Previous Message

He died long ago. Got through losing his mother at age 7 and father at age 13. Served late in WW II, preparing to invade Japan. Got a STEM degree at Case (now Case Western) thanks to the GI Bill.

I play senior softball with guys who have almost all lost their parents, and some their spouses. A teammate today turns 88 years old this year, still out their pitching and hitting.

To pass both my parents and all my grandparents, I only have to make it to 82 and 1 month. For my entire adult life I have been sick on average maybe a single day per year, taking after my mother and her father. Not a day since COVID.

But you never know, right? My mother's father had been so healthy that he waited too long to check out what turned out to be a fatal kidney problem that would likely have been treatable, even in 1959.

I have a wonderful pair of videos where I interviewed my mother and her sister about their parents and their childhoods in Cleveland at length. They had very little. Will my granddaughters care about those videos?

Probably not, any more than anybody will care about a cool photo of my father and his sibs and their mother in the late 1920s.