My Nashville adolescence was a time adrift without any clear idea of who or what I wanted to be. The people around me in public high school all seemed like people I wouldn’t want to become, and they seemed to view me in the same light. I worried a lot about what kind of life I should aspire to.

How, I was wondering, could homesickness affect someone who was so sick of home?

I was eager to run away from a bad divorce and the death of my father and was desperate for a job that would take me away from Nashville.

I had just finished my first-ever dish of angulas, baby eels, properly called elvers. They are a tasty specialty of Basque cuisine and come in a quarter-pound serving of tiny two-inch long animals, which look like thin transparent noodles with two black dots of eyes at one end.