The year is 2019. With the exception of a couple of brief, in-airport layovers while flying to or from South Africa with my head in the clouds and thoughts adrift, it has been a decade and a half since I committedly set foot on French soil. A small eternity. So when, casually brandishing the double-edged […]

Seated in the garden behind the Chamonix house, a glass in hand and dreamy eyes on the peaks above, I set my thoughts adrift and land in Côte d’Azur, long, long ago. Tucked against a small cape covered in towering pine trees and lapped at by the scintillant Mediterranean Sea, the flowery town of Antibes […]

That first night in Chamonix, we sleep blissfully and get up in Goldilocks fashion, not too early nor too late, preparing strong coffee with the provided stove-top espresso maker. Marie has smuggled a batch from Brooklyn, a special Beirut roast recommended by Gus at the Atlantic Ave Damascus Bread and Pastry Shop. It is even […]

High above Chamonix, a sharp granite needle called Aiguille du Midi shoots into the sky as if attempting to escape Earth’s embrace. Belonging to a crisply jagged ridge called les Aiguilles de Chamonix, the Aiguille du Midi tops at three thousand eight hundred and forty-two meters, or almost thirteen thousand feet above sea level, which […]

We leave Chamonix behind late morning on Pentecost Sunday, heading northwest through the Aravis massif towards Geneva. The weather has deteriorated into a stormy mess and we progress slowly under bleak light and tremendous downpour, mountains gently fading in washed-out grayness at our backs. Having promised a friend that we would drive by the place […]

Quelques vieilles photos de famille, un peu introspectives, tirées de scans récents d’un album jaunissant. Those were the days. Yours truly, blond and barefoot, gasping at the mightiness of who I might become one day, somewhere around Saint-Martin-Vésubie, Alpes Maritimes, France   Yours truly again, realizing I could not compete with the utterly cool and […]