Pursuing Grace

Clouds over Lake Harriet providing hope - thanks to Steven Mosborg.

Anyone else notice that life is pretty harsh right now?

It can be breathtaking to fill up a tank with gas, and grocery costs are stunning. The guys in DC are making startling decisions about buildings and institutions to tear down and banners to put up. One friend noted that our nation’s capital is beginning to resemble Pyongyang, which is disturbing to imagine. I’ll wait to visit for a few years, I suppose.  

Our batch of Baby Boomers are experiencing the impacts of our vintage - meaning health systems are struggling to keep up with our neurological, urological, oncological, and orthopedic issues. Try making an appointment in any reasonable timeframe, and you’ll see what I mean. 

So during this reflective time of year - before the leaves give up the lushness of green to be replaced with the vivid blaze of yellows and reds - I’ve been working to imagine how I can promote the idea of seeking grace in a society that appears to have lost touch with that attribute or value. 

There’s so much anger and frustration now. Parts of our country blaming conservatives and right wing whackos. Others screaming about the liberals - those socialist commies. And many want to blame immigrants with the collective amnesia that ignores we are all immigrants in this nation - other than the Ojibwe down the street from here. 

Where can we start to reclaim rational discussion and disagreement? How can we start listening carefully to the very real frustrations of those with different ideas of how to approach our rapidly changing climate and its impacts on life in the next decade? What will it take to bolster the spines of our elected leaders to stand up to those making a mockery of constitutional law? 

And how can we learn to respond to all the voices of outrage without reacting in the same vein? And when did it become a vice to hold compassion and empathy for those who struggle or need help?

These are the thoughts that are at the core of my reflective struggle during these days of awe - while the allegorical Book of Life is open and before it slams shut on Monday night. 

I want to pursue grace and understanding. I seek to focus on what I can do to make life less onerous for those I love. And I am grateful that as shocking or staggering or breathtaking as costs will become as our world’s oil supply is stuck in its tracks, we should be alright - for a while. 

I’m also grateful for the privilege of my childhood - having parents who cared about us and provided access to educational opportunities and a family of kind souls. Our hometown was vibrant with potential when we were kids, able to support cultural institutions that enriched us all. 

And now, I guess the challenge is to translate that gratitude into the grace needed for a bruising year end of harsh rhetoric and rampant antagonism. I welcome any ideas on living with grace through the harshness of this season. 

Signs of Change

Sunset on Minneapolis’ Lake Harriet, August 30 - by Steven Mosborg

I was triggered last week by an email from our friendly insurance broker, with our annual reminder to prepare for a health insurance check in within the next couple of months. First sign of changing seasons - that and the leaves that are beginning to fall from our old oak tree that is struggling again with the effects of this drought period.

I’m so not ready for summer to be over. It feels like we’ve just begun the lazy hazy days of the season with its required lounging and a book. I still have friends I want to have over on the porch, and restaurants with outdoor patios that beckoned in May will too soon be frozen over. 

Yet I do love fall. Once you’ve spent twelve of your formative years in the preparations for the start of school, the season becomes the harbinger of exciting newness ahead. I still buy a new pen every fall - although now, it’s more like pen refill cartridges. 

We have the fall holidays as well, filled with new recipes to add to the old standards for Rosh Hashanah. And in this household, the old standards have a Mediterranean bent. No brisket for this crowd. It’s fun to dress up the dining room a bit, pull out the good china, and dust off the pots and platters for the sticky art of dipping challah and apples into honey pots. 

Seasonal change is one of the things we missed in Southern California where the weather was always beautiful and the leaves never fell. Now I just miss the people from Southern California who made that sojourn such a marvelous experience. 

The other change coming into focus is the series of health shifts we’re experiencing in our current decade of life. No one in this house ever had allergies or asthma, but it turns out that a lifetime of exposure to particulates, and some of the new allergens making their way into Minnesota, can trigger all sorts of responses. Suddenly we have a ready supply of allergy pills and inhalers as ragweed blows and dust fills the air. 

We will adapt. Life is too interesting to avoid going outside for long. We’ve simply added to our check list - keys, wallet, phone, and now, inhaler and tissues.

I’ve also learned that when adapting to change, it really helps to have a cohort along with you. Today, for example, I woke up convinced it was Monday. It isn’t. It’s Tuesday - so I was blithely toodling along doing Monday things as my Tuesday agenda took place without me. 

You have to be a certain age to understand what I’m talking about. And fortunately, I have a whole gang of childhood, college, and grown up friends who have achieved my current decade who understand perfectly what that means. 

And that’s always been true for those of us Baby Boomers who have caused much of the change we’re all experiencing.

For The Love of Family

Our children and nieces in the Socco Chico of Tangier ‘s souk.

We’ve just returned from a weekend trip to Tangier, Morocco - and it was just as crazy as it sounds. Nine days away that included five travel days, four countries to make flight connections, and four days on the ground to explore and enjoy. 

Exhausting for someone in our well-seasoned era of life. And wonderful at the same time. 

As exotic as Tangier sounds - and is - it is also the hometown of my late mother-in-law’s family going back more than 500 years and the refugee haven for my father-in-law who left Europe ahead of the Anschluss. And that means it was a frequent destination for family visits over the past forty plus years. 

Somehow we’ve never lived in the same community as close relatives, so my kids grew up with friends serving the role as aunts and uncles and cousins. Seeing actual relatives required airplanes and passports. 

Friends would always say, “Ooh, you’re going to Tangier. How amazing!” And I would smile and shrug since what we were really doing was going to visit the in-laws. Not that there was anything wrong with that - it merely transformed a vacation into a trip with obligations. 

There were dinners at Uncle Harry’s with Uncles Ruben and Abram at the table to argue with my mother-in-law and her sister Simi over the color of their grandmother’s original table clothes. There were afternoons with the family at the Tangier “Yacht” Club, a thatch-roofed cafe with changing stalls overlooking the wide sandy beaches of the Mediterranean Bay. And relearning Spanish each summer to keep up with the conversations of the multiple cousins that would appear at our hotel to catch up as the kids swam and played. 

The generation of uncles and aunts - including my in-laws - are all gone now. Only the first cousins remain and they (we) too are aging. Our children are grown and our lives have become busy so we don’t frequent Tangier as we once did. However one of my brothers-in-law now lives there - so we go every few years to check in. 

We were tentatively planning one of those check in trips for later this fall, when our adult nieces piped in and told us that they really wanted to visit Tangier. The catch was that they would need to visit in July while kids were in camp. And we have a several decade rule that we don’t travel in summer - the weather is perfect in Minnesota then and we work to avoid crowds and heat whenever possible. 

But for the nieces? We were in and we got to work on a plan with their parents, the other brother and sister-in-law who live in the States. 

There are no direct flights to Madrid, which is the easiest jump off point to Tangier. So we flew from Mpls/St.Paul to the Paris airport and I dredged up all of the French I could remember from Miss Dock’s junior high class to maneuver from Terminal E to Terminal F which, based on the alphabet, should have been close by. Au contraire! But I perfected my one full sentence/thought saying, “Je ne parle pas Francais. Parlez-vous Anglais?” over and over again. 

And then we arrived in Madrid and la lingua changed to Spanish. “Hola!”

We spent two nights in Madrid - allegedly to deal with jet lag but really to see some cousins now living in the city and to visit a few places we’ve enjoyed over the years. And although the wildfire smoke of July wasn’t readily visible, the particulates made breathing a challenge  - and the heat? Increible!

Off to Tanger - where we arrived just as the Moroccans were celebrating Throne Day - in honor of the current king’s ascension to the Throne. That means lots of people and music and dancing in the streets. Festive and crowded.

Tangier itself has grown exponentially since my first visit in 1982 when there were fewer than 300,000 residents of the city. Today the city itself has more than 1.35 million residents, spreading along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts from its position at the tip of North Africa. The old city retains much of its charm and the souk is still home to friends Majid and Mohammed with their antique and Volubilis art shops. The Cafe Central in the Socco Chico is still a rest stop to watch the world walk by - and it’s strangely comforting to see familiar smiling faces that have graced doorways for more than forty years. 

For the nieces, we made certain they visited their great grandmother’s villa - now serving as the American Language Institute - so they could see where their father and his relatives gathered for family holidays in the halls. They went to the souk and met our friends on the way to the kasbah and they experienced the Villa Mabrouka for a meal at the former home of Yves Saint Laurent overlooking the straits of Gibralter. They all went to see the Caves of Hercules at the point where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean and we shared a Moroccan meal with cous cous and b’stilla (or pastilla, as some spell it). 

And along the way, we had a great time. We achieved the goal of checking on our Tangier-residing brother-in-law. He’s doing well. We saw old friends. We met some new friends. And we arrived home tired and grateful. 

Crossings

Sunset off the bow of the Queen Mary 2, May, 2026

I’ve never been attracted to travel alongside throngs of people that require loading on and off of buses to be deposited en masse for a few moments of “oohing” and “ahhing” in front of sites that are minimally explained by overly perky guides. 

Just not my idea of the point of travel. 

To me, it’s about discovery and surprise and moments of “who knew”! It’s rambling down cobblestone or tiled paths to find a small cafe with surprisingly refreshing beverages served by easy going proprietors. 

Add to that my general overwhelm at the concept of cruises on the ocean-going behemoths plying the seas today. The thought of pulling into port and disembarking with thousands of humans prowling about for the perfect souvenir - well, my palms are sweating just writing that sentence. 

So it is with great surprise and bemusement that I confess how much I truly adored crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2 this year. I had no idea that travel itself could be so calming and comfortable and truly enjoyable. 

As much as I enjoy being in other places - other countries - the process of getting there is always filled with certain stresses. The risk of weather delays that cause missed flight connections. Crowded and crabby airplanes. Simply schlepping suitcases and bags from planes to taxis to hotels. It’s the process of arriving - and departing - that’s the hassle. 

But not so when one travels from London to New York on the Queen Mary. This is a ship built for crossing the Atlantic, meaning stabilizers and the heft to remain steady. And a crossing is not a cruise. It’s a voyage with a singular purpose - to transport its passengers from one continent to another with no stops - or visible land, for that matter - in between. 

We had been talking about doing a crossing for nearly 45 years - as that is how my husband’s family came and went from the U.S. in the late 1940s and 1950s before jet travel was readily available. And we wanted to do a crossing together.

It is now my new favorite way to travel. We traveled on the Olivier Awards crossing - or the British version of the Tonys. That meant we had talented actors, singers, and choreographers on board for nightly entertainment and classes and lectures. There also were a talented classical pianist, a former ambassador, and a forensic pathologist as well to entertain and enthrall us with lectures and performances.

Dining options were plentiful and the daily afternoon tea was both a sight to behold and a replacement for dinner, if one so chose. There were quiet areas with puzzles and games; a library filled with books and magazines and daily word games; a decked out gym facility; a spa and salon; a casino and shops; and pools and decks for strolling and games. It was a complete resort experience on the ocean. 

A daily calendar of events guided some of our activities, but once again, it was those experiences we stumbled upon that are the most memorable. 

The first morning, we set off on a quest to find the best coffee on board led, naturally, by a sense of smell. When we located a lounge with the right aroma of espresso beans that had a surprise array of breakfast food available, we settled in for a comfy nosh. And that’s when we first heard the words, “Welcome to morning trivia!” 

We aren’t trivia people. Or we weren’t trivia people before deciding with a shrug that we could just play along on our own while the decidedly competitive lot around us teamed up with glinty eyes. 

At least we began on our own before a nearby couple asked if they could join our clearly non-competitive effort. And that’s how we met John and Delyth. 

They had been speaking an indecipherable language before saying they wanted to play. As we laughed our way through a shoddy showing that demonstrated our lack of trivial knowledge, we learned the language was Welsh, and now we have added Wales to our list of places we must visit.

They became our plus two for evening performances in the well-appointed theater, and our favorite people with whom to share a bottle of bubbly on board. 

Yes, the people on board become part of the charm of a crossing. There was the author and her wife celebrating the publication of her new novel; a fascinating former PR exec traveling on his own as his wife hated sea travel; darling octogenarian sisters who crossed every year with the Oliviers and had booked out the next two years. The sisters told us they once had crossed with a literary crowd but found them all toffee-nosed, a new favorite British slight to toss around when warranted. 

It turns out that a crossing of seven days leaves one with no jet lag as those five hours are reclaimed slowly along the way. So I’ve decided that this is the way to travel in the future and we’re already hatching reasons to return to London - new shows, old friends, and restaurants we simply must try. 

Fireworks for the Fourth

Fireworks over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis…taken by Steven Mosborg this year.

My earliest memory of a Fourth of July celebration was at Aunt Mary and Uncle Walter’s in Walnut Hills. Aunt Mary was actually my mother’s niece. But she was the same age as my mom since her sister was 21 when my mother was born. My mother was a classic” Oops Baby”, which explains so much about her persona. So we called our cousin Aunt Mary. 

Over the years, mom figured out that Aunt Mary was a deeply kind soul who never said no when Mom pronounced, “I’m dropping the kids over for a day at the neighborhood pool.”

So we’d spend mornings at Walnut Hills pool, then trek up the hill to Aunt Mary’s where she’d feed us, and we’d loll about until we’d gathered the energy to go back down to the pool where Mom would pick us up at the end of the day. 

I have no idea what my mother did on those long summer days with no kids at home, but I know Aunt Mary worked hard to feed us, dry towels for us, and provide a haven of comfort and calm when needed. 

And that’s how Fourth of Julys were at their place. Mom would announce - “We’re going to Aunt Mary’s to see fireworks.” So much easier to sit on her back lawn and watch fireworks shot off - and an easy drive home. And Aunt Mary, or actually Uncle Walter, would grill hot dogs and there would be potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, all the things. Oh - and pop. Something we didn’t have at home, but no one noticed when we nabbed one at Aunt Mary’s.

Fireworks were spectacular when we lived in Washington in the early 1980s. That was when going down to Capitol Hill to sit on the lawn overlooking the Washington Monument was no big deal. The symphony would play, and we’d await the 1812 overture which was the signal that fireworks were about to begin. The whole thing felt like a larger version of the fireworks from my childhood - just with a remarkable backdrop, excellent musical accompaniment, and several thousand neighbors sharing the lawn. 

And now that I’ve actually existed for close to a third of this nation’s existence, I enjoy  fireworks at a distance. We watched the spectacular explosions over New York City and Nashville, and the highly produced musical performances that backed them up. 

By then, we were in a postprandial stupor as we hosted a Vintage 4th Cook Out with former neighbors, dear friends, and family earlier in the evening. We thought it important to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the affirmation by the original Congress of the values and principles embedded in our Constitution - those articulate framers of our nation’s potential. 

They imagined a future of independence, liberty, and the freedom to pursue happiness…a work in progress for this nation of ours. Hope you have had an opportunity to celebrate. 

Bucket Lists

I’ve never really believed in making a bucket list. Why put off for tomorrow something you can plan for today?

I suppose it began when I was making the case for spending a college semester in Venice. My university thought that exposing students to other cultures in other lands was an excellent way to further its educational programs. So when I figured out that Wake Forest offered a semester in Venice for the same tuition and the same room rate to live on the Grand Canal instead of a dorm in Winston-Salem, I was all in. The trick was to get my parents to agree. 

This was in the 1970s when Europe was still encouraging college students to backpack about and the book Europe On $5 a Day had just come out with its new edition, promoting the same idea on $10 a Day. And Eurail offered discounted train passes for college students as did airlines. Ah, the good old days. 

I compiled my arguments for spending part of my junior year living in a palazzo on the Grand Canal next door to what is today the Guggenheim Museum, and then was Peggy Guggenheim’s home. As I laid out the well-researched arguments for why a semester in Italy made sense financially and academically, I ran into a question from my mother that stopped me in my tracks.

”If you go to Italy and Europe while you’re in college, Mary, what will you look forward to when you’re older,”” she said. 

I thought I had all her objections laid out. But this, I never anticipated. I paused for a long moment and said, “Many more trips to Europe, I suppose.” 

At that, my mom paused. She, who had pulled a wagon about Deshler, Ohio selling milk and eggs from the farm to augment the Depression era income for her family, and still managed to go to college to get a music degree, paused for a moment. 

“Hmm. That never occurred to me.” 

If she’d lived more than a year past my college graduation, she would have been amazed at our travels to Europe and beyond. With a husband born in the international city-state of Tangier, and a mother-in-law who spent the last 30 plus years of her life in Madrid, with family in Caracas - when it was safer, and in Israel which has rarely been at peace, I’ve  had a remarkable fulfillment of that prediction. 

Here I sit in a sweet little hotel bar within spitting distance of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London remembering all of the trips I have made with my foreign-born husband and our children, realizing that my semester in Venice was just a launching pad for the global curiosity I’ve maintained. 

OK - so maybe there is one item on our joint bucket list that we’ve talked about for more than 45 years…and we’re going to tick that off soon: a crossing of the Atlantic on a ship. 

Jacques has fond memories of the crossings he made as a child as his family was working to log the residency required in the U.S. towards citizenship in the late 1940s and 1950s. He remembers ping pong tournaments, and horse racing games that entertained the children as their parents dressed for dinner in the evenings. And he’s always wanted to do a crossing with me. 

Only once did I call it a cruise. “No. This is different. It’s crossing the ocean with a purpose - to get from one side to the other. Not a cruise to empty out a large ship of tourists in ports of call. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - but a crossing is different.”

We shall see. I’ll let you know how it goes as we cross off this singular bucket item from our otherwise non-existent list. 

Reflections on Aging

My talented neighbor, Steven Mosborg, captures reflections better than most…

Ever have one of those flashes of insight that make you wonder how you lived until today without figuring it out before? 

I’ve been having an alarming number of those lately, and I’m chalking it up to my relatively newly achieved well-seasoned age. As said by one of our founding fathers Ben Franklin ““Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.” 

At this point, I’m just grateful that I’ve achieved enough age to begin gleaning a smattering of wisdom, or at least I’ve become old enough to figure a few things out.

This week, I figured out that I share the same age decade with the man to whom I have been married for more than 44 years for exactly one and a half years every decade. And what does that awkward sentence mean? It means that when I finally reached the age of 30, he was still in his 30s for another year and a half. Same with 40, and then 50, and well, you get the idea. 

So this year, it was somehow shocking to realize that we would only share our 70s for another year before one of us moves into the next decade of age.  I mean, it is also somewhat shocking to realize we’re both IN our 70s, but that’s feeling more and more like a gift at this point. 

How did time move so fast? And how do we have fully adult children engaged in their fully adult lives who are nearly absolutely autonomous on their own? 

And that brings up another batch of insights that have been occurring with surprising frequency - those that make me realize that my mom, surprisingly, was right. 

Mom was a complicated woman who left too soon. She was gone before I turned 23, so my memory of “Momisms” goes way back. 

She always said that she couldn’t believe I was in high school because she sometimes felt she was still in her teens. That statement always stopped me for a second, as I looked at her freshly retinted red hair and thought, “Really, Mom?” 

When they drove to North Carolina to drop me off for my first year of college, she was enthralled with the Wake Forest campus. In her earnest and eager way, she was making friends with other parents with the opening line of, “Can you believe our children are old enough for college?” 

It was somewhat horrifying to my 18 year old self, but she got a laugh from other parents, so I didn’t interfere with her efforts. 

And now, here I am surprised that my grown daughter is old enough to go to a professional conference out of state without me, and that my son and his family are old enough to fly across the country to gather with their delightful in-laws. Now it’s me, saying to Jacques, “Can you believe our children are old enough to travel without us?” 

The Holiday of Memory

…the first table setting the day before the Seder..more plates were added

It’s really only eight days, but preparing for a Friday night with challah again feels like a big deal now that Passover has concluded. 

Now that the extensive preparation and planning are over, I have time to reflect on this annual experiential holiday that requires us to relive the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It’s the story of the Hebrew people, originally welcomed by Egypt’s rulers as sages, who then were seen as “other” by a new king who had not known Joseph or his brothers. Not that biblical timelines are perfect, but it apparently took about 100 years - a couple generations - for the helpful to become an enslaved people.

And every year - now some 3,000 years later - we gather around tables with family, friends, and always the children to retell, and relive, the story of the exodus. 

All families have different ways to bring the story alive so that we can experience the pain of slavery - with vibrantly bitter horseradish in this house - the tears of our ancestors, with radishes dipped in salt water - with various mideastern haroset, or sticky dried fruit, nut, red wine pastes that remind us of the mortar used to build the Pharaoh's temples. 

The ten plaques take on lively dimensions when ping pong balls fly across the table as the plague of hail is called, or bouncy plastic frogs, or dark glasses, or wild animals. And depending on the attention span of the children, there are sticker books to occupy little fingers as we tell the story one more time.

Passover is all about memory - ensuring the story of becoming an “other”, of suffering slavery and our ancestors' quest for freedom and autonomy through the hand of God - remains real for Jews today and for our children and grandchildren. 
It’s also a holiday where we remember all those who have shared our table over the years. 

Even when patience is waning, I need to sing Dayenu to bring back the memory of my mother-in-law's laughter as she sang that tune with great gusto. We remember Uncles Harry and Abram who liked to argue the timing of sundown in this Northern state, from their equatorial perspective of time. One of them loved watching us burn the hametz in the tin pail, while the other was bemused at our feather and wooden spoon search with the kids before the start of the holiday. 

And this year, others emerged at our table. The mother of a dear friend who departed a few months ago, meaning it was the first time he was observing without her in his 70+ years. My college roommate, who would have loved sharing the measured chaos of a Seder with her grandchildren if she’d had the gift of time to do so. Our former neighbor, who was always so curious about Jewish holidays. 

Once more, we put away the matzo platter, sweep up the crumbs and reintroduce pasta and bread and cakes to our menu, and hope the memories we created this year will last.