When I was 18 years old, I went to Europe for four months on my own, although I had rarely spent a night away from home before that. Recently, I discovered letters I wrote to my parents during that trip. Those letters were the seeds for this essay.

I met my best friend, Roland Labrie, when I was a teenager and he was a teacher at my high school in Vermont. He was the first person I met who loved language, literature, and poetry as much as I did. We were friends for nearly 50 years. I delivered the eulogy at his 2018 funeral in York Maine.