In Love with France, At Home In Italy

I am lucky to be affiliated with a college whose Dean sends weekly words of wisdom to our students. Of course he’s too modest to call them that. Instead, he refers to them as “Notes.” This week’s message hit home for me, as they often do, since he and I are usually on the same wave length. We come from the “old school” that views teaching not as a business, but as a sacred calling. As parents, we understand what it means to send your child off to college. In a leap of faith, you entrust them to people you hope will care about them the way you do. Our Dean is such a person. Even 65-year-old profs like me benefit from having a Dean in their corner. This week’s Notes hit a chord that prompted me to write back. This type of synergy can be a great comfort to us students of every age. NOTES “I see the moon, almost full, rising, framed by the window casing, and surprisingly exotic. Looking at her reminds me of ways of being that are so much older than our own, so much older than our ways o...

It's been a week of losses--two to Alzheimer's and one to an angiogram. Because these have occurred thousands of miles away while I am in Italy, there is an extra aura of unreality about it all.  So of course I am out here weeding, as I try to process it a bit. It's the third death that has left many of us feeling blindsided. The senior member of our book group, one of the country's most distinguished physicians and a prolific author, himself, will not be at the next meeting of the book group. My husband described him as a lovable curmudgeon;others in the group refer to "his unique wit and wisdom." Lovably (or by turns, irritatingly) cantankerous and opinionated, Howard was always a brilliant force of nature. I am having a flashback to "The Basileus Quartet," an unforgettable 1984 film that opens with a fiery performance of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." (I hadn't recalled that it was a Franco-Italian co-production, ...

At 5'6", she used to be an inch taller than I am. Or--full disclosure--an inch taller than I was, since I, too, have lost stature. Yet despite her hunch from scoliosis, she has the wrinkle-free skin and pretty, youthful face of someone much younger than her 87+ years. When asked her secret, she says, in her best what's-the-big-deal-I-don't-deserve-any-credit-for-this tone: "soap and water and a rough wash cloth."

 Members of my family do tend to look young for their age--on the outside, that is. My dermatologist dad whom I always felt I resembled, only made it to 63--a sobering thought as I approached 63, especially since the day my mom and my 12-year-old self came back from a happy outing to find him saying to the ambulance personnel who were working on him, "this is the day my father died and I'm going to die on the same day." He didn't, but what's an impressionable pre-teenager supposed to take away from this out-of-the-blue...