For those of us lucky enough to encounter a soulmate at all, such a person usually comes but once in a lifetime. For Edith Buchsteiner Schmidt, true love came twice: first, when she was 16 and met her husband-to-be, Helmut Schmidt, at a youth camp in Germany; second, nine years after Helmut’s death, when she […]
That is, if one can consider two women over twenty years younger than me as peers! The Wombat I have had some ups and downs with my energy level the last few weeks—a kind of mental exhaustion unrelated to actually having done any thinking or writing. When lovely Shauna Robertson of chicover50 invited me along […]
Today, Sunday Oct 8, marks 1 week since the shooter from Mesquite killed 58 and wounded 489 people in Las Vegas. A week before that dreadful day, Peter and I had booked our free hotel rooms on the strip. On Monday, after our kids and friends individually called or e-mailed to ask if we were […]
Some of my friends tell me I’m famous for having written Memory’s Last Breath. Well, I like to think that I am. But not quite in the way those friends might imagine. While I am ecstatically grateful for the great reception that my book has received upon publication, in the enormous world of US publishing a […]
Main image credit: Tomás Mondragón’s Alegoría de la Muerte (Allegory of Death), Mexico,1856. There is no question that my world is shrinking. Just this afternoon Peter and I were talking about how we go out less often. That is because Peter loves being home almost all the time, and the drive to go on an […]
Like many millions of our fellow-Americans, Peter and I ventured outside a few minutes before 11 am Utah time armed with our pinhole cameras and a colander, the latter having been recommended on the radio as a good instrument for focusing and multiplying the eclipsing sun’s image. The colander worked remarkably well—definitely better than our […]