Travels with Jessica

On our first day in D.C., I ask Jessica what she’d like to do and she immediately says she would like to see the White House, so we walk over to the concierge at our hotel and he gets out a colorful map and shows in very clear steps how to get there. “Maybe you…

Jessica is running her finger along the spines of the travel books on the shelf at the bookstore. “Hong Kong,” she reads. “We are not going to Hong Kong.” “Nope.” “Indonesia. Not there, either.” “Nope.” “Italy.” She smiles, and starts lifting books off the shelf and loading them into my arms. “We don’t need all…

Jessica is hanging over my left shoulder. “Are you buying the tickets?” she asks. “The airline tickets to Italy.” “Mmm,” I say, not quite clicking “buy now.” I have checked the bank balance, and I have checked the dates, but the idea of dealing with luggage and trains and Jessica and I don’t speak the…

To understand how Jessica managed to wrap me around her little finger and convince me that we should travel to Italy, you first have to understand how much she loves Disney World. That began because she loves Disney movies, which begat an unfortunate fascination with Disney princesses (“Sweetie, I’ve just been asked to work on…

I am standing on a subway platform in Washington, D.C., and trying to figure out how, exactly, to get to the line I want to get to, and Jessica is vibrating with anxiety next to me. “Do you know what you’re doing?” “Does it look like I know what I’m doing?” “Are we lost?” She…