A Gray Day in Februrary

There's a reason February is the shortest month and today that reason is fully evident. But those complaints about this most miserable 28/29 days of the year have been filed before so I won't go there. Pour yourself a cuppa strong stuff and get on with it.

Of more interest are the headlines. Among the usual world-wide horrors, I see that Paris Hilton has been rewarded for her no-talent efforts to reach movie stardom. She's been given a Razzie. Poor thing. I wonder how she reacts to such public drubbings of her efforts to be something other than a rich and pretty party girl. How long can one survive the 'unbearable lightness of being?' Even the likes of Paris want to be taken seriously. It killed Marlyin Monroe and she had talent. And if the Razzies have been issued, the real Show--the Academy Awards must be close at hand. Tout ce qui brille, n' est pas or--all that glitters is not gold.

Mr. Obama has been very busy getting his administration off to a rousing start and the American public seems to approve. Those poor cranky Republicans are honking and squeaking and snarling and gnashing their collective teeth. Talk about public drubbings. I heard an interesting observation the other day--Nixon was a moderate compared to the GOP folks that are out there squealing their tires now. Imagine. Where will this polarization of America take us? I suspect that the wisdom of the great middle of us--the vast population of moderates that is the real America and who voted the GOP off the island, will ultimately keep us on more-or-less a steady course (but didn't they vote in "W" twice?).

I'm 97 pages into the next book and have had some very fine luck with it this week. There's nothing quite like it when it flows.

By the way, the picture above is of a sign on the door of a restaurant in Kamakura, Japan. It would make a good title for a short story or a collection of short stories.

Love Letters From the War: Our Parents Teach Us What Is Really Important

Left to right: Me, Dad, my brother John, Mom


We found the letters in a shoe box, where all old letters should be found. They were on a shelf way under a cabinet in the living room, behind a lot of other stuff. Lucky for us. I'm pretty sure Dad would have burned them had he found them first.

They are love letters, every one of them, pure and simple. They range from passionate to playful, gentle to newsy, anguishing to soothing. They tell the story of an entire generation. Soon after their marriage in 1943, Dad had left for war, serving in the Navy on a destroyer in the North Atlantic. He left behind a young wife pregnant with their first child.

In one letter, my father writes, "I want to love you passionately for the rest of my life." He was true to his intentions. Each was the other's first and only love. Here they are in the picture above, taken last week at the nursing home in Massachusetts where they now live--still together. Dad will be 90 in July, Mom 88 in April. It's seldom easy to put your parents into a nursing home even if its absolutely necessary. The only way they went willingly was with the promise that they could still share the same bed. We got permission from the nursing home administrators to drop the side rails and push their beds together. They spend their days together, holding hands and reading, watching TV, and looking out over the New England countryside. They spend their nights lying side by side as they have for the past sixty-six years.