If you are getting old and know it and thinking to move yourself to an independent living/assisted care home, you are faced with more questions than you faced when planning your fancy wedding. For instance, to drive or not to drive. In other words, to take your car to the retirement home or not. […]
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This morning, thinking again about a lovely event I attended last week, I realized another perk of living a long life: you get to see your children retire. You might even get to sit and listen while people you don’t know talk about them and their accomplishments. You get to listen to them as […]
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I went to church on Sunday afternoon in a park. I think now we should do this once in a while, after we go back to meeting with walls around us. It was the Sunday after Easter, which I discover is called “low Sunday,” in some churches, because it is always attended by a small […]
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Four birds sat in a tree. Three of them decided to fly. How many were left in the tree? (A small math problem taken from a Lebanese friend’s fb page this morning.) But you wanted to hear about that storm in Texas. It was 1985. Our friend Maria Daoud had come home with us […]
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Monday had a special feeling from the beginning. This was the day we were getting vaccinated, all of us here, residents and staff, except for the energetic young mother who cleans my apartment on Tuesdays and Charlie down the hall who limps every step of the miles he walks up and down the halls every […]
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What You May Learn If you were compulsive before you came, you will be compulsive when you open your suitcases in the retirement center. Determination to make these rooms feel like home instead of a hotel will lead to the recurrence of the back pain that has already turned you into a drug addict. The […]
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I never expected to be where I am right now. I do, however, remember noticing that sometimes old age advances in sudden events. A woman is 91 and well and active; she falls and breaks a hip, and it is the beginning of the end. Because she can’t walk, she loses respiratory health and […]
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For a whole day I cried while watching the same newsreels over and over, the pictures of Beirut in a mushroom cloud, in flames, in flying shards, in broken walls and tumbling cars, her stunned people covered with blood. I will not attempt to tell you what happened that day or since, but it seemed […]
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One thing some of us have more of because of the COVID-19 pandemic is time to think. And the daily news provides us with ample substance for thought. Thus I have been thinking about many scattered topics. Some of them relate to things I said to myself (and confessed in my book) […]
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I have a question: is there anybody out there for whom 2020 is the year you dreamed of? Or planned for? Or, ok. . .just expected? I don’t mean to be silly or to rub your face in your disappointment, but I just want to establish that I am not the only one who is […]
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