My neighbor across the street told me he’s still paying his kids’ phone bills. They’re on his family plan which began years ago. He’s 80. His “kids?” One is an oncologist at Yale-New Haven with three children of her own. His son is the CEO of a tech company. He was surprised that I didn’t pay my kids’ phone bills. He says all his friends still do.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine. She told me she only took her kids off her plan a couple of years ago. She has just retired.

Once upon a time didn’t we live the way we could afford and expected our kids would do the same. In fact, we probably expected our children to do better than we had done.

Wasn’t that the American Dream?

It’s not that way anymore.

Of course, Baby Boomers as a generation are wealthy, some extremely wealthy. Drive around gated over-55 retirement communities in Boca and Delray and you’ll pass the homes of the millionaire next door and next door and next door.

Although advertising and marketing still focus on the young and that can piss us off, it’s older Americans who are the real big spenders. According to a study by AARP, the 50-plus population was found to contribute 40 percent of the US GDP. In fact, this “longevity economy” as it is called, taken by itself would be the third largest in the world, after the US and China.

I once described this in an interview. It caused an uproar on social media. Greedy Geezers! I got death threats. My granddaughter got death threats. Fortunately, I was sitting on a sand dune in Morocco when this happened. Still, it made me very uncomfortable. AARP had to apologize even though it’s true.

Cerulli Associates reports $124 trillion in wealth will transfer between generations by 2048. It is called the Great Wealth Transfer. It was once assumed Millennials would receive the bulk of this inheritance. But there has been an update: Cerulli now says Gen Xers — not Millennials — are positioned to receive the largest share over the next decade. That’s because a Boomer who lives into his or her 80’s or 90’s, as we know many will do, may leave an inheritance to a child who is already 65 or even 70. The old timetable of family life has changed. And that can create strange and estranged relationships.

Many people I know help their kids. Even if they’re not super rich and are at best “comfortable” and maybe even a little worried about their own retirement. They feel they should. Half out of concern. The grandson got into an Ivy League. Aren’t you proud? Shouldn’t you pay part of the staggering tuition? Half out of guilt. Maybe you weren’t the best mother when you were building your own career. So, okay, you’ll pay for your daughter’s weekly therapy.

Add to that we are now closer to our children. Boomers couldn’t wait to grow up and go out on their own. Remember the generation gap? But now parents and adult children far more often stay emotionally and financially intertwined. The old timetable of family life has changed. Kids grow up. Become independent. Not exactly.

New York Magazine and the Wall Street Journal have covered this story extensively. It’s now common real estate brokers in Manhattan and Brooklyn say for Mom and Dad to put up the downpayment for an apartment even a 40 plus couple is buying. Parents also have paid for private schools, IVF, covered back taxes and one guy told New York “My dad bought us a car. He bought it to ensure we always have a way to come back to the Midwest. We can never use the excuse ‘Sorry, flights are too expensive. Guess we won’t be seeing you.’”

It can make for a sticky relationship. Several detail the discomfort they feel when visiting their parents’ big homes in the Hamptons or Boca on weekends. They kind of hate it. When you’re back in a bedroom in your parents’ house you inevitably feel powerless. Especially powerless if you really need their help to have a lifestyle almost as good as they now have and even had when they were your age.

It isn’t only a big city problem; the Wall Street Journal’s recent “Parents Aren’t Waiting to Pass Down Wealth” describes how many in all parts of the country worry about the economic stresses their adult children feel and step in to handle health costs, vacations, college payments, even monthly bills.

It has made our relationship with our adult children complicated. Longevity and economic realities have changed the dynamics between us. Nowadays, as we grow into our 80’s we also get 30 extra years of being somebody’s mother or father. Thirty more years of love and misunderstandings. We can be controlling as we sign a check. They can be resentful as they take it. They change, we change, and the space between us is never fixed.

I know that the longer we live, the longer we will worry about our children and feel responsible for them. But once we expected our children to grow up. Fly away. Did we ever realize they would grow old along with us?

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Photo credit: Katie Harp

Bet the Royal reporters of the British tabs were grinning last week. Harry and Meghan were coming home! And it was the usually staid Telegraph that got the big scoop. Check out the front page above. Notice two other stories as well. One is about the cover-up of the Covid lab leak story which, I admit I believe, was probably the cause. The other was about the Chancellor of Cambridge talking about a need for integrity. Pardon? Wasn’t it Cambridge that hired the fabulist Jason Arday as a professor whose background story was so over-the-top that I wouldn’t have believed it if he applied for a job with me. And neither would you.

But back to Harry and Meghan. They’re homeward bound after six years in Montecito. Remember, they started in America as A-list celebs with big-buck contracts with Netflix and Spotify and Harry’s top-of-the-chart tell-all bestseller. It’s been rather downhill since. Lately they’ve been teetering on the top of the C-list with an invite to Kris Jenner’s birthday bash and Meghan trying to make a go of her scented candles and jam business.

They say they’re going home so Lilibet, 5, and Archie, 7, will get the benefits of a British education and will stay there till their children finish school. Like, graduate school? And dare I ask, what’s wrong with an American education? Harry went to Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy where the whole course lasts 44 weeks. Meghan graduated from Northwestern.

They’ll be living in a non-royal residence outside of London and they say they’ll not perform royal duties. As for security, Harry has been arguing for years that his family deserves armed protection. Last Thursday Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that the couple’s security arrangements were a “private matter.” The British taxpayers wouldn’t be footing the bill.

King Charles was told about the family ‘s impending move just a couple of days before it was announced. Bet that was a surprise! And you can just imagine how Prince William and Princess Kate must feel about it. There’s even a suggestion, though it’s doubtful, that Harry and Meghan have enrolled their children at the same school that Kate and William’s Charlotte and Louis attend. Can you just imagine the media crush if both moms arrived at pick-up time?

In fact, once they’re back the media will follow Harry and Meghan’s every move. They said they left six years ago because of the media’s intrusion and bias. Do they really think it will be any different. The Telegraph, which broke the story immediately documented all the critical statements Meghan has ever made about England and the Royal Family. While the Daily Mail has started once again calling Meghan Duchess Difficult and cataloged the Sussexes “broken US dreams.” And the Mail just handed Harry a $13 million bill for losing, along with six other celebrities including Elton John, in a case against the paper.

So why are the Sussexes going back? Harry, who really has had nothing to do in America, has been trying to repair his relationship with his family. Last year he said he would love to reconcile. “Life is precious,” Harry said. “I don’t know how much longer my father has.” Just a few weeks ago he and Meghan and the children met Charles, who’s being treated for cancer, and Camilla for a very private visit. It was the first time the king had seen Archie and Lilibet in four years.

As for William and Kate a reconciliation seems far less likely. Harry’s book “Spare” where he accused his brother of knocking him down, and the Oprah interview where Meghan implied the Royal family was racists were blabs too far for the unforgiving William. And you just know, as soon as they’re back there will be constant comparisons between the two brothers and the two wives.

Kate is now the most popular royal. Meghan is only slightly less unpopular than the prince now known as Andrew. In fact, the latest YouGov royal approval ratings show only a third of Britons (33 per cent) view Harry favorably, while just one in five (22 per cent) see Meghan in a positive light.

The Telegraph asked their readers to comment on the Great Return: One reader was skeptical: “Why? After all the drama over security, the accusations of how they wouldn’t be safe over here, and suddenly, oh, it’s all fine now?’ God help us all.” While another concluded: “Nobody could forgive the Sussexes’ behavior, their treatment of our late Queen. How can any of the family bear to be in a room with them, knowing that anything they say could be twisted and sold?”

That doesn’t sound too welcoming.

Other reasons for the return? Well, “Finding Freedom,” the Sussexes escape story, is over, but maybe there’s a new docuseries in “Back to Blighty.” Meghan’s “As Ever” might offer recipes for low-cholesterol Scotch Eggs and Spotted Dick. Don’t laugh, it’s a pudding my Northumberland mother-in-law used to make.

And there’s also the little sticky question of Harry’s visa. He did admit drug use in “Spare.” That should make renewing a visa a bit problematic.

Also, next year it is the 30th anniversary of Diana’s death. Wouldn’t it look churlish for William not to get together with his brother to honor her memory?

I’m sure we’ll find out lots more in the days to come. Harry and Meghan may simply believe that “home is the place when you go there, they have to take you in.”

Certainly, the British press is waiting to do just that.

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From my cabin, somewhere off Estonia

My grandson David and I just got back from a 12-day Baltic cruise. We’ve traveled together before. Three years ago, we went to France along with his father and his father’s partner. Two years ago, the four of us went to England and Scotland. When he travels, my son, David’s dad, doesn’t like to eat lunch. He thinks it’s a waste of time. When he travels, my son and his long-time girlfriend love to look for Christmas ornaments, everywhere, every day.

I decided this year David and I would go it alone, partly to reward him for the good grades he received during this school year, partly because we both like lunch and no ornaments. I also picked the Baltics and Scandinavia because I know how hot it can be in Europe these days. We were hot in Paris three years ago and hot in London two years ago and they were not nearly as stifling as these cities have been during this summer’s heat waves.

David and I have always been close. When I had an apartment in DC he would often stay with me on weekends. We’d go to the park, go out for Chinese or Japanese food and he would fall asleep on an air mattress in my small living room. I just don’t see him that much anymore.

Frankly, I was worried about this long trip. Would he be bored? Would he be sulky? He’s 16 now, a teenager after all. Would I be able to handle all the excursions I booked on those cobblestone streets of Riga and Visby. Would something awful happen? A lost passport? Credit card? Or, worst of all, a fall?

So how was it? Let’s start with our first adventure. David sleeps a lot. On our way to JFK to board our flight for Copenhagen, he fell immediately into a deep sleep, waking up only as we were at the terminal. No problem, plenty of time to check in. Maybe to even find a club for a pre-boarding snack. But as we were starting to look for the gate David said, very calmly, “I think I left my phone in the Uber.”

“Wha-at? WHA-AT?”

“It must have slipped out of my pocket when I was getting out.”

“How could you do that? You need a phone. What are you going to do without a phone?” I admit my voice was rising and rising. Maybe I was shaking, too. Absolutely disaster number one.

“Chill, Nana,” he said, still calm. “Just chill. I don’t need a phone. I can live without a phone. Remember you didn’t use to have a phone. It was an iPhone 12 anyway. I need a new phone.”

I think by then I was moaning and searching to find if we could buy a new phone in Copenhagen. Guess what? There are absolutely no Apple stores anywhere we were going. He was still very calm.

“Just a second,” he said. “Give me your phone.” He took it and started typing away with his thumbs, of course. First alerting Uber, finding out the driver’s phone number and calling him. Once, no answer. Twice, no answer. We had about an hour and a half till boarding and we still had to go through security. I admit I was probably moaning, again.

But on the third call the driver answered and, yes, he had the phone. Did we have enough time for him to come back to the airport? He was about a half hour away, depending on traffic. There had been a lot of traffic getting to the airport.

It was a nail-biter as we waited right where the driver had dropped us off. “Chill, Nana,” David would say every few minutes as we waited. But, yes, he got the phone. The driver got a big tip which David supplied, and we got through TSA and on the plane with maybe 20 minutes to spare.

What I wondered was going to happen next?

Nothing bad. Except when the guide of our group tour left us on a peninsula in Lithuania but, heck, we found another group that got us back on the ship. And that wasn’t our fault. Really. In fact, everything was great. We liked the ship. We liked the tours. But, best of all, I liked just being with David.

Every evening we ate elaborate three-course dinners together in the dining room at our own table with our own waiters who made a fuss over him, bringing him endless Shriley Temples and at least two Crème Brulées every night. And we talked. David is very able to share his feelings: About why he hated middle school. He didn’t have enough friends. Why he’s happier now. He has lots of friends who kept texting him all during the cruise. About the girl who hit on him but who he really doesn’t like. About why he’d love to live in the country because he likes being in nature.

He’s adopted and talked very openly about that, too. We’d never talked about that before. I hadn’t wanted to bring it up. He told me he isn’t all that interested in his birth parents but would like to know his ethnic background and wonders if there are any health issues he should be aware of. He spends two weeks with my son and two weeks with his ex-wife. Those are his parents and he said he knows they take care of him very well and love him. He said he feels lucky.

One night, I told him I really wished I’d be around in 10 years to know the young man he’ll become. “You will, Nana,” he said. “Don’t count on it.” I replied. But at least he will have the memory of our time together.

By the way, I hadn’t bought Wi-Fi aboard the ship. When we were waiting for our cabins, I said, “David, you said you don’t need a phone. So just chill.” But I bought Wi-Fi within the hour.

Of course, he needed it.

And so did I.

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Here is another fairy tale, dear readers. Let me know if you want more.

“What’s wrong with her?” Those were the first words my mother said about me. The neighbor woman who had come in to help with the birth just shrugged. “Nothing.”

I had two eyes, two arms, two legs and I was crying. So, what was wrong?

“On her head,” my mother said, half sitting up, pointing.” What is that?”

The woman laughed. “Her hair. It’s red.”

“How can that be?” My mother’s hair was blonde. My father’s hair was blonde. My three brothers and two sisters were blonde.

The woman shrugged, rolling up the rags, pouring out the water. “But nobody has red hair,” my mother said. That was true. Not in our village. Not in the next village. “It’s ugly. Horrible”

“She can wear a cap. Make her a cap,” the neighbor woman said, “When she is older a shawl, maybe, or a hood. Nobody will notice. But start with a cap. “

“A cap?” my mother said.

“You know like that peddler wears,” said the neighbor woman, trying not to smirk.

Once a year a peddler came to the village. He sold thread, pins, and pieces of cloth. He had red curly hair and green eyes and wore a little black cap on the top of his head. He told jokes and made the women laugh. A Jew.

My mother screamed. “No, no!” and I screamed too while the neighbor woman just laughed and took her rags and left, slamming the door.

The next day my mother got out of the bed and walked to the river near the village and threw herself in. It took days to find her body. My father, a practical man with six children, married the neighbor woman. She fed me goat’s milk and made me caps and bonnets and then a little red hood that almost completely covered my red curly hair.

I knew I was different but not that different. I played with my brothers and sisters. I went to school and did what I was told. I knew I shouldn’t stand out and so I didn’t stand out. I prayed every night and went to church on Sunday. I felt I was waiting for something to happen, but I didn’t know what. I told myself I should just be quiet and wait.

We all knew there was a witch who lived in the forest, so hidden away that there were no paths to her house. She was a witch, certainly, and maybe worse, a demon or a sorcerer. We knew that the Bible said we should not let a witch live, but everyone was afraid. Once or twice a young man from the village, and once or twice a young man from the neighboring village, brave and foolish had gone into the forest to find her, to kill her we thought, but had never returned. Of course, there were wolves in the forest too. But we knew it was the witch. The priest did not talk about her. How could he? She had the power to make us afraid. But only God was supposed to have the power to make us afraid. The priest kept quiet.

I was almost 16 when the peddler came back. Maybe it was the same peddler or a different one. I wasn’t sure. He wore a black cap, and his hair was a little red in places but mostly gray. He was very, very thin. “Things are bad for my people,” he told my father who nodded but shrugged. “We don’t want anything,” said my stepmother shooing him away.

I knew I shouldn’t, but when no one was looking I followed him to the edge of the village. I didn’t think he noticed I was behind him, but he turned suddenly and caught my arm. “So, it’s you,” he said. I couldn’t answer. “There’s an old woman who lives in the woods. Do you know who I mean?”

“The witch.” I whispered, shaking.

“Go visit her. She’s your grandmother,” he laughed and was gone.

I waited for days, for weeks, for months. I was almost 17. My stepmother wanted me to marry the son of the goat herder. Since she had fed me goat milk maybe she thought I was already part of the family.

The goat herder’s son came to sit with me. He was tall, thin but he didn’t talk much. We sat together in silence. This wasn’t what I was waiting for.

One day I was making bread, three loaves. I left two cooling on the table and put the third in a basket, covering it with a cloth. I was wearing my hood. I always wore my hood, and I put on my warm red cape. Everyone was busy. My father was in the field. My stepmother was talking to a friend. My brothers and sisters were scattered around, doing their daily chores. No one noticed when I walked to the edge of the village and stepped out on the only path. I was alone. Soon I was hidden by the tall dark oak trees. I felt brave, maybe more myself than I had ever felt before. Was this what I had been waiting for?

I walked on and on and it got darker and colder. The path ended but there was an even narrower overgrown path that I was able to follow. I could hear some sounds. Was it the wolves? But then suddenly a man was standing before me. Big, and heavy, wearing a uniform that I had never seen before. He had a long coat, a helmet, and a rifle. He came towards me, speaking a language I didn’t understand. He seemed to be smiling, showing long dark teeth and then he was on me. I tried to push him away. He was biting me, my neck and my breast and pulling at my clothes, my skirt, and my underpants. I tried to fight. I tried to scream. He pulled my legs apart. And though I kept fighting and crying I knew what was going to happen. But then a shot and then another. I knew the sound. He slumped over me, his hands suddenly still. I began to feel blood seeping into my dress.

“Can you get up? Try to get up,” she said in a quiet calm voice. I struggled from under him, scratching my back on the branches I was lying on. I was dirty, bloody, sore. I went to pick up my basket and the bread lying in the dirt. “No,” she said, “grab his leg. Hurry.” At that moment I know I should’ve wanted to go home, back to the village, back to safety but I didn’t. It was the witch, and I did what she told me to do.

We dragged him for a long time to the cottage, her cottage, so very deep in the woods. He was heavy and my arm hurt. “In the back,” she said. “The wolves should take care of him in a couple of days.”

She gave me water to wash, gave me a shirt and a pair of soft pants. I had never worn clothes like that before. She laughed when I took off my hood and my long, red, curly hair flowed down to the middle of my back. The back of my hood was soiled.

“I remember hair like that,” she said. “Give it to me,” she said and took the hood. “Now go to sleep. You need to sleep,” she indicated some pillows by the fire. I lay down and closed my eyes. I did not want to think about what had happened. She moved around and then finally sat nearby on a rocking chair, smoking a pipe. She looked like a little old woman, not a terrifying witch. But then I remembered she had shot the man who was attacking me, not once but twice.

In the morning two young men came to the cottage. They looked familiar. They were the young men from the villages who had gone away. “What is she doing here?” one said, sounding angry. The witch shrugged. “Come outside. We need to talk.”

I watched them through the little window. She pointed to the half-eaten remains of the soldier. One kicked the helmet and part of his skull fell off. They whispered together for a long time as if they were arguing. Finally, the bigger one, the taller one who I remembered the most from my village because he was handsome, and everyone had thought he was smart, shook his head as in agreement and they came back inside.

“Here’s the plan,” he said. “You lure them. We kill them.”

“What are you talking about?” I stood up. I knew they were looking at my body under the soft boy’s clothes.

“The war, stupid. Don’t you know anything?” The handsome one said. He did the talking. “The Nazis.”

I tried to remember. Months ago, my father had said something about soldiers to my stepmother. But then he said they won’t come here. There are no Yids.

“We are partisans,” the handsome one said. “Communists,”

“Reds,” the other one said finally with a laugh. “Like you. Are you red all over?”

The witch reached up and slapped him hard across the face. “Don’t talk dirty,” she said. He slunk away with his head down but did not protest. She went to the stove. “First, I make soup. Then I will make your explosives.”

She gave me my dress back and somehow made me another to wear. I learned fast. I lured them. They shot them. It was the plan. Sometimes before they raped me or while they raped me. When there was two or three after at least one had raped me. We wandered through the forest and sometimes even went into the nearby towns.

The handsome one whose name was Peter became my lover. But he didn’t seem much different to me when he fell on me and moaned than the soldiers. The other was called Jan. He watched. We became famous. People talked about us. We counted kills: 27, 32, 39, 51.

The two men went off sometimes by themselves to meet other groups, to blow up a bridge, to steal more weapons. I stayed with her. We didn’t talk much but we were comfortable together. I worried about getting pregnant. She seemed to know. She gave me something bitter to drink that burned my throat and burned going down. It always made the blood come.

I asked her to teach me her spells. She shook her head and said she didn’t know any. She tended a garden and fed the animals with scraps, even the small wolves that prowled around the door and sometimes circled her feet. She could even pet them. “Wolves kill to eat,” she said. “Men kill to kill.” Once a week she lit candles and prayed over them, muttering in a strange foreign language. I liked to watch. One summer night I woke up and the door was open. I went to look, and she was outside, surrounded by the wolves. The biggest one was as tall as she was, and his head was close to her. She was stroking him and murmuring. I wanted to cry out but stopped. But in the morning when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t just been a dream.

Peter, Jan, and I went away for a long time. There were soldiers to find and soldiers to shoot. I worried about her alone in the woods. Yes, she was a witch and people had been afraid, but I had seen terrible things, starving children, men being shot and screaming, falling into pits, women crying as their babies were bashed against walls. Far more terrible things than any witch would even want to try to make happen.

Weeks later, going back to the cottage, we knew something was wrong. The path was wider as if too many boots had broken the branches and trampled the dry leaves. The cottage door, hung on its hinge half broken. Two soldiers were lying in the front, a sack with her things spilling out was between him. They hadn’t gone far before the wolves had attacked. Their throats were torn.

“Where is she?” I screamed and rushed Inside. She was on the floor. They had beaten her. It had not taken much. “We have to go,” said Peter, pulling on my arm. I was crying. “They might still be looking for them.”

“We have to bury her.”

“The wolves—” Jan began.

“The wolves won’t touch her. We have to bury her. I want to put her things away—” Peter knew I would not leave until it was done.

Jan groaned but Peter shrugged and went to get the shovel. They both knew how strong I had become.

When the war ended, we went to the city. We were all given awards and honors, Heroes and Heroines of the Resistance. My father and stepmother came for the ceremony. It had been years since I had seen them. They said they were proud of me and that I should come home. I told them not yet, I had things to do but I was not exactly sure what I meant.

Like most who are confused, I went to school and became a teacher. Peter married a rich girl. Nobody was supposed to be rich anymore, but people were. Her father had owned factories and was very rich. Now he was the Minister of Production, even richer. I taught reading and writing to the first-year students at the University. Peasants come to town to better themselves like me. My specialty was a course in folk tales, but nobody much wanted to take it. The young were interested in chemistry and math. They needed the facts of the future, not forgotten stories. I didn’t blame them.

Peter would come to my small apartment to drink vodka and complain. He didn’t even try to touch me anymore. We were getting old. He said he wished it could be like it was when you could just kill your enemies and not argue with them over a conference table. He and his-father-in-law were accused of being disloyal to the Party and put in jail. His father-in-law was shot. They said Peter killed himself. I doubted that.

I knew when it was time to go home. I had a pension, enough to live on. My father and stepmother were dead. My brothers and sisters were scattered. I could live in the house I grew up in. But I knew I needed to find somewhere else. One day I went to the same trail at the end of the village. I walked and walked. It was even darker and more overgrown. It took hours and I was very tired. It was harder for me to walk now but I finally found the witch’s house.

The door was still hanging on the hinge. Inside was very dirty, the window broken, animal droppings everywhere. I needed someone to help. Jan had come back to the next village. He had never been comfortable in the city. He was a loner, a little crazy. The killing did that to some. I told him what I wanted to do and that I would pay him.

It took us a long time to clean and repair the cottage. He built chairs, a table. We brought a bed through the woods on a wagon like old times. I made soup on the old stove that still worked, and we sat down to eat the night when it was all finished.

He looked at me and smiled. “No more red, are you? Gray all over now,” he laughed.

“Should I slap your face?” I asked. We lay on the bed together. I knew it would be the last time I would ever do that.

Now I live in her house in the forest. I hear the people in the villages nearby are afraid of me. Not because they think I am witch but because they think I still have important friends in the city. That gives one power now. That makes them afraid.

I sleep. I eat. I tend the garden. The wolves come close but never too close. They’re two or three generations from her wolves. Not friendly but they won’t bother me.

The other day, I went to the old dresser near the back wall, the only piece of her furniture that had survived. In the back of a drawer. I found my hood, washed, smooth, topped by a dried sprig of lavender. There was also tucked inside a small old black and white photograph of a little boy with curly hair. I couldn’t tell if his hair was red. I like to think it was.

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He was the driver, a very bad driver. She was the cook, a surprisingly

good cook. A man from their village had found them the jobs. He said

they had references. They had no references. They worked for the widow

whose husband had started a large candy company. His sons now ran the

business. They needed servants to work for her. The old lady could be

difficult. She lived in a big house in Charlottenburg, not surprising. The

neighborhood was full of Jews.

They called it the Candy House. Above the front door there was a plaster

frieze decorated with shapes like lemon drops. It continued to be one of

the company’s biggest sellers.

The sons were busy with their wives, their children, their mistresses. They

came to visit but only once in a while. “Take care of her,” they said to

Hansel and Gretel, and always tipped them generously. When they first

came there were two maids in the house. “We don’t need them. My sister

is strong, she can clean too,” Hansel said. “I can do everything. We love

her,” Gretel said and gave the sons boxes of her excellent pfeffernüsse for

their children, as if they didn’t have cooks of their own. Still the sons were

pleased.

The old lady liked her food. Poppy seed rolls, butter, and jam for

breakfast, fish and pudding for lunch, and always meat and fresh

vegetables for her early dinner. But she didn’t eat much. Still Gretel

ordered each week roasts and chops, chickens and ducks, even hams

which, of course, the old lady would never eat. And there were pounds of

potatoes and butterbeans and apples and grapes from the greengrocer

sent to the house. Sugar and spice and flour, pounds and pounds. Gretel

liked to bake. They were told by the sons Hansel could write checks and

have the old lady sign for what was needed. How much could it be, the

sons had thought. Much of the extra food Hansel sold to stalls in the

Market Hall across town with the help of their friend from the village. The

brothers and sisters agreed. They had very good jobs.

The old lady rarely went out. But then one day she said she wanted to go

to the bank and get some money. She wanted to buy her oldest

granddaughter a birthday present at one of the department stores on the

Kurfürstendamm. Several were owned by friends of her husband. “Yes”

she said, “this is what I want to do.”

“But you don’t have to go,” Gretel said. “Surely your daughter-in-law can

buy the present. It is cold outside. You shouldn’t go.”

But the old lady, for once, was strangely stubborn. She didn’t argue but

dressed herself in a black silk suit and a lace blouse. Her dark stockings

and French shoes. She even put on two strings of her pearls. Then she went

to the closet by the door and put on her fox coat and a large hat. “We are

going,” she said firmly. “Tell Hansel to get the car.”

Always before when the old lady went to the bank, everyone had made a

fuss. The manager had come out of his office, invited her to sit down on a

couch in a special lounge. Invited her to drink a glass of sherry, like the

English drank. But not this time. At first, she was ignored even though she

asked for the manager. It was as if no one had heard. Then she was told to

stand at the end of a long line.

Gretel held her arm. She knew what was going on. “Let’s go,” she said.

“They are busy. We will come back.”

“Too busy for me? Ridiculous. Get me the manager,” she said again to the

guard standing nearby and who scoffed before he walked away.

“What is going on?” the old woman muttered “Is everyone going crazy?”

Finally, she was by the teller. She said her name. “I want a hundred marks.

Now. Quickly.”

“That is impossible,” said the teller, a small man with a moustache, without

even checking. “Your account is overdrawn.”

“That is ridiculous,” said the old woman, “Ridiculous. Get me the

manager.”

“He is too busy,” said the teller. “Too busy for someone like you.”

“Too busy for me? Impossible,” said the old woman. “I am rich. I have had

an account here for 50 years. You knew my husband; you know my sons.”

“You are making a scene,” said the teller. “I will have to call the guard.”

“What are you talking about?” the old woman said, her voice rising but

no longer so firm. “Why are you treating me like this?”

Gretel pulled on her arm, “Madame, please, let’s go.”

The guard was there. “Out,” he said, “Out.”

“Where is the manager?” she said again as Gretel pulled her toward the

door. People were staring, laughing. “Where is the manager?”

“The old Jew,” one said. “Crazy old Jew.”

She did not say a word in the car. Hansel drove home slowly and badly.

Gretel took her upstairs. Helped her take off the suit and blouse and

pearls and put a nightgown over her head. “I’ll bring some tea and cake,”

she said to the old lady. “It will be all right.”

Gretel and Hansel shared the money from the food that was sold. She

didn’t know he was stealing even more. She wondered how big the checks

were that he made the old lady sign. And where was all that money? The

bastard.

They were eating supper in the kitchen. Gretel had cooked a lot to calm

herself down. She felt sorry for the old lady. Well, maybe just a little.

Noodle soup, schnitzel, and roasted potatoes. An apple cake was cooling

near the stove. Just when they were finishing the schnitzel, the old lady

came into the kitchen dressed. At least half-dressed, her suit on without the

blouse, her shoes without the stockings.

“I know what you are doing,” she said. “You two, you are stealing from

me!” she said quite softly. But then she began to shout, “YOU ARE

STEALING FROM ME!”

“Madame, no—” Gretel tried to say.

“I have called my sons. They are coming.” Quiet again, then screaming.

“THEY ARE BRINGING THE POLICE!”

Gretel looked at Hansel. Hansel looked at Gretel.

“YOU WILL GO TO JAIL! YES, YOU WILL GO TO JAIL!”

Hansel, without a word, went to the stove, picked up a pot, the heavy iron

one, and hit the old lady hard on the back of her head.

Gretel gasped. The old lady fell, banging her head on the stove. “You shouldn’t have—” she began.

“Shut up,” Hansel said. “Get your things. Now. Fast.” Then he took a

kitchen towel, touched it to the flame in the stove and lit the old lady’s

skirt. Gretel screamed but she ran. By the time she packed her bag the fire

was roaring through the kitchen and was burning the wood paneling in the

dining room. But she had just enough time to run back upstairs and get the

pearls. And she certainly wasn’t going to tell that bastard Hansel.

Outside the street was full of people. Had they come already to see the

house on fire? But another house down the street was on fire as well. The

air was full of smoke. There were sirens blaring and music playing, and the

crowds were chanting and cheering. The sons could have never made it to

the house with the police. But then how could they? They were being

arrested. It was November. It was Kristallnacht. So much was burning.

Hansel and Gretel went back to their village. They had plenty to live on

though Gretel knew he never gave her a fair share. He spent his time

paying people off, trying to avoid being drafted into the army that was

already headed for Leningrad. But then their friend in the village said he

had found a perfect solution. He was always doing favors for Hansel.

Gretel didn’t let herself wonder why. He could get him a job at one of the

new concentration camps. Good salary, good living conditions. He would

have to go East, but still. They were just building a work camp called

Auschwitz, a big one. A steady job for years and important. All the big

wigs were involved. The army would leave him alone. Hansel thought

himself lucky and was on his way, without even saying goodbye.

Of course, he became one of the cruelest guards in the place of the

greatest cruelty. He loved the screams, the cries, the whips, the dogs, the

rifle. On the day the Russians liberated the camp he, who slept when

everyone else had run, was still there, hiding behind a barrack. The

prisoners, weak and starved, still managed to surround him. They debated.

The crematorium or the fire. Both were still burning. They threw him in the

fire. Quicker. He was too dumb to even note the irony.

Gretel’s story was different. Not much smarter, but yes, she was somewhat

nicer. And she could cook. She failed the exam to make her a guard at

Ravensbrück. But, as usual, she brought her pfeffernüsse. Delicious,

everyone agreed. Perhaps she could cook for the guards and the female

doctors who performed experiments on the Polish and Jewish prisoners.

She could order the food — oh, yes, she said, she had experience with that

and oversee the prisoners who kept the kitchen clean. She was there

three years and baked and baked. It was another good job.

But they all knew it was ending. The prisoners who could still walk were

marched out. The doctors and nurses left, going back to their homes,

pretending they had never left their pre-war hospital jobs. The guards ran

away. She knew she should pack and leave hurriedly too. But she had an

idea. Just one idea.

She went to see the lady tattooist who put the numbers on the prisoners

when they came. Fortunately, she was still there, just packing her

equipment. The tattooist had loved her chicken and noodles. “Put some

numbers on my arm,” Gretel said.

“Are you crazy?”

“Do it. Please.”

The tattooist shrugged and turned on the switch.

She went to Berlin. No food, and the Russians were there. A nightmare.

But then the Americans came. Better.

She tried to get a job, cleaning and cooking at a club for the officers. She

held up her arm. “I am a survivor,” she had learned to say in English. She

got the job. She started peeling potatoes. Soon she was baking strudel.

She began to learn their words and she smiled at them. There was one

soldier and then another. She said she had been in Ravensbrück, and she

kept changing her story. Sometimes she said she had been arrested

because she was against the Nazis. Sometimes she said it was just a

mistake. But one assumed she was a Jew because he was a Jew and nice

enough. She got pregnant on their first evening together.

She cooked the food for him she remembered she had cooked for the old

lady. No meat and milk together. Kugel and potato pancakes and

blintzes. She made blintzes the night she told him she was pregnant. He

cried. He was very young. He said he was glad something good had

come out of these terrible years, out of what she had suffered. He wrote

his mother she was a lovely Jewish girl, and it all was a miracle. His

mother was not so sure.

They were married by an army rabbi when she was six months pregnant.

He wanted a boy. They had a girl, but she agreed to name her after his

grandmother, Rachel. From the beginning, she called her Mitzi and spoke

to her in German.

It took a year before she was allowed to go to America. She thought he

lived in New York. He lived in Des Moines. She thought he was rich. He

worked in his father’s grocery store. But the people were nice enough and

only her mother-in-law was suspicious. She didn’t know the prayers. She

didn’t know the holidays. “You were secular?” her mother-in-law asked.

“Ya, ya, secular,” she learned to say. But she was a good wife, a good

mother, a good cook, thrifty. They sold the cookies and cakes she baked

at the grocery store. They even opened a small bakery next door because

of her. She never wanted to talk about the past and only said her family

had once been rich, owned a candy company. She had a couple of

strings of pearls.

At 55 she got ovarian cancer. Her daughter was 30 with two small

daughters of her own, but she took care of her mother through those two

long, very painful years. When she died, they mourned her in the

synagogue, praising her as a good woman and a survivor.

When Mitzi’s daughters were grown, both very smart, with scholarships to

Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota Law — and with nothing much to do,

she decided to find out more about her mother’s past.

She started with Ancestry.com, certain her DNA would be 99 percent

Ashkenazi. Wrong. It came back 90 percent European, pure German.

There had to be some mistake. She tried the other company that even

could find the town your relatives came from. Again, a town her mother

never mentioned. She said she came from Berlin.

She decided to do more research. It should be easy, she thought. The

Nazis were so efficient. She looked up the prisoner lists at Ravensbrück.

There were 150,000 names. It took her weeks. Her mother’s name was not

there. It was a little unsettling. She decided she would go to Germany,

and she would take her older daughter, now a lawyer, very organized. It

would be a little vacation trip, she thought. It didn’t take them long. Mitzi

still remembered her German. At Ravensbrück there was a list of all who

had worked there. After all several of the guards had been hanged in the

1950’s. Her mother’s name was on that list, the administration’s cook,

1942–1945.

It was even easier in the village. There were still three old women and two

old men who remembered them, the brother and the sister, Hansel and

Gretel. “He was a lout, a no-good. Worse than that,” they said. “And she,

she was not much better.” Mitzi cried all the way back to Des Moines,

shocked and horrified. She wondered if she should tell her father. But he

was half-gone with dementia. What was the point? And her daughter had

shrugged it all off. She didn’t remember her grandmother but looked a bit

like her. The rational daughter, a tax lawyer, already a partner, explained

she probably did the best she could. It made Mitzi crazy. Did she know

her mother at all? And her uncle was horrible.

She couldn’t let it go. She did more research, trying to find Auschwitz

survivors who might remember Hansel, women who had been in

Ravensbrück. She learned a few stories, maybe true, maybe confusing her

mother and her uncle with others from those years. She couldn’t really be

sure. She wrote a book, a little book about it all, her confusion, her

anguish, and what she knew, and self-published it. Nobody read it. Just as

well. It made her husband angry. “Don’t you see? It means you aren’t

Jewish,” he said. “Our daughters aren’t Jewish. Thank God, my mother

isn’t around to find this out.”

But somehow a small German publisher read her little book and called

her. She could understand their German well enough to realize they

wanted to translate the book and publish it in Germany. She agreed. What

difference could it make? They invited her to Berlin for the publication, and

they would pay her way. Even though it made her husband even angrier,

she decided to go. Why not? She thought he was having an affair with

one of the women from the synagogue anyway.

Amazingly, they got her on television on two shows. There was a spread in

the Bild with her picture and the picture she had brought with her of her

mother. She was invited to speak at a symposium called “No More Guilt:

We Are All Survivors.” She liked the attention. “It’s the names,” said the PR

girl, with the weird haircut, who drove her around in a small car and

smoked cigarette after cigarette. “Hansel and Gretel, the twins who follow

us. The little horrors.” The book sold 10,000 copies. There was talk of

a TV series in Germany, and maybe one in Israel. The publisher was very

happy. She was surprisingly happy, too.

Getting on the plane for the long trip to New York and then to Chicago

and then to Des Moines, business class, she knew it had been the most

interesting week of her life. “I should hate you, mutter,” she thought. But

now wasn’t she the daughter of someone, a rather famous Gretel. “Danke,

mutter, danke,” she was thinking as she took the drink and the menu from

the Lufthansa attendant who was welcoming her aboard with what

seemed like a familiar smile of recognition and approval.

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Saw The Odyssey, but not at Imax with a $1000 ticket. Just a couple blocks away at a not crowded afternoon showing. Most of the audience were old West Siders who know tickets are reduced in the afternoon. I went with my grandson. We’re about to go off together on Baltic Cruise for the next two weeks. It’s his reward for doing well in school. He’s 16, I doubt we’ll have the opportunity in the future to spend such time together. He’s already talking about where he’ll work next summer.

In the six months since I’ve seen him, he has grown an amazing four inches. He was always short. He’s no longer short. Not very very tall but I don’t have to worry anymore about him being very short. I thought it would be appropriate before we set off on our voyage to watch a movie about a very famous sailing misadventure. It was also a way to get him out of bed. He’s a teenager who loves to sleep.

So how was The Odyssey? Well, parts of the movie were terrific. Especially the set pieces. The Trojan Horse isn’t the way the Trojan Horse is usually depicted. And for the first time ever you’re inside the Horse with the anxious, waiting men. In fact, the entrance into Troy, the prying open of the gates in the walls, and the destruction as the fabled city is overwhelmed and plundered is the key scene of the movie.

There’s also a brief horror-movie-like Cyclops interlude, and some good Circe moments where the men are turned into swine by an enraged minor goddess and then restored back to their hungry, bedraggled human form. Doesn’t matter much. Though Odysseus gets home, at least briefly, none of his men do, mainly because of Odysseus’s certain-he-is always-right decisions.

I know some critics have liked the Ithaca scenes all about Penelope and her suitors. How they and her son Telemachus are plotting against each other for the throne since Odysseus after years and years still hasn’t come home. But I admit I found them kind of slow and talky. Matt Damon’s Odysseus doesn’t say much except at the end when he regrets the errors of his way. He just keeps fighting in action scene after action scene. In fact, the 55-year-old actor complained it was a “heavy Advil movie” for him. I’m not surprised. And though the actors in general have been praised I thought Anne Hathaway, as Penelope, without her usual giddiness, just looked serious.

The language of the dialogue is contemporary-light. Maybe to make it seem as if Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, and the lotus-dosing Calypso are Just Like Us. In fact, the scene with Damon and Charlize Theron’s Calypso was a break-up scene of a middle-aged couple whose relationship wasn’t bad but wasn’t that great, either. It was time for him to move on. But there is great poetry in Homer’s (or whoever’s) Odyssey. There is lots of spectacle but not much poetry at all in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.

I loved Oppenheimer Nolan’s last movie and, in some ways, I saw a connection. Odysseus is also the smartest guy in the room. After years and years of the Trojan War he figures out a way to get behind the walls and vanquish the city. He succeeded when none of the others, neither Achilles nor Agamemnon with all their swordplay could. But is he a hero or merely a trickster?

Then sailing home, he’s so sure of himself that he keeps making bad decisions. He’s now so foolishly self-confident. The Greeks called it hubris and knew it would do in most men. And, of course, Odysseus destroys his troops who he genuinely cares about because of his own arrogance and because only he knows the way. Afterwards he’s full of remorse about what he has done. The way Oppenheimer was. Do complicated men have to learn there’s great pain even when they win the war?

Was I a little distracted watching the movie. Maybe. I kept wondering why the airline hadn’t yet asked us to sign in. I’ll be with my grandson and of course I worry about all the things that could happen and probably won’t. I have to take care of him though he assures me he can now take care of himself and me as well. He loved the movie. Although three hours felt like three hours to me, he wanted to know what happened when Odysseus and Penelope sail west at the end. He wanted more.

I’m glad the movie is such a hit and like movies used to be and rarely are today, everyone both young and old wants to see it. Everyone is talking about it. So, forget my quibbles and go and see it, too. Preferably with someone else. so it can be part of both your memories. It will be for me and my grandson. As I hope our trip will be. I’ll let you know.

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I’ve been thinking about Lindsey Graham a lot. Maybe because his death was such a shock. I guess we’ve forgotten that people can die that suddenly, in the middle of the night, after just a chest pain or two. And he was 71. In fact, he had just turned 71 a couple of days before. As a friend who’s 81 said, he was young. You know the old cartoon of someone reading the obits and going younger, younger, older, older. Well, to a lot of my friends and to me, too, Graham at 71 was younger.

For years and years, he was always there on “Meet the Press” and on the top of the news. The Senator from South Carolina but more familiar and in-my-face than my own New York senators. These days Kirsten Gillibrand seems to be trying to figure out how the Dems can recapture the Senate. Not an easy task since Platner imploded. Were we really going to have a senator with a giant SS tattoo on his chest? And Chuck Schumer appears to be hiding out a lot. Maybe retirement is looking good.

I was also interested in how columnists were writing about Graham. John McCain’s daughter Meghan wrote a very touching tribute. Graham had been one of John McCain’s best friends. Along with Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, they called themselves The Three Amigos and traveled, drank and fished together. Graham once said, “If I had to pick one person in this great land to explain to someone from a different planet who are these Americans, it would be John McCain.”

Yet after McCain’s passing, Graham who had criticized Donald Trump and called him “unfit for office” among a lot of other things, joined Team Trump and became one of the President’s most vociferous cheerleaders. Was it because he was that ambitious and knew this was the only way to survive and stay in “the room where it happens.” When asked why he had changed from a Trump critic to a BFF he answered honestly. He said he wanted “to be relevant … to have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week.”

Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times had a more nuanced view than most about Graham’s changing allegiance. He noted that Graham had just come back from an overseas trip that had taken him from the NATO summit to a meeting with Zelensky in Kyiv. The trip represented a string of foreign policy triumphs for Graham. As well as an example of the senator’s steadying influence on the President’s behavior toward allies. At least some of the time. After the summit, America remains part of NATO. Trump and Vance have stopped scolding Zelensky.

Stephens concluded his piece by writing: Although Graham had flip-flopped he “didn’t abandon his core belief in the unity of interests of democratic nations against tyrannical foes or in the need for American power to serve just causes beyond our borders … He believed in big things, many of them important and true, and he didn’t let his moral or intellectual self-respect get in the way of advancing them. There’s a nobility in that, too.”

Graham compromised. In these days of fierce partisanship compromising is looked on as disloyalty or a cop-out. But I’ve been taking a course all summer about the Declaration of Independence. Let’s acknowledge it, the Continental Congress compromised. Big time. Without making a moral compromise, there wouldn’t have been a United States of America. At least not on July 4, 1776.

Of course, the real date when the Continental Congress voted for independence was July 2^nd. July 4^th was the date printed on the Declaration which explained the reason for their monumental decision. But I guess you learned that, if not in school, then over the last few weeks.

In fact, there was a good chance there would’ve been no vote at all. In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration there was a fierce condemnation of slavery “this execrable commerce.” He blamed the entire slave trade on King George along with the King’s many other misdeeds. This wasn’t true. Besides, the southern delegates, especially from South Carolina and Georgia would not vote “yea” for independence if that paragraph was included. And some of the New England colonies, home to the ship captains who transported the slaves, didn’t want the subject brought up either. John Adams and Ben Franklin were both early abolitionists. They wanted independence, they compromised. And if we are going to discuss moral self-respect Jefferson had slaves and never freed most of them.

Sen. Gary Peters, the retiring senator from Michigan, is in our class. We’re all interested in what he has to say. The Continental Congress together edited Jefferson’s Declaration. They cut out 400 words and made 86 changes. Jefferson, of course, hated every change. They did it all, a very good editing job, in just two days. “Well,” Gary said, at the end of our last class. “It just shows you that legislatures can legislate when they are working together. And working on a common cause.”

The last sentence of the Declaration is an oath by the signers: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Clearly even though they had made an enormous compromise that would bedevil our nation throughout its history they thought their sacred honor was still intact.

Did Lindsey Graham, no matter how outrageously he sucked up to Trump, believe as long as he kept protecting the Ukraine and Israel, he had his honor? What does honor mean at all these days? Stephens acknowledges that pundits can be high-minded, but politicians probably can’t. Were our wise, brave Founders demonstrating you can compromise and still have honor if you can stifle your partisan differences and work together to achieve the greatest good.

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When Harry married Meghan, I predicted they’d be on “Dancing with the Stars” within five years. Well, it isn’t as bad as that. Not yet. But it was a tough week for the Royal Spare. He’s in England and before he even landed, he was invited and then disinvited to stay at Buckingham Palace. At one time Meghan and the kids were expected to join him for the whole trip and to see the king, the granddad Lilibet and Archie had never met.

And yes, they’re both very peculiar names. Isn’t Archie just a nickname and not a proper name at all? Didn’t anyone point that out? And as for Lilibet, we all know that was the very private childhood nickname of the Queen. But a Palace source has said that the Queen was never asked if the name could be appropriated. And claims made in royal biographies allege that the Queen was “as angry as I’d ever seen her” when faced with a public statement from Harry that she had approved of the Sussexes using the name for their daughter.

Harry was in Great Britain to promote, a year ahead of time, the Invictus Games, a para-Olympic sports event he started for wounded soldiers. But before he brought Meghan and the kids to London, he wanted publicly funded security for his family. You can understand his wanting security. But it was turned down because Harry and Meghan aren’t working members of the Royal family any longer. You can understand that as well because after the recent Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor debacle the Royals are being very careful about how they spend taxpayer cash.

You’d think Harry would just hire his own. He says it’s the principle. His children deserve that protection but maybe it’s the cost as well. For the Sussexes aren’t doing all that much these days. That first heady flush of seven-figure Netflix deals, a top-of-the-chart bestseller and a splashy tell-all to Oprah special is long over.

And to add to Harry’s woes, last Tuesday he lost a years-long privacy invasion case against the Daily Mail for targeting him and several other celebrities with unlawful information gathering. But the judge wrote in his opinion that Harry and the others failed to prove that the information had been unlawfully obtained. Quite a slap down. The dismissal of the case could leave Harry and his fellow claimants with massive legal bills.

In response Associated Newspapers who owns the Daily Mail crowed: “The reputation of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated.”

I guess they managed to issue that statement with a straight face. I know British tabloid journalism. My husband worked for the Daily Mail for years. It really makes you wonder how unpopular Harry must be if the court ignored his complaint –– he was in tears on the stand when he testified –– and ended up accepting the Mail’s we didn’t do it defense. On the day of the judgment the Mail was gleefully reporting how Charles was pushed to the breaking point by Harry’s “chaos, disruption and disrespect.” It’s kind of sad. And finally Harry, Meghan and the kids did join Charles and Camilla for a very quick, very private meeting, with no photos being released. I’m sure we will hear how William felt about that.

I admit I know a lot about Britain’s Royal Family. And about British journos, too. But that’s another story. I once wrote a paper on “The Troublesome Wives of Windsor” for a graduate school class. I compared Meghan and Wallis Simpson, who was the Duchess of Windsor. Both Americans, both divorced, both unexpected choices by not the brightest of Windsor men. Both caused big problems. The Duke of Windsor when he was Prince of Wales and on the verge of becoming king, abdicated and gave up the throne for Mrs. Simpson. Nobody really understood why, including Wallis. Those were the times when the British press never mentioned that the Prince of Wales appeared to be in love with a totally inappropriate and not very attractive American woman. They only dished about it after he was gone.

Joan Collins, remember her, is starring in a new movie about the last days of the Duchess called “The Bitter End.” Yes, things got that bad. For years the Windsors were locked together, quite miserable, and would ask to be paid for personal appearances. I think Meghan tried that on just recently during a trip she and Harry took to Australia. Not a good omen.

It’s true Meghan was treated roughly by the British press during their engagement and when she was first married. First adored and then sneered at. I still remember racist headlines about her like “Straight Outa Compton.” She was put into daily competition with sister-in-law Kate. Harry and Meghan said they were shocked, shocked at the treatment. But excuse me, didn’t they remember how Diana was treated. It’s the way the tabloids sell papers. And it’s also the way the Royals stay top-of-mind and relevant.

I admit I get notifications daily on my phone telling me the latest. Is my algorithm that shallow? Maybe. These days it is usually about Kate. What she wears. That George, her oldest son is almost as tall as she is and is about to go to Eton. I know she just scaled the three highest mountains in the United Kingdom in 24 hours, a feat known as the National Three Peaks Challenge. It’s just 18 months since Kate ended her cancer treatments. She wrote on Instagram that she had completed the Challenge “to raise awareness for the deeper impact of serious illness and the importance of holistic healthcare.”

Her brother was with her on the climbs and wrote “Two years ago, I told you we’d climb this mountain together. We talked about climbing mountains while you were in hospital … Seeing how far you’ve come is nothing short of inspiring … Keep being exactly who you are.” Now William and Harry, Kate and her bro are two siblings that really seem to get along

Last week would have been Diana’s 65^th birthday. There was William’s tearful tribute and photos of her all over the internet. Especially the photos of her with her two sons. If she was still around, could William and Harry be so estranged? Would Harry have left England for the not-so-bright lights of Hollywood? Tina Brown in a recent column commented that all Harry really wants to do is public service work and get paid for it. Which is exactly what a Prince does. Shame he gave up the one job he was pretty good at. And for the woman he loved which has a bad track record for the Windsors.

Kate, I think, instinctively knows the right way to play an increasingly important role in the Royal family. You don’t try to change it. Meghan and Harry tried. You can’t. Rather you find what’s best about it and ever-so-tactfully make it better. Kate Middleton is a middle-class girl whose mother was a flight attendant and whose father was a flight dispatcher and made their money with an online party supply business. She figured it out and got it right. Princess Catherine is now the most popular Royal of them all. I really like her. I admire her shrewdness.

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I watched the Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova Netflix documentary the other night. My friend Bob Love, who was the editor of AARP Magazine, recommended it. We share streaming suggestions. Though lately streaming has started to freak me out a little. It has become something I do too many nights.

It reminds me of my parents, who turned on the television each evening at 7PM and watched dutifully whatever was on till the 11 o’clock news, often falling asleep along the way. Occasionally, they played cards with friends. Dad played gin rummy. Mom played Canasta. She thought Mah Jong was old-fashioned. I have friends now really into their weekly Mah Jong game.

The documentary, Chris & Martina: The Final Set, chronicles their parallel careers, rivalry, and friendship. It’s also about their battles with cancer. Martina has had throat and breast cancer. Chris had ovarian cancer twice and just had a relapse.

When they started playing tennis professionally, they couldn’t have been more different. Chris was a blonde, icy cool, very cute Florida girl with ribbons in her hair who started winning big at just 16. “Not so cute,” Billie Jean King says in the doc when you played against her. Martina, from then communist Czechoslovakia, was tall and plain and, at first, very emotional on the court. At 18, she broke down in tears when she lost. To Chris.

Both had fathers who taught them tennis and forced them to play for hours each day. Martina’s sister recalls they spent all their time at the local tennis courts in Revnice, the small Czech town outside of Prague where they lived. Chris’s brother acknowledges his sister didn’t have much of a childhood, never even had a date in high school. But they were both so talented, both so focused on being top seed number one. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, they faced each other in 60 tournaments, including 14 major finals. And many believe theirs was the greatest rivalry in sports.

The fans loved Chrissie. Martina not so much, especially when she was playing Chris. Chris was also a star beyond tennis, hanging out with A-listers and making big money from advertising endorsements. Tom-boyish Martina not so much at all. For she was fairly open about being gay, hugging a girlfriend after every victory, though she says she never wanted to publicly discuss her private life.

At Ladies’ Home Journal we used Chris all the time. She was on the cover alongside Katie Couric in August 1992, just before the summer Olympics. It was an Extra Bonus issue that also included coverlines: “Healthy Summer Meals,” “Mystery Extra: Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?” “Special Report: Is Pornography Sexy or Sick?” “Vitamin Guide for Women,” and “Romantic Summer Novel Bonus.” Boy, were we trying hard.

We also always included Chris in our Women of the Year roundups and our 100 Most Important Women of the Twentieth Century book. I only remember a couple of interviews we had with Martina. One made news. In 1993 she discussed defecting from a communist country because she loved America’s freedom. But she said, “It’s not so free anymore.” She was talking about civil and gay rights. It got a lot of attention but, I am sure, didn’t help her with endorsements.

In the documentary both women are remarkably honest about their medical treatments and about their lives. We see Chris having her head shaved by her son after chemotherapy. We watch Martina have an apparatus inserted in a nostril to check on how her throat is healing. And Martina talks about her loneliness after she defected, being without her family. Chris admits maybe she did a better job in her tennis career than in her personal life. She has married three times.

They were both supposed to take the documentary for a big showing at Wimbledon this year. At first the producer considered cancelling because of Chris’s recent unexpected diagnosis and surgery just days before the event was scheduled. But Chris wanted the show to go on. “Me having cancer magnifies the message,” Evert texted the documentary’s producer. “Go to Wimbledon for me, for the film, for Martina.”

Before the screening, a statement from Chris was read. In it, she called the three-year project a labor of love. She described cancer as something that strips away everything except what matters most. “There is no one I would rather be in the trenches with than Martina,” she wrote.

The documentary shows how these famous frenemies became true friends, and that the enemy is an unrelenting illness.

I had a frenemy once, though millions didn’t watch our competition. I got the job she wanted, but then she went on to get as good a job. We had similar backgrounds but, to be honest, she was a bit more of a princess. Once over lunch, she told me she was born rich, and she was. I was born comfortable. At lunch she would order a main course, eat only half, and then order dessert every time. I had never been allowed to do that. Still can’t.

We competed month after month, for celebrities, for writers, for newsstand sales. Over the years, both our magazines were successful and we both won achievement awards. I remember once getting off the shuttle from Washington together. We were coming back from lunch at the White House. Impulsively, she hugged me. “Don’t we have great jobs,” she said. We did. “Aren’t we lucky,” she said. We were.

I respected her, and I think she respected me. But we never had the time to evolve into friends. She got dementia so severe she didn’t even know that her loyal, loving husband died unexpectedly in an accident. She lived on for a while and died three years ago.

Chris and Martina are so kind to each other now. Martina brings Chris her wife’s soup when she visits. I only wish my frenemy and I had the time to know each other when the competing was over, when there was time to be friends, to look back together, and to just be kind.

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We all have a case we never forget. I’m a New Yorker. My case was about the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz. It happened in 1979, 47 years ago. But there was some news about the case just last week. The Supreme Court declined to invalidate the conviction of a man who confessed to the little boy’s murder, reversing a New York federal appeals court decision that would have granted him a new trial. The man Pedro Hernandez had been found guilty in his second trial. There was a hung jury in his first.

But the Etan Patz case was less a whodunit than the shock of what had happened. It changed parenting in New York City and probably across our country ever since.

Here are the details: On the Friday morning before Memorial Day six-year-old Etan begged his mother to let him walk to the school bus stop alone. The stop near their Soho loft was only two blocks away. He had been begging to be allowed to do this for weeks. All the other kids walked alone he claimed. And It was May, after all. He had been taking this walk since September. He knew the way.

It was a busy morning. Etan ‘s mother Julia had his two-year-old younger brother and a toddler friend to take care of and ran a day care. She was also packing for a weekend away. The whole family had been invited to visit a neighbor with a country home for the holiday weekend. So, she finally agreed.

Around eight, she took Etan who was dressed in a blue jacket, blue pants, his racing sneakers and an Eastern Airline Future Captain hat, his favorite. He also had a dollar he was given the day before. He would use it to buy a drink in the bodega near the bus stop for his lunch. She took him down the three flights of stairs to the building’s front door. She watched him walk the first block and turn the corner. Only one block to go. Etan was out of sight. Etan was gone.

The school called later that day. He had not shown up to his first-grade class. He’d never boarded the bus that morning. The police were called immediately. By that evening a hundred police with bloodhounds were searching the neighborhood. Etan’s father Stanley was a photographer. He had dozens of photos of Etan. And Etan was absolutely adorable. Within a few days his image was everywhere. Around their neighborhood. On the front page of New York newspapers, on local television, then on newspapers and television throughout the country. A little boy with an unforgettable face.

A friend of mine who lived only a block away remembers the police coming to her loft and searching it, interviewing everyone in the building. She lived near the bodega where Hernandez, who was charged with the murder years later, briefly worked. But though the search and the headlines went on for months and months Etan’s body was never found. And then the case went cold for decades.

But still it changed everything including the way the police searched for missing children. It led to the establishment of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and created the Milk Carton Campaign with photos of missing children on the side of cartons from dairies across the country. Of course, Etan’s photo was one of the first.

It certainly changed me. My sons were a little older, just 8 and 11 but if they had ever been allowed to walk anywhere without an adult even if they were together that stopped. I think it was at least three years before even the older could go anywhere alone. And for years if either of them was ever late, like ten minutes late, they had to be in a phone booth explaining why and where they were.

Frankly that fear stayed with me. When I was babysitting years later and took my grandson to the park in a Virginia suburb, I still would get anxious if I couldn’t see where he was playing. And when we went shopping and he went down another aisle I was the lady screaming, “Da-vid! Da-vid!” until he appeared.

Etan was lost at the time when New York was not even safe for adults. I was mugged twice. Once in a revolving door outside a rather fancy bistro. A very nervous teenager, no taller than I am, held the door and drew what looked like a pistol, though maybe it was a water gun, and asked for my wallet. A very nervous me handed it over. Another time the best bag I ever had, from Bottega Veneto, was cut off my shoulder in Grand Central Station. I was wearing a thick winter coat with shoulder pads. Lost everything and didn’t feel a thing. And the kids with their babysitter had a skateboard taken in the park. A glass case that someone must have thought was a wallet was extracted from a back pocket at Yankee Stadium. My husband had his wallet stolen too. I once picked up my younger son at a police station near his school in Riverdale. He and a friend had been harassed by a gang of boys from a nearby parochial school. The cops had intervened. I heard one of the assailant’s mothers screaming at her son, “Well this really does it for you for Boston College!”

When I was called for jury duty I complained to the official in charge that every member of the jury pool was either a victim of a crime or related to a criminal. “That was not what the Framers intended,” I told him. He shrugged and sent me to Civil Court. They dismissed me, too. New York is safer now although I still stand close to the station wall before the subway train comes roaring in.

Etan would have been 53. Julia and Stanley Patz lived in their same apartment with the same phone number for years in case Etan came back. He was declared officially dead in 2001. Now they live in Hawaii near their other son and daughter.

Did Etan’s case make other children safer? Maybe. After his disappearance parents started to teach their children to be careful, to never go anywhere with someone they didn’t know, to never take candy or a soda from a stranger. Now we can give them phones and our phones have trackers. My sons always knew where their children, now their almost grown-up children are.

But on those first days reading about the case all I could think about was the terror of that little boy and a mother blaming herself over and over for letting a little boy walk two blocks to school alone. And last week when there was news again about the case it made me realize the memory of Etan Patz will never go away and neither, I’m sure, will the pain and endless regret for those who loved him.

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Remember that scene in “The Way We Were” when Hubbell played by Robert Redford, and his pals are talking about the best year and the best day of their lives? Of course, it is always in the past. Redford, playing Streisand’s gorgeous goyishe guy in that movie was the reason I had a crush on him. That was dispelled by my very dull interview with the actor.

Still, I do think we keep in our mind best days. What’s your best 4^th of July? As it gets closer, I’ve been thinking about mine. I know in my family there were certain rituals. When my two sons were small, we’d watch the movie “1776,” a musical. It’d be on one of the three channels. Year after year, 4^th of July, after 4^th of July, we’d watch it sometime during the day. It’s a fairly accurate enactment of the final debates about independence and the writing of the Declaration. I’m currently taking a course on the Declaration, and the professor keeps referring to the movie with affection. Now it’s hard to find even on classic movie channels. I know one of my sons has a DVD of the movie and will make his son watch. I recommend it if you can find it.

The very best 4^th of July? I guess the Bicentennial, 50 years ago and yet it was a tough time in our history. It was a period of high inflation. I was at Family Circle then and our best coverline was “Feed a family of four on one pound of chopped meat.” We used it over and over again, I wonder if some internet food editor is looking for recipes like that right now.

In 1976 the Vietnam War had ended the year before and ended badly. The soldiers were coming home and not being given the respect they deserved. And Nixon was gone, flying back to San Clemente, his wife and daughters in tears. My friend, the great photographer Harry Benson was on that flight. “It was terrible,” he has said.

But there was an amazing feeling of patriotism as if “the guardrails of democracy” had held and it was time for a reset. One of the biggest events of the Bicentennial was Operation Sail, which featured 16 majestic tall ships and over 200 vessels from 30 nations parading past the Statue of Liberty up the Hudson River. It was the largest peacetime maritime gathering in American history, a million people lined the waterfront.

I live in an apartment on the Hudson and of course we gave an all-day party, watching the ships, eating hot dogs and potato chips on red, white and blue paper plates, drinking beer out of plastic cups. That’s the way I entertained in those days. With lots of kids running around, eating too many brownies and chocolate chip cookies, shrieking with excitement as each elegant tall ship glided right passed our eyes.

Afterwards that evening we went downtown with another couple to watch the fireworks. I’m sure we all wore some kind of crazy hats. My sons were so happy just being on the subway, holding our hands, cheering at the fireworks and coming home late after 11pm. They still went to bed early then. They were little boys.

Yes, it was the best but there were other good times. That patriotic son, grown up, had an apartment in Arlington, Virginia. You could see the fireworks over the Capitol from the balcony. There are no tall buildings in the District. He gave party after party.

And, a couple of times, I’ve been on a beach in Florida watching fireworks while Cuban music played. Last year I went to a much sought after local party in Connecticut with a massive fireworks display. Very impressive but kind of hard to find a seat, then kind of hard to find the car and get away. Sometimes celebrating can be a bit of a chore.

Still John Adams gave clear instructions on how to celebrate. But he thought we should do it on July 2nd which was the day the Second Continental Congress voted for independence. Twelve of the 13 colonies voted yes while New York being New York abstained. New York agreed a couple of weeks later. We celebrate on the 4^th because that’s the day the Declaration was approved and accepted by the Congress.

Adams suggested we mark the occasion with “Pomp and Parade with shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” And we are still doing that.

Our Founding Fathers were personally flawed but remarkable. Adams was brilliant but a workaholic who had three sons. One became President. Two were drunks and gamblers who resented their father’s total focus on independence, his own vanity, and the amazing Abigail. Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings, a slave who was his wife’s half-sister. On his deathbed he freed Sally’s children but not Sally.

Difficult, competitive, brilliant, they gave us our republic. An impossible achievement. “If we can keep it,” Ben Franklin, just as complicated and vain, warned.

There will be another tall ship parade up the Hudson this July 4^th our 250^th anniversary. I won’t be there giving a party. My sons are at their own homes and many of my guest are gone. I probably will be at a friend’s barbeque. No fireworks, thank you. But I will raise my flag outside my house. It’s the flag that flew over the Capitol on the day my husband, a Brit, became an American citizen. My son who worked in Congress then got it for him. Another memory. Another time we were all together celebrating being Americans.

I know I’m talking about the past and that’s easy. Sometimes it can be harder these days to feel patriotic. It’s very difficult for some of my friends. But I believe what our Founders built is still strong enough to withstand threats from without. I believe it’s strong enough even in trying times to withstand threats from within. So, I won’t be a sunshine patriot. I won’t let those I disagree with take away my love for this country.

Happy 4^th of July.

Tell me how you have celebrated or will be celebrating. And how you feel about America today.

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I love short stories. I used to write short stories for women’s magazines when Redbook,McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal published at least one story every month. This is a story I wrote for a writing class more recently when I was taking a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins. We had to write based on a prompt. The prompt was “It is not what you expected.” Read it and enjoy.

My True Story

Walking down the hallway the girl from 3A stopped me. “You look nice,” she said. I did. I was wearing my black coat with the Persian lamb collar. I only get it out for special occasions.

“Where are you going?” She’s young, nosy, with pink streaks in her stringy hair. It was already getting dark. She knows I don’t go out much.

“Dinner.”

“Special occasion?” Very nosy.

“Yes,” I said and added, “My anniversary.” I knew I shouldn’t have said that.

“How many years?”

“Ha! Years and years and years.”

“So how did you meet?” she asked, getting out her key from one of those big ugly bags the young ones carry.

“You know.”

“I don’t “

“Everyone knows.” I said, very softly.

“Me? I’ve tried everything. Hinge, Match, Zoosk. Men are dogs,” she added as the door slammed behind her. No longer interested.

If she had stopped to listen, maybe, just maybe, I’d have told her the way it really was. How that damned glass slipper rubbed my heel. How both of those damn slippers hurt like hell and how it was different in so many ways from the story everyone thinks they know and how in some ways it was exactly the same.

C and me were meeting at Café 82. We went there once a year. I was looking forward to their beef brisket hot sandwich with fries, my favorite. I knew he’d have blueberry blintzes. I’d cut them up and help him eat.

Walking very slowly down Broadway in the cold — I’m afraid of falling –– it made me think of that long ago time. It had been a very cold night, too. Maybe I should tell someone the whole true story before it is too late. Not the girl with pink streaks who could never understand. Someone who would care about the details because the details were important. Details matter.

It really is annoying because the first thing everyone gets absolutely wrong is that my father was rich, and my stepmother was poor. My father, the schnorrer, was a merchant with a lousy failing business. She was the one with the money who needed a husband and Papa, going bankrupt, was glad to make the deal. He even changed his name to hers. From Goldberg to Goldman and changed my name from Esther to Ella. You get the drift. It didn’t save him.

And as for the Fairy Godmother crap, all nonsense. When we heard about the ball, a friend of my poor, dead mother, may she rest in peace, who had expected to be the second wife and was mad at my father for dumping her and hated my stepmother for catching him came to see me. She said she felt sorry I was being treated like a servant girl and deserved to have some fun, too. She’d get me a dress, arrange a way to get me to the ball that everyone was talking about. I was very pretty, that I knew, and she wanted me to show up my ugly stepsisters, piss my stepmother off. What did I have to lose? I said, okay, sure, thanks. I was planning to leave town anyway. I kind of wanted to know what they served at the Palace.

As for the night of the ball, all I really remember was how damn uncomfortable I was. It was so cold and I didn’t have a coat. Those crappy slippers hurt, and the gown was two sizes too small. I said I was a 6. She could only get a 4, half price. In truth, I was an 8. When you clean off plates at every meal, you scarf up all the leftovers.

I guess I looked good enough. C made the rounds. Poor guy, he wasn’t very tall, so half the girls towered over him. I sort of felt sorry for him, but I was mainly there for the food. As I was reaching for my third smoked salmon canape, he caught my eye. I gulped it down. He sidled over, “I like a girl who enjoys her food.” He led me onto the dance floor. I pressed against him. What the hell. I said, “You know you are very cute. I like you. I bet we could have fun together.” What was the point in being shy? He quivered. That’s one of the moments I never forgot. One of the best. His shaking a little, flushing, and the beads of sweat on his upper lips. The poor guy just needed some love.

Then the fireworks started. I mean the real fireworks. Bang! Bang! I had to go. The coach was charging overtime after 10 pm. She wouldn’t pay. I couldn’t pay. I ran and that damn slipper hurt so much I just kicked it off. When I got home and looked at my foot my heel was bloody.

It took him a week for him to find me. C wasn’t the sharpest, but he wasn’t that dumb either. Compared to others in our little kingdom, which mapmakers sometimes tucked into Greater Poland, sometimes pushed inside the Ukraine and most of the time considered non-existent, he was okay. On his rounds, he wasn’t looking for fit but blood. Blood had dried on the edge of the slipper, another important but ignored detail. When he saw my mangled heel, he knew.

We married fast. We had to. The Einsatzgruppen had cleaned up the Polish villages to the east and were looking for action. His parents had already fled to London, taking most of the treasury. We took the rest. My father begged to come along. So sorry. They shot him in a field near the palace. My stepmother and stepsisters, guilt by association, were carted off to Auschwitz. One survived. She found me after and wrote me. I didn’t reply.

I decided on New York and he agreed. From the start, C just went along with my decisions. We never fought. At first, it was hard for him, but I told him to keep looking on the sunny side. I liked that song. He had skills I told him. He certainly knew bespoke tailoring, and, after all, he was damn charming. He ended up working at Brooks Brothers for years. Had his own customers. They thought he was a prince.

And I never minded cleaning. First as a maid at the hotel on 55th and then as assistant head of housekeeping. A woman owned the hotel that looked like a palace. A real bitch. She reminded me of my stepmother. We got along just fine. But that was long ago too.

C was already sitting at a booth in the back when I, half frozen, got to Café 82. They know me there. It’s dusty, still fairly cheap and everyone is Upper West Side old. The aide who brought him was at another table, already tucking into his hot turkey and fries. I’d pay for that and for the two desserts I knew he would order. I tipped him, too, each time I went to visit, about once a month. C didn’t talk. He can’t talk any more. But he smiled when he saw me and reached out his hand. Maybe he still knew who I was. I’m not sure. I kissed him on the top of head; he still had his hair. Sipping my tea, I could tell he really enjoyed the blintzes because I had to order extra sour cream.

There’s one other thing everyone knows about besides that damn glass slipper. That we lived happily ever after.

Of course, we didn’t.

But we lived. We lived. And isn’t that’s enough?

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I have more of my own fairy tales if you like this one which I will publish in upcoming weeks. But I would love to hear if any of you have stories you would like me to publish. I loved being a Book and Fiction editor!

Streaming is great but don’t we all miss a story before bed?

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I just wrote a paper on ageism for a course in my doctoral program. Throughout last term, we had been studying the usual prejudices: sexism and racism. There’s lots of writing about those. But almost nothing about ageism though it has existed as long as man has grown old. My professor thought it was a great topic for a paper.

In fact, the term “ageism” was only coined in 1968 by Dr. Robert Butler, a rare early geriatrician. Even today, there are still very few geriatricians. He was the first director of the National Institute on Aging. The coining of the term happened spontaneously during an interview he had with the fledging reporter Carl Bernstein for an article in The Washington Post.

Reflecting on community resistance to a program to establish housing for older people of moderate income in Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale neighborhood bordering the District of Columbia, “I was struck,” Butler said, “by the parallel to sexism and racism in terms of negative attitudes toward age. ‘You know, it’s really an outrage,’ I told Carl. ‘It’s like racism, it’s ageism!’”

Bingo! Bernstein’s article the next day made the front page of the Post. The word ageism entered the American Heritage dictionary a decade later in 1978.

But since the Greeks, even our greatest thinkers have exhibited startling amounts of ageism. Aristotle, for one, was full of venom about the old. In a section of the Rhetoric, he called them “cynical…small-minded…suspicious…stingy…cowardly…feeble…” In fact, everyone throughout most of history sneered at the old. The exception: the few old men who retained power because they had money and property. Then they were given respect. But, if they like that old fool Lear gave up what they had, they became their daughters’ caregiving problem, ignored and mistreated.

And if things were bad for most old men, things were worse for old women. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her masterwork “The Coming of Age,” “Across civilizations, the old woman inspires fear, disgust, or derision. An old man still remains a man; but an old woman becomes something else entirely. She has lost her usefulness.”

And old women, considered ugly and frightening and usually alone, were often persecuted as witches. Though the witch was young and cute in the TV show of our youth and could light a fire with the twitch of her snub nose –– remember “Bewitched”–– thousands of old women were truly put to the flames for centuries just for being old and women.

But modern ageism is different and full of strange contradictions. We know there are more who are old than ever before. And if all it took for the old to be respected was money, our Baby Boomer generation is the richest in history with their paid-off homes, pensions, and 401Ks.

It should give them respect, right? But nowadays it seems that happens primarily when they use their money to look or behave as if they are young. Case in point: Kris Jenner and her famous $100,000 facelift. She was admired by many because she was upfront about wanting to look younger, did look good and had the money to indulge herself. Amazingly, face-lifted Kris has become a meme in India and China as a symbol of good fortune, success and female empowerment.

By the way, my professor was impressed that I could cite both Aristotle and Kris Jenner in a somewhat scholarly paper!

Another oddity of modern ageism: the old who through the centuries never were particularly critical of each other, now can be very judgmental about those who are not aging well. While aging has always been an inevitability, it’s increasingly seen as a condition that can be managed, optimized, and even, deferred.

This shift definitely marks a new phase in the history of ageism. Rather than stigmatizing old age simply as decline, aging itself has been reframed as personal responsibility. One can now even compete at aging. One can fail or succeed and be criticized and can criticize oneself for simply not aging well. Yes lucky us, that’s very much part of modern ageism.

But maybe what should be most concerning is that age discrimination is alive and well when it comes to the workplace. Nowadays there is no surprise in reading about or knowing people who are in their 80s or 90s. Many, many people are living that long. But age discrimination in the workplace can start far earlier in the 50s. In fact, a woman who works for one of the biggest tech companies told me recently, “they try to get you out by the end of your 40s.” Age discrimination is a problem everywhere but the industry that seems particularly age adverse is technology and increasingly technology is part of every industry. So, life can be very tough for men or, especially, women who loses a job in their 50’s and try to get another job with the same prestige or salary. Or even try to get a job at all.

I truly believe that the greatest achievement of humanity is the extension of human life. We have added 30 more years in America and increased lifespan everywhere. But it seems that modern ageism can demand too much of ourselves while demanding too little of society, industry and the health care system. Often they still ignore the most important reality of this century.

The world is growing old.

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There’s a moment in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where the icy Miranda Priestly melts. She turns almost girlish, and confesses, with a grin, “Boy, I love to work, don’t you?” And there’s a previous scene when Miranda worries she may be losing her job and wonders what she will have in her life without it. Meryl Streep looks virtually the same in the movie’s new version as she did in the first, except in that scene. Suddenly she really looks older when she worries about not having the job that defines her.

Her new husband assures her she will still have “the twins” her never seen and hardly acknowledged daughters and, of course, HIM!

Nice try. Not enough.

In fact, TDWP2 is a romcom about ambitious women and the jobs they love. No leading man necessary. For the movie makes you believe that it’s work that keeps one young and happy. And that there’s more to be passionate about in the right job than in a dishy boyfriend or a caring spouse.

What else did I think of the movie? Not bad, not great. It left me with some questions and not about how long print media, even with billionaire backers, can survive. I think I know the answer to that one. Rather, I wondered why the much-lauded actor and director Sir Kenneth Branagh took the hardly-there role of Miranda’s hubby? Why Ann Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, who’s supposed to be an award-winning investigative journalist in her 40’s, acts exactly like she did as an intern in her early 20’s? And why Meryl Streep’s neck still look so good?

But back to my main point: Even before seeing Prada I’ve been thinking a lot about work and what it means in our lives. Especially in the lives of women of a certain age. Maybe that’s because it’s exactly a year since I gave up my full-time job. I knew at the time it was the right thing to do. But, to tell you the truth, it hurt.

Trying to cope I wrote a piece for a retirement website which I called “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” about how conflicted I felt. Yes, work, getting up, going out, thinking about it all the time, had been an important part of my life for over six decades.

Of, course, when I was growing up caring about the work you would do, if you even worked at all, wasn’t expected of girls. You knew what was expected. Marriage, of course by 25 at the latest, or your mother worried, and you, I admit it, worried too. Sounds almost funny now. That’s because for women a decade younger than me, the priorities shifted and shifted fast.

Millions of Boomer women suddenly began to go to work and see work, as opportunities opened, as both a challenge and a gift. Of course, some women have always worked, had always had to work, but it was different. In just 20 or so years at the end of the last century what women expected and what was expected of them totally changed. Not only did women work in greater numbers than ever before, they also began to have reasons to love their jobs and feel empowered. They made their work a significant part of their identity.

I certainly was Boomer-like in that way, and I was very lucky. I took a journalism course in my junior year in high school and was the editor of the school newspaper by my senior year. And after that I always found great magazine jobs, where I learned and which I loved.

Now Miranda does briefly mention “there is a cost” before she goes into her “I Love To Work” refrain. And I know there was. I have the memories. I remember way back in my upward climbing days a Christmas when the kids opened presents, delighted by the haul, while I was busy editing a “bestseller bonus” excerpt for an upcoming issue of Family Circle. I had spent too much money in order to beat out the competition. Hacking away--from 90,000 words to 10,000 that I hoped would make sense to a reader. That obsessed Christmas I worked most of the day while the kids played, and my husband complained. I almost forgot to put the turkey in.

More recently and even without the family, I almost missed a tour of Pompeii. I was standing aside, talking on my cell to the office about some now-forgotten crisis. It took me half an hour to catch up with the group, somewhere near the brothel. I’ve been to Pompeii, but there are mosaics I wanted to see but missed because of that call. Pompeii only once. Crises big and small that totally absorbed me almost daily for all those years.

Maybe the worst of all: I was offered a job in another city when my husband was already sick. He had stopped wanting to go anywhere. He stayed at home, in bed, on a chair or at the computer. This job was a good one, the chance to do important things and make an impact. Who gets offered such a job at age 73? My husband told me to take it, though he knew I’d be gone from Monday to Thursday every week. I wonder now if he was testing me. Of course, I took it.

Is that enough proof of my “I Love to Work” creds? But now I keep wondering why it’s so extraordinarily hard for women when the job is over. Lately I have met dozens of women trying to cope with what to do when that happens. And many, almost frantically, try to find ways to keep working, whether they need to for the money or not. They write books. They start businesses. Both are damn hard and very frustrating to do. That may give them part of what appeals about work but usually not the paycheck or the structure or the relationship, memorably close or interestingly antagonistic, one has going to an office.

Most men watched their fathers, and their grandfathers work and then retire. It was a pattern they expected. A friend who lives in a community where there are many retirees says men when they retire handle it more quietly. They really do play golf or fish. Take courses or find time for the grandkids they never had for their own children. Have hobbies. Watch sports or watch porn. Even if their work was an important part of their identity, they always knew it was going to be over and that they’d have to handle another stage in that life.

Boomer women didn’t have that preparation. They knew they didn’t have role models for work, but they don’t have role models for retirement either. They’re so proud of what they achieved, and they should be. They had done so much more than women had ever done before. Still, I sometimes wonder if Gen X and Millennial women who have always worked and had no choice about it, will have as much trouble retiring.

Maybe it’s the real responsibility for Boomer women who have led the way to show the next generations of women how to handle the years when the job is over. How to stay self-confident and fulfilled and able to flourish in a new stage in their lives.

Now isn’t that’s a worthy challenge to take on?

God knows, I, for one, am trying.

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Please check out my podcast above with journalist Meg Grant, a super celebrity whisperer. We share stories about the many celebs we interviewed over the years. Meg was the Bureau Chief for People in Miami, was Deputy Bureau Chief in Los Angles and helped launch People in Australia. She was also West Coast Editor for both Reader’s Digest and AARP The Magazine. At AARP when we needed a celebrity for the cover of the magazine, and we always needed a celebrity for the cover, it was Meg who always came through.

In the podcast we talk about the stars we liked and the ones, shall we say, who were a bit of a disappointment. We don’t want to speak ill of the sick or the dead but both Bruce Willis and Robert Redford are in that category. Find out why.

We both liked Elizabeth Taylor and both interviewed her. I met her a couple of times. Once, when she was launching her perfume White Diamonds, which was an enormous commercial success. There was a lunch for magazine editors to promote the perfume at the Plaza Athénée in New York. I sat next to Taylor. She was back from her second stay at Betty Ford and had lost a lot of weight. Promoting the perfume was very important.

Taylor didn’t talk that much. But at one moment, as we started on our salads, she looked down at her hand and said, “Where’s my ring?” She had misplaced the famous 33-karat diamond that Richard Burton had given her, now set in a ring. There was a sudden scramble around her. A phone call, a race back upstairs to her suite. All forks were laid down, all conversation stopped until an assistant appeared holding the ring. Taylor slipped the hefty diamond on her finger. It had been on the sink in the suite’s bathroom. She had taken it off to wash her hands. Burton had paid over $300,000 for what was then called the Krupp diamond. After her death, it was called the Elizabeth Taylor diamond, and the ring sold at an auction for eight million.

I remembered reading that at a Kensington dinner party Princess Margaret had once looked at the ring and sneered, “How vulgar,” but then asked to try it on. When she did, Taylor had said, “Not so vulgar now.”

Taylor was like that –– very direct and unimpressed by anyone else who was famous. After all, for a time no one was more famous than Elizabeth Taylor.

When I interviewed her in her Bel Air home, Taylor told me another story about missing a piece of jewelry. It was about a giant pearl called La Peregrina that Spanish royalty had once owned. Burton had given it to her, and she wore it on a chain around her neck. One Sunday morning in a hotel suite in Las Vegas she realized it was off the chain. Where the hell was it? The suite had shag carpeting. She started feeling around, trying to make sure Burton, who was reading the Sunday papers, wouldn’t notice. Finally, she realized that in a box in the corner, a puppy was gnawing on something. Carefully she extracted the pearl. Not much damage to La Peregrina, and he never knew.

Meg also has a story about Taylor and her jewelry. As well as stories about O.J. Simpson, Robert Downey, Jamie Lee Curtis and who she was with on the 9/11. Amazingly, it was Muhammad Ali!

Please have a listen or a view if you prefer and I hope you’ll enjoy.

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My husband’s ashes are buried a couple of graves from Arthur Miller’s. It’s in a cemetery in Roxbury, Connecticut. When my husband died, I knew I wanted him cremated but I also knew I wanted a grave with a headstone. I wanted a marker that inscribed his name: Jeffrey Blyth, his dates: March 20, 1926––September 21, 2013 and the title which was most important to him. Not husband, not father but Journalist.

A couple of days after he passed, my sons and I went up to Roxbury where we have a house. Roxbury is in Litchfield County, northwestern Connecticut, an area that has been settled since revolutionary times. If you have property, you can be buried in the local cemetery. In fact, there are two cemeteries. The original one, now crowded, has graves with headstones from the 17th century. The Town Clerk showed us around to help pick out a spot and suggested the new cemetery which at that time, a dozen years ago, had only a few graves.

There was Miller’s, close to the road. His headstone was a huge mossy boulder which the Clerk said came from his Roxbury property. He had lived there a long time. I remembered seeing photos of Miller and Marilyn Monroe in a blue and white polka dot sundress, his arms wrapped around her, sitting by a tree in Roxbury shortly after they married in 1956. On top of his unusual headstone, there were several pebbles. It’s a Jewish custom to leave stones, not flowers, to show that the grave has been visited and the dead are remembered.

A grave nearby was of the writer Frank McCourt, who had lived in Roxbury after “Angela’s Ashes,” had been such a huge success. His grave had a stone Celtic cross. And nearby was the grave of the actor Richard Widmark. He was famous, too. “Dad would like it here” one of my sons said. “Like three guys at a bar. He’d enjoy the conversation.” In the eulogy at my husband’s memorial service, a friend, another journalist, after describing where he was buried, said “I don’t know if Jeffrey ever read ‘Death of a Salesman,’ but I know he’d like to hear about Marilyn Monroe.”

I went to see the new Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman” the other night with one of my sons and his girlfriend. It has received a great deal of praise. It has wonderful performances by Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf though the staging is unexpected and a bit strange. My son’s girlfriend has been to New York many, many times and gone to concerts and the ballet but this was the first time she was going to a Broadway show. I’m glad she was seeing the great American play.

But both she and my son saw a somewhat different play than I did. I saw Willy Loman, The Salesman, as a man, confused and despondent because of the many disappointments and failures in his life. There’s the bitter failure of no longer being able to make a living after giving 34 hard years of work to a company that thoughtlessly discards him. There’s the painful disappointment of a father who adores his sons and expects a great future for them. The sons turn out, of course, even more ordinary and unsuccessful than he is. No wonder Willy is exhausted and a little crazy. That’s what I saw.

But they saw a man — Willy is only 60 –– as someone with early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia. The diagnosis was clearer to them than the cause.

But isn’t the play about the great American Dream that we all are supposed to share? That we will work hard and our children will do better than we have done? And isn’t it a tragedy when that doesn’t happen. Or, maybe, when you believe in that Dream too much that’s a tragedy too.

Both my son and his girlfriend are lawyers. I’m sure they want the best for their kids and want them to be satisfied with their lives. But that doesn’t mean that they will do better than they have done. In fact, I think they worry that their college-age kids may have trouble finding jobs after they graduate. At this changing and confusing time, they are uncertain about what their expectations should be.

“Death of a Salesman” originally opened on Broadway in 1949 so it’s clearly about the 1940’s. But it also reminded me of my 1950’s childhood. My father was no Willy Loman. Though he had gone to work at 13, he owned his own business. He was the boss. But the depression had scarred both my parents. They were always pinching pennies, looking for bargains, saving money for a disaster that didn’t happen. Treats were rare and after the fact nobody thought an expensive dinner or the special vacation was ever worth the money.

I went to school with kids whose parents were like mine or maybe even like Willy. They were fiercely competitive, wildly striving, determined to outdo each other and succeed. And so, the boys became doctors, lawyers, accountants and some ended up all over Hollywood. The girls were fierce in high school but mostly settled into early ’60s marriages where they pushed their husbands to achieve or like Willy ’s Linda comforted them whenever they fell behind.

At a Tina Brown event about women a few years ago I sat with a young woman who then worked for Tina. I mentioned I had a house in Roxbury. She said she once had one there too. I mentioned my husband was buried in the new cemetery. She said her husband who had died very young was buried there, too. It turned out his was the grave next to Jeffrey’s, between his and Miller’s. What a coincidence. Small cemetery. Small world.

Miller had a complicated life. He wrote one great play and a couple of good ones. After Monroe he married the photographer Inge Morath who is buried next to him. They had two children. Their daughter, the actress Rebecca Miller still lives at least part of the time in Roxbury and is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. They also had a son. The boy had Down’s Syndrome. He was placed in a state home right after birth. Miller never visited him or acknowledged him.

It is Memorial Day next week. I’m going to Roxbury. I haven’t been there all winter. I like the country. I like my house. But it can be lonely there too. Of course, I will go to the cemetery. Miller had great success and great disappointments in his life. So, to be honest, did my husband. I’ll check out the pebbles on Miller’s grave and look at all the graves I now know. I will clean my husband’s headstone after this long cold winter. As Linda Loman memorably says about Willy, about us all, “Attention must be paid.”

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I remember when I had my first son, someone said, “Now you’re a hostage to fate” And it’s true when my sons were growing up, every time the phone rang in my office, I was worried that something had happened to one of them. And there were a few cracked ankles, a slipped epiphysis, a dog bite. Then the colleges they didn’t get into, the girlfriends who dumped them, the job stress, the divorce. It goes on and on but basically, it has been okay.

Lately, I have tried to do what Arthur Brooks advises as the best way to get along well with adult children: lower expectations. In truth, my sons are good and caring, and we usually get along well. The only expectation I now try to have is for them is to live long and healthy lives. And be happy. I know that’s all a mother should wish for and maybe more than she should expect.

Still, I thought you were hostage to fate once you had children only because of your concern about them. Now I know that isn’t true. It’s more complicated than that. You’re a hostage too to the way they turn out, the way they treat you or ignore you, even the way they want to help when you need their help.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since it was just Mother’s Day. I did okay. I got the flowers and the phone calls, the texts from friends. But I know a lot of mothers didn’t. I just learned, doing some research, Mother’s Day was created at the beginning of the 20th century by Anna Reeves Jarvis, to honor her own mother. Anna’s mom was quite a dynamo. She organized Mother’s Clubs to promote reconciliation between Confederate and Union moms after the Civil War, an amazing gutsy endeavor. All Anna, who so admired her mom, wanted was for children to write letters of appreciation to their mothers on Mother’s Day. Woodrow Wilson signed the Day into law in 1914.

Almost immediately Mother’s Day became a commercial bonanza. It was predicted that $38 billion would be spent just this past Mother’s Day. Anna, who never married and had no children, hated commercialization. She tried to stop the holiday. Poor thing, she ended up penniless and ignored in a nursing home. The greeting cards and chocolate makers she had decried for exploiting the holiday paid her bills. It’s an example of things turning out not the way you expected which is kind of appropriate, considering the relationship a lot of mothers have with their own adult children.

AARP has a newsletter called The Ethel. It is for women over 60 and has a wonderful, caring and talented editor in Shelley Emling. I was involved in its creation, and I think it’s one of the best and most meaningful things AARP does. It also has a closed Facebook group where women share with each other. They talk about everything from online dating to cataract surgery to what to wear and what to watch. But very often they write about their problems with their grown-up kids. They often post anonymously. Maybe that’s because they know each other online, but they don’t really know each other. It seems a lot harder to talk to even your closest friends about the challenges and disappointments you have with adult children. You usually want to say everything is fine because you still want to believe everything is fine.

The Ethels sometimes write about how their sons or daughters suddenly cuts off relations. Completely. They never understand why. They write about the kids asking for money, even stealing money. Then there are the drug and alcohol addiction problems that they have tried to help solve for years and years. And the worries about the ones who can’t keep a job or a mate or even, hard as it is to admit, stay out of jail. Some, they complain, are always asking for help but never think of giving any. Please baby sit. Please take care of the dog. Please help with the first payment because after the accident we need a new car. These posts get hundreds of responses. Everyone understands.

I remember one little holiday story a woman shared. Her daughter came over to deliver a box of Christmas cookies and said, “See you next Christmas.” Sounds nice. But the daughter lived 20 minutes away. They only saw each other once a year. Their whole relationship was one yearly box of cookies. The mother did not understand why and the daughter didn’t explain.

Recently I tuned into a chat on a website for retired executive women. I thought they’d talk about coping with life without their big jobs. Wrong. They only wanted to talk about the son who never called or the 35-year-old daughter who still blames mom for all the problems in her life.

There are good kids, too, of course, but they can be a different kind of challenge. Example: I have a friend who fell out of bed a couple of weeks ago and broke three ribs. It hurts. Her husband has dementia and is getting worse. Not angry, just quiet, very, very quiet. Lately he gets up in the middle of the night. She found him outside on the deck. He could start to wander out onto the street. She’s in pain and very concerned.

She has two sons who are both doctors. Her husband was a doctor, too, a psychiatrist. She thinks he doesn’t remember that. Her sons are concerned and are trying to help. They have both come to visit for a week. One son has what she says is Type A energy. Both sons have decided they need to de-clutter the house where she and her husband have lived for nearly 50 years. They’re starting with papers they think she no longer needs. They’re throwing out a lot of paper. They’re probably right but it is making her husband agitated and making her crazy.

I know if we have kids like that, shouldn’t we be grateful? Even when they’re bossy. When my friend’s sons finally left, she and her husband slept for almost a day. She appreciates their help. She really does. She was so glad they were gone.

I think the relationship with one’s children is the most complex relationship of all. And the most guarded. They change, we change, and the space between us is never fixed. We’re still close. We’re far apart. Yes, wasn’t it simpler on those Mother’s Days when they were so excited to make you breakfast and you praised the lopsided pancakes or the burnt bagels. And it was simpler, too, when you managed their lives and they didn’t think they had to manage yours. Now, we’re left to make peace with a more ambiguous truth: we are still hostages to fate, but also to one another — bound by love, of course, and sometimes irritation.

Still, I hope you just had a lovely Mother’s Day.

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When I went to college all those years ago history was simple. There was a straight line from the Greeks through the Founders to contemporary America. Progress! And mostly good. Not anymore. In college or grad school and certainly in the current course in my doctorate program the lesson is that Western Civilization has lots of ‘splainin to do. Even the Enlightenment wasn’t all that enlightened with featured thinkers who were racist slavers and had a new admiration for science that accepted crackpot theories as truths.

In my current class we’re concentrating on all the sins — colonialism, racism, sexism. You can add a lot of slamming of capitalism as well. As part of the course, each student must make a class presentation related to that week’s topic of disdain. I, of course, choose sexism

Now everyone in the class is younger than me, including the very pleasant Professor, even though they’re all at least in their mid- 30s. When we read several of the French critics of colonialism, she spoke about how they were influenced by France’s painful giving up its colony in Algeria in 1960. Oddly enough I was in Paris at the time, just out of college, and living with my dashing British journalist boyfriend, later my husband, who was often sent to Algiers or Oran to cover the story.

I remembered the riots in the streets when the colonists enraged by being abandoned by De Gaulle would roar Algeria Francaise and confront the police outside the Elysee Palace. The cops, les flics, did not carry guns but their capes were lined with lead, and they would hit the demonstrators across their faces, bloodying them. Amazing, my professor said, when I shared my memories. Amazing, that I was there. Amazing, I’m sure she was also thinking I was so old and a student in her class.

To study sexism, we read Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, of course, and then bell hooks (who no, does not capitalize her name) and Joan Butler. (Wikipedia uses they as Butler’s pronoun.) But I made my presentation on Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. For, unfortunately, criticism of the book can be part of gender studies, while the importance of the book and Betty, brilliant, difficult, explosive Betty are often ignored.

The Feminine Mystique was published in February 1963. Only a couple of months before in December 1962 George Gallup, America’s leading pollster at the time had done a survey of American women. The poll, according to Gallup, wasn’t intended to examine “the extremes” among American women. “Old maids, divorced women, childless women, working mothers certainly existed in America but they were of concern mainly to sociologists, because they are unusual and exist in a society not geared to them,” Gallup stated. Rather the aim of the poll was to portray how “most” American women felt about their lives. According to Gallup, “American housewives are content because they know precisely why they’re here on earth … Practically every one of the 1,813 married women in this survey said that the chief purpose of her life was to be either a good mother or a good wife.” Although Gallup acknowledged many women also said, “it takes more than motherhood to make a woman completely happy; it also takes a man.” Gallup’s buoyant conclusion was “the typical American female is serene, secure and happy.”

Now Betty based The Feminine Mystique on her own instincts and a survey she did of less than 200 of her Smith classmates for their 15th college reunion. And Betty found these women not so happy. Instead, she claimed they were suffering from what she called “the problem that has no name” bored, unfulfilled and frustrated about the narrowness of their “happy housewives’” lives.

The book was an immediate bestseller that sold millions of copies and started second-wave feminism in America and around the world. Makes you wonder why we have ever trusted pollsters or been so easily convinced by data.

Still the book now, has many important feminist critics. They complain it was only about and for upper middle class White suburban women. Betty even though she had been a journalist for union papers and was certainly a Democrat was quite conservative herself. She was concerned about lesbians becoming too important in the women’s movement. Although she was divorced and had an unhappy marriage, she didn’t like man bashing. She was jealous of younger, prettier, far more telegenic Gloria Steinem who was becoming a feminist leader around the same time. And whenever Betty held a meeting at her large Upper West Side Manhattan apartment there was always a maid or two cleaning up in the background.

I knew Betty. I admired her. For Ladies’ Home Journal I bought excerpts from her later books though they were never as popular as The Feminist Mystique. She always was a contrarian. At the Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 a big dinner was held in her honor. Lots of food which she liked. Lots of attention which she liked. But when she got up to speak, the mother of second stage feminism said. “You know, I feel sorry for men these days. They’re having a hard time.” It was what nobody expected. That was Betty.

What did my classmates think of The Feminine Mystique? Not much. In fact, the whole class about sexism was kind of a bust. There was a lot more enthusiasm for bashing the British Empire about colonialism. The men said almost nothing. Though one wondered if there was any sexism in the animal kingdom. Only one woman had a read a copy, a gift from her grandmother.

The Professor asked us all to read two Guardian articles about how tradwives were trending among Gen Zs. The articles noted that the young women who wanted to be tradwives wished they didn’t have to go to work and envied the leisure time and lack of stress they believed women once had. Currently a book about a tradwife influencer is on the Times best seller list.

My class made me realize what the constrained life was like for millions of women before Betty’s bombshell of a book was no longer even a memory. Even odder, for some it had become a dream.

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Anna Wintour and her Chanel sunglasses are everywhere. One would think they should be Prada. But they are Chanel on the cover of Vogue. And there’s all the publicity, online and in the papers, starring Anna and her shades, about Monday night’s Met Gala. I have met Anna several times over the years. Once when she gave a presentation at an ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) function that I was overseeing. Someone had mixed up her slides. She was not happy. Wonder how that happened.

I met her father once, too. My husband, a British journalist who worked for the London Daily Mail, was a casual friend of his. Anna’s father was the editor of the London Evening Standard and was known as Chilly Charley Wintour. Anna’s been called Nuclear Wintour. Maybe it’s in the genes.

Charley’s wife Audrey Slaughter was the editor of a magazine for teenagers. So was I at the time we met. Private Eye, the British humor weekly always referred to her as The Flame Haired Temptress. I had red hair then, too. It was a long, long time ago.

Now most people if they had the chance to ask Anna a question would ask about fashion. Not me. I would ask her about her eyes. I can’t believe those sunglasses are just to keep her aloof and mysterious. Or even to cover wrinkles. What is it really? Cornea? Retina? Blepharitis? Glaucoma? Severe dry eyes? (But that might be too common.) I’ve read she has lousy vision, but I bet it’s more than that.

At the Oscars when she was announcing an award, she took her sunglasses off for a couple of minutes and she couldn’t keep her eyes open in the bright lights. Streisand was wearing tinted glasses, too, when she gave her salute to Redford. And think of all the old rockers with their dark shades always on. After 75, some things don’t hold up no matter how much work you have done, especially the eyes.

Of course, I’m interested because I have lousy eyes too. Always have. Wore thick glasses from 1st grade on. Hated those glasses from 1st grade on. My eyes would always get red too. From allergies in the spring and fall or pink eye infections in the winter. And worst of all I knew my eyes, when they were at peace, were probably my best feature. Big and blue. But too often big and blue and red and teary. And behind thick glasses. Can you understand my obsession? Anna, are they your obsession, too?

I have a couple of friends with bad eyes. We talk about our eyes all the time. When you are old, you do talk to your friends about your ailments. It’s called the organ recital. That’s funny but only the first couple of times you hear it. But most people are talking about aches, pains, joints, and the aftereffects of a fall. Not a constant blur. Anna, happy to listen if you want to share.

I have a friend who also wore glasses when she was young. From the time when she was three. She had Lasik surgery not once but twice. Not a good idea. Her corneas are very thin. She loves her doctor. But when she had cataract surgery, he put the wrong lenses in her eyes. He explained he was shipped the wrong lenses and had to change them. Another surgery on her thin corneas. Then she had retina problems. Again, the doctor operated. Her retina detached. He fixed it. It detached again. Maybe she should consult another doctor. At a teaching hospital. Who do I recommend? But I know cornea doctors, lid doctors, not retina doctors. And my doctors have made mistakes too.

That’s one of the problems with eyes; in case you are interested. Some doctors are experts with corneas. Some with retinas. Some with dry eyes — and everyone over 50 now has dry eyes. Remember when there were only one or two drops at the drugstore for dry eyes? Now there is half an aisle. Drops for dry eyes are the Manolos of medication. Little tiny bottles, big monthly price tags. And, in truth, nothing really helps. Anna, tell me, Vevye, Miebo or Xdemvy? Did any of them work for you?

But for a long time, I was all right. When I was 16, soon after Leonardo invented them, I got a pair of contact lenses. They were very, very new then. Very few people prescribed them. I remember I took the train from Long Island and went to an office in Manhattan, and a woman put them in my eyes, a pair of very rigid hard lenses. I had to stay in her office wearing them for an hour and come back a week later for another session. It took at least six weeks before I could take my prize, the lenses, home. I could see. My eyes were big and blue and clear. A miracle.

And that went on for years and years and years. Of course, there were a few problems. Scratched corneas that had to heal. Broken blood vessels that didn’t. Conjunctivitis now and then. And maybe putting a hard plastic disc in your eye 16 hours a day for more than 50 years might not have been the best idea.

In my 60s my eyes got drier and drier and drippy at the same time, too. I also had small cataracts. Solution: Have the cataracts removed, and then I wouldn’t need to wear my contact lenses. Great! Mistake number one. I went to what I was told was the best cataract surgeon in New York. He had his own clinic, had invented the lasers that were now used to perform cataract surgery. He was in business with his son. Oddly, he looked somewhat younger than his son. I was too trusting.

Of course, when his assistant was trying to test my eyes to find the correct lenses to order, they couldn’t come up with an answer. One would have thought he might have wondered why that was happening. Instead, he plowed ahead and sold me a pair of lenses that Medicare didn’t cover. As it turned out it didn’t matter about the lenses because simply cutting into my corneas which one must do in cataract surgery was about the worst thing anyone could have done.

Afterwards my eyes got even drier. I started getting cornea abrasions, scratches usually on my left eye, my bad eye, that hurt. Now I was going to Wilmer at Johns Hopkins, considered the second-best eye hospital in America. They keep treating and, even over treating me for dry eyes. Mistake number two. Afterwards there was a torn cornea. And nobody there, at the second-best eye hospital in America, noticed maybe something else was wrong. After months of too many steroid drops that made the pressure in my eyes skyrocket plus pain and blurring, a young doctor at Weill Cornell in New York, where I was also going, wondered if I might have a very rare disease that could be affecting my eyes and sent me to a doctor in Boston, as strange as the cataract surgeon, who was the leading –– and one of the very few — experts on such diseases.

He also had his own clinic, rather than working out of a hospital. These genius doctors inevitably have fights with the big hospitals and go out on their own to make more money and only do what they want. The strange Boston doctor, who sat too close, biopsied my eye, a worse experience than childbirth. It was the conclusive way to diagnose the disease. Afterwards, I took an Uber back to New York from Boston. Yes, it was that bad. And, of course, I have the rarest of autoimmune diseases that affect one’s eyes. So now I take lots of pills, have monthly infusions which make me feel tired for at least a week afterwards. That has been for the past few years. Things don’t get much better, but the doctor I now have is trying to assure that things won’t get worse. So, Anna, whatever you’ve got, I have empathy. I really do.

The Vogue cover story, about Meryl Streep who is also wearing sunglasses and Anna, is, of course, just a promotion for the new “The Devil Wears Prada” film. I read the story, white type on black background on my monitor screen. (By the way, if you have eye trouble, that makes reading a lot easier.) The piece was, of course, a puff job about them in fact, a powder puff job. It was written by the new editor of Vogue, who isn’t called the editor but rather the Head of Editorial Content, Vogue US. I’m sure it was a challenging assignment for her. Still, it made me want to see the movie, maybe even before it starts streaming.

In the piece, Anna says, “Age is actually an advantage,” and I agree in some ways it is.

But, Anna, I’m sure we both know even with sunglasses, Chanel or Prada, when it comes to our eyes, it really is not.

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But, hey, live and learn.

And learn you will because my guest is my friend Jeri Sedlar who’s an author, speaker, and lecturer, and the co-author, with her husband Rick Miner of a highly acclaimed book about retirement called Don’t Retire, Rewire

.

Though the book, in its third edition, is 25 years old, it was very recently cited by Forbes magazine as one of the best books ever about retirement. And it is.

So why did Jeri and Rick write the book when not even the oldest Boomers were thinking about retirement? That’s when the only retirement question was do you have enough money and the only retirement advice was buy a comfortable recliner.

“I thought there were other important retirement questions, too,” Jeri says talking about the book’s inception. “Do you have enough money to do what interests you? Do you have enough money to do what fulfills you? And that was an ‘aha moment’ for me because when I started talking to people and asking, do you know what really fulfills you? People kind of looked at me a little bit blankly and said, well, not really. And I thought, if you don’t know and you’re planning retirement, it’s going to be a lot harder when you’re in retirement and you don’t know yourself.”

Another experience that the book is based on: “We had a good friend, who was getting ready to retire. He was 59. He had been so excited about retirement. He was giving up the demands, the budgets, the people, everything. And he told me he walked into his office, and he looked around and he realized, this is where I got my ‘Atta boys!’ He had been focusing on so many of the negative things that he was giving up, that he just didn’t realize his workplace had been feeding not just his checkbook and his bank balance and the opportunity to retire, but had been feeding him emotionally.”

That led Jeri and Rick on a quest to really understand the satisfactions people found in their work. They did their research, including one-on-one interviews, focus groups and a major survey. And they asked the big question that is rarely asked: What would you or do you miss most about work?

Do me a favor. If you are thinking about retiring, if you are already retired, ask yourself that, too. It can be very enlightening.

I know I asked myself that question six months after I retired and was a little low. A friend had suggested maybe I missed the power I had in my job. Wrong. I mostly missed having responsibilities. And that’s, I confess, part of why I’m writing this Substack and doing a podcast.

Jeri and Rick edited down the answers they received to the 30 that are in the book. They call them your “drivers.”

“Our book,” she says, “shows you how to identify your own personal drivers. And then shows you how to take those drivers, the satisfactions you found in your work and use them to help rewire your future. Yes, it’s a little like therapy,” she acknowledges, with a laugh. “Without the high-ticket price.”

“For example, there was a partner in an accounting firm who said he loved mentoring the new partners. Well, there was a call out right there. If it’s mentoring and being with younger people, then you begin to think about what other ways you can do that again…maybe in a non-profit environment. Of course, I don’t want to make it sound like everybody enters the future not knowing what they are going to do. But a lot of people have been so focused on their jobs. They just didn’t think about developing other interests. “

I know Jeri believes you must work on your retirement and keep working at it. And I’m finding that is very true. “The first chapter of our book is called Flunking Retirement, because if you don’t do some of the things we’re discussing, you really can get stuck. We found that often 18 months after retiring people can hit a wall. The honeymoon phase is over.” (Hmm. I have about nine months to go.)

Now we know the most important question to ask when considering retirement. But I also know the worst one because I heard it so often and so does everyone else who retires.

What are you going to do next?

“People cringe because they feel they must have an answer,” Jeri says. “But you don’t owe anybody an answer but yourself. How can you answer about the next 30 years? If you really look at this gift of longevity you realize retirement is not one big block of time. And that’s how I think people should look at it. There are several different stages in there. And I hope that people feel they can change over time, try new things, find new satisfactions.”

Her advice on how to answer that most annoying question?

“Just say, stay tuned. And smile. “

In our podcast Jeri shares many other savvy tips and solid advice including:

Ø An easy way to figure out what you really want to spend time, money and energy on

Ø Why Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett inspired her

Ø Who has a better time in retirement, men or women

Ø Why moving after retirement can be a good idea

Ø How to get around those retirement roadblocks

Ø And how she uses her own drivers to “test her brain and feed her soul”

Please read Don’t Retire, Rewire.

And listen up to our podcast. Jeri has certainly helped guide me through my own rewirement. Please share your questions and your rewirement journey with us.

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