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Practicing

Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

Struck

I often wonder if there was something I missed, if the thunder and lightning said something I couldn’t understand.

Dear Old Dad

What would Young Dad think about Old Dad? Young Dad: professional Alpine ski racer, multi–Emmy Award–winning sports cameraman, and documentary filmmaker—handsome, tan, rugged, jovial. Young Dad, steering the outboard motorboat to Sandpiper Island in Maine, zipping around town in his burgundy Saab, flying around the world for work. Young Dad, skillfully extracting our splinters, icing our bruises, reassuring us about hurricanes and heartbreak.

If Young Dad met Old Dad—hunched, plodding along the beach in water shoes and a straw sun hat, arguing in favor of gluing a live snail onto an art project—Young Dad would have been nice to the old guy. He would have gone out of his way for a chat. But if he discovered the old guy was him, I know exactly what he would have said: You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Chores

On a solo backpacking trip, in a desert military base, at a church revival

Shaving

A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face

Sunbeams

There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.

Rosalynn Carter, quoting a caregiver colleague

Home Sick

Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Speak, Memory

Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia

Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?

Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.

Care Warning

Take care of yourself during this essay, whatever that means for you. Perhaps you need to drink a lot of water or unwrap a snack (quietly please!) or play Angry Birds on your phone — whatever works to tamp down your discomfort.