Note: I wrote this Facebook post just over a month after Holly and the kids had moved out to join me in Saudi Arabia. Those neighbors (sadly now divorced) and those Thursday nights on the patio are some of our dearest memories from that time. We carry on the tradition still. Just last night we had our own South Carolina Friday night on the patio, complete with shisha, home-made charcuterie, and music. (DL, June 10, 2023).

How do you memorialize one of those nights, one of those special moments that shines as one of the best of your life?

Tonight as I was finishing a late-night call with a vendor in California, Holly stuck her head in and said to come next door. Our neighbors (whom I had not met) wanted to share their secret stash of vodka and wine with us.

What followed was two exquisite hours of drink, and cheese, and forbidden Corsican salami with a generous and delightful Lebanese couple, sitting in the night under the leafy green of their back patio, soaking in Adele and Jaques Brel and talking of life, and parenting, and politics, and life in America, and Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

It was one of the best nights ever.