E-mail du jour: Letters from a Year in France

In September of 1996, I ran away. That may be overly dramatic, but yes, basically I put my normal, everyday, go-to-work-and-be-responsible life in storage and took off on an adventure. It was not as daring as rafting the Zambezi, nor as scientifically meaningful as studying the mating habits of killer bees, but it did have a certain romantic charm.

I'm not sure that all of my friends believed I would really do it. Some marveled at my taking off to do something like "we used to do in college...