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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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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Relationships and Our Needs In this day of a global pandemic, many people of all ages, especially those who live alone, are faced with some of the experiences large numbers of older people have known for years. If we had a dozen single-word descriptors of aging and we took a poll of the […]
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