Moving Abroad: A Guide to Not Letting Extraordinary Become Ordinary

Yuri likes to ask me a lot of random questions about my childhood.

Not normal questions like, “What was your favorite subject in school?” No. Obscure investigative journalism like, “What kind of curtains did you have in your bedroom when you were seven?” or “What did your mother usually make for dinner on Tuesdays?”

Sir, I don’t know. I was seven. I wasn’t keeping minutes.

And whenever I tell him I don’t remember, which is almost always, he looks genuinely concerned and asks, “Were you hugged as a child? How do you not remember these things?”

I was hugged. I think.

Honestly, I barely remember what I did last week.

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My French tutor kicks off every lesson with the same seemingly innocent question: “What did you do last week?”

And every week I sit there like I’ve just been questioned about my whereabouts on the night of a murder.

Last week?

Define “did.”

Today, the only thing I could confidently report was that I saw the eclipse yesterday. The rest of the week has been deleted from the server. I went to the gym. I read. I ate things. Presumably I parented. Everyone in my household appears to still be alive, so I’m counting the week as a success.

I am reading The Calamity Club, by the way, and it is excellent. So apparently my brain can retain the lives of fictional people while completely deleting my own Wednesday.

But every once in a while, something cracks open a memory so specific that I’m suddenly right back there.

And recently it was a playground. Gen Xers, you already know where this is going.

We walked past a playground with a metal slide.

A METAL SLIDE in 2026! I actually stopped and stared at it like I had just spotted an asbestos factory offering school tours. How are these still legal?

For anyone who did not grow up in the 70s or 80s, allow me to explain. The metal slide was less “playground equipment” and more “municipally funded hibachi.” You would joyfully climb those stairs in shorts on a 90-degree summer day, sit down and immediately realize you had made a catastrophic error in judgment.

There was no turning back. Your thighs had already bonded to the metal.

You pushed off and somewhere around the halfway point your legs were no longer legs. They were two Oscar Mayer hot dogs being dragged across a commercial griddle.

By the time you reached the bottom, you didn’t slide off. You were served. Medium well.

Nobody called the city. Nobody sued the park. Your mother just looked over from a bench smoking a Virginia Slim and yelled, “I TOLD YOU IT WAS HOT.”

Lesson learned.

The entire 1980s playground, looking back, was basically a torture park with monkey bars. There was the merry-go-round, which had no motor, no brakes and absolutely no adult supervision. Six children pushed it as fast as humanly possible while another six clung to the metal rails experiencing G-forces normally reserved for fighter pilots.

The goal was not entertainment. The goal was survival. Eventually someone flew off. Nobody stopped. That child simply became part of the landscape.

Then there was the seesaw, a piece of recreational equipment built entirely on trust, which seems like an insane amount of emotional responsibility to give an eight-year-old. You sat four feet in the air staring into the eyes of another child whose only job was not to suddenly jump off.

Eventually they did.

WHAM. Straight to the tailbone. Your first lesson in betrayal. This is why Gen X has trust issues.

The monkey bars were suspended approximately fourteen stories above packed dirt. There was no soft rubber flooring. No foam. No carefully engineered wood chips. There was Earth. If you fell, gravity handled the paperwork.

The swings weren’t any better. Nobody was casually swinging back and forth enjoying the breeze. The objective was to get so high that the chains went slightly slack at the top and for one magnificent second you genuinely wondered if today was the day you were going all the way around the bar.

Bonus points if you jumped off at maximum altitude. Again, onto dirt. We weren’t playing. We were training for ‘Nam, and most of us were born after it ended.

And let’s not forget the spring animals. You know the ones. A metal duck, horse or vaguely identifiable woodland creature mounted on a spring powerful enough to launch a six-year-old into another postal code. We still have these at our local playground here in Carcassonne. Because, of course we do. France looked at the accumulated child-safety knowledge of the past forty years and said, “Oui, but have they tried holding on?”

So why am I talking about playground equipment that would now require a liability waiver and possibly a tetanus booster? Because for someone who claims to remember almost nothing about his childhood, I remember a park.

Just down the street from our family butcher shop was Allison Henderson Park. And sometime in the early 80s, my mom took me there to see a solar eclipse.

Of all the memories my brain could have carefully preserved, this is one of them. I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing. I don’t remember what we did afterward. I have no idea what was happening at school that week.

But I remember my mom. I remember the park. I remember that ridiculous little piece of cardboard with a pinhole punched into it so we could watch something extraordinary happen in the sky.

Apparently my childhood memories are stored less like a family photo album and more like a junk drawer. Nothing is organized. Most of it is missing. Every once in a while, you reach in looking for something completely unrelated and pull out exactly what you need.

Which brings me back to the eclipse.

Not so once in a lifetime, apparently, because there I was again yesterday, more than forty years later, preparing to watch another one.

I told Sonia she was going to see an eclipse and asked if she knew what that was.

“Yes. It’s when the moon crosses over the sun and everything gets dark.”

Excuse me? You’re six.

When I was six, my primary areas of expertise were He-Man and determining which flavor of Kool-Aid had the highest probability of permanently staining the kitchen counter.

But yes, apparently she already understood basic celestial mechanics. I told her she wouldn’t see another total solar eclipse in France until she was 61.

Without missing a beat she replied, “You’ll be watching it from up in the sky.”

Well.

Thank you, tiny Grim Reaper. I was trying to make a childhood memory, not confront my mortality in a vineyard. Nothing keeps you present quite like your six-year-old casually reminding you that eventually you’ll be dead.

Earlier that day, though, I honestly didn’t think we were going to see it.

We didn’t have the glasses. They were sold out everywhere. It was hot. I had things to do. I figured, no big deal. Sonia will survive missing an eclipse. Children have overcome greater adversity. I survived metal slides.

But something kept nagging at me, because I remembered.

Of all the things I don’t remember about being a kid, I remembered my mom taking me to that park. Suddenly this wasn’t really about an eclipse anymore. I wanted Sonia to have her own version of that memory.

There was just one small problem. We still didn’t have the damn glasses.

After the gym, I headed to Monoprix to pick up a few things for dinner and ran into my friend Jack. He had been at the Italian shop in town and mentioned to the owner that he didn’t have eclipse glasses either.

Now, this is where small-town France becomes less like an actual functioning municipality and more like an elaborate network of somebody knowing somebody.

The Italian shop owner picked up the phone and called a local jeweler, because naturally the solution to an astronomical event was apparently somewhere between the prosciutto and fine jewelry.

The jeweler had glasses.

And where was the jeweler?

Right outside Monoprix.

At this point the universe was doing everything short of physically grabbing me by the shoulders and screaming, “RICHARD. TAKE YOUR CHILD TO THE ECLIPSE.”

Fine, universe. Message received.

I hurried over, secured the glasses in my best French like I was completing a black-market transaction in protective eyewear, ran home, made dinner and announced that we were going out.

Wine. Walk. Eclipse. The holy trinity of parenting in France.

And this was where I realized just how different Sonia’s version of this memory was going to be from mine. I saw an eclipse in the early 80s at a community park in Iowa with a piece of cardboard. Sonia was about to watch one from a vineyard in the south of France with a medieval castle rising in from of her.

Same moon, slight upgrade in production value.

We walked behind the Cité as the sun was getting lower, through a part of the landscape I had somehow never bothered exploring before, which is ridiculous when you think about it. People cross oceans to come here. They plan vacations around this castle. They take approximately 6,000 photographs of it before lunch.

I live ten minutes away and apparently had reached the stage of local residency where my reaction was, “Castle? Yes, yes. Seen it. What else?” Then we stepped into the vineyard.

The castle was glowing in front of us. The sun was dropping. Sonia had her ridiculous little eclipse glasses on. There were grapevines all around us.

And for a second even I had to admit:

Oh. Right. I live here. This is fucking beautiful.

And that might have been the bigger thing I needed to see yesterday.

Not the eclipse. My own life.

That is the weird thing about living abroad long enough. Eventually, abroad becomes home.

At first, everything is charming. The shutters are charming. The cobblestones are charming. The tiny French cars are charming. The old man carrying three baguettes under his arm is so aggressively French you consider taking his picture.

Then you live here for a while. Suddenly you’re not looking at the medieval architecture. You’re looking at bird shit on your window. You’re not admiring the ancient town square. You’re staring at the fresh graffiti thinking, “Are we just leaving that there now?”

You start noticing the overflowing bin. The broken shutter. The weeds. The dog poop someone has apparently decided is now a permanent municipal installation. Meanwhile, a tourist is standing three feet away from you absolutely losing their mind.

“Oh my God. This is MAGICAL.”

And I’m standing there like, “Is it, Susan? Because have you seen that wall?”

That is the strange thing about making a dream your everyday life. Eventually it becomes Tuesday. The castle you once couldn’t believe was real becomes the thing you drive past while wondering whether you remembered to buy toilet paper.

The little café in the square becomes the place where you’re mildly annoyed because your coffee is taking twelve minutes. The cobblestone street becomes the street where you almost rolled your ankle carrying groceries and briefly considered suing the Middle Ages.

The beauty doesn’t disappear. You just stop seeing it first. I think that is what happened to me.

When we first moved abroad, I wanted to experience everything. Every market. Every village. Every festival. Every château. Every street that looked remotely like someone might be selling cheese at the end of it.

But eventually you can start chasing experiences so hard that you forget to actually experience the place you already are.

You start thinking the next village will be prettier, the next trip will be more interesting. The next restaurant will be more French, the next weekend will be the one where you finally do something worth remembering.

Meanwhile, there is a medieval castle ten minutes from your house and you haven’t even bothered walking around the back of it. Apparently I needed the moon to physically move in front of the sun before I could be bothered.

Subtle, universe.

Sometimes staying present isn’t about pretending the mess isn’t there. The graffiti is still ugly. The windows are still dirty. The bird responsible for mine is clearly eating a high-fiber diet and thriving.

Presence isn’t walking around in a linen shirt whispering, “Everything is beautiful,” while stepping over dog shit. It is remembering that the dog shit isn’t the whole view.

Tourists are walking right past the things that annoy us most, standing beside us thinking, “My God, look at this place.” Maybe every once in a while we need to borrow their eyes.

Not permanently. That would be exhausting. I have errands…but long enough to remember what they can still see that we have learned to look past.

Maybe the secret to staying present isn’t learning to ignore the mess. Maybe it is refusing to let the mess become the only thing you notice.

Standing there in that vineyard, with Sonia looking up at the same kind of celestial event I had watched with my mom more than forty years earlier, I realized something else. Maybe that was what my mom gave me that day in the park.

She interrupted an ordinary day.

Whatever else was happening, whatever errands needed to be run, whatever dinner needed to be made, she stopped, and essentially said, “look up. Something is happening.”

Forty-something years later, I don’t remember the ordinary stuff from that day. I remember looking up. Now I was doing the same thing with Sonia only with significantly better scenery and fewer third-degree burns from playground equipment.

So here are a few reminders I’m working on this week, because apparently “be present” is too vague for my brain. I need instructions.

Not everything needs to be spectacular to be worth showing up for.

Yes, an eclipse is spectacular. An eclipse in the south of France with a medieval castle in front of you is admittedly showing off. But I almost skipped it.

Too hot. No glasses. Dinner to make. Gym. Life. All the extremely important responsibilities that somehow feel urgent until you realize you cannot remember what any of them were three days later.

Sometimes presence means quitting the habit of asking, “Is this really worth it?” Go. Worst case, you wasted an hour. I have wasted considerably more time looking for something to watch on Netflix.

Think about what your child, or your younger self, will remember, not what you will accomplish.

I don’t remember what my mother accomplished the week she took me to see that eclipse. I don’t know whether the laundry was done. I don’t know what she made for dinner. I don’t know if she answered all her emails, although it was the 80s, so she had the enormous luxury of not having any.

What I remember is that she took me to the park. Will Sonia remember that the eclipse she saw was only 98 percent? Of course not.

She’ll remember standing in a vineyard wearing ridiculous glasses, looking at the sun, asking if she could steal grapes off the vines and casually informing her father that he would be dead before the next one. Core memory secured.

Stop waiting for the postcard version of living abroad.

France does not have to be Paris. Italy does not have to be Rome.

Living abroad does not require you to spend every weekend frolicking through lavender fields carrying a baguette like you are being photographed for a pharmaceutical commercial about moderate depression.

Sometimes life abroad is just life. You take out the garbage. You buy toothpaste. You argue with an appliance. You go to Monoprix because you forgot onions.

Sometimes you walk outside because something interesting is happening in the sky. That counts too.

Become a tourist in your ordinary life.

Until yesterday, I had never even walked behind the castle to see that view at sunset. I have lived here for more than two years. This is insane.

On vacation, I will walk 25,000 steps uphill through a European capital in 97-degree heat because some website said there is “a charming little street” at the top.

At home? The bakery is ten minutes away and suddenly I’m Dorothy heading to Oz. How far is this fucking bakery? “Walk? All the way there?”

We will cross an ocean to look at someone else’s ordinary life and then refuse to cross town to look at our own. Every once in a while, pretend you have three days here.

Where would you go? What would you notice? What would you photograph? What would you stop complaining about long enough to actually see?

Notice your “I can do it next time” reflex.

Living abroad makes this one especially dangerous because there is always another market, another festival, another château, another village, another summer, another Christmas market.

You start believing proximity equals permanence. “I live here. I can do it anytime.”Which is exactly why you don’t. Until one day the restaurant closes, the festival ends, somebody moves, your child gets older, you move somewhere else or life simply changes. Sometimes “next time” is real. Sometimes it is just procrastination wearing a beret.

Let your old memories remind you what matters now.

My memory took me back to Allison Henderson Park in the early 80s. I couldn’t tell you what I was wearing that day. I couldn’t tell you what was on television that night. I couldn’t tell you whether my mother had a million other things she should have been doing. But I remember where I was.

More importantly, I remember who I was with. That became my compass yesterday. Hopefully forty years from now, Sonia won’t remember what she was wearing either. She probably won’t remember what we had for dinner. Maybe she won’t even remember exactly where we stood.

But, perhaps something will happen one day when she is 46 or 56 or 61 and suddenly she’ll remember being six years old in a vineyard with her dads, wearing those stupid glasses and looking up.

And maybe she’ll stop whatever she is doing, and look up again.

And finally, put the damn phone down after you get the photo.

I almost worked harder at documenting the eclipse than experiencing it. I wanted the castle in the shot. I wanted the sun. I wanted Sonia. I wanted the vineyard. I wanted a photograph so perfect it could emotionally manipulate strangers on Instagram.

And at some point I realized I had the eclipse glasses in my hand instead of on my face, which feels like a fairly accurate summary of modern life.

We go to concerts and watch them through our screens. We photograph our dinner before tasting it. We record our children doing something instead of watching them do it. We become unpaid documentary filmmakers for lives we are forgetting to actually live.

Take the picture. Absolutely. I love the picture. Then put the phone away. You rarely know you’re making a lifelong memory while you’re making it.

Sometimes it just feels like a Wednesday, until forty years later, when you realize it wasn’t.

Maybe the moral of the story is this:

Life is a little like an 80s playground. You’re going to get burned. Someone you trusted is occasionally going to jump off the seesaw and send your ass crashing into the ground. You’re going to fall off the monkey bars onto something considerably less soft than you were hoping for.

Every now and then life is going to spin so fast you’re just hanging onto a metal pole wondering who the hell thought any of this was safe. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you get back up and keep playing.

Somewhere along the way, we grow up and get so busy trying not to fall that we forget to look around. We start protecting ourselves from the hot slide, the hard landing, the dirty window, the graffiti, the disappointing day, the trip that might not be worth it.

We notice all the things that could be better. Sometimes we miss what is already beautiful. Maybe staying present isn’t some grand spiritual practice requiring meditation, linen pants and a personality that enjoys herbal tea. Maybe it’s much simpler.

Maybe it’s occasionally remembering to look up. My mom did that for me more than forty years ago. She took an ordinary day and interrupted it with something extraordinary. I don’t remember most of my childhood. Yuri will undoubtedly continue his investigation into whether I was adequately hugged. But I remember that.

Yesterday, I got to pass it on.

Different country.

Different park.

Better glasses.

Much better backdrop.

Same sun.

Same moon.

Same feeling of standing beside someone you love while the universe does something incredible and, for a few minutes, absolutely nothing else matters. One day Sonia may not remember that she casually predicted my death while I was trying to create a tender father-daughter moment, but I hope she remembers that we went.

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If this made you laugh, give it a restack. Then go do something future-you might actually remember.

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