unbearably hungry and walked into the first trattoria I found. It was still early for dinner; only one couple was inside—a man and a woman, both very short and old, dressed in tweed suits that seemed to match, each gracefully eating their spaghetti with fork and spoon. The sight of this pair gave me a feeling I often had when traveling abroad—a feeling that our country had gotten so much wrong, almost everything, all of it, wrong, and perhaps I had, too, that I was entrenched in my wrongness, that I had somehow committed myself to it and no longer knew the way out.
