In about two weeks, I will be celebrating my 87th birthday. In all those years I have, miraculously, never spent a night in a hospital bed. I may actually have been kept overnight when I had my tonsils out at age 4 or 5, so someone suggested that I qualify that statement by saying I’ve never spent an “unplanned” stay in the hospital. Well, that Cal Ripken-like health record came to a screeching...
Larry Stoler and I have been engaged in a travel adventure of sorts as part of nurturing our cross-generational friendship. It’s nothing like the Rhine River cruise type of travel that I wrote about last week. It’s more like the “I have traveled widely in Concord” kind that Thoreau wrote about. We never leave the confines of Chicago for our excursions (a word forever sullied by Trump’s use of it...
I am of the generation of Jews, fast disappearing, who grew up in the 40s and 50s of the last century, close on the heels of the Holocaust. My mother’s sister, her husband and their three children were murdered in Auschwitz, so the atrocities committed by the Germans were not an abstraction. They were in full view on the family tree in places where no lines leading to the next generation are...