Sally

On the recent trip to Jordan (much, much more on that soon) I was able to see my old friend Sally a couple times. She teaches at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and in sheer happenstance she was visiting Jordan with students at the same time I was visiting Jordan with students. We've known each other for something like fifteen years but hadn't seen each other for around thirteen of those years, so it was such a pleasure to spend a couple hours gabbing with her. Although we both make it to Jordan quite a bit it seems like our schedules never quite line up, and I suspect this will be true for next year as well, which made this lucky alignment all the sweeter. That said, there's a beautiful, terrible, cruel poignancy to seeing a friend or lover for the first time after many years because, in the almost Dickensian sense of paths not followed, you'll almost certainly never see them again. As Proust reminds us, the memory of a particular image is simply regret over a particular moment.

On the roof of the Petra Moon Hotel waiting to catch another amazing Jordanian sunset.

Sally has decided to, cruelly, not age, while I, well, am obviously and sadly taking a very different approach.