Sorting through a gift of 700 postcards, I was delighted to find places I’d been.

The Brock Monument in Canada. While my brother and cousins played in the park, my mother tied me to a tree, with about ten feet of slack, so I wouldn’t get lost. And then, before the picnic lunch, she washed my hands with a soapy washcloth she’d brought in a mayonnaise jar.

I never actually went to the Nomad Motel in Potsdam, N.Y., but when I was visiting a boyhood friend at Clarkson College, the Nomad frequently came up in conversations as a hot spot of this college town’s sexual encounters.

In Italy to celebrate my wife’s sister’s birthday, I walked on the Ponte Vecchio, looking in the shop windows and soaking up the history. In one of the shops, I found a coral necklace for my wife, while she was shopping with her mother, looking for a gold cross.

I was in England for my nephew’s wedding, and spent a night and day at Canterbury Cathedral. Going to a morning service in a lower chapel, I passed through this crypt, and singing echoed around the columns.