In our half-century of living and vacationing in small town New England, we’ve attended many Fourth of July fireworks. Even for people like us who are too cynical for our own good, the event awakens what I just heard a radio commentator describe as a sense of “progressive patriotism.” The roads leading to the fireworks are lined...
On a pleasant weekday afternoon last week, I was in our community garden serving my slot with the irrigation team. The job involves hooking up our apparatus to the hydrant on our corner (we have a permit from the city), rolling out the hoses in the southern end of the garden – there’s a similar setup on the north side – and making them available to any gardeners who come by during the posted...
Last week I had my say on the rewards of intergenerational friendships. Today, I want to focus on the upper end of the age spectrum where Rosellen and I are definitely encamped. For a long time, I agreed with a gerontological social worker friend’s contention that aging is no less a social construction than race. I still believe...
Rosellen’s parents moved from Manhattan to West Palm Beach, Florida when the New York air became difficult for my mother-in-law to breathe. Their new home, Century Village, was a community of perhaps ten thousand retirees, all living in similar one- or two-bedroom apartments. It is telling that in preparing their wills, they asked each of their three children if they would like to inherit the...
I’ve read a lot of proposals in my time for new schools, new programs, new institutions. They contain many statements about the nature of the new entity that have to be seen as aspirational. In the fortunate instances when these proposals actually come to life, we can sometimes trace the way these aspirations mutate because the circumstances into which they are born are in constant flux. I want...