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Reading this postcard I see myself, carefree and exhilarated, standing in the middle of the bridge, halfway between the Louvre on the Right Bank and the quai Voltaire on the Left. What I see is a woman who is not thinking about observing life but experiencing it. The observations would come later, in postcards sent home.

From Milan and Siena, from tiny villages along the Amalfi Coast and small towns in the Cotswolds, from London and Oxford, the postcards were waiting for me when I returned, each one recounting like a spontaneous child the impressions of a day spent exploring the world. As I read them, I relived the days spent at Brasenose College in Oxford; the momentous meeting in Paris with Naohiro, a Japanese man who read my soul; the sunny Italian days in Sorrento; the days of self-discovery in Asolo, a village at the foot of the Dolomites.

It was not a new habit, writing postcards to myself. It had begun about fifteen years ago, while traveling alone to Bornholm, a remote island in the Baltic Sea. It was homesickness that prompted me to write that first time; the postcard served as a companion, someone with whom I could share my feelings.

Over the years, the postcards took on another role: they became a form of travel memoir, preserving and recapturing the feelings of certain moments during a trip. When I see such a postcard, the handwriting oddly familiar, it startles me and, like Proust’s madeleine, has the power to plunge me back into the past.

Until recently I was convinced—quite smugly so—that I’d invented this form of travel writing. But about four months ago, while going through a box of papers collected from my mother’s apartment after her death, I came across a postcard she’d written to herself from Dublin. The picture is a charming view of O’Connell Street and the Gresham Hotel. She writes:

We stayed here for eight days. A lovely, comfortable hotel, with Irish poetry readings in the evenings. The food was very good. And Dublin has the loveliest zoo in all of Europe.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I read these simple words in a handwriting as familiar as my own. It is the handwriting that signed my grade-school report cards; the handwriting that scribbled out the lists I carried to the corner grocery store; the handwriting that, over the years, in countless letters, supported and encouraged me in good times and bad.

Holding the postcard in my hands, I thought of my sons and of the future. Would they someday read my postcards, I wondered, and think of me, as I do now of my mother?

If so, I hope they see me soaring like a bright kite into a big blue sky; happy and adventurous, going wherever the wind takes me.

—Baltimore,

January 1999

1

THE NOVICE

Dear Alice,

Each morning I am awakened by the sound of a tinkling bell. A cheerful sound, it reminds me of the bells that shopkeepers attach to their doors at Christmastime. In this case, the bell marks the opening of the hotel door. From my room, which is just off the winding staircase, I can hear it clearly. It reminds me of the bell that calls to worship the novice embarking on a new life. In a way I too am a novice, leaving, temporarily, one life for another.

Love, Alice

For weeks I had imagined my first day in Paris: I could see myself sipping a citron pressé at the Flore, a famous Saint-Germain café that was once the haunt of Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus; then darting in and out of the shops on the rue du Bac or browsing the bookstores in the historic rue Jacob. Always in this fantasy I saw myself responding with curiosity and excitement to the pulsing street life of Paris.

I had night dreams, too, along with the daydreams. In one particularly appealing dream, I bumped into Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who once lived on the Left Bank in a hotel just blocks from where I would be staying. I accepted their invitation to Sunday breakfast at their favorite café, the Deux Magots. Waking from this dream, I scribbled a note to myself: Must have Sunday brunch at Deux Magots.

In another dream I entered an unnamed passageway