December, 3, 2019
Medium, a popular website, asked me to write about “How to Talk to an Old Person.” At first I thought it was about talking to people older than I — people in their eighties or nineties. Then it landed with a thud: the old person — that’s me. But I don’t feel old. I feel like I’m 50. When I was 40, I felt like I was 28. You always feel younger inside than your chronological age, but both ages are moving upward, in tandem. The “I” — the interior being that you […]
Read MoreOctober, 17, 2019
In July, when I told friends I was taking a tour of Ukraine and Moldova, they were baffled. “Why?” they asked. It sounded like vacationing in lower Slobovia. We did not know—at that exact time in July—that President Trump was pressuring Ukraine’s President Zelensky to dig up dirt about Vice President Biden, nor that in a short time, Ukraine would be leading the world news. So why, indeed, was I going? Well, my father’s parents came from Odessa, which was then part of Russia though now it’s in Ukraine. I was curious to […]
Read MoreJuly, 5, 2019
This is Part 2. To read Part 1 click here. I don’t know how or when I got home. I remember driving my black Beetle out through the tight-packed crowds. This time, though, without police escorts, I was tense and anxious, the beetle crawling forward as we waited for people in front of the bumper to move aside. The only other memory I have is that we were nearly out of gas, but all the gas stations in a 60-mile radius were closed. Pulling into one, I inserted a hose into my gas tank, […]
Read MoreJune, 3, 2019
Judy Blue Eyes, Somebody to Love, With a Little Help from my Friends — I’ve been singing those and other songs over and over, to memorize the harmonies for a concert our vocal group is giving, honoring the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. I’m the only one in the group who was actually at Woodstock. In 1969, I was a young reporter living in N.Y., covering the city for the Boston Globe. My husband was a disc jockey on the primo FM rock station in the city. They’d been running ads for a three-day […]
Read MoreMarch, 9, 2019
What happens when a new technology is so disruptive that secrets long buried are unearthed, creating havoc and, in some cases, wonder? Back in the 80’s, before we had internet or mobile phones, I created a TV series on ABC called HeartBeat, about a group of women ob-gyns. At that time, there were few women doctors delivering babies, and the show was based on the first all-female group of ob-gyns in Los Angeles. After hanging around their office for months, I wrote an episode about an orthodox Jewish couple having fertility problems. The […]
Read MoreOctober, 24, 2018
DENVER—I was lost, searching for Helen Simon, walking through a maze of corridors in a skilled nursing community—the current term for the dreaded words, “nursing home.” I passed a dining area with no one eating. A grand piano with no one playing. Seeing an attendant, I asked, “Where can I find suite M-2—Helen Simon?” * “She’s not in her room,” the attendant said, pointing to an alcove with a large TV and a woman in a wheelchair parked in front. “That’s her,” she said. I dropped to my knees beside the wheelchair. “Hello, […]
Read MoreSeptember, 24, 2018
This month, I had the privilege of being with my son, Andrew, and his wife, Fay, as she gave birth to their second baby, Emma. I’d been present when their first daughter, Siena, was born, two years earlier. But this was miraculous all over again. At the hospital, Fay had started pushing, and we could see the top of the baby’s head with pitch black hair peeping out. The head inched forward with each push, then receded. The doctor, a young woman with a butch haircut, kept saying, “You’re gonna give birth any moment. […]
Read MoreJuly, 21, 2018
We had little to go on when my sister, Terry, and I took off for Hungary, to reverse the journey our grandparents had made when they’d come to America in the early 1900s. We had some family stories, a couple sepia photos, and an application for U.S. citizenship filled out by our grandfather, Louis Wass. What would we find? It had been more than 100 years since they’d lived there. Two world wars and borders that changed three times had probably destroyed every trace of them. Yet it seems that many are feeling […]
Read MoreApril, 20, 2018
On a sunny afternoon last August, a dozen women from Balfour Senior Living in Louisville, CO, boarded a bus for a field trip to a marijuana dispensary. One used a walker, one was hooked up to an oxygen tank, one wore a linen suit and jewelry, and all were told to wear hats while walking from the bus to the dispensary door. “The sun is our enemy,” one said. Joan Stammerjohn, 84, said she’d joined the group because she’s had chronic pain in her legs and has been taking Oxycontin for ten years. […]
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