A few months ago, a family member asked me, out of the blue, whether I’d ever fully processed my mother’s death. The question took me by surprise, and I responded that yes, I thought I had, and why did he ask? He referenced the fact that I’d graduated from a good school and gotten a good job, and then left...
In 10th-grade Spanish, we had to do a report on a Latin American city. I was assigned Montevideo, which I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce, so I flip-flopped between “Mon-tay-VID-ee-o” and “Montay-vid-AY-o” throughout my entire presentation. Since then, I hadn’t thought much about Uruguay or its capital city until I started planning my trip, and even then, I afforded...