In Love with France, At Home In Italy

To be the lone dissenter in a "do not resuscitate" order–that's one place where one's voice counts. That was the situation when my father was in the hospital after what seemed to be a terminal event. My ever-kind baby brother disagreed with my position of lone dissenter who was not ready to give up on dad. I understood where he was coming from when he said, "Would you want your last memory to be of someone frantically pounding on your chest?" No, but if it turned out not to be my last memory--that I would live to have a few more--I might be grateful for that. In dad's case, the cardiac arrest situation fortunately did not present itself, and we did get an important two-and-a-half more months of vital memories. Was the disagreement over whether to resuscitate part of the drama of the eldest child – which tends to include certain reservations about sharing? As I continue to try to focus, develop and print this "p...

  1.ON THE RELIEF OF NOT BEING A KNOW-IT-ALL (I see that I have previously written on this topic-- DIFFERENT TEACHING STYLES AND ON BEING THE #1 CHILD-- in a post from August 2011, SOME RANDOM MUSINGS FROM MY "STAY-CATION"   I’m not sure about the significance of my returning to it just prior to heading back to yet another school year, my 30 th at this particular institution, but here goes, anyway.)   As every eldest child knows, it can be exhausting to be a know-it-all. No one got that more right than J.D. Salinger in his "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, " where #1 son, Seymour Glass's suicide remains unexplained. I'm thinking that the responsibility of being the first of these excessively wise Glass children might have gotten to be too much for him. If he had moved to middle-of-nowhere Italy, things might have turned out differently. When you move to a new country, especially at an advanced age, all the know-it-all ...