David and Pop-Pop's Europe Trip
Barcelona, Spain

After dinner, Pop-Pop wrote Bubba a postcard.

I worked on the soap carving I was making for Emily.

I should tell the story about Emily now, since it is not in my diary and this page has the picture of the soap carving.

During elementary school, my best friend was Aaron Schatz. Years later, when I was at Pomona, we kept in touch with e-mail.

Now, in those days you could use a special program on the computer to find out about people on the internet. You would see if the account existed, if they were currently logged on or how long it had been since they logged on, and the text of a file called their Plan.

A Plan file was your bumper stickers in the internet world. Not everyone had one, but the people who did made it funny, and sometimes changed it regularly.

For entertainment, I would check to see if friends and friends-of-friends had Plan files. One day Aaron sent out a form letter to several of his friends. This told me their internet account names, so I could check their Plan files. Most were the usual humorous stuff, but one was a great poem that I had never heard of before.

I was currently in a poetry class, and for related reasons the poem interested me. I wrote to Emily, Aaron's friend, asking her where she got the poem.

That was October of 1992. Emily and I soon were friends and chatting about many things. But we never met, for she lived in Massachusets.

Then we found out that during the Summer of 1994, when I would be traveling through Europe with Pop-Pop, Emily would be study abroad in Italy. We arranged to meet in Venice.

The relationship between Emily and me was never romantic, and indeed was a safe place for both of us to talk about other romances. But we were both romantics at heart, so for a present I decided to carve her name in a bar of soap. I had done lots of soap carving, using long thin pieces of metal (the bristles that fall off a street cleaner truck into the gutter--they are perfect!).

To decorate her name I put a butterfly and two people who were looking at and reaching towards each other but not quite touching. I cannot remember what the butterfly represented. The people were our friendship, and how we had never met but soon would.

And that's all of the story you get until Venice.