On the morning I was scheduled for my appointment, I woke to loud thunder and lightning. I got up and walked in the dark through the living room and stood in front of the glass sliding door to watch. Interestingly, there was no rain. I love thunderstorms, so I stuck around for a few minutes … More A New Me
Ten days ago, I began to receive an unsettling drumbeat of emails from the senior residential community where my 91-year-old mother Ginny lives. August 28th: “We now have 2 confirmed cases in Memory Care.” August 29th: “we currently have two (2) positive cases in Memory Care and two (2) positive cases in Assisted Living.” August … More Delta Developments
Last week, I was digging through a stack of aging, faded newspaper articles I wrote as a free-lancer back in the late 1990’s, hoping to find a particular story I thought might be a good fit for the blog. Suddenly, I landed on a clipping which I didn’t write. It had been snail-mailed to me … More Saving Lissa
I grew up less than an hour from Amish country. When I think about that, it’s hard to believe because I was full-on suburban girl, hitting the mall, the movie theaters and going to sleep-overs on the weekend so we could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. It was only 55 minutes, but … More Connecting to the Amish
It has been almost a year since my mother Ginny turned 90 during the Covid lockdown. At the time, I remember telling her that as soon as restrictions lifted, we would celebrate this important birthday by taking her out to her favorite restaurant, ordering her favorite gin and tonic cocktail and digging into a birthday … More Life Inside Memory Care
This is not a story about my hair; but it starts there. It had been eight months since my last chemotherapy session and my short hair was as curly as Little Orphan Annie though the color was far different. This phenomenon, often referred to as chemo curl, is common post-treatment because the chemicals damage the … More A Tale of Two Journeys
I had high hopes when I used my Libby app to download Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics written by Atlantic Senior Editor Ronald Brownstein and published last March. This nonfiction work would be a great choice for my first book review. As a teenager in … More Rock Me On The Water: LA’s Legendary Moment in The Sun 50 Years Ago
Gleaming white buildings. Miles of freshly-dug lagoons. Venetian gondolas. A Ferris Wheel. These were the images that came to mind when I was first asked a question over dinner one evening. “If I could go back in time, to any point in history, where and when would I choose?” I suspect that there are as … More A World’s Fair To Remember
It was the Monday of Labor Day weekend 2015. My husband and I had only been living in our newly adopted state for 33 days. We had driven from the Chicago area to our new community east and south of Orlando, Florida; just a 20- minute drive from the Atlantic coast. We were renting an … More Fins: A Summer Memory
Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist known for her politically charged interviews throughout her career. But in 1979, she moved away from that genre to write a novel – a thinly veiled story of her real-life relationship with a man who tried to assassinate a Greek dictator. I read it back in 1982 through a … More As Fate Would Have It…
