Before and After

Back from California.

We spent a few days in San Francisco. Pier 39. Lombard Street.

But the first stop was Ilan. He's one of those friends who are basically part of my extended family. Haven't seen him in years. Watching him and Orly meet each other for the first time was something I'd been looking forward to for a while.

Orly gave me a tour of Stanford, where she spent five intense and formative years. The grounds. Her old lab. Fellow researchers who still work there.

At one point she sat down on a sofa and told me she used to rest on it. Then her eyes lit up and she told me it was Philip Zimbardo's.

We'd been staying at Laura's apartment in the city. I'd heard a lot about her. It was great to finally meet in person. On the day of Passover eve we drove to her parents' house for the Seder.

The next morning we started our road trip headed east toward Sequoia. Laura drove.

We stopped at the General Sherman Tree in the Giant Forest. Snow still on the ground, even in April. I tried to hug one of the Giant Sequoias, but I felt like an ant next to a skyscraper. I'd never seen anything living that was that massive.

That night I barely slept.

The next morning we hiked Marble Falls. At the top, I handed Laura my new Canon EOS 60D. I'd bought it a couple of days earlier. Set it to high-speed continuous shooting. Told her to keep the shutter pressed.

We posed for a photo with the waterfall behind us. As we hugged, I bent the knee and asked Orly if she would marry me.

Click click click.

She said yes.

Back in the Bay Area, Orly introduced me to James A. Fox and to mochi at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, just down the road from Stanford. He's an anthropologist she knows from her time there. Back in the day, when she traveled to Yucatan to conduct her research on how the language you speak affects the way you picture time, she spent some time with him while he was there deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics.

That evening, Lera Boroditsky, Orly's PhD advisor, and her partner Scott took us to dinner at ICHI Sushi.

We sat at the bar, right across from chef Tim Archuleta. As he handed us one insane dish after another, he told us his story. An ambitious kid from Sacramento who fell in love with sushi. Apprenticed under Sensei Chef Kiyoshi Hayakawa. Years of earning his place.

One course was a whole deep-fried Aji fish, karaage style. Head, bones, everything. We were instructed to eat it all. Crunchy. Interesting. Different.

The conversation turned to Instagram. The Facebook acquisition was announced the day before. A billion dollars for a photo app with a dozen employees. More validation that social media means business. Scott had been Mike Krieger's thesis advisor. The thing that impressed him most, he said, wasn't the app itself - it was that they kept the experience clean. Pure human-centered design. Figure out what people actually need, strip away everything else. That's the hard part.

On the way back to Israel, sitting at the gate at SFO, there was time.

I took a photo through the window. Our plane parked outside the terminal.

A couple of days earlier, Orly and I had each bought the new iPad at the Apple Store. I'd also picked up a capacitive stylus.

I'd heard about Procreate and wanted to try it. Bought it for $4.99.

I don't usually paint. But something about the medium made it inviting. I traced the photo. Slowly. Shapes. Lines. Structure. Stripping away detail instead of adding it.

It was meditative.

Airports are good for that. You're between places. Between states. Nothing to do but wait.

I don't think that sketch was really about the plane. We were no longer just traveling together. We were becoming a family.