To amuse myself, I counted the ornaments as I took them off the Christmas tree on New Year’s Day. One hundred sixty-five. Five weeks earlier, I had carefully hung the same one hundred sixty-five. Having quantified a vaguely uneasy sense of hours lost to unwrapping tissue, climbing up and down …
My mother passed away this spring at the age of 86. She had lived her life exactly as she wanted, with few, if any regrets. It was hard to begrudge her departure. Her world was shrinking due to failing eyesight, nerve pain, and cancer. But it wasn’t shrinking only in …
On the day before my twentieth birthday, in 1980, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. My childhood friend and I were on a month long trip through Europe. On the day we arrived in West Berlin from Copenhagen, the sun shone on us for the first time in …
Here in Illinois we’re nine weeks into the COVID-19 mandated shutdown, and by all objective measures, I am doing well. I’ve had disappointments and frustrations. I’ve felt restless and bored. I miss many features of my pre-virus life. But I am not suffering—not even close. I’ve been buffered from the …
Twenty years ago today our family hiked along the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China. A couple of days earlier, we had flown to Beijing from Hong Kong. Our good friends, Doug and Becky, who were living in Beijing with their four children, graciously hosted us in their …
The shark fin soup incident occurred twenty years ago today. As I wrote in a previous blog post, I learned many things as a result of our family trip to Hong Kong and China in March of 2000. But the lesson of the shark fin soup lunch remains to this …
Twenty years ago this week, my husband and I took our three young sons—ages five, nine, and eleven—to China for spring break. We had enjoyed family vacations all around the country, and our kids were good travelers. But a one-week trip to China was an audacious choice. It began with …
