Storytorch

My husband Mark and I are in Edinburgh, Scotland, in place to attend the famous Military Tattoo drum and bagpipe exhibition tomorrow night amid a crowd of 10,000. We've been up and down The Royal Mile, discovered an old monument to Robert Burns in a seemingly abandoned cemetery, and lunched at The Beehive pub near Edinburgh Castle.

Today, while enjoying paintings by Scots and others at the Royal Museum, we took a seat on a tufted velvet sofa in a ground floor gallery to give our legs a short rest. Other tourists were milling about, and Museum guards stood at their posts.

Still a bit jeg-lagged, I felt my eyelids close. Able to sleep deeply while sitting stock-still, I power napped, returning to consciousness after only five minutes or so. "Where am I?" I wondered, casting about until my eyes caught the plaid pants of a burly guard. "Oh, right, Edinburgh."

With pleasure, I recalled a short snooze I enjoyed in front of Sargent's "Madam X" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of years ago, and another on a beautiful June day sitting at a table in the Tuileries near the Louvre in Paris. Perhaps I should start a checklist of world cities where I'd like to doze impromptu.

I was probably in my 30s when I bought a pair of silvery earrings bearing "New York, Paris, Milan" in artsy script along the sides. My joy was great when I ran across them some years later, having visited, as I hoped I would, each city.

Today's Fortune Cookie Fortune:
You will relax away from home.