He would say the name, then he would pause for a long second to see if I had met them or been there, or at least if I knew of the person or had heard of the place. He talked like an encyclopedia. Every twentieth word was a proper noun. He enunciated the first letters of the names to remind me they were capitalized.

When I didn’t know of the person (which was more often than not) and confessed that I didn’t (which I only did a few times when his pauses were extra long and accusatory of my ignorance) he would say, “Oh, they are important, you must read about them.” Of a place, he would say, “Oh, it’s beautiful, you must go there.”

Afterward, I thought of a couple of possible reasons for my conversational partner’s manner of speaking. Either he had learned in the past that bringing up names was a way to seem intelligent, or he just wanted to be anyone other than himself, somewhere other than where we were.