Attaining the age of seventy is a once-in-a-lifetime milestone, deserving the revelation of (hopefully) wise realizations not possible for the young of limited age and experience. The fact is, that I don’t feel so old, though it’s questionable whether seventy still qualifies as “middle age.”[…]
For the third year in a row, Susan and I attended the conference Middle Eastern Nurses Uniting in Human Caring. This year’s title was Human Caring in a Time of World Crisis, a theme chosen almost a year ago, before the most recent war between Israel and Gaza, before the hideous executions by ISIS, most recently of a Jordanian pilot burned alive. . .
Corfu and Albania face each other across a narrow channel. Ferries carry tourists back and forth from Corfu several times a day. Albania is perhaps the least-developed country for tourism in all of Europe. For many years Albania was the poorest country in Europe. Prices are half the costs in Corfu. This makes Albania attractive for tourists. The Albanian landscape is very mountainous, so the tourist industry is promoting the country’s undisturbed natural attractions for adventure tourists.
When I took Latin in high school, I learned the acronym FRIPS for the five Romance languages, derived from Latin: French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So here we are in Romania, and I can recognize half the written words. I didn’t know much about Romania before. In my five days here, I have learned a lot. My naïve preconception was that Romania was inhabited by gypsies and peasants. Wow, was I wrong! We traveled a bit in the province of Transylvania and saw some older traditional houses. But the residents had every modern convenience. So let me declare, Romania is a modern, sophisticated, highly developed, relatively affluent country, not at all like the outdated memories of its Communist decades. . .
I try not to think too much about the fact that I’ve reached that lofty milestone in age of having attended my fifty-year high school reunion. I graduated from Columbus High School in Columbus, Georgia, in 1966. My graduating class had around four hundred seventy. . .
