I have just finished watching the new Ken Buns documentary called The United States and the Holocaust. In the film an older survivor of that horror tells of his very moving arrival in America. Both he and his sister were German Jews, and had been separated from their parents in the maelstrom that was the Jewish experience at that time.

The foods that are available to us today in no way resemble the foods of my youth.  Here are the startling facts that will make that obvious: I never saw or tasted pizza, the most ingested food for the under ten set, until I was in my twenties;  not one fast food joint served breakfast food of any kind; and  spaghetti was a glamorous ethnic dish. 

I am not particularly a sports fan. Oh, I watch the Olympics sporadically when they come around every few years, seeing sports played that I never knew were sports. (Curling??? Who knew.) And I watch football sporadically while I sew or quilt, but my husband must tell me what team to root for.

My vocabulary has been expanded. This increase in knowledge happened on a recent road trip with my 17-year-old grandson. I was invited to join this new college freshman and his mother on a two-day drive to his chosen college.

We hear the term heroes a great deal during our current health crisis.  And certainly there are heroes, particularly those who march into hospitals every day to take care of their fellow countrymen struck down by the virus.  I think particularly about the nurses who have been doing their jobs day in and day out for years without the recognition they are finally getting.

I am not into cars, and I have always said that I would like to have owned one car in my life and be buried in it like a Viking in his ship. However, I have begun to realize that cars have changed as much as I have and maybe I do not want to go back to that particular ship.

      Prepare yourself.   I am going to be a bit crabby.  I recently made an investigative expedition to my local library to see what the experts were writing on aging.  I not only perused the books, but also the periodical shelves as well as the internet.  I have two takeaways from all of this research.

Even the title of this blog shows my age. Does any young person out there even know what this phrase means? And while we oldsters may know what it means I, along with many others, did not know its origins. It actually comes from the word umble which was old English for the organs of a deer.

Recently the tragic history of a ten-year-old has made the news which has caused an uproar on both sides of the divide that seems to have currently afflicted our nation. But putting this divide aside, I would just like, for a moment, to look at what it is to be a ten-year-old girl.

This last week we drove by a house that I lived in with my grandparents when I was ten and eleven. I was flooded with memories of these two special people. As we drove home, I pondered what made them so special to me. Besides the love expressed in so many ways, it was the time, freely given, that made them remarkable.

I was born during World War II, a war that saw the death of my father in combat. As I was growing up these two facts made me feel that I had special relationship with that war and everything to do with it.

I remember years ago when one of my grandsons was about six, I was helping his parents arrange furniture in a house into which his family had just moved. The adults were all talking, busy moving furniture around, and not listening to a small boy who had something to say.

As a small girl, one of my joys was going to my paternal grandmother’s for adventures in the city of Washington followed by reading in her apartment until bedtime. One of the places that we often ate while out was a now long-gone place near the White House called the Allied Inn. This was a favorite of hers since she had served in the Red Cross in World War I.

One of the advantages of living for over three-quarters of a century is that one now has a long view of life. Rather than using it to complain about how much better things used to be, we are now in a position to see how well some of the stories we have lived with have turned out.

This week I am honoring the South Korean government and its people who are the very best of rememberers. There is a whole office of the government entitled the Korean Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, and part of their outreach is honoring the American service members who served in the Korean War.

One of the great interests of many as they age is their family tree and heritage. In the midst of child rearing, challenging jobs, bills, car repairs, family activities and general chaos there is not much chance to ruminate over where our antecedents came from or indeed their history.

I can picture my grandmother in her late eighties, sitting in her apartment looking out the window at the green trees that surrounded her retirement home. 

Not in my lifetime, including the tumultuous sixties which I lived through, have I seen such division in the country. I am certainly not alone in noticing this as it is spoken of on an almost daily basis. Have we become a Tower of Babel, fragmented into many languages and cultures by the overreach of thinking we have become gods?

Everyone knows that Beethoven, one of the greatest composers of all time, was increasingly deaf over the last years of his life. 

I am learning that my cultural references are no longer relevant in today’s world.