I have been feeling half my age lately…physically, psychologically, and it is a wonder. I’ll take it. As proof positive, look at the photo of me on a camel in a desert from a few weeks ago. Never would I have thought….

Life and my mood have surely been enhanced by a month or two of Edward and me seeing friends, celebrating, and spending time in Paris, Rome, and Marrakech. We just had another meal at La Tour D’Argent in Paris, our celebratory ritualistic end to our holiday season of indulgences. It is nice to keep track of the progress on the exterior repairs and restorations of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, perched at a table in the grand restaurant. Sipping from a glass of bubbly only enhances the moment. And a sunny day helps. There are still a couple of years to go before the exterior cranes and scaffolding are no longer necessary or visible.

Speaking of Notre Dame, in mid-December, we began our year-end festivities with a guided visit to the “refreshed” interior. Wow. Centuries wiped clean. The new chandeliers lit up the inside and created an aura of luminous joy. Spectacular. Edward and I have built up a rich lifetime of experiences and memories, and over the past month or so we’ve been musing aloud about time and memory, especially as we revisit places we’ve been to at various stages in our lives. I am half my age when I eat something that brings me back to my mother’s kitchen or to a restaurant meal decades ago. Those Proustian moments of involuntary memory hit with regularity when stimulated by travel. Certainly, by food tasted, whether in a restaurant or at a holiday meal at home. Time travel is marvelous. I am back at the same restaurant, eating the same thing—was it ten or fifteen years ago? Sometimes I am fully in a childhood moment.

Of course, it is not only food that triggers my involuntary memories…it could be a visit to a church in Rome, watching kids kick a soccer ball, or certainly revisiting Marrakech—vivid moments of my first visit there back in my college days bursts upon my subconsciousness or is it consciousness? I am there, then not now. Nice. The range of ochre colors on buildings and churches in Rome always stun me after the colors of Paris. When I visit Roscioli in Rome for my obligatory dish of pasta cacio e pepe, with every fork I am eating all the forks of that pasta I have ever eaten there…and some at other places. That is not involuntary memory, but experiencing a moment filled with every moment that I have experienced up to that present.

But you can’t step in the same river twice, and that’s the Thomas Wolfe notion and expression of “You can’t go home again.” You change, and the world changes, and that’s also very much a part of my travel experience and repeat visits to favored places. We were especially reminded of that by our recent New Year’s celebration in Marrakech with friends. It wasn’t the same Marrakech as 20 or 40 years ago. It is better. The past still lives in the present in the old Medina, with its shops and shopkeepers and tiny alleys—it is as if some of the old photographs had been taken recently. Sunny, warm, and chaotic, but such a welcoming and endearing place. The city and government have been hard at work displaying their patrimoine. We thoroughly enjoyed four riads transformed magically into four different museums that were not there a decade or two ago…Photography, Music, Gastronomy, and Confluences (a mix of all arts emphasizing zellij, ceiling paintings, and local artists). True gems and highly recommended.

Even in Paris with my lifetime of experiences there, I was stunned to discover new things, especially one museum that recaptured the past was a kind of going home again. Just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, and a photo op par excellence is the Cité d’Architecture et du Patrimoine, a sleeping beauty until the curator came up with mixing the Middle Ages with American modernity in Chromoscope. Established in 1879 (I missed that), it is a museum of historic French architecture and sculpture. Just the place to see models, originals and replications of ports of French cathedrals from the 12th to the 18th century, for example. Murals…stained glass windows… Spectacular presentations. I didn’t know. Awesome.

So, we continue to build memories. Did I mention lots of yummy dishes? We flew back to New York a couple of days ago, and I am back at my word processor and easel.

While we can’t stop time, we have a way of experiencing it fully in the moment and with the richness of the past.