Seven decades after Tareq Baconi's grandmother fled in terror from the port city of Haifa, carrying a Bible, a crucifix and a week's worth of clothes, he followed her directions to the family home a few blocks from the sea. The building was still standing, almost as she had left it in 1948, instantly familiar from childhood stories. Standing beside his husband, Baconi could not bring himself to ring the bell,
I'm a little ashamed to admit that when I arrived at the train depot in Durango, Colorado, for The Polar Express train ride, I had never read the book. I knew it existed and had been turned into a movie, but I was oblivious to the magic everyone at the station seemed to feel. Kids wearing Christmas pajamas jumped up and down in anticipation, parents took photos, and everyone was talking about the journey to come-a journey that would take us to the "North Pole."
My mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She'd never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all.
He was 69, too young, but on the plus side he was doing what he most loved digging on an archaeological site. We weren't close in the way I was with Granny; he could be quite scary. But we got along fine and I liked him. Mum said I could help myself from his wardrobe. I had only known him dressed for retirement, in blue workers' overalls for archaeological digging, or baggy beige shorts for caravanning holidays.