain with the cashiers at American supermarkets, and that dentist appointments are for a precise time, not whenever you show up. Over the years he has become “Uncle Joe” to Yoda’s family, celebrating with them as the older kids graduated from college and started careers, when Yoda became a biomedical engineer, the day green cards were finally granted in 2023, the announcement that youngest, the toddler kidnapped by the Taliban, made the high school track team.  Joe and his wife, Susan, recently joined the family for iftar, the meal after sunset that breaks the Ramadan fast. Joe’s story made me think about all the people — from close kin to total strangers — who must have assisted my relatives when they first immigrated to America. Why do we help people we don’t even know? Because we understand, deep in our ancestral brains, that cooperation has always been the key to survival. That was true when we were spindly little newcomers on the African savannas, surrounded by larger creatures with ferocious teeth and claws, and it’s equally certain now, as we turn more and more of our lives over to machines with 6 billion times our data capacity, but none of our hard-earned wisdom or compassion. Looking out for one another is how we Homo Sapiens have paid it forward for 200,000 years. Given current realities, who is to say that we might not end up as refugees in a foreign land someday? If so, we can only hope that we are lucky enough to have an Uncle Joe around to welcome us to our new home.  Much to learn we still have FINDING HOPE This story is part of a series of blog posts exploring ways people help each other find hope in this worrying world. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Ohio, 1988. We had to drag Buck out from under the deck for this family snapshot. Can you tell he's not really into it? Right after we married, Rich and I moved to Ohio, bought an old stone house, and adopted Buck. He was a fine figure of a dog but (and I say this lovingly) not an intellectual giant. He was perpetually baffled by half-open doors, never realizing he could push one all the way open with his nose and walk through. Everything terrified him: loud noises, people he didn’t know, people he did know, his food bowl, and mice, to name but a few. His favorite activity was cowering under our back deck. Occasionally we would drive him into the nearby village of Chagrin Falls to stroll through the park by the river in a vain attempt to interest him in the world. He would shuffle morosely along, looking like he was on his way to the gallows, until we gave up and took him home. And then, one snowy winter day in the park, he spotted ducks landing on the river’s frozen surface. A hitherto unsuspected killer instinct kicked in. He tore his leash free from human hands and galloped across the ice toward his prey. Unfortunately, there had been some thawing, so ten yards out the ice crumbled beneath him. As the ducks flapped slowly away (I swear they were snickering), Buck dropped like a stone into the freezing water, just above the falls.  Chagrin Falls in winter. Photo: David Petkiewicz Rich dashed into the nearby hardware store shouting, “Dog through the ice. I need a rope!” The owner flung him one. Rich raced back, tied the rope around his waist, handed me the end, and crawled forward on his belly like a reptile to distribute his weight across the fragile surface. Buck was pawing at the crumbling ice, his wild-eyed look clearly saying, “See? The world really is a terrible, horrible place!” Slowly Rich inched across the frozen surface, grabbed hold, and hauled Buck out of the water to safety. And it did not lessen the heroism of that moment one iota when we learned that the river was less than two feet deep in that section, and Rich could have easily kicked through the ice and waded to the rescue. But then, I wouldn’t be re-telling this story decades later, would I?  "Well, I think you're wonderful!" Afterwards, while Buck wallowed in PTSD, Rich basked in the satisfied glow that accompanies acts of kindness. In these cynical times, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the survival of sentient beings over the last four billion years is largely due to cooperation, the simple act of lending a helping hand — or paw — when it is needed most. Scientists and philosophers once defined altruism as uniquely human, but they’ve had to eat their words as experiment after experiment has demonstrated the surprising amount of selflessness in the animal kingdom. Classic trials with rats show they’ll work to free a trapped companion and refrain from pressing a bar to get food for themselves it if means one of their own will get an electric shock.  A mouse petforms a kind of rodent CPR on a friend. A recent University of Southern California report “shows that mice tend to help other mice they know are unconscious. Their response ranges from gentle sniffing and grooming to more forceful actions such as mouth or tongue biting, before finally escalating to pulling the tongue out of the unconscious mouse.” (I'm hoping this means extending the tongue past the lips, not ripping it out altogether.) The study’s author, Wenjian Sun, commented, “The behavior was especially unique due to its similarity to how humans behave in emergency responses.” (OK, yes, whew! I think that means the tongue thing is what I said.) “A pawsitively endearing behavioral study on dogs,” reported Huffington Post, “has discovered our four-legged friends exhibit human-like levels of empathy and giving toward each other — but with special preference for ones they know.” In the experiment, dogs literally pulled strings to obtain treats for their friends.  Doggone good behavior from donor on the right, who tugged the cord to give his friend a treat. Photo: University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna “Chimpanzees,” noted Live Science, “have now shown they can help strangers at personal cost without apparent expectation of personal gain, a level of selfless behavior often claimed as unique to humans.” Are humans really selfless? Not all the time, obviously. But we sometimes manage to rise to the occasion with breathtaking acts of compassionate courage. Take the evacuation of Dunkirk, for example. For younger readers, this was early in WWII, when the Nazis overwhelmed the Allied Forces and trapped them on the northern tip of France with their backs to the sea. Their only hope for survival was evacuation, but the beaches were too shallow for ships, the harbor was heavily mined, and the Luftwaffe kept circling overhead, strafing and shelling. A call went out, and 850 British volunteers set forth in their own small boats — skiffs, fishing trawlers, pleasure yachts, lifeboats, barges — anything that could stay afloat long enough to get those soldiers off the beach. The organizers prayed they could save 40,000 men. They rescued 338,226.  A flotilla of "Little Ships" rescued soldiers trapped on the beach at Dunkirk.  It took nine days to get them off the beaches. It seems to me that we are in a Dunkirk moment right now. Our world feels more chaotic and dangerous than ever before in my lifetime. The ultimate outcome is far from certain. Many of us are afraid. And I ask myself, if they were in my shoes, what would all those altruistic mice, dogs, and chimpanzees do? They would look after each other.  Lowland gorillas Jamila and Suwedi comfort each other in a German zoo. Photo: Roland Weihrauch/DPA/AFP via Getty Images I’m proud to say many humans are stepping up to meet the animal kingdom’s standard of compassion. In the two weeks I’ve been back in California, I’ve been impressed and inspired by all the ways, large and small, my friends and neighbors are helping those around them. Their acts of kindness recall the seven Corporal Works of Mercy I was taught in my Catholic schooldays: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead. OK, I’m leaving that last one to the professionals, but the others are as important today as they were in Biblical times. Not to second-guess Divine Wisdom, but I would add more stuff, like helping newcomers, the illiterate, and the technologically challenged. However you define them, works of mercy and compassion matter in this world. And if the nuns were right, in the next as well.  As my regular readers know, I spent the last six months in Seville answering questions from anxious friends about how to escape the US and move abroad if necessary. Now that I’m back in California, I want to explore how folks in America are finding ways to stand firm, build connections, and watch out for one another. Like that ragtag flotilla of little boats heading to Dunkirk, we must endeavor to save as many as we can. And who knows? Maybe our small acts of kindness will add up to something that changes the course of history. I’m still debating what to call my new theme — Dunkirk Moments? Ordinary Heroes? The Kindness of Mice? Whatever I settle on, the posts I write this spring and summer will highlight compassion in action, reminding us that the world isn't always, as Buck thought, a terrible, horrible place. Somehow, in spite of everything, life still offers hope, love, laughter, and on a good day, evidence that humans can be as decent as mice. THE KINDNESS OF MICE This is the first in a series of blog posts exploring ways we help each other when we need it most. Know someone you think should be featured? Let me know in the comments below. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville My new book: My San Francisco  If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Getting ready to hit the road again! One of the great things about being married to Rich is that even after forty years, the man constantly surprises me. A few days ago, he turned to me out of the blue and said, “I just read an interesting article about how to fold feta cheese.” My jaw dropped in astonishment. “How is that even a thing? Why would you want to? What’s the point?” He looked at me oddly. “Weren’t you complaining just this morning about how impossible it is to fold our fitted sheets?” Oh, fitted sheets. Now it all made sense. Yes, our fitted sheets have a tendency to look as if they’ve been dragged off the blades of a propeller and shoved into the closet by a blindfolded toddler. No matter what Rich had read, making them look any tidier seemed as improbable as folding crumbly white Greek cheese into origami swans. I’ve learned to live with it and suggested he do the same.  My sheets are among the countless domestic elements I am trying to corral into some kind of order at the moment, because at the end of this week we’re leaving for a six-month stay in America. (Do I have mixed feelings about that? Don’t get me started.) As I putter around the apartment, reshelving books and collecting stray paintbrushes and candle stubs, I’m thinking about all the fun I’ve had over the past six months, especially with the Amigos Project. As my regular readers know, I’ve spent a great deal of time over the fall and winter months interviewing expat friends to help me answer readers’ questions. People keep asking about the feasibility of escaping America if things get exponentially crazier. (And yes, never doubt that could happen. Probably will, in fact.)  I’ve done my best to reassure you all that moving abroad is quite feasible. (Here’s my starter checklist.) You’ll probably want to begin as a part-time expat (as these success stories demonstrate). If you’re retired or work online (see tips for remote working overseas), living in Europe can be a very affordable option, depending on your choice of location. As for feeling lonely, you’ll likely find it easier (as many of us have) to make friends in a sociable city like Seville than you ever did back home. Of course, there are downsides. Yesterday Rich and I got to talking about all the things we’ve learned to do without here in Spain. A car. A clothes dryer. A dishwasher. An automatic ice maker. Central heating. Amazon. While those things are obtainable in Seville, for us they’re so impractical we don’t bother. In winter I keep individual rooms toasty with space heaters and view my rapid dashes through the arctic zone (formerly known as the hallway) much as younger friends speak of their ice baths: useful for shocking the system into a state of heightened mental acuity but not a place you'd linger long.  Somehow I just can't warm to the idea of ice baths. While my apartment may lack a few modern conveniences, my Seville lifestyle is easier and more relaxed. My days unfold at a more civilized pace, giving me time to absorb some of this community’s age-old wisdom. For a start, nobody here is invisible. I am never just a number on a credit card or a pile of groceries on a conveyor belt. I make eye contact wherever I go and kiss more people in a week than I do during six months in the US. In fact, while in California I have to keep a tight rein on my impulse to cheek-kiss everyone I meet, because often it is misconstrued in disturbing ways. Here in Spain I have learned that the word nosotros — us — means everybody, not just those who are rich, lucky, white, and/or politically connected. Every Spaniard has access to education, health care, and an old age pension sufficient to keep them off the street. Amigos argue fiercely over government policies (and everything else) but agree that disagreements don’t make the other person a spawn of Satan.  Our Spanish neighbors love to gather, drink beer, argue fiercely, laugh, order another round, argue some more, laugh harder, and remain lifelong friends. Over the millennia, Sevillanos have weathered just about everything history can throw at a population: war, disease, invasion, dictators, tourists. During the pandemic, I could almost hear my neighbors thinking, “You call this pestilence? The Great Plague of 1647, when we lost a quarter of our population, now that was something!” These days it’s more like, “Oligarchs? We were invaded by Julius Caesar! Religious fanatics? We survived the Spanish Inquisition!” Even in its darkest hours, Seville is confident that the community will endure, and I am hopeful America will, too. As I toss out the ragged leftovers from my refrigerator and check the expiration dates to see if my canned goods will last into next autumn, my mind is already roaming ahead to California and our Apocalypse Chow Food Locker.  In the summer of 2020, Rich built our Apocalypse Chow Food Locker, which serves as an outdoor pantry and survival gear storage shed. Before leaving California last fall, I stuffed the locker with rice, beans, coffee, oatmeal, artichoke hearts, olive oil, and canned tuna. Unfortunately, the bargain brand of tuna I chose is being recalled because there is a slight but worrying chance that it could kill us. So I guess I have more discarding and restocking to do when I get back. Naturally, everyone is suggesting I pack my suitcase full of fresh eggs, which around here cost just 2.06€ ($2.25) a dozen. If only I could! At current US prices, they’d sell for enough to finance my tuna needs for the rest of the decade.  My next task is reviewing California’s latest emergency preparation warnings to see if I have to update anything else when I return to my San Anselmo home. Luckily the town managed to survive winter’s flood season without a major inundation. Now all I have to do is get ready for instant evacuation during an earthquake — with headlamps for night flight and digging through rubble — and check the current boundaries of the official wildfire zone, which creeps closer to us every year. In my spare time, I'm hoping to learn whether they ever caught the neighborhood pyromaniac I heard so much about last fall. All in all, I ‘m expecting a pretty exciting summer in California. Whatever happens, I will rely on my Amigos Project wisdom for guidance. I will remember that us means everyone, and that everyone matters. Even people I disagree with. As I go about my day, I will make eye contact whenever possible, although I will refrain from kissing anybody unless I actually know them. Being aware that disaster could strike at any moment, from any direction, I will keep my heart, mind, and home in a state of readiness. As for my fitted sheets, I will accept that, like my country, they are always going to be a disheveled mess, but they are mine and I love them. Just as they are.  IN SEVILLE THIS WEEK? COME HEAR ME SPEAK! I'm appearing at a free, English-language author event on Wednesday.  I'M TAKING A SHORT BREAK FROM POSTING I'll be in transit, then trying to absorb all the changes taking place in America. Could take a while. In April I'll be back with all new snarky commentary and helpful survival tips. THIS IS THE LAST AMIGOS PROJECT POST See the complete Amigos Project series here. THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO MADE MY NEW BOOK A SUCCESS!    If you haven't read My San Francisco yet, you can order it HERE. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. Pop quiz: What creature do you see below?  OK, now what other creature can you see? Originally printed in a German humor magazine in 1892, this sketch has become a litmus test of mental flexibility. By now you’ve probably noticed it can be viewed as either a rabbit or a duck. (If you’ve identified any other creature, such as a flesh-eating zombie, we need to talk.) A Swiss study showed that around Eastertime most people see a rabbit and in October they spot the duck first, reminding us that what we see is deeply influenced by context. And that’s one of the reasons so many of us choose to live in another country. We get to view the land of our birth from another perspective, in a wholly different context — which can be incredibly refreshing.  The Latest Authorized Nearly Legal Map of the United States | The New Yorker You probably won’t be surprised to hear that these days millions of Americans are talking about packing up and going overseas. Last fall — starting Wednesday, November 6, to be precise — the number of Americans Googling information about moving abroad surged by 1514%. Not all of those queries landed in my email inbox (¡Gracias a Díos!), but these days I am fielding lots of questions from my friends, relatives, readers, and random strangers, all of whom seem anxious for a change of scene. “I’m gonna do it — sell the house, pack a bag, and jump on a plane,” they say, usually after the second martini. “Who’s with me?” I rarely consider myself the voice of reason, but in these cases I do caution people to cool their jets a little, taking time to consider their exit strategy and find a congenial place to land. For me it was Spain, but for two of my fellow bloggers — Lynn McBride, author of Southern Fried French, and Lori Cronwell, author of Bringing Europe Home — the allure of France was irrésistible.  After 140 years in the USA, Lady Liberty packs up and heads home to France. Courtesy of Southern Fried French  Lori Cronwell. Photo courtesy of Bringing Europe Home I caught up with Lynn and Lori this week and asked each of them how they navigated their move to France. In both cases, their successful transitions started with 90-day tourist visas and living as part-time expats in rental apartments. Both women still own property in the US and consider real estate a key factor. Lori Cronwell, a travel writer and digital nomad in her sixties, found herself traveling back and forth to Brittany on a regular basis. She decided to rent out her 1800-square-foot home in Portland, Oregon, so she built a 700-square-foot accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on the property. She lives there while she’s in the US, and the rest of the time it’s an Airbnb managed by her renters. “To create this lifestyle of having a beautiful and comfortable homebase — in two countries — coupled with the freedom to travel, didn't require a ton of money," she said. "It did require a shift in my priorities, a drastic downsizing, and a few innovative ideas. Renting out the main house gave me the freedom to travel. Living in a smaller home is liberating. There’s less to maintain, less to clean, and more time for travel and fun.”  Lori's Airbnb serves as her pied-à-terre when she's in Portland, Oregon. Photo courtesy of Bringing Europe Home Two months ago, Lori decided to become a full-time resident of France. “Living in another country part-time or full-time means taking a big leap out of your comfort zone,” she says. “You may have to learn a new language and a whole new bureaucratic system. But that’s part of the grand adventure: experiencing a new culture, stepping up to new challenges and meeting new people. All of which will keep your mind sharp and your spirit young. And you won’t be alone. You’ll make new friends; you’ll find your support group; and you’ll be living your dream.” For more, read Lori’s posts: The Perks of Being a Part-Time Expat The Pitfalls of Being a Part-Time Expat  It's easy to fall in love with France, as magazine editor Lynn McBride, now 75, discovered over many vacations there with her husband, Ron. When they wrapped up their careers 22 years ago, they realized they were ready to leave Charleston, South Carolina. “We decided to have a retirement adventure. We sold everything we owned — our house, our car — and went to France. We just serendipitously found this apartment in a chateau.”  When Nicole and Pierre began renovations, the Château de Balleure in southern Burgundy didn't even have a bathroom. Owners Nicole and Pierre Balvay had spent 30 years renovating the crumbling 14th century Château de Balleure, which had been in Pierre’s family since the end of the French Revolution. Lynn and Ron lived there while rehabilitating a nearby farmhouse, where they lived for 13 years before moving to an apartment in the town of Beaune. The cost of living is generally cheaper in France, Lynn says, especially when it comes to real estate. “If you are set on living in central Paris or on the Côte d’Azur, or in one of the uber-trendy perched Provençal villages popularized by Peter Mayle, then be prepared to spend big. But once you get out of these areas, real estate is quite reasonable and can be amazingly cheap, especially if you are interested in living in the countryside or in a village.”  Lynn (left) and her husband, Ron, enjoy le déjeuner with friends in the French countryside. Lynn learned to cook the rich stews the region is famous for, such as Beef Bourguignonne and Coq au Vin. She continues to study French (“A lifelong occupation,” she admits ruefully) and to write about her expat lifestyle. In her most recent post she introduced me to my new favorite word: epoustouflant, which means flabbergasting. For more, see Lynn’s post: Moving to France: A Cheaper Retirement Option? And her book: How to Learn a New Language with a Used Brain  Lynn likes to gather a few friends and hold French pastry tastings. I'm angling for an invitation to the next one! Photo: Southern Fried French For most people, expat life sensibly starts with 90-day tourist visas. Longer stays usually require getting a residency visa (bonjour paperwork!). In Spain and elsewhere, staying more than 183 days a year or buying property can define you as a tax resident; see how this affected my amigos in my post Five Things We’ve Learned About Living Abroad. Like the duck-rabbit illusion, my life has two different faces: the six months I spend in Spain and the six months I spend in California. And while I mostly write about the joys of my Seville life, there are plenty of downsides, too. Don’t get me started on Spanish bureaucracy or the appalling lack of decent chocolate chip cookies. And there are days when just trying to discuss a modest purchase at a hardware store tests my vocabulary and nerves to the limit. But living abroad isn’t all residency visas and replacement door handles. It’s about those wonderful mornings when we open our eyes and realize we are actually living in a place we once barely had the courage to dream about. That's when we feel the rapture of living in a world that is so vast, so precious, so exhilarating — so, as the French would say, epoustouflant — that it takes our breath away. Knowing that we are invited to take our place in that larger world is worth every bit of expense and fuss it took to get there. And then some.  Rich walks on a beach in Corsica, thinking profound thoughts about where to go for dinner. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how to enrich our lives while living or traveling abroad, finding new ways of avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO MADE MY NEW BOOK A SUCCESS! If you haven't read it yet, you can find it on Amazon worldwide. If you have read it, I invite you to leave a review HERE.  DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. FOR FURTHER READING My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  One of the joys of friendship is laughing together over goofy greeting cards. I love this greeting card but have to admit I’m puzzled; who are you supposed to send it to? A friend or relative who identifies as a psychopath? Your barista, with a note thanking her for not shooting your companion when he actually did order a quad shot, non fat, vanilla soy, extra foam light whip with caramel drizzle? Even as I pondered this mystery, I knew exactly what to do with the photo of this card when a friend sent it to me. I printed it out and taped it up in my kitchen, on the cupboard door where I keep a motley collection of cartoons, memes, and sayings. It sits just above this one.  “Laughter is an instant vacation,” said comedian Milton Berle. And couldn’t we all use a little time off from the world right now? “Happiness is laughter that’s shared,” observed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. And that’s why our friendships are so precious. I no longer remember the details of the flamingo-covered moment shown below, but I vividly recall collapsing into helpless laughter with our friend Pete.  Karen, Rich, Pete, and a flock of feathered friends make merry. . Sharing loony moments with pals is one of life’s great pleasures. “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows you are slightly cracked,” said radio host Bernard Meltzer. Or as Groucho Marx put it, “When you’re in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun.'” But how do you form that kind of closeness in a foreign country, when you arrive alone, knowing nobody? It’s all about reaching out to those you find around you. Eleven years ago, Donna Wolski was a 62-year-old widow living alone in Florida. When a vacation brought her to Seville for three days, she suddenly saw a way to build a new life and realized she was ready to make a bold change. “On my flight home, I said to myself, ‘I think I’ll move to Seville,’” she told me.  It's not hard to see why Donna fell in love with Seville. Friends urged her to make a second visit to the city before doing anything rash. “I came back in September; it was hot as holy hell, and I was staying in an apartment with no air conditioning. And despite that, I went home, put my house on the market, and sold or gave away everything. I was back in a couple of months with two big suitcases and that’s all. I came intending to be here the rest of my life.” “Did your family and friends think you were nuts?” I asked. “They were happy that I was doing something with my life. My really good friend said to me, the last day I was there, ‘Go to Spain and live Donna 2.0. Leave the rest behind you.’ And that’s what I’ve done.” To connect with people in the community, she joined the American Women’s Club of Seville, a lively social group open to all English-speaking women. (Similar clubs exist in 45 cities around the world.) Donna became the AWC’s Membership Coordinator, helping people sign up and pay the modest annual fee. “For me it was great, because it meant I met everybody. Being alone, I would always say, ‘You want to meet for coffee?’”   Donna dressed for Seville's Feria de Abril (April Fair) Social friends soon became a lifesaving support network. “At the end of my first year here, I had spine surgery,” Donna said. That’s terrifying under any circumstances, let alone when you don’t speak the language or have experience navigating the medical system. Her AWC friend Christie stepped up, saying, “I'm going to put together a group of people who will help.” She reached out to bi-lingual members of the AWC and began organizing a timetable. Throughout her five-day stay, “these incredible women would just show up in my hospital room; five of them volunteered to spend the night," said Donna. "In the US you’d be lucky to get a family member to do that, let alone strangers.” In the decade that followed, Donna became an integral part of the community, serving four years as AWC president and creating a strong, active friendship circle. Last December, while she was on vacation in Morocco, a dog ran out of nowhere, tangled in Donna’s feet, and sent her tumbling hard onto stone paving, breaking her knee in three places. For the past two months her friends have been showing up daily, bringing groceries, translating medical advice, taking her out for coffee, keeping her involved and cheerful. “My brother said to me tonight, ‘Donna, what would you do if you were in the States and you were laid out for twelve weeks with a broken knee? Your friends are still going to work, they live in different suburbs. You wouldn't get that kind of daily support.’”  I always tell newcomers, and snowbirds who winter in Seville, about the AWC. And they nearly always draw back, saying, “I’m not a joiner.” Neither was Donna, I point out. Neither was I. But you’re here now. This is You 2.0, capable of great changes. Isn’t that why we travel? When I’m on the road, one way I like to connect with people is via EatWith, an organization often called “the Airbnb of dining.” Local (carefully vetted) chefs invite you to their home for a meal; an app shows the menu, cost, and setting. My hosts have always provided great food and conversation; some have become friends.  Paolo and Carlotta, our EatWith hosts in Turin, Italy, later visited us in Seville. Traveling through Greece a few years ago, I met two sisters (siblings, not nuns) who had just spent a day working in a soup kitchen in Athens. I asked how they’d arranged it. “We found them online,” one explained, “and just wrote and told them we wanted to come by and make a small donation. And while we were there, we’d like to volunteer for a day.” Rich and I did the same and were welcomed with open arms. My post Breaking Bread with Strangers in Athens describes that experience, an unforgettable mix of comfort, heartbreak, good food, and hard work. It not only reminded me to count my blessings, it gave me the deep satisfaction of knowing I was doing a (tiny) bit of good in the world. It was the kind of day, as Rich put it, “that lets you know that you are useful, that you matter, that your actions count for something.”  At the Athens soup kitchen, my main job was scrubbing trays for reuse. Not exactly glamorous, but hey, somebody had to do it. We live in an age of isolation and loneliness, so any chance to connect is heartening — and can be a lifesaver. “A new study suggests that lifestyle and living conditions affect aging significantly more than genetics,” reported Nice News, quoting a major Oxford University study of the “architecture of aging.” Life operates on the buddy system. We all need convivial companions to help us navigate traumas, celebrate joys, and send us silly greeting cards that spark laughter. Fortunately, we can build a friendship circle at any age, wherever we are. “If I can do it,” said Donna, “so can others.” And the effort is richly rewarded. As Salman Rushdie so wisely observed, “In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.”  Monday, August 4 is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. It's not too soon to start training for it! THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how to enrich our lives while living or traveling abroad, finding new ways of avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. GOOD NEWS! YOU ASKED FOR A PAPERBACK EDITION OF MY NEW BOOK AND IT'S HERE! FIND IT ON AMAZON WORLDWIDE  DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. TRYING TO POST A COMMENT BUT NOT SEEING IT? For a short while, my efforts to reduce the flood of spam on this blog resulted in making it harder to post comments. I think it's fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please let me know. [email protected] FOR FURTHER READING My upcoming book on San Francisco My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Ten books? Are they kidding? I'd need at least this many! If you were marooned on a desert island, what ten books would you bring along? Besides, obviously, Raft-Building for Dummies, Six Easy Ways to Catch Fish with Your Bare Hands, and How to Send Up a Humongous Smoke Signal Without Setting Fire to the Trees. A surprising number of people — asked this question online — choose Stephen King novels such as The Stand, It, and The Shining. For a start, each of these books is enormous enough to occupy countless hours. “Plus,” as one Reddit reader notes, “you could kill food with it.” A Quora reader picked the Oxford English Dictionary, and while I generally prefer my books with a more compelling plotline, an unabridged dictionary does have its advantages for clobbering prey.  A fearsome hunting tool indeed! This morning I pulled out my favorite dictionary, the battered Español-Inglés Diccionario, faithful companion of many hours of mind-bending labor during my early days in Seville. It wouldn’t be much use in hunting animals for food, but it did help me slay a lot of dragons, such as the two different verbs “to be” (ser and estar) and the slippery subjunctive used to express hypotheticals (“If you were marooned on a desert island…”). My dictionary lives on a shelf alongside Spanish translations of many old favorites, the ones I ran across in Seville bookstores and rejoiced to own again, albeit in slightly different form.  Mine is what Susan Sontag calls “a book-drenched life.” It’s a rare and satisfying pleasure to find others who are equally as smitten with the written word, which is what drew me to Seville’s new English-language book club this winter. The Any Book Book Club was launched a year ago by newly arrived author Angela Atkins. Born in the UK, she came of age in New Zealand, where she married and built a company with her husband. Since then they’ve lived in the UK, New Zealand, California, France, Valencia, and Madrid; currently they’re dividing their time between France and Seville. She’s published several bestselling books, holds writing workshops, and runs the book club, many of whose members are writers and editors.  The Any Book Book Club last Saturday I was curious about Angela’s intensely literary life and invited her out to lunch after book club last Saturday. We ate gorgeous Peruvian arroz chaufa (fried rice) and causa a la limeña (Lima-style potatoes) at one of El Cevichano’s sidewalk tables. (Yes, it’s warm enough to eat outside in Seville right now. Please don’t hate us.) I asked her about the book club’s unusual format: we pick a theme (mysteries, for instance, or Asian authors) and everyone brings a favorite work in that genre. “I love this format,” I told her. “Having slogged through countless book club selections that didn’t work for me at all, it’s a pleasure to talk about a book I truly love. And you go around the circle, so everyone has a chance to speak about the one they brought. Did you dream this up yourself?” “Actually….. I went to a similar one in Valencia and loved the format too.” That made me think of the Oscar Wilde quote, “Talent borrows, genius steals!” — which is also attributed to T. S. Elliot, Pablo Picasso, and others, thus neatly proving its own point.  Bestselling author Angela Atkins at El Cevichano on Saturday “What advice do you give to budding writers?” I asked. “Read, read, read, read, read, read,” she said. “And then write: journal, write short stories, experiment. Be part of a writers group, or meet somebody who you can get some guidance from.” It’s tempting to rush headlong from manuscript to submission or self-publication, but Angela advises patience. As a reminder, she keeps the 1000-page handwritten manuscript of her first novel, composed at age 14, at back of her closet, where she feels it belongs. “The first thing you write is not going to be publishable,” she says. “If you want it to be good, you need to write, and you need to edit, and you need to get feedback. Every successful novelist has written one or two or three novels before the first novel was published — just for fun, just to practice writing.” Not everyone bothers to edit or proofread. In these self-publishing times, it's not uncommon to stumble across works riddled with typos and errors. I find myself muttering furiously and reaching for an editor’s blue pencil, which is, of course, useless on a Kindle. As Stephen King wisely says, “To write is human, to edit is divine.”  “When the books are finally ready to make their way in the world,” I said, “what do you tell fledgling writers about marketing them?” I’m now in the marketing stage with my new book, and it’s always a struggle. “The younger generations are much more comfortable with social media and promoting themselves,” Angela said. “They've been doing it all their life. Gen X and boomers are perhaps less comfortable with it.” This is certainly true for me. I often have the disconcerting feeling that my mother is watching from beyond the grave, giving me her trademark disapproving look to suggest I’m putting myself forward in an unbecoming manner. Sorry, Mom. It’s all part of an author’s life these days.   To launch my new book, I’ve been busy for many weeks drafting media releases, updating mailing lists, designing the cover, tweaking the text, and sorting out formatting. Meanwhile Rich plunged into the Byzantine complexity of Amazon’s marketing algorithms, which have to be propitiated like ancient gods, with strict adherence to esoteric commandments. To our astonishment, before the book was even officially published, your pre-orders made it shoot up to #1 in multiple travel categories. It was an instant bestseller before it was even live — yay! A thousand thanks, everyone! My San Francisco: 20 Extraordinary Walks in America’s Quirkiest City went live on Amazon today. If you are thinking of buying a copy, be sure to do it this week, while the launch price is 99 cents; as of Monday, February 24, the book will cost $5.99. At the moment, My San Francisco is only available on Amazon Kindle, which publishes the majority (72%) of e-books and offers the most efficient way to release a new work. I realize not everyone has a Kindle, so if you’d like to see the book in a different format, such as a paperback or another kind of e-book, please let me know. If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll certainly look into other options.  My first travel memoir A big part of the fun of publishing is getting feedback from the reader universe. I'd love to have you share your thoughts in a customer review on Amazon after you read My San Francisco. My first travel book, Dancing in the Fountain, now has more than 500 reviews. Most are extremely kind, although years ago one reader wrote grumpily, “The author talks about herself way too much.” Hey, it’s a memoir. Isn’t that the idea? In the end, as Angela points out, writing is about having fun. We don’t do it for reviews or sales or ranking but because it is who we are. “I write for the same reason I breathe,” said Isaac Asimov. “Because if I didn’t, I would die.” So I’ve finally decided what survival books I’m bringing to that desert island: ten blank notebooks and dozens and dozens of pens.  On a desert island, books come in handy for all sorts of activities. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how to enrich our lives while living or traveling abroad, finding new ways of avoiding the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. TRYING TO POST A COMMENT BUT NOT SEEING IT? For a short while, my efforts to reduce the flood of spam on this blog resulted in making it harder to post comments. I think it's fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please let me know. [email protected] FOR FURTHER READING My upcoming book on San Francisco My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  As the old joke goes, "Sure I let Rex fly the plane. But don't worry, I keep him on the leash every second!" Our pets are, of course, cherished members of the family, and bringing them with us when we move adds a whole extra layer of excitement. I’ll never forget the sensation Rich caused in the security line at Chicago O’Hare Airport when he revealed his tote bag held live goldfish, swimming around in a plastic water bowl. Incredibly, some of our less sensitive friends had suggested we simply flush the little dears down the toilet and buy new ones when we got to Ohio. What kind of fiend would do that?  After the entire O'Hare security staff had chuckled and exclaimed over the unusual carry-on, Rich, the fish, and I were waived through. That was before 9/11; today, of course, those fish would be arrested and probably end their days swimming in Guantanamo Bay. On another occasion, a Dutch friend brought a miniature dachshund puppy from Amsterdam to San Francisco as cabin baggage. Somewhere over the Atlantic she took the puppy out of his cage for a snuggle. When she dozed off, the puppy climbed down off her lap and proceeded to scamper joyfully up and down the aisle, causing pandemonium throughout the plane while my friend slumbered on, oblivious. Then there’s my harrowing dog-lost-at-the-airport tale. Don’t worry, it has a happy ending, and no humans or animals were harmed. Upset, yes. Stunned by the callous indifference and staggering incompetence of a major international airline, you bet. Here’s what happened. It was late November and we were moving to Spain with our dog, Eskimo Pie.  Eskimo Pie in our Ohio garden She was too large for cabin travel and had to go in the cargo hold, so I bought a roomy crate and researched pet-friendly airlines with heated cargo areas. I got her vaccines updated, had a tracking chip injected into her shoulder, and filled out reams of paperwork. When the day came, I watched her crate being loaded onto the plane. So far so good. I stepped off the plane in Madrid and asked the first airline representative I saw where I could go collect her. “A dog? Here?” the woman exclaimed incredulously. Clearly she’d never heard anything so absurd. What next? Asking directions to the nearest flying saucer? She had no idea where I could find Pie. She almost seemed offended that I’d asked. I spent four hours showing Pie's documents and photo around Madrid’s five terminals, and then, having rented a car, half a dozen outlying cargo areas.  Eventually Pie’s crate was discovered on top of a 20-foot stack of wooden pallets. Her nose was pressed against the bars, she had a fierce gleam in her eye, and I could almost hear her thinking, “You’ve a lot of explaining to do.” Pie was an old country dog, and while she loved many things about our urban Seville lifestyle — the perros in the dog park, late night walks through the city, jamón (ham) — she had some trouble adjusting. I turned for help to Spanish veterinarians, and I have to say they were wonderful: clinically savvy, compassionate, and emotionally invested. It was like being in an episode of All Creatures Great and Small. I’ve lost touch with those particular vets, but this week I had a chance to chat with two bright, dedicated young women who recently opened Clínica Veterinaria Pets&Co in Sevilla Este, six miles east of downtown Seville. I knew at once the vet Cristina and her assistant Sara — who have been friends since they were five — were my kind of animal lovers. “We love our dogs. We really do,” said Sara. “We go home thinking, ‘How is Mini? Did it work? Are they feeling better?’” Cristina nodded. “This is something you take home when you leave. You take home your animals. I say to clients, ‘This pet is yours, but a little bit of him or her is mine.’ And when the animals are ill or when we have to do something that we don’t want to think about, I cry a lot.” Despite the occasional sympathetic tears, a cheerful atmosphere prevails, thanks in part to the lively presence of Roxy, Sara’s pug (listed on the website as “the Boss”) and Cristina’s two rescues, Gordo and Margarita. The clinic is sparkling clean, modern, fully equipped, and very innovative. The two species they serve, dogs and cats, each get their own separate entrance, waiting room, and examination area to reduce stress (and avoid possible bloodshed) among the patients. The clinic offers a health plan so pets with chronic or complicated conditions can access services without running up unexpected bills. Both women speak English and French as well as Spanish. Most unusually for a Spanish vet, they offer online consultations via Zoom or WhatsApp.  “Imagine someone is thinking about flying over,” said Sara, “and needs to chat with a vet for peace of mind. ‘What am I going to face there? Which is the vaccination protocol?’ If you have a worry, you can ask Cristina.” Cristina’s best advice? Allow enough time. She’s so right. It can take months to figure out the rules, sort out the paperwork, and schedule vaccines and tests — some of which need to take place a specific number of days before the flight. In many countries, including Spain, pets don’t need to be quarantined so long as they’re vaccinated, microchipped, and documented. Be sure to check US re-entry requirements as well.  Service animals and emotional support animals require special documentation; just saying you want your Best Friend with you onboard won't cut it. Photo: DoD News I can hear you thinking, “Yikes! Where do I find all this info?” Below are handy places to start. This is the most current information available, but I don’t need to tell you that America is in a state of flux, with laws changing in the blink of an eye. Re-check often to make sure there are no last-minute surprises. US State Department Pets & International Travel (what's required to transport pets into and out of America) About the Destination Country’s Policies (pet entry requirements, quarantine rules, and application forms for dozens of nations) Pet Policy Guide for all US Airlines Transporting Animals in the Aircraft (tips from Lufthansa, winner of the International Pet and Animal Transportation Association award) USDA Pet Travel Guidance from the USA to Another Country Traveling with Pets in the EU Navigating a Pet Friendly Journey (best airports, railway rules, and more)  Here a friend tries to teach Pie to read Spanish. I'm not saying she mastered it, but she did move her lips. Is your pet worth all the fuss? Mine sure was. Pie sustained me through the upheavals of the transition, introduced me to countless canine neighbors, and inspired chuckles every day. One of her favorite things was riding up in the elevator; she couldn’t get over the fact we went in one door and exited through another, on a whole different floor. Every single time, she looked up at me with astonished delight, as if to say, “Did you see that? It did it again!” She’s been gone for many years now, and I still miss her. It’s comforting to think that Robert Louis Stevenson might be right when he said, “You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.” If so, I picture Pie spending eternity making joyful noise like this dog, captured on a nanny cam after neighbors complained about the racket. HOT NEWS! My new e-book is now available for pre-order and goes on sale Monday, February 17. For the launch, I have temporarily reduced the price to 99 cents, to make sure it's totally accessible to all my readers, friends, and family. Enjoy!  This book is a love letter to my home city. When I sent out early review copies, the response was enthusiastic. “I loved this book! “Witty, wise, and informative” “An entertaining read and invaluable guide” “Captures both the soul and the stomach of San Francisco.” “You don’t need to visit San Francisco to enjoy this book!” My regular readers will find this goes far beyond the San Francisco stories from last summer’s blog posts. I’ve expanded and updated the practical information and mixed in even more offbeat historical tidbits, outrageous urban legends, and wacky anecdotes. Writing it was tremendous fun, and I hope you'll get the same rib-tickling pleasure from reading it. NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER ON AMAZON KINDLE THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how moving, living, and traveling abroad can enrich our lives and help us avoid the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. TRYING TO POST A COMMENT BUT NOT SEEING IT? For a short while, my efforts to reduce the flood of spam on this blog resulted in making it harder to post comments. I think it's fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please let me know. [email protected] FOR FURTHER READING My upcoming book on San Francisco My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  “And suddenly you just know… it’s time to start something new and trust in the magic of new beginnings.” — Meister Eckhart, 13th century German mystic The sentiment seems intensely romantic, especially in a flourishing font superimposed over an exotic landscape. Cast your fate to the winds! Live your life, take chances, don’t wait! Leap and the net will appear! Or will it? I hope I don’t have to tell you how much I love living in Seville, but occasionally I've watched aghast as someone arrives in starry-eyed haste only to repent at grumpy leisure. One woman spent a single sun-drenched, wine-soaked weekend here, went home, sold everything, came back, moved into an apartment … and was absolutely miserable.  "I can't complain. But I'm going to anyway." She found everything substandard, from the weather — too hot, too cold , too wet, too dull — to the people around her, who had the nerve to be busy with their own lives when she wanted to go out for tapas — which were never as tasty as she’d remembered. She had nothing to do, no place to go, and nobody eager to listen to her complaints. After a few months she took off for another country, where no doubt she’s learning to grumble in Arabic. In my experience, if you’re contemplating a leap to a new life, you want to look — long and hard — at where you’ll be landing. Before picking a forever home, it's wise to spend a year trying out the lifestyle. As blogger Kirsten Raccuia demonstrates in My Moving Abroad Regrets: How to Learn From My Mistakes, even expats who make a successful transition overseas have lists of “if I could do it overs.” Dancing in the Fountain, the book in which I describe my move to Seville, is brimming with faux pas and ridiculous misunderstandings. The object of the game is to keep the bloopers and regrets to a minimum. Which is why I compiled this checklist in consultation with my brother Mike and his wife, Deb. I’m not saying they’re obsessive compulsive, but they dotted every letter of the alphabet before moving to Seville for a year.  Deb and Mike, shortly after arriving in Seville This checklist uses some examples drawn from transitioning to Spain, but the advice applies wherever you go. THE YEAR-ABROAD PREPARATION CHECKLIST Define your goal or purpose. Is the trip about adventure? Learning a new language? Discovering the seediest dive bars? Finding a quiet place to write the Great American Novel? Choose a suitable destination. Have you been there before? Do you know anyone there? Will it support your goal? If you’ll be traveling, is transit convenient? Might violent conflict break out? No? Are you sure? You might want to check that out with a reliable source. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. I looked up Spain on the US State Department’s travel advisory webpage. It warned, “Exercise increased caution. Terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in Spain. Terrorists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, local government facilities, hotels, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, parks, major sporting and cultural events, educational institutions, airports, and other public areas.” Yikes! That’s everywhere I go! Was my life hanging by a thread? Before fleeing in panic, I decided to check the UK Travel Advice page for Spain. There was nothing beyond the lifting of the weather advisory after last fall’s flooding. The only thing missing was a yawn emoji. I figured it was safe to stay put.  A safe and peaceful atmosphere prevails during a festival at Seville's Plaza de España. Check out your destination’s entry requirements, visa regulations, and tax laws. Start with their government’s official website, and thank your lucky stars most countries now provide English translations. Consider consulting an immigration lawyer, as Deb and Mike did. “We Googled immigration lawyers in our area and her name came up: Debora Eizips-Dreymann,” Mike told me. “At first we kept saying, ‘Yeah, that’s good advice but we could have figured it out ourselves.’ By the end of the process, we were saying, ‘Wow, absolutely worth it!’” For details, see my post How to Get a Residency Visa Without Losing Your Mind.  Rich in 2015, with a backpack full of documents on his way to Plaza de España's Foreigner's Office where our residency visas are processed. Make sure your passport’s good for at least six months. Allow plenty of time for renewing. Review your finances and work situation. Planning to work online? Organize everything in advance; learn how and why in my post Is Remote Working More Fun Overseas? Hoping to work locally? Check out options on job sites such as GoOverseas. Living on your savings? Be realistic about how long your money will last. Your new home may be cheaper, but it’s not free. Set up an international bank account. I use Wise, a London-based financial technology company specializing in international money transfers. Keep your old account for online bill paying. Opening an account in your new home might involve surprising complications; see my post Five Things I’ve Learned About Moving Abroad. Make arrangements for your home and pets. Don’t sell up until you’re comfortably ensconced in your new life. Find a renter or hire a house/pet sitter.  Deb's niece Allie rented their house and fell in love with their dog, Django. Research medical insurance. Medicare won’t cover you abroad, and you may not qualify for the national health service. Find out the reimbursement policy of your existing insurer. Need more? Sanitas is popular with expats worldwide. Make sure you’re covered! Get medical records, renew prescriptions, discuss vaccines. Research health resources as discussed in my post In a Medical Emergency Abroad, Where Do You Go? Update your Covid vaccine and find out if other vaccines or meds are recommended for your destination. Visit the CDC Traveler’s Health page; get a second opinion from the UK’s National Health Service. “Go see your doctor shortly before you go,” Deb advised. “Make sure your prescriptions won’t expire.”  In Spain, if you have a copy of a valid prescription or the medicine's container, pharmacies can often dispense medications that require a prescription in the US. Arrange mail forwarding. The US Post Office only pauses mail up to 30 days for free but now offers a Premium Forwarding Service for a fee. Adapt your phone or get another. You’ll want an unlocked phone with e-sim cards and an international plan. Register with the US Embassy. The Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) enables consular agents to update you about health and security concerns. Lease before you buy. Study neighborhoods, prices, and tax implications before you even think about committing to any form of real estate. Get set up to watch US TV. I use Express VPN to access entertainment in my own language. Bring a few small things that remind you of home. Don’t ship cars, furniture, or appliances, but photos and mementos will make your new place feel cozier. Once you’re sure, ignore the naysayers. “When setting out on a journey,” said the poet Rumi, “do not seek advice from those who have never left home.” As the gag gifts below suggest, sometimes your plucky decision may inspire jealousy and passive-aggression in others. “So what was your goal in moving to Spain for a year?” I asked my brother. “Our goal was to travel around Europe and see if there was some place that we would ever consider living permanently.” “And did you accomplish that?” I asked, and we all laughed. Because no, of course they didn’t. Five weeks after they arrived in Seville, Covid hit and the world went into lockdown. Which just goes to show that you can never prepare for every possibility. But they made the most of their year abroad anyway, touring Spain and Portugal when lockdown loosened, creating vivid memories of a remarkable moment in world history. And isn’t that really why we move abroad — to plunge into unexpected adventures and to experience, as Anthony Bourdain put it, “the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown”?  The final item on your move abroad checklist: When it's all over, kick back and enjoy yourself, like my friend Joel and his cat, shown here on their deck in a Greek village. WANT TO KNOW MORE? For easy reference, I've compiled a list of the links included in this story. Find those links here. THE AMIGOS PROJECT This post is part of my ongoing exploration of how living and traveling abroad can enrich our lives and help us avoid the isolation that's become a global epidemic. See all my Amigos Project posts here. DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] SUBSCRIBED BUT NOT GETTING POSTS? Check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. If you still can't find it, please let me know. TRYING TO POST A COMMENT BUT NOT SEEING IT? For a short while, my efforts to reduce the flood of spam on this blog resulted in making it harder to post comments. I think it's fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please let me know. [email protected] FOR FURTHER READING My upcoming book on San Francisco My bestselling travel memoirs & guides Cozy Places to Eat in Seville GOING SOMEWHERE? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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I'm an American travel writer dividing my time between Seville, Spain, and California. I travel the world seeking eccentric people, quirky places, and outrageously delicious food so I can have the fun of writing about them here.
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