March 13th, 2024 | Family, General, Loss, Memory, Time Passes
No one asked me, but if they did, this is what I would say. “On your 50th birthday, stop collecting stuff. Immediately. Tell friends and family members that from here on in, you only want comestibles or donations made in your honor. No stuff. No tchotchkes. No...
November 30th, 2023 | Family, General, Holidays, Loss, Time Passes
The most difficult change has occurred, as I have pondered for the last six months in this blog. Dan’s struggle with kidney failure and other chronic illnesses came to an end on June 6. It wasn’t something unexpected. I had a sense of being ready. I don’t think,...
November 21st, 2023 | Education, Friends, General, Memory, Time Passes
Let us now praise those who keep their ephemera in immaculate order, fully identified and thoughtfully edited. Okay most of us aren’t people of particular cultural or historical import. Our scraps of paper, tchotchkes, photographs and whatnot are unlikely to be the...
October 22nd, 2023 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, General, Loss, Memory, Time Passes, Travel
Vilnius—in fact, all of Lithuania—is a constant experience of déjà vu. Or perhaps more accurately, jau matytas. Every day seemed a trip down Memory Lane. October 6 I hadn’t planned to be ensconced in my room at Bookinn B&B by that day, but I had fled the pas...
October 4th, 2023 | Europe, Family, General, Matters of the Spirit, Memory, Pets, Time Passes, Travel
Douglas Keister published Stories in Paris: A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries and Their Residents in 2013 and I don’t remember when I bought it. I must have encountered it in the travel pages of The New York Times. but I don’t recall. Cemeteries in Distant...
July 4th, 2023 | Family, General, Health, Matters of the Spirit, Time Passes, Writing
Unless I want to be an Edie, Big or Little, in an ersatz-colonial Grey Gardens, I need to begin the process of emptying this house. We’ve been happy here. At least I think so. It is hard, indeed, to truly know what Dan was thinking about much of anything....