Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

(Allan Gurganus)

Prague. In my mind, it is a magical place. It changed my life, before I was born. My father, on a trip to Prague with the Vienna Summer School, a program sponsored by his college, Hope College of Holland, Michigan, looked over the roofs of Prague, and gave up his dreams of lawyering. He looked over the roofs and said, "I could be ambassador to a place like this someday."

He never did become an ambassador. He was a Consul General right after I was born, in Belem du Para at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil, and he was the head of the Econ department in at least three posts: Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Warsaw, Poland; and Brasilia, Brazil. He acted many times as the Charge d'Affaires, which is to say, the man in place of the ambassador when the ambassador is out of town or out of the country. He was the point person in charge of Al Gore's visit to Brazil in the mid 90s, while Gore was still vice president.

He is a person I trust on historical analysis. He reads book reviews, but rarely books. He often reads more than three newspapers daily. He emails me obituaries of famous children's authors and librarian innovators, among other things.

My mother didn't go to Prague when she went to Vienna the next year with the same summer school program. She stayed back, I think with someone who was sick, and herself slept the whole weekend. Though my parents weren't dating at the time, people would say to her, "P will take you to Prague." I think it was about 30 years later before he did.

I went to Prague in the summer of 1990. Though I didn't follow the family tradition and attend Hope College, I was transferring from one college to another and my parents realized I would lose credits. They asked if I'd like to do VSS and c'mon, could I say no? Four weeks in Europe without my parents? I'd traveled in Europe before this, but never with peers. Even better, my dad drove me out to Berlin from Warsaw, giving us ample father-daughter time. He was my ambassador, as he spent the first night with the group in Berlin, in a dormitory type building, the first time the group had stayed on the East side of Berlin. My dad was a bit of a celebrity, a Hope graduate that had gone on to live an international life. Later on, he had a conference he had to attend in Vienna, and took me out to dinner.

Prague was one of the stops on a pre-tour before the Vienna Summer School officially began. We started in Berlin and from there went to Dresden, and Prague, and...well, that was over 10 years ago. I remember looking over the roofs of Prague and thinking, if it weren't for this beautiful town, I might be the daughter of a lawyer.

So it is a huge debt that I owe to Prague. When Peter Sis wrote his book, The Three Golden Keys, which is a magical-realism trip through Prague, I purchased it as a Christmas present for my father. He loved it, and now my father and I share a love for Peter Sis, a Czech writer/illustrator who lives in New York City.

In Prague, I made many purchases. I have earrings that I'm almost positive are Venetian glass. I bought my father a Mozart mug. I bought a delicious gyro sandwich. And though I was still at least two years from having my own apartment and kitchen, I bought a sugar bowl. It is pink, of course, and once the top handle broke off, which I fixed with Super Glue. It is one of my most treasured possessions.



Thursday Show-and-Tell, courtesy of Blackbird