It’s all anyone can think about. On walks or on email chats, we try to talk about other things, but the conversation inevitably drifts back to vaccination appointments: the When, the Where, and the How. In Massachusetts last Thursday, the over-65 crowd was suddenly allowed to sign up. So guess what? With a million new … Read More
February in New England is cold. One winter many years ago, when I lived halfway up Vermont and had to get to the office early in the morning, the outdoor temperature gauge read thirty below zero. At first, I suspected the gauge was broken. Because sleet had iced up the lock, it took some time … Read More
We live in a golden age of memoir. While we often like our fiction, in this postmodern age, to explore the outer boundaries of the imagination (including alternative histories and magical-realist fables), we also crave the weight and heft of real life. Well-written memoirs fill that spot perfectly. So it’s no accident that two of … Read More
The documentary film Some Kind of Heaven paints a provocative portrait of post-retirement life in The Villages, an enormous complex in central Florida. My friend Maddy—author, journalist, professor emerita, and good buddy—saw it last February at an early screening, at the Miami Film Festival. When the film became widely available on streaming services last week, … Read More
A year or so ago, a friend pulled me aside and whispered urgently that everything was “going south.” She meant everything in her body, and I confessed that mine was doing the same. (Alas.) But I prefer to contemplate the prospect of literally going south, to Florida, Arizona, or Mexico. Or west, for some–to Hawaii. … Read More
Last year left us jittery and suspicious. So when my husband saw the New Year’s cards I’d bought—with Rilke’s “And now let us welcome the new year, full of thing that have never been” on the front—he pointed at the final words and said, “Really? ‘Things that have never been’? How about ‘things we had … Read More
Going to an exciting, late-night New Year’s Eve party? Me neither. And this year, those of us who prefer a quiet, reflective evening at home don’t even have to feel so profoundly uncool. It’s what everyone—everyone with any sense—is doing this weekend. Still, I’m looking forward to sweeping out all the bad luck of 2020 … Read More
Michael and I invented Camp Remowas twenty years ago, when the kids went off to camp every summer. Money was tight in those days. (College was looming, weeks off work were few, and parents lived far away. We both worked two jobs, and relaxing vacations were few and far between.) One afternoon, I said plaintively, … Read More
By one of those lovely coincidences that sometimes happen, I was reading Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance (about various kinds of fathers and what we inherit from them) when I got the call last week that my father’s clock was repaired and ready for pickup. My father was a railroad man—the kind who didn’t just work for … Read More
It will be strange, this afternoon, to sit down to turkey for two. We will miss the kids and grandkids—though, like many others, we will spend time on Facebook and Zoom with them. But we will light the candles, carve the turkey, serve out stuffing and cranberry sauce (two kinds, by way of marital accommodation), … Read More