The other day I was shit on by a gecko. I was sitting with a friend at a Vietnamese pizza place, eating pizza that tasted very little like real pizza, and a suddenly a little turd blossomed on the crook of my elbow, like a hairless, slightly watery black mole that had appeared on my arm in one second flat.

Observing this, my Vietnamese friend tried to convince me it was a happy event. “That’s good luck,” she said.

“Sure, it is,” I replied. “For you. You weren’t just shit on.”

To be honest, I didn’t actually mind that much. It didn’t land in the pizza – not that I would have noticed. And, fortunately, it was a one-wiper.

Geckos are ubiquitous in Southeast Asia. They’re as common as South Carolina palmetto bugs, but less disgusting. Like their bigger cousins the garden lizards, they pretty much ignore you until you get within grabbing distance. Then they disappear in a frantic graygreen blur. They seem to pop in and out of existence like tiny illusionists. One moment they’re there, the next they’re not.

They’re also more playful than bugs, if you can call a dozen of them chasing each other around the sun-smacked walls of a café ‘playing.’ What looks to me like frivolty might actually be a life-and-death battle royale for mating rights or territory. Or a complex traffic control system in which they’re calculating critical pooping trajectories. Meanwhile, the big-brained primates below them are patronizingly attributing all this activity to random luck.

Once, in a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia, as I lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling, I counted thirteen geckos on the walls of my room. I didn’t realize there were that many until I spotted several and decided to do a full inventory. And who knows how many were hiding behind cabinets, curtains, and framed, slightly crooked paintings of the Angkor Temples at sunset.

That’s a lot of little reptiles to be sharing a room with.

I found that these guests didn’t unsettle me the way thirteen of some other creature on my walls might – rats, for example. Or cockroaches, or spiders, or even houseflies. Thirteen tiny snakes in my room and I’d have been looking for another guesthouse in a pounding heartbeat. But for some reason I was perfectly ambivalent about sharing my sleeping quarters with a baker’s dozen or more of Hemidactylus frenatus.

A superstitious person might have found some dark meaning in the number thirteen. Not being superstitious, I didn’t have to worry about that. “There’s no such thing as a black cat,” somebody suggested to me the other day, in a line that I loved, “only cat-shaped holes in the universe.” I’ve never been much of a believer in luck, or its supernatural cousins fate and destiny. What I believe, what I know for fact, is that a few billion years of evolutionary biology as both predators and prey have made our brains predisposed to attribute anthropomorphic forces to random, undirected events. It’s perfectly natural. But that’s all it is.

It’s not that I haven’t considered the more tempting alternative. But if God has a plan for everyone, how does He choose? How does He select who’s rescued at sea and who contracts ebola and dies in bloody agony? Or who becomes a Hollywood celebrity and whose Cambodian child is tortured to death in front of her parents by Khmer Rouge prison guards because her father is a teacher?

Maybe He has their souls draw straws. Random chance. It sucks to be an unfortunate soul, I guess.

Of course, there will always be people in the world who think it’s good luck to get shit on.

We all think like geckos some of the time. I know I do. The oldest parts of our brains are the parts we share with reptiles: the ancient, atavistic regions that are at the wheel of our central nervous systems and our behavior at its most primitive: aggression, reproduction, self-preservation.

These regions lie darkly at our brain’s center like a pit in a peach, deep beneath the fresh-off-the-showroom-floor thinking machine we know as the cerebral cortex, below even the relatively newfangled amygdala and hippocampus, wherein lie the levers for fear, anger, memory, and identity. They develop before any other part when we’re in the womb, and they predate all other gray matter in the fossil record.

Here, in the shadow-filled basement of your brain, that most primeval part of you still sends out reconnaissances – chemical emissaries speeding toward the hinterlands of limbic and neocortical borders like winged messengers, bearing dispatches from your brute past. Eat! Run! Fight! Fuck! Don’t forget to breath!

Down at the very bottom, our reptilian brains are the uncharted zones from which dreams bubble up and nightmares stalk. Here, we all chase each other around walls.

*

One Saturday night shortly after I arrived in Saigon, I found myself with a small group of friends in a local bar popular with the young backpacker crowd – not the sort of place I’d normally hang out, but they served beer, and there were no signs of a drunken brawl breaking out near me in the immediate future, so I stuck around. Pretty quickly I noticed a girl looking at me. She was sitting at the bar, alone and lovely, sending me postcards with her eyes: wish you were here.

Topped off with liquid courage, I walked over and took a seat next to her at the bar. Close-up, she was even more striking. Half-lidded, gently slanting eyes with lashes like wet palm fronds, a tiny faux dimond peeping from one side of a button nose brushed with freckles the color of warm milktea. A tiny mole bobbed in the ocean of her nape like a lost soul, caught in the perilous cross-currents of her bosom and her throat. She smiled shyly with that rarest of Southeast Asian gifts – perfect teeth – and the room lit up.

I can’t remember her name, but she was a hooker. I realized this about one minute after I’d taken a seat, which was about 60 seconds longer than it should have taken me. Beautiful girl, very well-dressed, speaks good English, sitting alone late at night in a bar full of lonely young tourists: in what world could this girl not be on the clock?

We talked for about ten minutes, but my interest nose dived after minute one. Seeing this, she made to intercept it.

“You live near this?”

“No,” I said. “I live in District 7. Long way.”

“Not too far. We go there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks, though.”

She frowned. “You want go hotel room with me?”

“No,” I said, standing up. “You’re very pretty. I have to go.”

“We can only for one hour, if you wish,” she said. “Very nice. You like.”

Vietnam lacks much of the basic social infrastructure and capital assets of more developed nations, but one area where this country is fully invested is in its prostitute resources. There’s no shortage here of what expats euphemistically call ‘working girls’ to save themselves the embarrassment of having to consort with whores.

I’ve never been very good at sex without affection, and any small capacity for it I may once have had has vanished altogether in my middle adulthood. I also have zero tolerance for phony and feigned attention from other people, which is what these girls specialize in. Taken together, these qualities make me a poor target for the prostitutes in Vietnam, who are numerous enough to be able to populate a small country and set up a decent government, if they ever got together and did something about it.

Walk into most any club in Ho Chi Minh City frequented by tourists or expat foreigners, and the first thing you’re likely to notice is that you are a Star Attraction among the ladies, for whom Western = rich, caring nothing for the niggling distinctions we foreigners assign to levels of wealth or its lack. The next thing you’re sure to pick up on is that almost any given one of them wants to leave the club for your house or a hotel within minutes of meeting you. This can be heady stuff for a guy looking for an excuse to believe that he’s Special.

These are attractive women. Very attractive. They look like the same kind of girls you see at stylish, cosmopolitan nightclubs anywhere in the developed world: sleek as gazelles, hard-eyed, soft-bodied, purposeful, and dangerous, like sharp things swaddled in velvet. And they speak excellent English, at least compared to your Vietnamese.

The typical lizard brain is no match for weapons of this caliber. With their practiced hands they can slip right through the locked doors of your frontal lobe, knocking down traffic cones and pushing past the police tape at your limbic regions to lay a perfectly manicured finger right on the shuddering center of your most primitive defenses.

Yet just as, in our American pseudo-realities, there are gradients of western wealth, and many of us are aware of not even being able to see the lowest rung, so too are there gradients of interest in it here among women. There is the short-term interest, which can be lucrative in a hurry, underwriting stylish outfits and manicures and perfect teeth. But for at least as many, possibly more, there is the longer-term interest.

In the U.S., the American dream inspires millions of people to work themselves numb in the entrepreneurial ideal that anyone, no matter how humble or poor, can become a cigar-smoking, Mercedes-driving, suburban-home-owning millionaire. In Vietnam, achieving the American dream means marrying an American.

There’s a girl who works in the lobby of a hotel near where I live. The lobby also has a chain coffee shop with wifi and a small supermarket in it, so I’m in there a few times a week. I’m nothing special to look at: middle aged, receding hair, invisibly thin blond eyebrows, bags starting to form under my eyes. But when I started going to this coffee shop, every time I walked through the lobby this girl began pulling faces as if the video crew from Fashion TV had just walked in. It took me a while to realize this was for my benefit, because it’s been quite a few years since I could motivate that kind of activity, and even then it was as rare as a planetary transverse of the sun.

We became friends. Her name is Hai. She’s 22 years old, and she wears the long, flowing traditional Vietnamese tunic called an ao dai for ten hours a day, seven days a week, in the lobby of the hotel, escorting visitors to the elevator behind her. Hai can only speak a few words of English, and she doesn’t have a phone of her own, but she asked for my cell number anyway, scrawling it onto the back of her hand like a prayer inked in Henna.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a cryptic text message on my cellphone from one or another number I don’t recognize.

“You ok? Today you go to world 11am you me coffe ok? Hai.”

If I’m free, I’ll go to the coffee shop and Hai and I will sit awkwardly and fumble with our coffee and steal glances at each other like schoolkids, and I’ll crack bad jokes in English that she doesn’t understand, but she’ll smile anyway.

It’s a kind of courtship, I suppose.

If I’m not free, there’s no point in replying to the text message, because whoever the owner of the phone she borrowed is, he or she generally ignores any message I send, as if they have no idea someone had borrowed their phone. For all I know, Hai sneaks a complete stranger’s phone out of her pocketbook while they’re all standing at the elevator and dashes off a text message to me before slipping it back home as the doors open. She’s never offered an explanation, and she doesn’t speak enough English to understand me when I ask her about it anyway.

But one time, someone did reply. I’d received a garbled text message from Hai, whose broken English encryption I couldn’t crack, no matter how many times I read it. An hour so so later I replied with a quick message asking for more detail. I received a quick response.

“I do not know you.what you name?why are you know number telephone of me?”

I wrote back. “I replied to a message sent to me from this number. Did Hai use your phone to send me the message?”

The answer was fast and, it seemed, furious.“Dua vay thoi.ban hoc gioi tieng anh qua m kohieu.ban ko noi ten m ko noi chuyen dau!”

Whatever that meant, I decided to cut my losses.

“I don’t understand Vietnamese,” I wrote. “Only English. Sorry for bothering you.”

I got a reply immediately. “Where are you from? Im really sorry.I hope to understand to me.”

“I’m American,” I replied. “It’s ok, don’t worry about it.”

Almost as soon as I’d hit send, another reply arrived. “What are you doing?How do you do? How long have you been vietnames? Can I make friends with you? I was born vietnam.I am poor so I have to do part-time job in restaurant hotel. Did you have lunch?are you feel about people vietnam?do you marry?”

What human heart lay behind those words? Chasing something, anything, across the walls of her life. Blind, heedless, hopeful. Before I was even finished reading it, another text pinged my phone.

“I am name Loan and you?do you think about girl vietnam?do you teach the school?do you love someone?“

*

If you ever manage to catch a gecko, you have to take care with it. One of the most interesting things about them is that if they’re in a tight spot with a predator hoping to make a meal of them, they can drop part of their tail and scramble away while the tail continues flailing about, flopping madly as its owner watches from a safe, secret hideway. Eventually, after a long time, the tail grows back.

But it’s always shorter than it was to begin with.

My mom was a lovely women, but she had a terrible hangup about having her picture taken. You could trick her into busting out a smile for a camera, but only if you snuck up on her and gave her no chance to think about it. This was a person with roughly the spontaneity of a philodendron.

Yet in most photos of my mother, she’s cracking a funny face. This was rarely deliberate. Her discomfort with photographs stemmed from the fact that she was afflicted with a genetic disorder known as unphotogenecity. It’s a common affliction that causes otherwise perfectly attractive, even beautiful, people to take horrible, ghastly photographs. In picture after picture, my mother has got her eyes closed, or she’s peering off-camera with a confused look on her face, or she’s in the middle of blinking and chewing with her mouth open at the same time. In person, my mother turned heads at the supermarket or the nearby bar and boat landing that qualified as a yacht club on James Island until well into her fifties. But in photos, she often looks like a cast extra from an after-school special about mentally disabled kids – the one where you find out the kid’s mom is a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, too, but she’s still a good mom, goddammit.

I can personally attest to the fact that this disorder is an inherited one, as can, I suspect, my sisters. The only person in my family who ever managed to take a photo that was worth a damn is my father, who is, ironically, the one person among us who cares the least about his appearance. Isn’t that always the way? The greatest gifts are wasted on those to whom they mean the least.

My mother also had this infuriating habit of pretending not to know the answers to questions her children asked her, instead sending the querulous child – who meanwhile while was mentally punching him- or herself repeatedly in the face – to the bookshelves in the living room. There, we knew, with a certainty born of innumerable trips past, we could find all 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia, bought from Time Life Books at a special discount rate through Reader’s Digest, a subscription my mother had picked up at a bargain-basement rate by mailing in the proof-of-purchase labels from 12 cases of Tab with a hand-written letter about how much weight she’d lost drinking a diet soda product that tastes like the carbonated tears of unhappy, chronically obese people.

To us kids, this always seemed like a cop out. It would be a simple enough question, often just an offhand musing-out-loud during family TV hour: How did Klinger manage to get all those snazzy dresses when the rest of the M*A*S*H unit couldn’t even get a regular supply of antibiotics and Hawkeye had to brew his own booze? Next thing you knew, the TV was turned off and the petitioner was being directed to the hated Encyclopedia, volume K-L, to enlighten the family with a 20-minute dissertation on the Korean War. It got to where my sisters and I were afraid to ask any kind of question at all. We didn’t really care whether John-Boy could have left Walton Mountain and become a WWII fighter pilot with prescription eyeglasses. But my mother could see the skepticism brimming beneath our adolescent eyes, and some unlucky sap would be sent to the WBE for a riveting discussion of Charlottesville, VA during the Great Depression.

My mother died eleven years ago today. My father was a huge influence on me, as fathers always will be. It’s him I have to thank for being such a sentimentalist, and also for being a writer who struggles daily with a weakness for rationality. But it was my mother who shaped my character – the singular lens through which I view the experience of life. I miss her as deeply as I would miss, if it were possible, myself. She breathed in life like oxygen, and sometimes she breathed too deeply. She allowed herself to be as battered by the world as she was by her own fears of it. Yet she was also a fearless student of experience. Her own mother died when she was 13 in a car accident, and she ran away from home four years later, rather than submit to a stepmother. She saw, and imagined, a side of the world that only the rarest, luckiest among us catch glimpses of, and she did her best to share that vision with her children. At my very best moments of observation, I have but a fraction of her gift for seeing the spark of truth in the artificial, the wonder of perfection in the mundane, and the majesty in the small, the unseen, and the overlooked.

The other day I ran across a short essay I wrote about my mother shortly after she died. It was never published, which was probably for the best. But this seemed like a good time to pull it out, dust it off, and lay it down on the table again for a look. She couldn’t take a picture if you gave her money. But pictures are for fools without memory or imagination.

I love you, mom.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the worst situations often have a weird tendency to bring about wonderful things.

This has been on my mind because it was four years ago this week that my mother died. It wasn’t a sudden death, which was both a blessing and a tragedy. It was one of those difficult, extended deaths that one hears about-worse than some, but also easier than many, I imagine. No matter how you look at it, though, it was the most difficult thing I or anyone in my immediate family had ever endured. To say nothing of her.

When she was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996, my mother, whose name was Carmen, was given only a few months to live. She’d been in Louisiana for several months caring for her own parents, who were both quite ill with heart disease, and she had ignored the signs that something was wrong with her own body until she found herself in the emergency room, panic-stricken, alone, her insides a wreck. When she arrived at the airport in Charleston a week later, my father, my two younger sisters, and I were waiting for her.

It was the first time for us together as a family for many months: not only had my mother been in Louisiana for almost a year, but she and my father had been estranged for several months prior to that. The reasons were many and complex, and we children were the least likely of anyone to be capable of understanding them. But it was every bit as real as her sickness, and we hated both the cancer and the division between my parents with the same bitter lack of comprehension.

She emerged from the gate red-eyed and weak, her abdomen distended with ascites as if she were eight months pregnant. She cried at seeing us, and we cried at seeing her cry and at the fear we all felt. We huddled together for a little while, a little ball of family, crying together, drawing strength from each other and trying to pass it on in equal measure. But the terror crept in among us, bubbling up in that group hug as if our closeness was all the permission it needed.

“I’m going to die,” she cried into my and my sisters ears necks. “I don’t want to die.”

“Don’t be silly, mom,” we cried back. “You’re not going to die. You’re just scared, and that’s okay.”

Yet inside, we all suspected she was right. The doctors in Louisiana had been clear: advanced ovarian cancer, not yet metastasized but almost certain to do so without extraordinary luck.

But what could we say?

Even after my mother was admitted to the hospital and her doctors told us the cancer was still treatable, she knew her chances were slim. But she grasped at that sliver of hope with the astonishing strength that only nearly hopeless people can muster. And she did it with such grace, such consummate eloquence. I lose my breath thinking what that must have cost her.

But my mother was a rock, unwavering in her conviction that she could beat the thing that was killing her if she wanted to badly enough, unwilling to give in to the numbing fear that would cause most ordinary people to withdraw into themselves like beaten animals, people who remain uncaring and unaware that the overwhelming beauty of the world and the people in it persists, even if they themselves do not. My mother poured her heart into her friends and children, and we spent as much time with her as we could, which was, for my part at least, hopelessly inadequate.

She was living in an apartment, which my sister shared with her many nights. Still, she kept my father at a distance. Sadness leaked out of her in silent waves when we spoke of him, but she was unrelenting.

The doctors finally gave up on the chemotherapy. It was doing her about as much good as a warm glass of gasoline each morning, noon and night, and it was a lot less pleasant. She didn’t despair but rather continued to hope that an alternative therapy might be found. My father spent the majority of his waking time calling physician friends, researching new or untried therapies on the internet, sorting through the thousands of snake oil peddlers and legitimate medical programs across the country, none of which would ultimately prove a salvation in any sense but in the hope that one might be. But we prayed, and my mother prayed, and my father prayed perhaps hardest of all.

In August 1997, my father announced that he and my mother were traveling to Houston to participate in an experimental procedure at a hospital there.

“It’s a little unconventional,” he told me, “but there’s a real chance it could do the trick.”

Somehow, I allowed myself to be persuaded that this was not a fantastic exaggeration. My sisters both knew the truth, of course: experimental procedures exist only for those who have exhausted every other possible medical recourse. They are the straws at which refugees of modern medical science clutch in their last, desperate hopes.

Yet I was too weak not to believe him. I knew I’d been neglecting my mother in recent months, unwilling to believe she could possibly die, afraid to confront the anger that festered in her toward my father, who, in her less lucid moments, she accused of causing the cancer. I had buried myself in work, pretending that I was too busy to make time for her,

About a week before she died, my mother was lying in bed, so weak she could hardly speak or even turn her head to look at us. Her eyes were sunken deep into her face like flickering bruises, her head hairless but for a few stray wisps, her skin colorless and wan. She wore a mask that fed her oxygen in a regular whish whish of air gurgling through humidifying water beside the bed.

It was an exceptionally good moment for her; she was sitting upright in the bed and smiling, looking around at us as if seeing us for the very first time, a surprised, slightly entranced smile playing across her face. She stared at my sisters and I with wide open eyes, soaking up the glory and the unspeakable magnificence of these things she had created, and she smiled with the happiness of all that. And we all felt it. I will never forget that look for the rest of my life. At that moment, she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

My father was there with us, standing beside her, holding her hand tightly. As he had been for weeks. He suddenly leaned down, whispered something secret to her, and pulled the mask slightly aside so he could give her a quick, reassuring kiss. Somehow, my mother managed to raise her hand, tremulously, and place it on the back of his head, pulling his face down to hers, where she kissed him for what seemed like an eternity.

And it was.”

There’s a game foreigners visiting Vietnam like to play, a parlor diversion that doubles as an intellectual and moral exercise. It’s called “How Can I Justify Not Giving This Person Any of My Money?”

A casual listener can hear any number of people engaged in this game at tourist-packed corner cafés in Saigon on a typical evening, when the street hawkers and hucksters are out in force. It starts when a Vietnamese person of any age approaches a foreigner who is otherwise busily engaged – in sitting down, for example. The solicitor could be a toothless local man carrying a case full of remarkably inexpensive name-brand timepieces. Or maybe it’s one of the legions of booksellers who lug around five-foot-high piles of haphazardly photocopied paperbacks. The game’s early stages involve players ignoring the vendor and his or her repeated entreaties to buy, until said vendor moves move on to the next table, where the ritual begins anew. One player then sighs, turns to another and utters the game’s official opening line: “I’d love to help every one of them, but…”. This is the cue for a companion, or any nearby English speaker, to reply with, “But you just can’t.” Thus the game begins.

The object, of course, is for you and the other players to successfully rationalize brushing off the endless parade of Vietnamese men, women, and children who approach you with goods or services in the hope that you will exchange money for those things, usually much more money than you think they’re worth. Extra points are awarded for using the phrase “At least they’re working” and/or making a veiled – or not veiled, whichever – reference to supposed abusers of federal welfare programs “back home.” Points also are given for comparisons to grifters, swindlers, and idlers in one’s home country. Extra credit is awarded for the exchange of knowing glances if, while playing, you’re approached by someone selling something, especially if they’re under the age of five.

In the tourist-choked District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City, street vendors – and, more rarely, handout seekers – operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They zero in on foreigners like guided missiles, programmed not to take no for an answer, or at least to pretend not to understand the meaning of the word in English, until the target’s body language has taken on the aspect of a cornered dog being force-fed a bowl of steamed beets.

Their tactics are creative, visceral, and brutally effective. A sweet-faced youth of perhaps four, clutching a few packs of chewing gum, might wander up to you where you sit, place one hand up on your knee, and look at you with deep, soulful eyes, eyes that couldn’t possibly belong to an ordinary four-year-old. “Please, mister,” she’ll say. “You buy gum.” This appeal is difficult if not impossible for any semi-sentient, warm-blooded mammal to resist, especially when one takes into account the asking price, which in most developed countries is the kind of money you wouldn’t bother picking up off the street if you noticed it lying there.

Ironically, an odd characteristic of Vietnamese currency makes parting with such a pathetic sum much more difficult for the average tourist. The currency in Vietnam is the dong, a single one of which is worth roughly as much as a hundredth of a paper clip or, if you prefer, a dozen or so of the little sprinkles that go on Christmas cookies. In other words, one dong by itself is pretty much worthless. Yet the Vietnamese insist on expressing sums of money this way, which has the practical result of making them sound like much bigger amounts than they really are.

A cup of coffee, for example, might be priced at VD 13,500. Thirteen thousand and five hundred?, you think to yourself, scrambling for a calculator. That’s highway robbery! Or maybe you’re presented with the bill after an average meal for two at a low-key Vietnamese restaurant. A hundred and twelve thousand dong?! We’re gonna have to cut this vacation short, if things continue this way. The western brain has difficulty dealing with such big figures, forgetting that a thousand dong is considerably less than a dime, therefore failing to grasp that the coffee clocks in around .80 cents and the meal sets its two owners back a total of about $7.

I’ve often thought that the Vietnamese government would do itself a lot of favors if it retired the dong in favor of a more muscular unit of currency – say, the kilodong. Or better yet, the millidong. It’s got a nice metric ambiance about it, and it’s worth ten thousand of the other kind, bringing it into closer parity with western currencies. A typical dinner for two would cost MD 11.20 under my plan, and that coffee’s now MD 1.30. This puts the perceived value of the millidong (but, crucially, not the real value) somewhere between the dollar and the Euro. Americans would feel just as inferior visiting Vietnam as they do in France, and Europeans might be a little less inclined to throw around those sneering, post-colonial attitudes. Everybody would take Vietnam a little more seriously, if you ask me.

But until that happens, you’ve still got to deal with a puppy-dog-eyed Kewpie doll barely out of diapers asking you for several thousand somethings, presumably so that she can someday go to school and avoid a life of drug-addicted prostitution.

And she’s only the barest tip of the iceberg. The Vietnamese know the value of youth all too well. Around 9pm each evening, the streets swell with an army of mothers who carry sleeping newborns and infants around in the crook of one arm or draped over a shoulder while walking from cafe to cafe. In their free hand, they carry small, individually wrapped packs of facial tissues for sale. Maybe you’ve got the stones to send a four-year-old packing, but are you man enough to show the door to a mother-and-child team who look like they stepped out of a History Channel documentary on Dustbowl-Era Oklahoma?

The combined mass of street vendors, xé ȏm drivers, and pleading restaurant touts make negotiating the sidewalk on De Tham or Buy Vien streets as mentally hazardous as running a gantlet of pitchforks and shovels. The sheer salesmanship on display would bring the canniest used car dealer to his knees.

“Hello friend!” “Hello boss!” “Hello chief!” “Mister you help me please? I sell nothing all day.” “You need motorbike?” “You buy t-shirt? Give you good price, very cheap.” “You want DVD? All new release.” “You like fruit? You buy please. They so heavy.” “You need wallet? Real leather. How about Vietnam postcard? Twenty postcard one dollar.”

Watches and backscratchers, bracelets, rings and keychains. Toothbrushes, nail clippers, shampoo and Q-tips. English-language newspapers and magazines, cologne, fans, cigarettes and lighters. Pirated anything and everything.

Eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. Stepping into a cafe or restaurant is no guarantee of a reprieve. Vendors patrolling the street walk right into open-air restaurants, stopping at every table to see if you wish to become the owner of a bobble-headed rubber horse or a new pair of sunglasses to accompany the ones you’re already wearing. Cafe owners are curiously unperturbed by this, rarely giving the hawkers so much as a glance – simply stepping around them to deliver food to the table.

Not everyone is selling hardware. Beggars, often disfigured, are free to hobble just about anywhere they like – into stores and through restaurants, stopping often to display gimp arms, hunchbacks, and stumps, hat held between your nose and a meal you were formerly planning to enjoy.

I’m in awe of two Cambodian kids, brothers, who work De Tham Street downtown, a.k.a. backpacker central. They’re performers of the old-school style, despite being approximately 6 and 8 years old. Dressed in garish, handmade costumes at once too big and too small, they specialize in the classic sideshow arts: fire-breathing, snake-swallowing, hot-coal-eating, and the like. After a typical ten-minute sidewalk performance, they walk through the seated cafe crowd soliciting tips. I’m always tempted to give them a big bill, something special for the effort, but I’m worried one of them will try to staple it to his forehead for an encore.

Like most of this workforce, these boys are smart. A friend used to dismiss them as “hacks,” claiming the snakes were rubber fakes. I always felt this was a little harsh. Personally, I can’t see much difference between the difficulty levels of threading a long green plastic piece of rubber down your throat and doing so with a similarly-shaped live reptile; I’m impressed and disgusted either way. But these snakes are real, which my friend discovered to his dismay one night when he was a little too loud in his denunciation and suddenly found one draped around his neck, dripping in saliva and heading down his shirtfront.

I tend to like the kids best, especially when they’re selling something, because they’re so easily distracted from their mission. There’s a little girl of about five who has the De Tham Street cafe my friend owns on her circuit every night starting around 8pm. I don’t know her name; she’s still got a lot of baby fat on her, so she walks with a little bit of a waddle. It’s pretty clear she’s getting enough to eat. The only English she knows is “Buy gum?”, but I always like to have a little fun with her. Like all the working kids her age, she’s a great actor. She shuffles/waddles up to you and fixes you with a look that bespeaks a life of deprivation, tedium, hopelessness and hunger – although as I’ve said, this last one is a little hard to believe. The overall effect is a portrayal of despair that Brando could have admired.

It’s good, but it’s no match for the tickle monster. One finger in the ribs and her technique falls to pieces. She giggles and shrieks, squirming in delight, and then an instant later she’s back in character, looking even more serious because she’s on the clock and she’s got a job to do, and tickling’s not in the rulebook. But she’s also easily distracted by typical childhood pleasures. My cheap cellphone has a game on it called “Rat Xenia” that’s as dull as any videogame I ever saw. In it, squiggly, pixelated blobs that are evidently supposed to be rats scamper across the screen. Your job is to steer them, using four phone buttons, toward pixelated traps that appear randomly on the screen. It’s electronic boredom incarnate, but if she’s giving me the eyes of despair and keeping just out of tickle reach, I’ll hold up my phone for her. In a moment she’ll be leaning against me, clicking hypnotically, rapt with her mission of guiding rats to their dooms.

There are also the fruit ladies, or as I like to call them, the basket cases. Usually older women, this gang carries across their shoulders a two-meter wooden plank, notched at each end, from which hang baskets piled high with fruit – rambutans, mangoes, pineapples, local bananas, exotic dragon fruit, coconuts ready to be turned into boat drinks with one deft slice of a razor-sharp machete, and other bewildering varietals I can’t even begin to name. The women keep fairly busy with the locals, for whom they’re essentially mobile produce sections. But tourists are too easy a mark to pass up. A common tactic is for these women, who have calves of steel, to approach a foreigner and moan miserably about how weighty the basket is: “You buy please. So heavy.” Another bit of genius is to ask the target if he or she would like to try carrying the baskets. This works well on new arrivals, still in thrall to a place that has never seen a Starbucks. Having discovered for themselves just how heavy the baskets are, it’s that much harder not to buy something from her after they’ve had their fun and taken their pictures. As you might imagine, this one rarely works twice.

Foreigners sometimes try to draw a distinction between these workers and those who exclusively target tourists, supposing that somehow one is more “legitimate” than the other. But that doesn’t make sense to me. They’re all just trying to earn a living any way they can. That little girl’s act is perhaps a little more transparent, but not fundamentally different from the one put on for you by a realtor or an investment broker or anyone who’s ever worked in advertising.

Even the handicapped keep busy here. While many profoundly disabled persons do resort to begging, others ride around in three-wheeled carts powered with a vertical hand crank that sits in the area between what would have been their legs. One morning a few months ago in Hoi An, while I sipped a cup of coffee at a cafe with a view of the river, I watched a gentleman pump toward me in one of these contraptions, stopping just in front of the cafe, which was set a few steps above the street to prevent it from being inundated when the river flooded. He gummed a huge smile at me and waved an English-language Vietnamese magazine over his head, something I’d be no more likely to buy than I would a copy of Grit. I shook my head and found an invisible object a hundred yards away with which I suddenly became intensely preoccupied. Not to be deterred, the man threw himself out of the cart with a calculated thud and began dragging himself up the steps toward me, in the manner of a cat who’s just been hit by a speeding car and is returning home to die.

“No thanks!” I said, panicking. “Really, I’m fine! I’m allergic to ink, that’s all!” I tried to catch the eye of the cafe owner for a little help, but he was stepping over the man’s torso on his way to another table with a plate of toast.

It’s a challenge saying no to these people, I tell you. Vietnam is developing fast, but not so fast that it’s prepared to legislate disability benefits – or social security benefits, or unemployment benefits, or subsidized housing, or Medicaid, or homeless shelters, or really any sort of social welfare program at all. You lose your job or your legs in Vietnam, you’d better start working on those fire-breathing and hot-coal-eating skills.

So it’s no wonder that relatively wealthy westerners on holiday here, accustomed to those kinds of entitlement systems, get flustered, questioning the merits of handing over their hard-earned money to what they see as a pack of grifters and street urchins. My advice is to keep a few millidong handy and be generous with it. A pack of gum here and there won’t break the bank. And you sure don’t want to end up with a spit-covered snake down your shirt.

I have a not-so-secret fondness for a subject that ordinary Americans tend to avoid talking about in public. This is not because they fear getting arrested or anything (although it’s happened) but because doing so too often results in an argument. One of the nastier results of the so-called culture wars is that what used to be a perfectly manageable list of topics best avoided in casual company – God and politics – has ballooned into an encyclopedia-sized catalog of unmentionables, mainly because one group (I’m not naming any names) decided to conflate the two original items on that list, after which all hell, so to speak, broke out. These days you can’t use the noun “choice” without somebody calling you names and threatening to pitch a drink in your face. And pity the fool who mentions Parkinson’s Disease at a cocktail party.

My not-so-secret fondness – actually fondness is too mild a term, but it falls short of flat-out obsession – may rank among the dorkier ones out there. Yet despite this, it’s also one of the most currently inflammatory: evolution.

It’s not the sort of subject you want to bring up on a first date or, say, in the dentist’s chair, attitudes being what they are these days. But this is not new. Darwin put off publishing “On the Origin of Species” for 20 years because he knew that once he did, what followed would be the cultural equivalent of a giant record needle scratch sound effect. And he was right. And that sound was followed by the din of all Christian humanity screaming at the top of their lungs.

Curiously, almost exactly 150 years later, theyʼre still screaming. Why this is, is a mystery to me. In 1859, you could understand the reaction. Here he was, overturning thousands of years of institutionalized belief and dogmatic conditioning. He was lucky not to have been burned alive, as he most certainly would have been just a few hundred years earlier. Galileo, who pulled pretty much the same surprise on this gang in 1610 with his notion that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, was forced by Inquisition thugs to take it all back, and even then he barely escaped with lifelong house arrest instead of the stake.

It took the Catholic church 382 years to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe Galileo had had a point (this was 23 years after the first moon landing). So maybe it’s not too surprising that so many Christians are still resisting Darwin’s genius. If the past is any measure, they’ll be throwing fits about evolution for another 233 years before finally coming around.

In the meantime, appalling numbers of people continue to pretend that the cornerstone of modern biology and the fundamental explanation for the staggering diversity of all past and present life on earth is nothing more than a conspiracy cooked up by scientists designed to separate people from their religion. Polls show that more than of Americans believe the world, mankind, and all creation came into being in a divine puff of smoke a few thousand years ago, and that none of the creatures in it, particularly us, have changed one iota since that moment. They attribute the entire fossil record to Noah’s flood, wave away radiometric dating as too complex to make sense, and explain vestigial limbs in whales as God’s idea of fooling around.

Many of them are convinced that in order to acknowledge the incontrovertible physical evidence of evolution in the fossil record and in the DNA of all creatures (and it is incontrovertible), you also have to become a card-carrying atheist. But that’s just plain silly. Many of the the world’s most intelligent, eloquent spokesmen for evolution have mused on how the wonder of Darwin’s revelation, in its sublime beauty and elegance, makes them more likely to believe in a Creator, not less. And I ask you: how much more amazing is a God who set into motion such a remarkable process than one who merely snapped his fingers and called it a day? Even the Catholic church, that paragon of scientific enlightenment, recently noted for the record that as far as it’s concerned, Genesis and evolution are as compatible as milk and cookies.

The genius of evolution by natural selection lies not just in its simplicity but in its simple plausibility. It’s not difficult to grasp, at least not in its fundamentals. And when you do understand it, it makes perfect, beautiful, exquisite sense.

Yet deniers persist, even flourish. Ideology turns out to be much stronger than scientific evidence, at least when that evidence is twisted, suppressed, ignored, unseen, or willfully misinterpreted, as it is every day by people who feel their own ideologies are threatened by the fact of evolution. Part of the problem is that, the Pope’s copasetic attitude notwithstanding, lots of the more fundamentalist brand of Christians feel that learning anything at all about evolution would be like having dinner with the Devil. As far as they’re concerned, the less they know the better. As a result, there’s a frightening gulf of ignorance among people about just what evolution is and how it works.

Also, there’s the inconvenient issue of the Bible having its own version of how things got kicked off, a version literalists tend to take, well, literally. If the Bible contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence and the world’s entire scientific community, to them that can only mean the scientists are either all wrong or all lying.

“Evolution is only a theory,” they like to say say. Well, sure, but in scientific terms so is Relativity. E = MC² = “theory.” That’s the way science works. Scientists are always open to the idea of somebody finding hard evidence that changes the whole ballgame, so they’re unwilling ever to sound too positive about anything. But you don’t hear Christians questioning the scientific validity of what will happen if a nuclear bomb is dropped on their head. That’s only because the Bible is strangely silent on the subjects of Relativity and quantum physics. If Genesis had suggested the sun was made of the fiery flatulence of heavenly angels, you can bet that today we’d be arguing over whether to teach astronomy in public schools. “Nuclear fusion is only a theory,” they’d say.

So I’m gratified beyond words when I see people standing up publicly for reason, common sense, and the willingness to actually use the mental faculties that we’ve been endowed with. One of my favorite of these people is Olivia Judson, the author, journalist, and evolutionary biologist who’s been writing a weekly column for The New York Times since January called The Wild Side.

One of the great things about Olivia is that she’s not preachy or didactic; her columns are usually about the wonder and the majesty and, yes, sometimes the mystery of the evolutionary process, from its business at the very bottom of biological systems, at the level of DNA, to its operation at the top, at the level of hungry crocodiles, intestinal parasites, blind salamanders and serenading humpback whales. But yesterday’s column was an exception, and a welcome one. In it, she argues for the critical importance of teaching evolution in schools, for having the courage to pit 3.8 billion years of irrefutable evidence against blind ideology and see which one emerges victorious. I’m pasting it below so you can read it (and please, for all our sakes, do) without clicking all the way over the The New York Times’ website. I hope they don’t mind.

My hometown friend Ida Becker is traveling the globe on a personal mission right now. She’s asking people everywhere she goes to tell her one thing they believe with all their heart. “With no criteria or requirements for participation,” she asks, beyond simply stating “something that particular person believes to be true.”

Ida’s a long way away at the moment, in Thailand, and she’s not likely to be in Vietnam for several more months. But I’ve thought about her challenge for a long time. And I’ve often thought that if I were asked to choose one thing that I believe in with my entire body, heart, and mind, it would be that evolution by natural selection is the single most marvelous, transcendent, influential, beautiful, paradigm-changing, life-affirming idea ever conceived by a human being. Bigger than fire, bigger than the wheel, bigger than sliced bread, Darwin’s revolutionary epiphany lifted humanity to an entirely new plane of intellectual and spiritual existence and, at long last, told us where we had come from. Evolution is the best and most important thought ever thought.

Yet as Judson and many others have observed, the field of evolutionary biology has made astonishing progress since that first light went on 149 years ago. In the intervening years, thousands of people have refined, elaborated upon, and transformed that most excellent of thoughts into an entire new realm of scientific inquiry. The understanding of evolution today has about as much in common with Charles Darwin’s original idea as an F-18 fighter jet has with the Wright brothers’ first flying machine.

Incidentally, you might ask where God fits into all this. The answer is, anywhere you like. Not least of the wonderful things about evolution is that it doesn’t require God – but it doesn’t preclude Him, either. And that’s fine with me.

******

Optimism in Evolution

By OLIVIA JUDSON

Published: August 12, 2008

LONDON

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America’s science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It’s discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught – indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes – for at least three reasons.

First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. The astonishing variety of nature, from the tree shrew that guzzles vast quantities of alcohol every night to the lichens that grow in the Antarctic wastes, cannot be probed and understood. Add evolution – and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions. All of a sudden patterns emerge everywhere, and apparently trivial details become interesting.

The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve – and fast. And I’m not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person. The impact we are having is much broader.

For instance, we are causing animals to evolve just by hunting them. The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago. Fishing for grayling in Norwegian lakes has caused a similar pattern in these fish. Human trophy hunting for bighorn rams has caused the population to evolve into one of smaller-horn rams. (All of which, incidentally, is in line with evolutionary predictions.)

Conversely, hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct.

Thus, a failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In short, evolution is far from being a remote and abstract subject. A failure to teach it may leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence – or indeed, evidence of any kind – has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. (This is not to suggest that science is never distorted by the ideological left; it sometimes is, and the results are no better.)

But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.

While I’m on the subject of motorbikes, I was musing recently that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve driven a car. Not in itself an earth-shattering piece of news, I know, but it’s one of those little things that you catch yourself missing every once in a while, along with such things as convenience store hot dogs, American football (to the rest of the world, “football” means only one thing, and the NFL doesn’t enter into it), un-subtitled Hollywood movies, and non-smoking sections.

That got me thinking that I’ve got an anniversary of sorts coming up – it was on August 14, almost one year ago, that I landed in Narita Airport in Tokyo and began doing whatever it is I’ve been doing with my life since I’ve been in Asia. It’s a pretty significant milestone. One whole year. That’s longer than some people spend in prison, or getting a master’s degree, or married. So I was thinking that I need to do something significant to acknowledge it. Not just throw a party or bake a cake or go to Bangkok and spend a memorable evening trying not to contract Hepatitis C, but something more lasting. (Yes, smartass, Hepatitis C would fit into the “lasting” category, but I’d prefer something I could share with my grandchildren, thanks very much.)

So I’ve almost convinced myself that I’m going to get a tattoo.

Yes, go ahead, make another Hepatatis crack. I’ll wait.

Got it out of your system? Good. And while you’re at it, ask yourself this: Is Hepatitis really something you want to joke about? I’d be knocking on wood if I were you.

Back to the tattoo. For starters, I don’t have any others. I was never really a tattoo kind of person. Back when I was a kid, they were the sure sign of somebody who was not to be messed with, someone who had probably been to prison, drove a loud motorcycle, ate glass shards with bourbon for breakfast, and looked for fights in which he could headbutt his opponent. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy. Then, later, when I was an adult and tattoos became trendy and ubiquitous … well, you can see the problem. Tattoos were trendy and ubiquitous. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy, either. So it just went on like this all of my life, with me never really regretting not getting a tattoo, never feeling like I was in desperate need of something that, when I was old, would look like there were melted crayons running down the folds of the skin on my back.

So were I to actually get one, it would be my first and, presumably, my only. I can’t really see one small tattoo becoming an addiction to ink or a gateway drug to multiple body piercings and suspending myself from hooks. On the other hand, I bet people who suspend themselves from hooks said the same thing once.

There’s also the issue of what kind of artwork I’d choose. Something traditional? Something “tribal”? My name translated into Asian characters? Could be risky. I heard from too many Japanese people who’d seen Americans walking around with magnificent kanji characters encircling their neck or bicep that translated as “TOILET DRINKER” or “PLAY MYSELF ALWAYS” or “BELLY BUTTON KING.”

And of course, joking aside, I really, really don’t want to catch a blood borne disease that will remain with me for probably as long as the tattoo. Here in Southeast Asia, hygiene is often a difficult concept for common individuals to grasp, to say nothing of restaurant workers. Extrapolating from this, I’m guessing medical-level sterility is an abstraction on a level with quantum electrodynamics.

The upshot is it’s still just an idea I’m toying with. Part of me hates the idea of joining the ranks of millions of brainless, attention-seeking fraternity dickheads, even if I’m not sporting “sleeves” and never, ever call it a “tat.” But I’ve got to do something to mark a year as a stranger in a strange land. One day, I want to be kicking back with my grandkids – or more likely, my sisters’ grandkids – take off my shirt, and watch them gape. “What’s that on your back, grandpa?” they’ll ask in hushed voices.

“What, that old thing?” I’ll ask, casually flexing my arms and watching their eyes pop. “That’s a memento of mine, a little something from when I was a young man and I spent a year in Asia.”

“Really?” they’ll say, agog. “What’s it say?”

“It says, ‘REMEMBER YOUR ANTIVIRAL DRUGS.’”

Looks like itchy-footed New York Times’ scribe Matt Gross, a.k.a. the Frugal Traveler, is kicking off his latest budget pilgrimage for the paper’s travel section, and it’s a biggie: a 12-week circuit of Europe, modeled on the age-old Grand Tour – the venerated solo trip around the contininent that young Englishmen and women of yore undertook as a kind of on-the-road finishing school. Basically it was a chance to get up to no good, sow their oats and poke fun at the locals, all in the name of rounding out the ol’ “education” on daddy’s credit. Some things never change.

Ah, the European summer. It puts me in mind of my own three-month Grand Tour long, long ago, when I was just out of college – fresh-faced, naïve, horny and idealistic, not necessarily in that order. This, of course, is in the distant prehistory of 1991. But some things never change.

It was my first trip outside of the U.S. I didn’t model it on any legendary historical precedent, but it was still pretty grand. Mine started at the beginning of June in Luxembourg. (What? Why Luxembourg? If you must know, IcelandAir offered rock-bottom European rates at the time, with a stopover in Reykjavík and a terminus in Europe’s least sexy city. Hey, it got me there. As I said, this was a while back.)

I put chilly, dreary Luxumbourg behind me as quick as I could and headed immediately for, well, Normandy, France. Not finding it any different from Luxumbourg in any material sense, I recalibrated my inner compass and made a beeline south, toward warmer climes and less prudish female beachgoers.

The next three three months were chock-a-block with your standard inventory of backpacker adventures: youth hostel lockouts, topless beaches in Portugal, stolen passports, overseas romances, topless beaches in France, a hike along the Cinque Terre, de rigeur museums in Florence and Rome (plus a stop in Spoleto, Italy), pastoral Swiss mountain scenes, a very blurry weekend in Amsterdam, Eurodisco fever, running out of money, having my altered Eurail Pass confiscated by eagle-eyed rail officials, and sleeping under the night sky atop a Paris Metro ticket station with a pair of pierced British lesbian hippies (maybe those last two are not in the standard inventory per se).

I saw London, I saw France, and I saw a cute FSU coed named Jenny Kissel’s underpants in Lagos, Portugal. (Actually, I didn’t see London.) All told, I traveled in a succession of third-class train compartments from France to Spain and Portugal, across to Austria and Switzerland, over the Alps to lurid, humid Italy and back up again through the bratwurst belt of Germany and Czekoslovakia (it was still just one country then), still further up into the Netherlands, on to Belgium, once again into Paris and, finally, to Luxumbourg again at the end of August. I was roughly two thousand 1991-era dollars poorer, but exponentially richer by pints of beer drunk, languages butchered, foreign women ogled, touristy sights seen, snapshots snapped (with actual film), borders crossed, hostels snuck into, kilometers logged, international horizons opened and exotic thoughts thunk.

I kept generally to the beaten path, but I also made a point of breaking from the well-trod tourist trail and striking out into the uncharted realms beyond the guidebooks’ smooth itineraries as often as possible. Here, I hoped each time, let there be monsters. Quite often, I found them, or anyway predators of a sort – an audatious, fearless pickpocket on a near empty bus in the middle of nowhere, Spain; another, even bolder larcenist who sliced the straps of six money belts and relieved their dozing owners of them following an evening at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich; and other, similar encounters.

But mostly I learned that the best way to see a place is to glance through the guidebook and then set it aside, letting your gut lead you where it will, following the invisible string that tugs at it. It doesn’t always yield the greatest number of famous sights notched, but it satisfies a more fundamental, limbic reason for why we travel. Even the most jaded, sunburned, souvenir-shlepping tourista feels this urge, though he may not recognize or acknowledge it.

When I returned from my 12 weeks in Europe, I was crushed to find that every single roll of film I’d taken was completely blank, every inch of it overexposed – ruined because an idiotic 22-year-old first-time traveler didn’t know how to properly load film into a 35mm camera. This mistake ate at me for years. Sure, I still had the journal I’d kept, and I glanced through it wistfully on occasion. But without the photos I’d taken, somehow it all seemed … irretrievable, lost forever to that fixed moment in time, that distant version of me.

Only long afterward did I realize what an excellent thing that is.

Incidentally, Jenny Kissel says hello.