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Tea with Queens Victoria and Mary

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As tributes poured in for actress Betty White, who died on New Year’s Eve 2021, I recalled a long-ago summer afternoon when I ran into her at the Dennis Public Market on Cape Cod. Actually, White ran into me.  That would have been in 1962, when White and her husband, Allen Ludden, were appearing together in a comedy at the Cape Playhouse. I was ushering at the Playhouse that summer, and after a week of performances I had learned most of White’s lines and many of her perfectly timed pauses.   I was making some hard decisions at the market’s dairy cooler (chocolate or strawberry ice cream?) when White suddenly was standing beside me. “Would you happen to know where they hide the raspberry jam?” she asked, with a Sue Ann Nivens gleam in her bright blue eyes. I remember feeling like she had invited me to join her in some antic prank. A treasure hunt, perhaps, among the marmalades.  I steered White down the aisle of condiments and made sure that she could find two or three other items on he
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Marching with Parkinson's

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“Faster!” my son yells, as I inch my way down the driveway.  “Come on!” my grandson chimes in.  If they both weren’t wearing such big grins, I’d smack them with my cane. Instead, I proceed with caution, making my way very slowly down the incline of our driveway, crossing several fingers and praying that I won’t fall. Again. Walking downhill is scary for me these days. Even trying to ride a “down” escalator feels threatening because I have a lot of problems with balance and depth perception.  There are other weird, daily constraints. My hands get the shakes, for no apparent reason. My feet unexpectedly “freeze” and feel as if they were glued to the floor. I have hallucinations. I can’t smell baking bread—or anything else. I tire easily. I fight recurring battles with depression.  More worrisome is the cognitive decline. Some days I have trouble thinking about more than one issue at a time; other days it’s difficult to make decisions. I can’t remember names and proper nouns. I stop in th
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Wanna dance?

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  She was sitting at a table by herself, watching couples on the dance floor. As techno music blared and dancers swirled, she sat contentedly, quietly watching. I also was sitting by myself, but with considerably less poise. I kept scanning the roomful of women, looking for someone I might have met at a previous event organized by PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). I saw a few familiar faces but no one I knew well enough to approach.  Still, I really wanted to dance, and I kept returning to the handsome woman in the red turtleneck. But I couldn’t walk across the room and ask a total stranger to boogie, could I?  I poured myself a Dixie cup of white wine. If I was going to do this thing, I would need some serious fortifying. A few sips later I stood up and headed across the room. As I arrived at her table, the DJ was turning up the volume and I had to shout to be heard: “Wanna dance?” She nodded yes and off we went. For the next 15 minutes we rocked out, busting
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Of mermaids' purses

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My grandson and I have our favorite beaches, from Point of Rocks on Cape Cod to Kaanapali on Maui’s westernmost tip. But where boogie boarders rip through crashing breakers on those silvery strands Jackson and I tiptoe along the high tide lines, proding gently with our driftwood sticks as we uncover elusive treasures: mermaids’ purses and devils’ pocketbooks, fragile sand collars and spiny purple urchins.   My six-year-old pal has been combing beaches with me since he was a gung-ho toddler stumbling from one pile of kelp to the next. Today, like many parents and grandparents who are returning to beaches for the first time since COVID emergencies were declared a year ago, Jackson and I are reminding each other to slow down and listen for the tiniest scurrying sand fleas. Nowadays he’s often the one who crouches down to uncover a glistening blue mussel amongst the rockweed. Jackson likes the way a handful of jingle shells can carry a merry little tune. He likes opening a dried-up mermaid
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Doing the route step, the goose step

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It was an unfathomable moment. At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 2018, as we stood on the steps of a 12th century Romanesque church in the little French town of Chatillon-sur-Seine, we felt that my grandmother was there, too. Just as she had been, 100 years before.  A young American nurse serving in France with the Allied Expeditionary Forces (AEF), Edith Simpson Cooke Rogers had briefly stepped away from her gassed and broken patients on that November morning in 1918 to watch the celebration of the armistice that marked the end of La Grande Guerre, The Great War. She would later write about that moment: “Down the narrow street that yesterday was lined with trucks and English lorries came lines of gay young soldiers marching in squad formation, their arms about each others’ shoulders, doing the route step, the goose step, any step that would bring them into town for a day of rejoicing, for, ‘The war was over!’” I can picture Nana doing her own little celebratory dance as she looked up: “Ab
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My grandmother ‘visited’

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If she’d been asked what she did in life, my grandmother might have responded that she “visited.” Half the year she shared an apartment with my mother and me, and the other six months she visited her two nieces or stopped over with long-time friends. Living quarters were tight in the home of the niece whose husband was a school headmaster. The family lived on the premises and Nana used to tell us that she enjoyed the challenge of getting into bed in the guest room that doubled as a train room for two young boys. By day, Lionel HO Gauge locomotives criss-crossed a waist-high plywood platform; by night, Nana scrunched down on her knees and rolled onto the mattress that was laid beneath the silos and grain elevators of a model farmland. Widowed at age 40 with an 11-year-old daughter to raise on her own, my grandmother learned to live frugally on a monthly Social Security check plus a small pension from her Army service in World War I. She counted her pennies and when she sent me to the st
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Old enough to be friends

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Dateline: Seoul, South Korea October, 2011 In these luminous days of high skies and fat horses, as Koreans describe their crisp autumn season, I feel I have come home—to a place I hardly recognize. Forty-one years ago I left Korea, after working here for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English at a women’s college. Recently as I stood in Gwanghwamun Plaza, gawking at the skyscrapers soaring above the renovated heart of this ancient Joseon capital, the techno-bling of the new century looked more like Abu Dhabi than the Seoul I recall. The gazillions of “hand phones” I saw on sidewalks and in subways were a far cry from the days when making a call home to the U.S. required a long bus ride from my campus to the downtown post office, where I had to reserve an overseas line a week in advance. But this is 2011, and along for the ride were my wife and my 28-year-old son. We came to the Land of Morning Calm, along with 81 other former volunteers and their families, at the invita
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