Life can at times seem to be one long meal … which is not a bad way to think about the journey we all take. Meals and conversations form a long road, a connected series of days and nights and tables and bottles and sensual memories that one can return to again and again.

I spent a month in 2013 with Dean Cox, one of my closest friends, in Hong Kong. I have known him a long time, and never tire of his company. (I am missing him now, because we have not been together in the same place since March of 2013.) We have shared meals in Paris and the Loire Valley, Hong Kong and Macau, New York and Basel, and Stockholm and Huntsville and Birmingham. It’s been a great journey thus far, and it continues.

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