I came in from the garden. I took a shower, and the water prickled my frozen skin. I got dressed, parted my hair to the side with a comb, and drove with Sarah through a treacherous evening of wintry mix to the poetry reading. We talked about her book, and about our kids. After a while, she turned the radio on. On another night, the same weather would’ve been threatening or menacing or joyless. But not tonight. What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with. That night, I was with just the right person in just the right place, and I’ll be damned if the graupel wasn’t beautiful.

I give wintry mix four stars.

THE HOT DOGS OF BÆJARINS BEZTU PYLSUR

IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, Sarah and I traveled to Europe with another couple, our friends Laura and Ryan. I like Laura and Ryan a lot, but one thing you need to know is that they are the sort of people who really try to suck the marrow out of life and make the most of their brief flicker of consciousness and all that stuff. This is quite different from my style of traveling, wherein I spend most of the day psyching myself up to do one thing—visit a museum, perhaps—and the rest of the day recovering from the only event on my itinerary.

The trip took us from Denmark to Sweden and then on to Iceland, a small and mostly rocky island nation in the North Atlantic that attracts tourists primarily by offering free stopovers to anyone who flies Iceland’s national airline, Icelandair. I was interested in visiting Iceland because 1. It has a population under four hundred thousand, and I’ve long been fascinated by tiny nations and how they make it work, and 2. My longtime publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel is a frequent visitor to Iceland and had vociferously recommended a certain hot dog stand in Reykjavík.*

The trips to Sweden and Denmark had been lovely. There were smorgasbords and museums, but the highlight had been an evening spent with Ryan’s Swedish relatives, who lived on the shores of some endless lake in the wilderness. They welcomed us to their home and proceeded to get us blisteringly, unprecedentedly drunk on Sweden’s national liquor, brännvin. I do not often drink to excess, because I have an intense fear of hangovers, but I made an exception that evening. Ryan’s relatives taught us Swedish drinking songs, and they taught us how to eat pickled herring, and my glass kept getting filled with brännvin until at last the eighty-year-old patriarch of the family stood up and spoke his first English words of the evening: “UND NOW VEE SAUNA!”

So we got in the sauna and I was so drunk that I was pouring cold beer over my head to stay cool in the sauna, and then after a while Sarah and I stepped outside and walked knee-deep into the lake. The eighty-year-old patriarch whose name was I think Lasse joined us, and he was standing there completely nude, next to the ridiculously modest Americans in their bathing suits. And then Lasse clapped me on the back in what was intended to be a firm gesture of camaraderie. Unprepared for the strength of his embrace, I fell face-first into the lake. I was uninjured but my glasses were thoroughly and irreparably scratched from an encounter with the rocks in the lake bed. The next morning I woke up reminded that my abject fear of hangovers is fully warranted, and also unable to see much on account of the gouged glasses.