Recently, I gave my students an assignment to interview someone in their major field. I wanted to introduce a skill that would allow them to connect with potential mentors and colleagues. Many have embraced the new skill: As future doctors and scientists, they’ve found interviewing to be surprisingly fun, if suitably outside their comfort zone.

That latter is partly the point of the whole exercise. My high school journalism instructor, Jack Kennedy, once told our news lab class that to become journalists, we had to risk our comfort zone. I remember my eyes widening, with both trepidation and delight. I had always been deeply inquisitive but also terribly shy. It turned out that interviewing was the perfect tonic to knock me out of my shell while also sating my innate sense of wonder. Interviewing was also what I loved most about working as a journalist, from the very first time I did an interview. My first interview was for a feature story on the national trend, in the 1990s, of American couples adopting Romanian babies from neglected orphanages. In addition to adoptive parents, I interviewed Romanian intellectuals who’d fled Communist Romania, including a mathematician in our town. Since I was only 15, and too young to drive, my mother dropped me off at his house. I don’t remember much of the actual interview, but I remember feeling smitten afterward by the exchange — so much so that I walked all the way home across town.

Despite my affinity for interviewing, I’m not actually a ‘people person,’ nor am I the life of the party. But I meander through parties by essentially interviewing people, one-on-one, pulling something out of them, usually what makes them tick. Although nowadays I rarely go to parties, I do regularly accompany my daughter on play dates, where I am left to talk to her friends’ parents. Sometimes this is tedious, but a few weeks ago, I learned the interesting backstory of the mother of one of her friends, who in 1989 left North Vietnam for Berlin, when she was just three years old. She remembers the plane ride, and the Wall coming down. Her father had previously been a student in East Germany and was going back to Berlin to settle his family there. She grew up speaking German and Vietnamese, earning her doctorate in Germany before moving to the United States.

Kristine Crane was in Rome last summer, imbibing all that the chic and bustling Monti neighborhood had to offer. Photo by Kristine Crane.

A little while later, I heard a woman speaking Italian, so I spoke up, in Italian. Turns out she was from Rome, Monti no less, one of my favorite neighborhoods. She’s a veterinarian at the university here, married to another veterinarian from Buenos Aires. When I told her that I’d lived in Rome for nearly a decade and missed it, she said that she’d been here just as long — and that she thinks it’s easier as an American moving to Italy than a European moving to the U.S. I don’t disagree with this; for the first time, perhaps, I imagined how hard it must be to adjust to the U.S. (with the caveat that Europeans still have a home to return to that is an arguably more humane place, with free health insurance).

She’d tipped me off to a new perspective, perhaps even a future story idea. Suddenly, this playground in a small city in the South had become a much bigger world, which was also a pleasant antidote to the horrors of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. America’s own claim on “the sweet life” is precisely this: A place where people from wildly different places converge and connect. All it took for me to get there was opening my mouth — and leaning in to listen.