The Coffee Moment In the mid-90s, I somehow talked my way onto a mission trip to Costa Rica with a group of eye doctors who were visiting rural villages to give eye exams and fit people for glasses. I had zero optometry experience. My official job became “Vanna White of the eye chart.” Vanna in the jungle - Costa Rica 1995 The trip was sponsored by the local Lions Club, and I quickly became friends with the organizers and their families. One morning, I was grumbling about not having Diet Coke...

In 1991, while teaching in Prague, I traveled to visit a college friend who had married a Cypriot and was living in Nicosia. Getting there was its own epic. Still very new to international travel, I set off alone with a giant duffel bag (this was pre–roller luggage) on a week-long journey that began with a bus ride to Vienna and then a long train ride through a Yugoslavia, that was actively falling apart. Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. Macedonia. Sleepless nights. Guarding my bag. Not eating much...

I grew up in a wine-drinking household, but I didn’t really drink wine myself until my twenties. I was very principled about waiting until I was legal to do so, which meant I arrived in adulthood as a complete novice to wine. And then I moved to Prague in 1990. It was the first wave of ESL teachers after the Velvet Revolution. The Iron Curtain had just fallen. The world felt like it was rearranging itself in real time, and I wanted to live inside that change. It was exhilarating. And...