August 9-10, 2024
51.91 miles; 5,230.23 miles total
I pedaled more than 5,000 miles for the honor and pleasure of catching up with the legendary Jessica Golloher in Confolens, France.
If you pay attention to world affairs, you probably have heard Jessica's voice sailing over the airwaves from Moscow, Kyiv, and Jerusalem, to name a few of her datelines. After decades of breaking stories from war zones, Jess is now taking a well-earned respite in her medieval home in Confolens, so named because it marks the confluence of the Vienne and Goire Rivers.
It's been 23 years since I last saw Jess in Boston, and 30 years since we first met in Moscow, where we lived in the same MGU dorm. One of my favorite memories of Jess is this: My boyfriend, Sasha, had invited us both to an overnight birthday party at a dacha. I was dreading another night of heavy drinking, questionable choices, and slang-heavy Russian I could barely understand.
But Jessica's enthusiasm turned my attitude around. "We're going to a real Russian vecherinka!" she kept saying with glee, reawakening my inner anthropologist.
Now in France, Jessica bounds ahead with her fearless embrace of French culture and language, tinged with her Oklahoma accent.
An old joke between us is to gaze off into the middle distance and exclaim, in Russian, "Look!...People." (Posmotri!...Lyudi.) Jessica cracked us up with this one time when we spied some people on the balcony across from our dorm. We didn't know why it was so funny then, and we still don't know why it's so funny now. But it is.
I'd like to think that, in Confolens, while we were lunching on a terrace, two new friends were joking around and having a laugh as they watched us dining. And that, in 30 years, these old friends will reconnect in some other country and laugh at their old jokes.
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