TROPHY ROOM

Going on safari.

- DAVID SEDARIS

It was a good year for Christmas parties. At one, I met a number of authors I had always admired. This can be tricky, but they were all lovely. The food was lovely, too, though I dropped a miniature barbecue sandwich on the new white shirt I was wearing, and will likely never get the grease stain out.

At another party, the following week, I was introduced to a curator from the Metropolitan Museum. We talked about people who throw soup and oil on beloved paintings, hoping to draw attention to climate change or poor nutrition or whatever their cause is, and then I learned that he would soon be leaving on an African safari, the sort where you carry a camera rather than a gun.

“Have you been planning it for months?” I asked.

“Actually, it all came together over the past few weeks,” he told me.

On the subway home, I said to Hugh in the faux-pouty voice that I use to challenge extreme injustice—other couples taking a vacation when it should be us, for example—“Why can’t we go on a safari?”

A month later, we were in an open-sided four-by-four vehicle surrounded by seven lions, none of which seemed to care about us. All of them were female, and I wondered if, when writing about this afterward—for surely I would—I might be taken to task for using the term “lionesses.”

“Is it like referring to someone as a ‘waitress’ or a ‘stewardess’?” I whispered to Hugh, who was seated beside me, sketching. “Will people say, ‘Why did you have to mention their gender in the first place? Why can’t you just say “lions” and leave it at that?’”

To my mind, the gender mattered, since the females do the majority of the hunting, and are therefore scarier when they’re eight feet away and can surely smell you.