My son this week left for St. Petersburg (not Florida as some neighbors guessed, but Russia). Study abroad but with the added challenge of a whole different alphabet. I remember St. Petersburg as Leningrad. It looked in pictures like an unusually inviting Soviet city.

I went to Madrid to study abroad at the same age as my son has gone to St. Petersburg. Learned only later it was among the hottest years of the Cold War. Before I left, the Soviets had shot down a Korean Air Lines jet, killing 269 people, including a friend of my brother Tim’s. Terrorists in Lebanon had blown up a marine barracks killing 299, including a friend of my brother Steve’s. I watched that year’s film “The Day After” at my friend Jon Di John’s cold flat in London and we stayed up afterwards talking about infinity. (The photo shows Spaniards’ graffiti protesting the U.S. invasion of Grenada that year.)