Liz Fosslien ’09 is the co-author and illustrator of the Wall Street Journal bestseller No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. She is also the head of content at Humu, a company founded by Laszlo Bock ‘93 that uses behavioral science to make work better. In her spare time, she draws cartoons that have been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, and TIME.

Q: When did you first start drawing?

I’ve always been an avid doodler. While I was working as an economic consultant in my early 20s, I started putting my feelings into charts and illustrations. One of the earliest projects I put online was “14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You”—super nerdy, but economists seemed to like it, which gave me the motivation to continue drawing in a more serious way.

Q: How do you come up with ideas?

A comedian friend of mine once said he only goes to gatherings he knows will be amazing or horrendous, because extremes give him the best material. I feel similarly. When I’m brainstorming ideas, I try to think back on the moments when I felt intense emotion, good or bad.

For example, last summer I went to a wedding that started at noon, which is a very early time to start an event that goes until midnight. I’m an introvert, so around 7 p.m. I could not bear the thought of one more small talk. The only closed-off, quiet area was the coat closet, so I went inside it, sat on the floor and started messing around on my phone. A few minutes later, another woman came in to do the same thing. We quickly bonded over being in the coat closet and then had a long and lovely discussion about all the things we’d done just to get some peace and quiet at a party. I made a cartoon out of that.

Q: How do you keep track of your ideas?

I send myself text messages. I tried writing ideas in a notebook, but it became too cumbersome to constantly be responsible for a notebook. Here are a bunch of idea texts I recently sent to myself: “weather forecast,” “coffee and garbage can,” “sharing and oversharing firehose.” They’re semi-nonsensical, but they usually do the job of jogging my memory. I don’t remember what the “coffee and garbage can” text meant, though, so it’s not a perfect system.

Q: What do you find funny?

Economics, the comic series Calvin and Hobbes, the book Catch-22, the human Larry David. And my partner—he is pretty funny.

Q: Many artists seem to have rituals. Do you have any?

So many. I’m most rigid about my morning routine. I’ve eaten the same thing for several years: seven mini-scoops of Trader Joe’s plain nonfat Greek yogurt and one s’mores Luna Bar. While eating breakfast, I read academic abstracts or, if there is a new episode, listen to the podcast Reply All.

Trader Joe’s has the best plain, non-fat Greek yogurt. My partner doubted there was any real difference between this yogurt and other brands, so we did a blind taste test. He fed me seven random spoonfuls of Trader Joe’s, Fage, Chobani, and Wallaby yogurts, and I had to identify which one was the Trader Joe’s yogurt. I got a perfect score.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with a new breakfast by swapping out the Luna Bar and swapping in peanut butter and walnuts. This is for health reasons only. The new breakfast is not as delicious.

Q: Have you ever had a cartoon bomb?

Sort of. I posted this cartoon [next column] on Reddit, where it made it to the front page and was then promptly ripped to shreds by Internet trolls. The top comment was “Hooray, I get to have a colonoscopy!” and it went downhill from there. My parents thought it was hilarious. My dad, who lives in Chicago, still texts me from time to time. “I get to shovel the driveway again,” he’ll write. “I get to file my taxes.”

Q: You’ve written a book about work. What’s a good joke to tell when you’re late to an important meeting?

My advice is to be punctual to important meetings.

Illustrations by Liz Fosslien ’09

Odds are high that food is one of your favorite topics. Office conversations about where to go for lunch. Calls home on your commute asking what’s for dinner. Recounting a delicious meal in meticulous detail to a friend. Binging on the Food Network. And, of course, your Instagram feed (no pun intended). Food is a near and dear topic for Samuel Yamashita, too. The Pomona College Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History combined two great loves—food and, of course, history—and wrote Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai‘i Eats. In the book, Yamashita chronicles the way Hawaiians have eaten over time, and the way good, local island eats combined with French and Continental mainland fare to create a distinctive style of cuisine.

PCM’s Sneha Abraham sat down for a chat with Yamashita on all things food.

PCM: You grew up on the Hawaiian Islands?

Yamashita: I did. I grew up in a suburb of Honolulu, a place called Kailua, which has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, top 10. And it’s where Obama would rent a house during his presidency, but, of course, he really couldn’t go on to the beach because of too many people.

PCM: Security.

Yamashita: Yeah. So, I grew up in a beach town. I didn’t really wear shoes until I was 12. And so I had huge feet with really hard, kind of leathery soles. I had a great childhood. I mean, I played, I fished. I didn’t study much.

PCM: You’ve made up for it in the years since.

Yamashita: Well, I had to.

PCM: Were you born there as well?

Yamashita: I was born in Honolulu, in the same hospital where Obama was born.

PCM: What inspired you to do food studies?

Yamashita: In about 2007 or ’08, my editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press asked me out of the blue if I’d be interested in writing the history of Japanese food. She knew I was interested in food, and she was too. We’d have great lunches, and it was at the end of one of these celebratory lunches (on the occasion of the publication of my book Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies, that she oversaw) that she asked me, “How would you like to write a history of Japanese food?” I was old enough to know that I really needed to think about this. To think about what sources I would use, how I would organize it, what kinds of narratives I would write. And I said, “Let me think about this.”

I thought about it for half a year, and then I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to give it a try.” But I said, “You and I know that you’ll be long retired by the time I finish.” She was exactly my age, and I sensed that she was going to retire in a few years, and I was right. So she retired about four or five years ago, and I’ll finish this history of Japanese food in 2025 or so. It’ll probably be my last book. That was the beginning of my interest in food studies.

I also had collected and read many dozens of wartime Japanese diaries and had written some pieces on the food situation in Japan during World War II. My first food pieces were actually on the food situation in wartime Japan. And then in around 2009, or ’08 maybe, I was having to visit my widowed father in Hawai‘i about four times a year, and I thought, “I need to be able to write off these trips.”

So I began to interview chefs—the chefs for the Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine movement. And I ended up interviewing 36 people, including eight of the 12 founding chefs of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. And then I wrote a paper called “The Significance of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine in Post-Colonial Hawai‘i” and presented it at a conference, and somebody who heard it said, “How would you like to contribute it to a volume?” And so a volume called Eating Asian America was assembled and published by NYU in 2013. That was another important piece for me. And then I began to map out a book on Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. And in the meantime, I published in 2015 a book called Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 that used about 100 of the diaries I collected.

Once I finished with that, then I was able to concentrate on what became Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. I’ve also had good support from the College, chiefly in the form of the Frederick Sontag research fellowships, which are for senior faculty. So without those and without a series of spring leaves, I wouldn’t have been able to finish.

PCM: Talk about the perceptions of Hawaiian food that you write about.

Yamashita: Well, people who traveled to Hawai‘i didn’t go for the food, and Alice Waters once said to a friend, “If you go to Hawai‘i, be sure to take some good olive oil and vinegar so you can make a dressing and buy some watercress and have a good salad at least”—right? That was the prevailing view—that you went to Hawai‘i to spend time at the beach, to do other fun things, but not to eat. And the one food phenomenon that was somewhat popular was the so-called luau, a kind of Hawaiian feast. And I certainly grew up attending luaus because our Hawaiian friends and neighbors would usually have a luau whenever there was something to celebrate. When a new child was born or a child graduated from high school or somebody got married or when there was a new baby, often there’d be a luau. And this is pretty typical of the Pacific and parts of Southeast Asia—you raise a pig especially for the luau, and the pig is ready at a certain point, and it becomes the main item in the luau. And so, our neighbors would dig an underground pit called an imu, and they cooked the pig in the pit. They’d also make all sorts of dishes that accompanied it, including poke, which is very popular now in the U.S., but poke was … I could never eat poke outside Hawai‘i. Often they misspell it, P-O-K-I; it’s really P-O-K-E.

PCM: People here pronounce it poke-EE, too, right?

Yamashita: Yeah, yeah, it’s po-KEH. So, I’d say Alice Waters’s characterization of food in Hawai‘i and then the construction of the luau as a tourist food event were probably the two prevailing views of food in the islands. And, of course, as I point out in my book, there was fine dining in the islands, usually at the top hotels that would hire Anglo chefs, usually European or American French-trained chefs. And what’s interesting is that they would cook the very same things that their counterparts on the mainland or in Europe cooked. They would make the same French dishes, and they would use imported, generally imported fish, meat, vegetables and things of that sort. They weren’t using local, locally sourced ingredients much at all. And, of course, all the chefs, all the top chefs were Anglo, and locals served in subordinate positions as cooks.

So-called “local food” is the food that the local ethnic communities brought to Hawai‘i when they immigrated. The food they ate was denigrated by these Anglo chefs. So, there was a pretty stark hierarchy that separated haute cuisine, which was French and continental, from local food.

PCM: Can you talk a little bit about colonialism and then food, that relationship?

Yamashita: In almost all colonial situations, the food of the colonial masters is valued and elevated and affirmed. Of course, it is served in the homes and in the clubs of the colonial elite, and local food is denigrated. I have cookbooks from the 19th century and the recipes are typical of New England. And they added a few Hawaiian things, but about 96 percent, 97 percent of the dishes in those cookbooks were American.

There’s a scholar whose work I admire named Zilkia Janer who has written about food in Central America and Latin America. And, of course, there it’s the Spanish cuisine that’s elevated, and local cuisine of local indigenous people was denigrated. I actually use her piece in my book, as well as a number of other works on colonialism in South Asia, which offer a framework. So I also placed Hawai‘i in that broader colonial context.

PCM: Do you think we’re seeing kind of an iteration of that today in terms of globalization—the standard American diet is being adopted across the world?

Yamashita: Globalization is spreading American fast food as well as American popular culture. So McDonald’s is in many places, even places where you don’t expect to find it. Of course, now it’s almost everywhere. And that’s very typical, but it’s a new kind of colonialism; it’s a latter-day, postmodern colonialism that’s a little different from what existed earlier.

PCM: Talk a little bit more about the historical distinctions between fine-dining food versus local food. What dishes did you find in fine dining? What dishes in local food?

Yamashita: Before Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine?

PCM: Yes.

Yamashita: So essentially, fine dining was dominated by continental and/or French cuisine. And so lots of emphasis on heavy sauces, as was the case with the French cuisine served with imported wines. Usually not served with rice, but with potatoes. I analyzed menus from some of the top restaurants in the islands before HRC, and the menus would be recognizable to anyone familiar with fine dining on the mainland as well. It’s actually what you would find at top fine-dining establishments, especially French restaurants, in New York, in San Francisco and in Chicago. And you wouldn’t find local dishes on the menu.

What really suggested to me that something had happened was the following: My wife and I went to this really wonderful, well-regarded restaurant called CanoeHouse on the Big Island. It’s a great place for a great romantic dinner, located close enough to the ocean that you would hear the surf breaking. We got there at dusk and were led to a table and sat down, and I noticed on the table what you would find in the homes of locals and especially working-class locals—bottles of soy sauce and chili pepper water. And so when the waitress came back to the table, I said, “What’s this? What’s going on?” And she said, “Oh, we have a new chef. His name is Alan Wong.” That’s the two-word answer to the question. The bigger answer, the fuller answer is Hawaiian Regional Cuisine. Suddenly, people like Alan Wong and Roy Yamaguchi made it possible for local food to find its way into fine-dining establishments and, of course, this is what triggered my interest.

PCM: What did the chefs say triggered it for them?

Yamashita: Oh, that’s a good question that has several different answers. Let me give you the big answer first. Roy Yamaguchi graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, 1976. He was one of the first students of Asian descent to go there, you know—CIA in Hyde Park, New York. And after he graduated, he came to L.A. and cooked at a number of different places, finding his way in the restaurant world because there weren’t many Asian chefs. And he ended up finally at the best French restaurant in Los Angeles.

Then he cooked at two other French restaurants. And food critics writing for the Los Angeles Times wrote reviews of those restaurants and they said, “You know, I had the best French dinner I’ve had all year at this restaurant,” and who was the chef? It was Roy Yamaguchi. And then in 1984, he opened his own restaurant called 385 North, which was located at 385 La Cienega in West Hollywood. But what was also happening is that in 1982, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago, and then in 1983, he opened Chinois on Main, and then a bunch of Japanese chefs sent from Japan opened Franco-Japanese restaurants. And then Roy opened 385 North, and they were all cooking something that Roy called “Euro-Asian cuisine.” And he claims to have invented the concept in 1980; he may have invented it, but it quickly spread and was adopted by Puck and these other Japanese chefs.

Nobu Matsuhisa opened Matsuhisa in 1985, just about half a mile south of 385 North. But they were all doing Euro-Asian cuisine. And then in 1988, Roy came back to Hawai‘i and opened his own restaurant called Roy’s, and he used the Euro-Asian cuisine concept. And what that made possible was the adoption by chefs at fine-dining establishments of all kinds of Asian ingredients, the serving of Asian dishes. Conceptually that was what made HRC possible at a very high level. Because Roy was extremely well-trained and had experience and came to Hawai‘i, and that Euro-Asian framework was adopted by the other HRC chefs as well.

But at another level, if you asked Alan Wong that question, he would say something different—Alan Wong and Sam Choy, who were the two of the 12 chefs who are local. Alan Wong would say, “This is plantation food,” because the plantation communities were multi-ethnic.

Alan puts it this way: “You know, they would share their lunches, and so the Japanese would bring a Japanese lunch, the Chinese would bring a Chinese lunch, the Filipino would bring a Filipino lunch, and they would share food.” And so, Alan’s answer then is, “Well, this is what happened historically in Hawai‘i, beginning in plantation times.” It’s a very different kind of answer, but Alan did not go to the CIA. Alan went through a culinary arts program at a community college in Hawai‘i for two years, and then he went to a famous resort in Virginia called the Greenbrier, where he had two more years of training. And then he worked in New York at Lutèce, which was one of the best French restaurants in New York City. And after several years there, he then came back to Hawai‘i.

So he had the technical skill to make the best possible French cuisine imaginable, but he began to incorporate things from the local diet. That’s how he would explain that. So two very different kinds of answers. I think Alan’s answer is somewhat mythicized; it’s a kind of romantic view of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. I think the story of Roy is one that, historically, I’m more comfortable with. You know, I don’t like myth.

PCM: Yeah, you deal in history.

Yamashita: Yeah, that’s right, exactly right.

PCM: There is a sort of farm-to-table element, right, in Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yamashita: Well, that emerges somewhat late. Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine—its founding is formally announced in August 1991. It’s really not until the second decade, in the 21st century, that Peter Merriman and others developed the farm-to-table dimension of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. Of course, farm-to-table also emerges on the mainland, the continental U.S., around the same time—I think in the 21st century. And, you know, it’s important, but the impact of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine on farming is actually much larger than that because farm-to-table is a kind of tourist phenomenon, right? It’s so that tourists can visit the farms with the chef and meet the farmers and so forth. What Peter Merriman and others began to do in the 1990s was to develop relationships with farmers. What it does is to encourage local farmers, and it makes possible a kind of locavorism that was beginning to be really big on the mainland as well.

PCM: What is the legacy of HRC?

Yamashita: Good, good—that’s an important question. In the first place, Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine has made haute cuisine in Hawai‘i part of what I call “the restaurant world” on the mainland, and this was very important. That is, they were noticed by mainland food writers and won national awards. Secondly, it affirmed locavorism and encouraged local farmers such as Tane Datta. His daughter’s name was Amber. I think she was a 2013 Pomona graduate. Third, Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine affirmed “local food,” in quotation marks—that is, the food that local people, non-Anglo people, ate. Fourth, it led to the formation of farmers’ markets throughout the islands. Fifth, it made culinary arts an acceptable path of study, and even graduates of Punahou [a prestigious private K–12 school in Honolulu] became chefs—Ed Kenney and Michelle Karr-Ueoka, they’re both Punahou graduates. In the sixth place, HRC helped de-racialize fine dining in the islands. And that’s, to me, a really important point. Roy Yamaguchi says, “In an earlier generation, I would’ve been a cook, not a chef.” So he’s aware of that demographic change.

It also helped shatter the domination of French cuisine. And I was able to track this in recipes of HRC chefs. And that connection made it easier for chefs in the islands to cook locally, to cook things inspired by what they grew up with in their respective ethnic communities. One of the post-HRC chefs, the Filipino chef Sheldon Simeon, says, “I’m cooking my community.” Which I thought was a wonderful way to put it: “I’m cooking my community.” And then finally, the HRC movement and chefs brought important food issues to the attention of the broader public. So, sustainability, obviously, is one important issue.

There’s a kind of bottom fish called pink snapper; it and other types of bottom fish were being overfished. And so HRC chef Peter Merriman brought that to the attention of the broader public in some editorials that he wrote. And this resulted in careful regulation of bottom fish catches. When a certain limit is reached, then they close it down. And some of the chefs even began to use farm-raised tilapia instead of pink snapper.

Tilapia can be farmed. And apparently, the farmed tilapia tastes good. Whereas the tilapia that some of us caught when we were kids, you know, it tasted muddy, it tasted like catfish. So, it’s had a huge impact. And, of course, the HRC chefs became celebrities, got TV shows and contracts. And so, they became part of this global celebrity-chef phenomenon. Yeah, big deal.

PCM: Yeah, it is. What was the most fun part about writing this book?

Yamashita:: Well, of course, eating the food.

PCM: I knew the answer, but I had to ask. Do you have a favorite Hawaiian dish?

Yamashita: A favorite dish? Well, you know, Alan Wong’s loco moco was my all-time favorite dish.

Alan Wong’s interpretation of loco moco

PCM: Can you describe for the readers what loco moco is?

Yamashita: Well, it’s an interesting story because the loco moco was invented in Hilo, after World War II. And it was a dish created for a bunch of local teenage boys who were about to play a football game. A particular cook said, “I’ll make a dish for you guys.” It’s a plate with a mound of cooked short grain rice, topped with a hamburger patty with brown gravy poured over it and a fried egg on top. So they got starch, they got protein, you know, and lots of carbohydrates, and that carried them through the game. And so if you go to L&L Drive-In, they serve loco moco.

What Alan Wong did was to deconstruct the loco moco. For the rice, he used mochi rice, which is a highly glutinous rice. He cooked it and then created a kind of patty, rice patty, and deep fried it briefly. And then, instead of the ground beef patty, he used ground wagyu beef and unagi, which is Japanese eel. Mixed that together, created a patty, and cooked that and slathered it with an unagi sauce, which is sauce made with soy sauce and sake, and probably sugar. It’s a thick, dark sauce. He poured that over it, and then he topped it with a fried quail egg. There’s a picture of it in my book, and it’s a magnificent, brilliant, brilliant take on a humble local dish. I had eaten several different loco mocos of Alan Wong’s over the years before I encountered the version I just described. This was, to me, the pinnacle.

PCM: Loco moco 2.0.

Yamashita: Loco moco 4.0.

PCM: Do you cook?

Yamashita: You know, I do, or I used to. My wife’s such a good cook that I leave it up to her. No, I like to cook the things that are my favorites.

PCM: What’s your signature dish?

Yamashita: I used to have my students over, and what I used to make was a beef carbonnade described in a French cookbook. It’s essentially a stew made with beef and onions and a lot of red wine. It’s just a really hearty, rich dish, but a lot of our students are vegetarians, so they didn’t always like that, but that was what I used to make.

At that point I started making instead a Chinese dish called white-cooked chicken, where you parboil chicken and serve it at room temperature, and you slice cucumbers into thin strips and put the chicken on top of that and serve it with a peanut sauce.

PCM: That sounds delicious.

Yamashita: That’s one of my favorites. So, when I’m a bachelor, I often make that for myself.

Photos By Antoine Doyen

It was 2007. He was pushing 70. He and his wife had separated, and he was about to retire. Pages in his life were turning. It was time, he decided, to flip ahead to the next chapter.

Now, 11 years later, Charlie Crummer ’59, a one-time physicist in Southern California, lives in an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, a quiet, mostly residential plot of land in the River Seine as it flows through the heart of Paris. He’s an inch or two over six feet tall, his white hair mildly scattered, as Einstein taught us a physicist’s hair ought to be. On the street, he winds a scarf around his neck, which isn’t actually a municipal fashion ordinance in Paris but might as well be. Inside a quiet, simple neighborhood crêperie, he relaxes over lunch as he talks about how the seeds of his move from California to France had pretty much been sown long before he shipped out. About how, really, it all started with a car.

But not just any car.

“It was a 1966 Citroën DS,” he says, smiling at the recollection. “Do you know it? A French classic. I’d been driving an old Chrysler—a real tank. I brought it to the repair shop and the owner had this ’66 DS, a Pallas, which was the luxury model. He said ‘Take it for the weekend and try it out.’ Fifty miles later I was a raving convert. This was 1972. Riverside, California.”

For car guys back then, the front-wheel-drive Citroën DS was a dream vehicle, with self-leveling hydropneumatic suspension, power steering, disc brakes and other features that were, for the time, trophies of cutting-edge engineering and an oddly attractive space-age body design. A decade ago, a poll of 20 top automotive designers named the introductory version of the iconic vehicle—the 1955 model—“The Most Beautiful Car of All Time.”

“I kept that car for 13 glorious years,” Crummer continues, “until one day it ran out of water and the engine was damaged. We were going on vacation and drove it as far as Sacramento airport and it died. I left it in the airport parking lot for quite a while and then sold it to a Citroën aficionado. It was approaching 200,000 miles; all it needed was an engine overhaul. I dream that somewhere it’s still on the road. It was a work of engineering art.”

“Really,” he says, “it was because of the Citroën that I fell in love with France. I knew it in 1977, when we took a family trip to France—we were there just a week, less than a day in Paris. That was my first time in the country, but when we left… I can’t explain it, but I felt kind of homesick. It was like leaving my hometown.”

He especially connected with Paris—the soaring churches, the endless art, the streets and squares—but he didn’t go back for more than a quarter-century. When he did return at last, for a short stay in 2004, he found the city’s appeal was still there. He visited again the next year, and the next. It was after his separation in 2006 that he began to think seriously about moving there. Moving—you might say—to his spiritual hometown.

The following March 28, Crummer retired from his job as a physics lab manager at UC Santa Cruz. That same day, he was on a plane to Paris.

He brought along his two big lifelong passions: physics and jazz. (Ask him to name his major influences and he’ll start with Albert Einstein and Charlie Parker.) Both interests go back to his time at Pomona. A physics major (he later earned a Ph.D. in quantum gauge theory at UC Riverside), he was a versatile reed musician who played oboe in the orchestra as well as jazz on several members of the saxophone family. “I remember playing Dixieland on an exquisite gold-plated Selmer soprano sax owned by a professor in the music department,” he recalls. “That was ‘Doc’ Blanchard. To this day, I’m amazed he let me borrow such a valuable horn.”

It being the 21st century, among the first things Crummer did in his new Paris home was to establish a blog, so he could express an occasional thought about his new surroundings and a stray opinion about the world as he sees it. He headed his page:

Charlie

in

France

Some thoughts and some pictures

Impressions of Paris and other random thoughts

In his first blog post 11 summers ago, he celebrated the city’s parks and alleys and gardens. He responded emotionally to the sound of the great 19th-century organs in the churches of Saint-Sulpice and La Madeleine (“Tears of joy well in my eyes, taking me by surprise. My heart swells in my throat and explodes with the passion of the moment”). He reported briefly on visits to two jazz clubs. In one, a tiny bar (“about 4m by 8m, good beer, not so good sandwiches”), the audience barely outnumbered the performers: There were, in total, three listeners, including Crummer; the band was a tenor sax player and a pianist (“I listen to the sound of six hands clapping as they finish each tune”).

And then: “I took my clarinet down to the Seine the other evening. I found a place where I could sit alone. Carefully, I put the horn together and then paused. Who am I? An old guy sitting in rapture beside the ancient river ‘flowing under’ that has lived its life continuously since before the first man came there to receive its succor. I’m a little nervous even though there is no one else around. I can’t remember any tunes so I just play some changes. The river is kind. It flows on.”

Crummer brought his clarinet and his alto sax to Paris; he left two other horns—a tenor and a baritone sax—behind. “A bari is too big,” he explains. “You can only take so much on a plane.” In a life reboot, wherever you go to, you take some of you along, you leave some of you behind.

To keep up his musical chops, Crummer downloaded a copy of the famous Universal Method of Saxophone, the sax man’s bible (“I had it as a kid”) for exercises. He started playing in a saxophone quartet. “The leader of our group is a tenor man who’s an economist,” he says. “He travels a lot, so we can’t rehearse regularly. We have a guy who doubles on soprano and alto, and I’m on second alto. The other two are the leader on tenor and another guy on bari. We play mostly jazz and tango. We have a terrific jazz chart by Gerry Mulligan, better than anything else I’ve seen from him. We also have great charts from Astor Piazzolla, the ‘nuevo tango’ composer.”

Not that joining a group means the end of his solo playing. “I look forward to the good weather,” he adds, “when I can walk down by the old coal ramp by the Seine and play, alone, next to the swans and ducks. It’s so romantic.”

His occasional blog entries, usually brief, are written at home or, on occasion, sitting on a bench in a park with a laptop and free wi-fi. He mentions musical events ranging from a solo balalaika concert to a quartet playing gypsy jazz in a church. He marvels at Paris architecture. He offers quick opinions on capitalism versus socialism (the way economist Milton Friedman uses them, they’re cartoon-like loaded terms, he argues, and “Life isn’t a cartoon strip”), on oil drilling and oil spilling (“It’s time to just leave things alone down in the deep ocean”), on gun deaths and the NRA (he’s very opposed), and on his kids (he’s very proud).

Lately, Crummer has also been guest blogging for a small not-for-profit publisher in San Francisco, which has appointed him its “Paris Bureau Chief.” Since he finds managing the French language an ongoing battle, he schedules weekly one-on-one sessions with a French woman in which they converse for an hour in French and an hour in English. He’s a retiree apparently with no shortage of ways to keep occupied.

The physics part of his life came along to Paris mainly in the form of a paper that has been, typically for the scientific world, years in the making: “Aerodynamics at the Particle Level,” a continuation of work he began back in Santa Cruz. The paper—90-some pages long—explores the collision of fluids with solid surfaces from the particle perspective. It has been posted online for comments and suggestions from the scientific community; he’s revised it multiple times. “The way aeronautical engineers design a wing,” Crummer explains, “is to look at a bird and make a model and put it in a wind tunnel. We actually know a fair amount about just why things happen as they happen, although not enough. But engineers don’t care; they just want to make something that works. I want to know what’s behind the phenomenon.”

Considering all the elements of his Paris life, could he return to the States? That may depend on someone who entered his life soon after he arrived in Paris: Christine.

During his first month in the city, at the coffee hour after a regular service at the interdenominational American Church in Paris, he noticed a woman across the room. “She looked like a damsel in distress,” he recalls. “I thought ‘Uh-oh, that’s trouble’ but I went over and introduced myself. This is a church for Americans mostly, but she was French. She had an apartment to rent on the Île Saint-Louis, and she was there to post a notice on the church bulletin board.”

The woman was Christine, and as it turned out, she wasn’t trouble at all.

At the time, Crummer had a six-month rental arrangement across town, so he didn’t need the apartment Christine was looking to rent out, but when the six months ran out they moved together to her childhood home in a close suburb, where she was able to care for her aging mother. “If I hadn’t been religious when I came,” Crummer says, “I would have been converted just because of the magical things that have happened to me since I moved here.”

Eventually, they took over the apartment she had been looking to rent that day, the apartment on the Île Saint-Louis. The island is just a few hundred yards from the tourist hordes around Notre-Dame Cathedral yet light-years away on the serenity scale. “I’ve been all over the city by now,” Crummer says. “The Île Saint-Louis is the absolute best location I can imagine.

“Christine would love to live in San Francisco—she’s thought about that for a long time. I might go back there with her. After all, she has a dream; she helped me realize mine, so what could be fairer? We might do six months and six months. There’s a lot to be worked out.”

He pauses a few seconds to reflect, then continues: “I’m thinking of the old saying: ‘Go with the flow.’ It’s all an adventure. We’ll see what happens.”