When I first started work on this memoir, I fully expected it to conclude with the events recounted in chapter 11, “West Coast Years.” Unexpectedly, however, Laura and I found ourselves in 2014 back in Philadelphia—in the same apartment building we had lived in when I was working for the Philadelphia Orchestra in the 1980s, and for a time with the same doorman, Dwight, still on the job, and as courteous and efficient as ever.

The reason for this last move was that, rather as had happened nine years earlier in Philadelphia, Laura's job in Bremerton became insupportable— her fifteen- and sixteen-hour working days were leaving us with scarcely any opportunity of leading a real life together—and she was offered a new job just outside Philadelphia. But also, while we loved the physical beauty of our surroundings in the Pacific Northwest and the remarkably friendly and laid-back attitude of many of its inhabitants, the realization that we really are big-city people made the move even more desirable.

Ironically, now that we have moved from a place where, to go anywhere or do anything, we had to get into a car, to the very heart of a city (with the concert hall, the opera house, and a wealth of excellent restaurants within a mere two blocks’ distance), we are walking much more than we did in an area full of people dedicated to open-air pursuits. And though we miss good friends that we made in our eight years and a half in the Northwest, it is good to be renewing older personal and professional friendships on the East Coast, not to mention having my son, Sam, who is chef at a restaurant here, within easy social and gastronomic reach. Sadly, Harvey Wedeen died while I was writing this book, a few days short of his eighty-eighth birthday, but Helen is still a close neighbor, and now I can have my hair cut again by my former barber and valued friend Dino Taormina.

It happened that no one had taken over my Philadelphia berth on the reviewing panel of “Seen and Heard,” so I stepped right back into that agreeable activity.