MR. ADAM GOES TO LUXEMBOURG

My friend Pavone and his family recently moved to Luxembourg. Over in the friends' column on the right of this page, I've got a link to his blog about living and cooking there. It's really good—both the writing and, as it turns out, the actual living and cooking there. Sunday I took the TGV from Paris to Luxembourg (two hours in pitch black; there could be a tunnel there for all I know) to stay with them for a couple of days. I'd never been to Luxembourg, was a little skeptical of its existence and, after a fun week, needed sleep and tennis. Pavone picked me up at the train station. He is by birth and temperament and fierce loyalty a true New Yorker, so it was a fun to find him standing by an idling Audi in the icy dark of middle Europe. He expertly guided the Audi through a kind of stone slalom of ancient roads back to his apartment which, as promised, was directly across the street from the Grand Duke's palace. (He looks out on the back of the palace; I took the picture above early the next morning after waking unaccountably early). I got to hang out with his excellent almost-five-year-old boys, Sam and Alex, who decided to call me "Mr. Adam". This at first seemed slightly formal, deferential, fitting given the proximity of the ducal palais where foreign heads of state are welcomed. By day two however the boys had taken to pinning me into the kitchen with a plastic sword and screaming so that all the world's last remaining grand duchy would know, "Mr. Adam is a monster!" Pavone roasted a blue-legged Bresse chicken. In the morning we played tennis at a sports complex in Kockelscheuer that also housed badminton courts and a pizzeria. So I'm happy to report that Luxembourg exists and my friends seem well there. After I'd left for Paris, Pavone reported this verbatim exchange with his all-knowing all-seeing kinder.

"Why can't Mr. Adam stay?" [Alex asked]
I told him that you needed to get back to New York.
"Why?"
Because you had a job, I said, and you needed to get back to it.
"Job?" he asked, looking at me incredulously, actually shaking his head.
"Mr. Adam doesn't have a job."