The autoroutes in France may knit Normandy to Provence, but you can drive across the entire nation without, it seems, noticing a single thing. "Life doesn’t happen along the Interstate,” William Least Heat-Moon wrote,” it’s against the law.”

But recently I tapped the brakes near the village of Gordes in Provence and drove the winding uphill road to the stone village founded in 1031 and perched like an eyrie above the autoroute.

Tourists blocked the road just outside Gordes, taking selfies on their iPhones with the village as a backdrop. Then in a village café, I discovered that I could order a “Real Manhattan Hot Dog.”

Few things can be as elemental as a place like Gordes, a village built of the stone it stood on, huddled for defense in a hostile place, yet with a town square where a seamstress and a farmer could share a pastis.

Today, by contrast, we live in a whirl of possibility, enabled by the autoroute and the internet, where everywhere is available but nothing is really significant.

If the autoroute and Instagram belong to everyone, I thought, Gordes belongs to where it is.

With or without Le Hot Dog.

“I Don’t Know what to call him,
But he’s mighty like a rose.

Lyrics by Frank Lebby Stanton
Music by Ethelbert Nevin

It was New Year’s Eve at Duke University Hospital emergency room in Durham, North Carolina, and my friend Perry was dying. Few places have the adrenaline rush and high anxiety of a hospital emergency room at night. There was nothing anyone could do for Perry but make him comfortable.

I stepped outside under the canopy where the ambulances unloaded.

A mother and her eight-year-old son offered me a place to sit beside them on the wooden bench underneath the canopy. Then she walked away to talk on her cell phone.

As I sat thinking of Perry, a tiny voice from behind me asked, “What did you get for Christmas?”

It might as well have been Elijah; I was so startled.

I told the little boy that my favorite Christmas present was a book about the oldest living things in the world. And what did he get, I asked? His favorite gift was a football.

It seemed as though Perry had dispatched an angel.