In the fall of 2002, I took a trip out to London to visit Betty, and during Halloween made the short flight out to Prague by myself for a few days. There’s no point in me adding to the generations-long catalogue of “wow”-type descriptions of the city; suffice it to say that there’s really no other city that I can compare it to in terms of pure haunted romanticism.

On the last night I was there, I found myself in Old Town, drifting amongst a mist of watering holes and restaurants. Prague is famous for jazz, of all things, and I was looking for a place to rest my weary tourist noggin and close my eyes to some memorable music. I found just the right place in a crowded jazz club that rested at the bottom of a cavernous stairwell, its entrance perfectly conspicuous to a seacher’s eye.

Toward the side wall, adjacent to the stage, I found a table with three young women sitting around an empty seat, which they were kind enough to offer me. While the band was setting up, I learned that one of the ladies was from Switzerland, the other two were from somewhere in France along the Switzerland border. The talk was polite but not particularly interesting, and we tried to stretch it out long enough to not have to say too much to each other before the music started.

Finally, and thankfully, it did. The show that night was vocal jazz, and the singer was an American women full of buxom bravado who clearly loved what she was did for a living. Whenever I am asked what would be my dream job, I hardly hesitate in answering “musician.” I say this because I can see at jazz concerts that the music rises up and inhabits the people playing it; I can’t think of a drug more natural and more potent than playing music that you love.

I opened my eyes as one song ended, and the vocalist introduced the following song with an anecdote that I don’t remember at all, but with a name that I’ll never forget. “It’s French,” she whispered into the microphone, “and it’s called ‘Tendresse.’” There was some shifting in the crowd, and I knew that most either understood French, approved of how this song title sounded, or both.

I leaned over to my French table companion, a young blond woman who, aside from some brief murmering with her companion, had been quiet and appeared very drawn to the music. I asked her what the title meant, and in a moment that oddly enough, despite my crumbling hold of the past, will be one that I will never forget, turned to me and translated: “Tenderness.”

I would fail beyond pathetically to try to use my limited descriptive capability to convey how beautiful that word sounded to me when she said it. Her French accent, mixed with the lazy tendrils of smoke, the strum of the bass string, and stirring of the wine inside me, will define what tenderness is to me forever. When I see the word, and more importantly, when I feel the word, it is always with a beautiful French accent in a dark but warm jazz club in Prague.

I bring up tenderness now because, in this very cold winter in Shanghai, it’s what I know can keep me warm and content. It is also something that I crave right now, something that has been missing in the formula of decadence and recklessness that is my whiskey-drenched life of Shanghai. In a string of punches to the gut, from Poe-dah shock to the system back in California to Jenny finding love with someone else in Singapore, I find myself looking for that evening in the wellspring of romanticism that shows itself uninvited at the door of my thoughts every once in a while. In a city with so many millions, what does it take for one to find a blanket of tenderness to keep the nights warm and beautiful?