Recent unrest and demonstrations on university campuses have reminded us of student opposition to the Vietnam war, when young men with no desire to fight were objecting to being drafted and sent into battle. Critics of those demonstrations often accused the participants of being unwilling to serve their country. Student opposition to the war […]
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I am living in probably the safest place I have ever been. My family is not worried about me. While I sit here thinking about the Thanksgiving season, someone is cooking my dinner. The wonderful colors of autumn are hanging on in the courtyard. Even the weather is better than predicted. The hardest decision I […]
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Mildred knew the time was near when she should not live alone. She had lately locked herself out of the house more than once. That was a predicament! She frequently misplaced the credit card bill and had to pay a late fee. Not wanting to cook, she often ate a bowl of cereal and called […]
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Before I moved to the retirement community, I was alone in a big house, responsible for the meals I ate, the dirty dishes, my laundry, the kitchen floor, shopping, fetching the mail, taking out the trash and knocking the unexpected snow off the awning over my deck. And my doctor kept asking what I […]
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In October, I sat on the porch with Bee, another resident here. I was in one of the big white rocking chairs that always seem to invite me to sit awhile. My friend was in her wheelchair. The day was sunny, the sky brilliant, and across the road the strip of forest that protects us […]
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A couple of years ago while consciously thinking about how to help myself grow old, I realized that it was really important to me to keep learning. This was partly recognition that learning had something to do with my brain health, and that I would need my brain when my legs were already worn […]
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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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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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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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