I call it a bad year when all three of my brothers die. Well, fourteen months, if you want to be technical about it. Two of them—Gene and Walt—were done in by Covid in March and August of 2020. Jay failed to survive heart surgery this last May. But I’m beginning to realize there’s something maybe even worse than losing them. It’s not being able to properly grieve them. The pandemic effect has quashed families’ ability to gather as families have always gathered in the wake

It took a small village to raise us and our kids. The small village was a fortuitous group of seven young families who met and bonded through an innovative, free-form worship group in the late ‘60s. Our children became each other’s best friends, and the same was true for the parents. We were each other’s constant companions, praying and playing, eating and exercising, camping and canoeing. With all the adults fully employed, four families even developed a shared-cooking p

About three million. That’s my best estimate of how many times I hit a tennis ball with a racquet during my seventy years playing the game. But some neurological nonsense—disequilibrium and double vision, mostly—forced me to quit playing the game a year ago. Falling down is no fun at any age, but these days I don’t bounce any more. So I took up golf. In that game, I get to stand still, and so does the ball as I swipe at it. But that turns out to be the most trivial differen