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would ride the motorcycle, and my mother, sisters, and I would follow him in the car, though the safety benefit of this is still unclear to me. I guess if he wrecked, she wanted to lock eyes with him as he flew through the air to meet his Maker so he could see those eyes shouting, “WHAT DID I TELL YOU, GODAMNIT?”
    My sisters and I cried the whole way, and at red lights, we’d stick our heads out the window and shout, “Get in the car, Daddy! We don’t want you to die!”
    Soon after, the motorcycle was parked in front of our house, wearing a FOR SALE sign.
    I thought of this story as I stood in the wings, plotting my escape from the theater festival.
    This is my Nighthawk, I thought, but I won’t keep it all locked up. I’ll ride fast and hard. I’ll ride til the wheels come off.
    Within a week, I was kneeling at St. Peter’s, my face suffused with the sunlight that poured through the stained-glass dove above the altar. I sat in Piazza del Duomo, taking in the majestic glory of the cathedral while drinking a Campari paid for by a handsome stranger, who just so happened to have a seat waiting for me on the back of his motorcycle if I felt like a ride. Not a Nighthawk but close enough.
    I used the birthday and graduation money I’d been saving and blew it traveling through Vienna, Budapest, Amsterdam, and Paris. I drank in the sight of winding canals and towering palaces and smoking-hot international guys who didn’t speak English, but didn’t need to do any talking, anyway. I stood in front of Sacré-Coeur while its bells tolled and watched women on stilts waving scarves, and the undulating violet blur of the scarves against the white of the church and the blue of the sky made my heart ache with fullness. That was the right regret.
    Dr. Hall was right. I did need to start making changes.
    Life was telling me to find myself some silver linings. And to Life I said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

 
 
Tip #4: On smoking
    Never light your own cigarette. You risk revealing your hidden handicap when you keep on missing. If you’re showing a little décolletage, there’s always a guy with a match nearby. Do it right and asking for a light can be alluring, very Bogart and Bacall. Do it wrong and it’s still better than lighting your hair on fire.
     

 
    4. NOTHING VENTURED
    On those long train rides around Europe, I had plenty of time to ponder, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I’d taken my vision for granted over the past nineteen years. I’d wasted a ton of precious time looking at the same faces, the same street signs, the same insides of the same rooms. Everything would change now that I had to cram a lifetime of sights into the next decade or so. I needed to accumulate images.
    In order to see more, I’d have to do more. And in order to do more, I’d have to become someone different. Now that my eyes had been given an expiration date, there wasn’t time to waste being a dishwater blond with a good head on her shoulders.
    I’d always been so cautious, sensible. “Better safe than sorry” was my family’s motto, and the phrase I’d heard more than any other growing up was, “Be careful!” My mother and grandmother repeated it with a cultlike persistence, pairing it so frequently with “I love you” that to this day I find it hard to divide the two. Being careful all the time ruled out not just recklessness and spontaneity but, to a large extent, frivolity. Thus, my mother’s idea of a good time was eliminating redundancies in the cereal shelf (“Why, WHY do we have two half-eaten boxes of Corn Flakes? Let’s just consolidate them!”). All of my father’s hobbies fell under the category of “things I’d pay other people to do,” stuff like retiling the bathroom and washing the mop. Letting loose in our house meant pouring yourself a cup of OJ straight, not cut with water. When we went on vacation, my parents planned and attacked our leisure with such intensity that