“Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child. (I should have gone on semester abroad. I should have lost my virginity to someone nice.) But on that morning, I made the first of many real mistakes that would stack up on top of one another until they blocked out the sun. I did not get mauled by an animal. I had not been mugged or assaulted in dangerous Johannesburg. I had not even failed at the unlikely task I had invented for myself when I insisted I could find my way and my story on another continent about which I knew nothing. The world had left me unscathed. But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the most pedestrian: the cellphone you press against your head, transmitting the voice of your mother, pouring radiation into your brain day after day; the little tick bite in the garden that leaves you aching and palsied for years. It can come in the form of an email from an old lover whom you have not spoken with for many years, which you receive when you are back at the lodge, sitting under a thatched roof drinking a cup of milky tea. It can come when, instead of writing to the person with whom you share a home and a history, the person you adore and have married, you write to your old lover. And you say, “Today I saw a family of lions licking each other in the yellow grass, and they looked like they were in love.” 3 My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out. She had inherited from her own mother the immigrant’s mistrust for authority, and combined it with insurrectionary tendencies left over from her days as a student radical, and what it all added up to in the kitchen was a ban on Cheez Doodles.”