Musings

from p.8 of Jan. 2010 edition of Real Simple magazine... "Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants." - Esther De Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict.

The New Social Worker's book club had picked their next book, Still Alice . The name immediately caught my attention because one of the most fascinating books I've ever read was Go Ask Alice , the anonymous diary of a teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the 1960s. I received a message that the  Still Alice , however, is not about drug abuse or a teenage girl. Still Alice is the fictional story of Alice Howland, a 50 y.o. Harvard professor of Psychology who is diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease. While I'm sure most people know a little something about Alzheimer's, my guess is that very few are aware of the early onset variety. One of the most striking scenes in the book is when Alice goes for a run in the afternoon. At the end of her run on her way back home, Alice gets stuck at Harvard Square. Keep in mind that she's taught at the school for some twenty years and yet, she still doesn't know which way is home. Later in the book...

My pink shoes... were what I would now call "slip-ons" ---flat soles, no laces or buckles, a bit like ballet shoes.  The front of each one was ornamented with an artificial flower, a darker pink than the body of the shoe.  When I was six, those shoes expressed more about the world in which I wanted to live than anything I could possibly have put into words.  In a strange way, those pink shoes and my appetite for the places I might go in them led me, after many twists and turns, to a cell in Evin Prison. - p. 13 The depth of our grieving has to do with the importance of love in our culture.  This may sound very strange to Westerners who have been encouraged to adopt a cartoon-version of Iranians---suicide bombers, warmongers, religious zealots.  But love is the more important thing to grasp when you study Iranians. - p. 29 Iranians fall in love in exactly the same was as everyone else in the world. Muslims fall in love in the same way as everyone e...