A Holiday

No, I'm not really at a spa, but it feels like one.  My room has a safety deposit box, I'm given a snazzy blue bathrobe with white piping which covers robes that don't make look as if I'm in rags, I order my meals from room service at whatever time I want to eat, and the food is not only delicious, but beautifully presented.  There's an afternoon tea service.  A single pink carnation stands in a pretty blue bottle on my bedside table.  For the first time in my hospital experience, I'm given my anti-reflux medication before breakfast, when it should be taken, rather than after.  Television service is free and the channel numbers corresponding to various networks are given.  My room provides free Wi-Fi service.  You can order meals for your guests.  It's a great place to be if you have to be in a hospital.

I entered it on Saturday afternoon, August 25th, thinking I'd be dismissed soon, but they keep finding things wrong with me.  I'm now scheduled for a minor operation on Friday, August 31 and will spend Labor Day weekend here. If all goes well, I'll return to posting next week.  Wish me luck.

Perfection

While preparing a commentary on “Shoftim,” last week’s Torah portion, I came across a statement by Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), the noted Talmud Scholar and religious leader of Modern Orthodox Jewry.  He said that at Rosh Hashana we are judged on our efforts to perfect not only ourselves but also society.  We are all obliged, he said, to seek out the injustices in our society and to try to correct them.  

If I believed that on Rosh Hashana the Power of the World would examine my behavior over the past year and decide whether to write my name in the Book of Life, as the tradition has it, I would be examining my will right now.  I’ve done nothing during the past year, if ever I have, to ascend the scale of perfection or to improve the world.

But Rav Soloveitchik’s s statement made me think what I’d be like if I were perfect.  I’d never speak disparagingly of another person.  This morning, when I made our bed, I’d have smoothed over the wrinkles at the end of it.  I’d never burp, fart, or pick my nose when no one was around to see, smell, or hear me.  I’d be unfailingly kind, patient, empathetic, and considerate, and I’d speak only when it was appropriate to do so.  I wouldn’t complain about my various aches and pains.  And I’d leave the last piece of chocolate in the refrigerator for my wife.

And what would the world be like if it were “corrected,” if all the injustices were removed.  There would be no car alarms going off in the middle of the night because there’d be no need for car alarms.  We’d leave our car doors and our house doors unlocked because there’d be no theft.  Nor would there be any more stop and frisks.  Police forces would be drastically reduced, but in a perfect world there’d be plentiful alternative sources of employment for them.  Able people at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid would rise, and the rich would no longer be able to pass on their advantages to their children.  In a perfect world, we’d figure out what to do about those who are lazy or incapable and fall to the bottom of the pyramid.  And of course there’d be no more war and no more increase in global warming.  The industries that produce weapons would reconfigure their machines and find other markets for their goods.  There’d be gender equality in all spheres of life, and the whales and polar bears would no longer have to be saved.  Furthermore, in a perfect world, everyone would be perfect, so that social interactions would be unfailingly pleasant.

If I were perfect, but nobody else was, I’d soon be regarded as a pain in the ass.  If the world were perfect, there’d be no more “causes,” there’d be nothing left to fight for, there’d be no justification for complaint, and life would be irretrievably dull.  But we are so far from perfection in ourselves of in society that there’s plenty of room for improvement, with no danger of attaining perfection.   I think I’ll start with society.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Silver Linings

Doctors have different strategies for delivering bad news.  In the spring of 2007, my urologist at St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital  perched himself on the window sill of my hospital room and said “I think we need to have a little talk.”  This was his introduction to telling me that I had prostate cancer. 

In 2011, my regular doctor ordered a bone scan because my hip hurt.  When I entered his office to hear the results, he said “I’m so sorry.  Your cancer has spread to the bone.”

Last week my urologist, at Memorial Sloan Kettering, after performing an unusually painful cystoscopy, said “how would you like to wear a catheter for awhile?”  He went on to explain that he found growths not in my urethra, as I expected he would, growths which he would excise as he had done several times before, but in the penis.  These were inoperable.  “So what’s the story?” I asked him.  “It looks as if you’ll need to be attached to a tube and a bag from now on,” he said.  This would either be a conventional catheter or a device that entered the bladder directly. It was clear that it was painful for him to tell me this.  It wouldn’t be “awhile” that I’d be wearing a catheter or its equivalent, unless this was his way of telling me that my life expectancy is exceedingly short, but as long as I live.  The “awhile,” I guess, was his way to break the news gradually.

Well, it’s not so bad.  I won’t be wearing a colostomy bag, which collects feces, and to my mind is even worse.  And I won’t have to swallow a pill with a tiny camera, as a dear friend of mine must do this week, in order to find the source of unexplained bleeding.  And there’s a silver lining to my cloud.  I’ll never again have to get up in the middle of the night to urinate.  Lately I’d been getting up every hour or half hour, disturbing my wife in the procress.  She's sleeping better now and as for me, I’m at last sleeping through the night, and I feel more rested than I have for years.  Now I can drink soup and dinner and not worry about it.  One more advantage:  I wear long elasticized socks to control the lymphedema in my legs and feet.  I need to check them constantly and pull them up if they’ve slipped down.  But now the straps that keep the urine bag affixed to one leg keep that sock up all day long.  It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

The Sixth Grade

In the wall of my study hangs a black and white photograph of my sixth-grade class.  All of us are there except one. He was the most popular boy in our class and easily the most brilliant, becoming a professor of applied mathematics.  I would often daydream that I’d save him from a fire by carrying him out of a burning building.  (At the time he was among the shorter boys and I was among the taller.)

He is not the only person who has left this world.  The cute girl in the second row, who lived next door to my aunt and her family, died young.  Since those of us who are still alive are 80 or 81, the gaps in our numbers are probably considerable by now.  Next to her sits my first date, whom I took to the circus when I was thirteen.

In the third row stands a tall girl who lived in the street behind ours.  When I told her, forty or so years later, that I had had a crush on her then, she turned unsmiling away from me.

We’re standing on the steps of our school building, with the tallest standing on the top step and the shortest sitting on the ground.  Some of the boys are wearing ties.  Others are wearing knickers with long socks.  Most of the boys and girls are fresh faced and smiling, with the notable exception of yours truly, who’s scowling at the camera.  My head is topped by a mass of curls.  I was tall for my age so I was standing on the top step. Every time I look at myself in that photograph, I’m struck by how very dark I was.  This was no tan.  This was me.  “Dark as the Ace of Spades,” my mother used to say of my father, and in that regard I am his son.

Even now, about 70 years later, I can still recall the names of about half the class.  I’d be thrilled to attend a reunion, but there’s almost no possibility of one’s being held.  What’s been the fate of my classmates?  My curiosity is almost great enough for me to join Facebook.  I’d enter the name of our school, the John Ward School.  Perhaps that would reconnect me with some of my sixth-grade colleagues. 

Looking at their youthful faces now, there’s no way of knowing who will become distinguished, who will fail at their careers, who will remain single and who will divorce, who will suffer more than average heartbreak, and who will die young.  No one looking at that scowling, dark fellow with the mass of curls would ever predict that he’d amount to much.  Considering that I was born into a prosperous family that could afford to give me a first-class education, perhaps I should have achieved more.  But I'm satisfied with what I've done.  In any case it's too late now to change the assessment, if anyone is keeping score. 

2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Stages of Life

My niece recently published a beautiful tribute to her mother, detailing the debilitation age has brought but celebrating a spirit that insists on not letting these disabilities keep her from traveling or from otherwise participating in the life around her.  (lazygal.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-mother-is-alien.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FNqJH+%28Killin%27+time+being+lazy%29).  My niece’s mother is my sister, six years younger than I am and a college classmate of my wife, which was a friendship that resulted in our marriage.

Radcliffe permitted her to keep a car so that she could readily visit our father who was a widower and lived alone.  It was a white Ford convertible with a blue top.  Once when driving with the top down, she stopped next to a truck at a traffic light.  The truck driver leaned out his window and shouted, “Hey, Red, you’re looking like a queen!”  And she must have looked like one because she was a spectacularly attractive young woman, with her curly red hair and her long legs, shown to advantage in the chorus line of a college musical in which she participated.  But she viewed her attractiveness as a disadvantage, fearful that people valued her only for her looks.

Her hair is now white – I think she was glad when the color turned – but she was never simply a good-looking woman.  Of our parents’ three children, she is, in my opinion, the cleverest. When I told her that I loved raisins, she said, “they’re your raison d’être.”  When I asked her if she’d like some wine, she asked for “a thimbolic amount.”   

It’s hard to apprehend the physical changes that have overtaken her.  She has difficulty rising from chairs.  She can no longer take long walks.  “She still has the chorus girl legs…” writes my niece, “but the knees are swollen, as are her ankles and there are no high-kicks in the near future.”  Three of her fingers are notably arthritic.  The changes my niece saw were so great that she viewed her mother as an alien, a stranger.  It seems unfair that my sister’s physical disabilities are so much greater than mine.

Can this be the same person whom I tortured, along with my brother, with tales of Cobra Island?  Can she be the girl I drove to and from school and took shopping for clothes after our mother died?  Is this the bride at whose wedding I served as best man?  My niece summed it up very well when she noted my sister’s infectious laugh.  “My mother has a laugh that can verge on the hysteric – so much fun except when she’s driving!  And she’s Mom again.” 

My sister’s laughing sets me off on a laughing jag and together we laugh until it’s hard to keep our breath.  We stop, breathe deeply, and start laughing again.  As long as we’re both compos mentis, and even if we’re not, I trust this will never change.



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Drinking Cocoa

A recent study suggests that drinking cocoa with flavanol daily improves the mental functioning of patients with mild dementia   

(http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2012/08/14/Cocoa-may-help-mild-cognitive-impairment/UPI-74461344922109/#ixzz23djNU0tg).

Dr. Giovambattista Desderi, director of the Geriatric Division of the University of L’Aquila in Italy, reported that 90 elderly persons with mild cognitive impairment drank daily either 990 mgs, 520 mgs, or 45 mgs of a dairy based cocoa flavanol drink for eight weeks.  (A flavanol is an antioxidant found in various types of plants, particularly the cocoa plant.)  Not only did participants who drank higher levels of cocoa have higher overall cognitive scores at the end of the study than those who drank lower levels, but the blood pressure also decreased in those who drank high and intermediate levels of flavanols daily.

Wouldn’t it be fine to drink cocoa daily?  If that can improve mental functioning in those with mild dementia, can it prevent the occurrence of dementia in the first place?  Would it reduce my blood pressure?  I hereby volunteer to participate in a study that examines these questions, as long as I’m in the group that gets to drink the most cocoa. 

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

The Feelings of Machines

Last April I bought a new printer.  It’s more than a printer, though. It’s a fax, copier, and scanner too, and it would probably wash the dishes if I knew how to operate its controls properly.  The printer was working beautifully when we went to Jerusalem, but when we came back it refused to operate.  It wouldn’t even apologize by telling me, for example, that it wasn’t connected or that I had not yet indicated it as the default printer.  No, it greeted me with frosty silence. 

In an effort to figure out the problem I asked it to print out a test page.  It did so beautifully, but when I asked it to print out something I had written, it refused.  If it had a tongue, it would have stuck it out at me.  So I brought out my small traveling printer, which I had just put away, and used that instead.  I placed it on top of the recalcitrant printer.  True, it printed much more slowly, but it obeyed me.

From time to time, I’d ask my large printer to operate, but without success.  I almost resigned myself to asking our computer technician to make a house call, when a few days later, I tried once more.  This time the large printer not only produced what I had just asked it to print but also all the other jobs that I had sent to it in an effort to make it work.

Why had it stopped working and why did it start working again?  The simplest explanation is that I had hurt its feelings by not saying goodbye when we left for Jerusalem and by not even sending it a card while we were away.  So it sulked when we returned.   It began working again after figuring that it had punished me sufficiently.  Also, it may have understood that if a pipsqueak printer could replace it, its days on my desk were limited.  But these are just theories.  Until a better explanation can be offered, I will treat my printer with utmost respect, greeting it submissively each morning and politely asking it to perform its functions that day. 

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

A Consummation of Desire

“Coveting a Jaguar” (7/27/12) described my love affair with the Jaguar XK120 roadster, which was manufactured during the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.  My affair, ardent though it’s been, was unconsummated until last week.  But now I have one of my own.  My sister and brother-in-law, with characteristic generosity, bought one for me.  Requiring no restoration whatever, in perfect condition, it's burgundy, with white-wall tires and wheels with wire spokes.   It’s seven and a half inches long, two and a half inches wide, and two and a half inches high.

It is, in another words, a scale model, down to its rear view mirror, its doors that open, its gear shift that moves, and its steering wheel that turns the front wheels.  It has amber lights on its front fenders and red brake lights at the rear.  I’ve parked it to the right of my computer and every time I look at it joy fills my soul.  It’s made me happier than the real thing possibly could.  I’ll never have to struggle to find a parking space for it nor will I ever have to pay to park it in a garage.  Its maintenance costs are zero, no one will think me ridiculous for owning it, and I won't need help getting in and out. 

Wearing leather driving gloves and a burgundy silk ascot. I’m driving it along a sinuous mountain road.  I descend to a little town, where a red light stops me.  Women look at me with interest and men regard the car with mingled admiration and envy.  I drive slowly through the town, conscious of the conspicuousness that might elicit a traffic ticket for an infraction, imagined or real.   As the traffic lights disappear and the town melts into the countryside, I increase my speed, slowing down only when I approach my rendezvous, a gated estate.  What am I going to do there?  That, I’m afraid, is a secret. 

The Mortality of Heroes

A few weeks ago we received the unwelcome news that a good friend of ours has been diagnosed with brain cancer.  Radiation and chemotherapy can slow down the disease but they can't eradicate it.  Our friend is a world-class theoretician, extremely influential in his field, whose productivity has continued well beyond retirement.  The news was hard for me to grasp.  How could such a formidable intelligence succumb to attack?  Besides, our friend is a decent, kind human being, a thoroughly nice guy, a mensch.   Is it fair that the gods have hurled that thunderbolt at him? But what, after all, has fairness to do with it?

I’ve long admired him and somehow I imagined that an academic superhero like him would manage to live forever. This was stupid, I know, but that’s the way I felt.  His diagnosis was deeply upsetting to me.

Of course one is sad when a good friend is diagnosed with a terminal disease.  One is sad for one’s friend, for the suffering that’s bound to ensue for him and his family, and one is sad for oneself, for the prospect of losing him.  My wife and I attended his wedding reception, he and his wife spent a weekend with us, and we’ve spent weekends with them, memories that I treasure.   But he’s been more than a friend.  He’s been a hero to me and that’s one of the roots of my severe reaction to this news.   The other source is that I've not yet come to terms with the mortality of those I love.  I know I'm mortal but somehow I expect my friends to live forever. 

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Homecoming

It was no surprise when my wife, who could strike up a spirited conversation with a stone, was soon talking with the attendant who was pushing me in my wheel chair down the endless corridors at JFK.  This was on Wednesday, when we landed after 15 days in Jerusalem.  She learned that he arrived a year ago from Guyana, where he was a self-employed landscaper, after his wife, his children, and his grandchildren had settled in the States.  She learned that he is a Muslim and that in another week, at about the time Ramadan ends,  he will be celebrating his 55^th birthday.  On the basis of his appearance, I’d say he was the descendant of indentured servants that the British  brought over from India in the 19^th century to work their colony’s plantations.

A kindly and considerate man, he asked me if I’d like to relieve myself before waiting in line at passport control.  After I gratefully agreed to his proposal, he wheeled me into the men’s room and told me he’d come back for me later.  After finishing my business there, I returned to my wheel chair and waited for him.  Looking straight ahead I saw two men standing at urinals.  One of them, who looked to be in his 30s, stood further away from his receptacle than is normal, enabling me to see the stream of his urine. 

To call it a stream is a misnomer.  It was more like a torrent, a horizontal Niagara Falls.  I recalled a short story – or was it a novel? - in which a bride listened for the first time to the sound of her husband’s urinating and reflecting that it sounded as if the urine were issuing from a horse.  The story followed the couple until they were very old, and the vigorous husband was now a feeble old man. 

I too once peed like a horse and of course I thought nothing of it.  Nor could the young man whose Niagara of urine I had glimpsed imagine that some day the flow might become smaller and smaller, issuing forth with less and less force, as his prostate gradually squeezed his urethra.  Nor could he know that if he developed prostate cancer, small growths, removed every few months, might additionally impede the flow and that the torrent would become a trickle.   

My attendant returned and wheeled me through passport control, attended to the luggage retrieval, and finally wheeled me to the taxi stand.  I thanked him for his help, tipped him, and told him I hoped that when I got to be 55, I would look as good as he does now.  “But you’ve already reached it,” he said, taking him a moment to appreciate my joke. 

There was another joke, one I didn’t tell him: while youth cannot imagine what it’s like to be old, the old don’t forget what it was like to be young.

Time Marches On

Last Friday evening, when we were in Jerusalem, we walked down to the home of good friends for Shabbat dinner.  We followed the same route that we followed when we lived there, diagonally across the street from our hotel.  On the way I remarked to my wife that our visit to Jerusalem was the closest thing possible to time travel, that we seemed to have gone back at least four years in time.  On the surface everything seemed the same as it was when we left in 2008.

But one doesn’t have to go far to see important differences.  Jaffa Road, which was riddled with ditches when we left, is now a beautiful pedestrian walkway, with the new Light Rail running down its middle and the exteriors of its old buildings cleaned, their former glory restored.

More important from our point of view are the changes that have occurred in some of our friends.  One has been struck down by Alzheimers and now requires a 24-hour a day caretaker.  Another is showing the first signs of dementia, having forgotten some significant events and beginning to search for words.  A third friend has developed bladder cancer, while a fourth has been struck by prostate cancer, and and a fifth has died.  

But most of our friends seem relatively healthy and appear to be enjoying life.  They tell us of new grandchildren or great-grandchildren.  They tell us of their grandchildren marrying and their widowed children remarrying.  They engage in volunteer work, pursue their hobbies, and travel.  Younger friends continue to find pleasure and fulfillment in their work.  The twin infants whom we photographed on our sitting room rug are now lively little girls, rushing to show us their drawings.

In the four years we’ve been away, the cycle of life has continued to operate and now that we’ve returned we see the results  – birth, marriage, productivity, decline, and death.  Nothing remains the same.  This is as it's always been, no different now than in the days of King Solomon.   We are borne along the stream of life and if I'm nearing the end of my journey, I'm still enjoying the ride.



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

A Little Boy and a Man

Hotel Montefiore      

Jerusalem

One of our best friends is a prize-winning journalist, novelist and poet, who lived in Israel for about 30 years.  Her first visit to Israel was in 1973, when she covered the October War.  She found her colleagues so biased against Israel that she decided to settle here.  With her she brought her youngest child.  He was ten years old.

That’s a tough age for a child to move to foreign country, whose language and culture he must now learn, and for a while he acted out against his forcible transfer.  Some of his new friends seemed in his mother’s eyes to be on the border of juvenile delinquency.  When he started playing ball with our son, she knocked on our door to check us out.  And that was the beginning of a long and deep friendship, facilitated by our proximity.   She and her son lived literally around the corner from us for decades.  We watched him grow up.

Last Friday we met him and his wife for lunch.  The father of three, he is now a well-regarded medical doctor, a lecturer at the Hebrew University School of Medicine, and a researcher whose work takes him abroad several times a year.  He was always a good-looking kid and as a grown man he's handsome.  The signs of his aging – gray hair and small wrinkles around his eyes  – have only enhanced his good looks.  For a man so busy it was extremely kind of him to make time for us, but then he always struck me as kind.

He and his wife speak beautiful English and that was the language of our conversation.  As we talked I tried to picture the little boy that he once was, but I was unsuccessful.  What I saw was the distinguished adult he’s become.  If he’s the way I was at his age, I thought, he’s on the cusp of the most productive period of his research career, a notion that made me both happy and sad.  I was happy for him, but I felt a melancholy in the knowledge that my own research career was well over.  That the little boy I knew was now a middle-aged man reminded me how very old I’ve become, an awareness reinforced when he had to help me up from the deep banquette on which my wife and I had been seated. 

I dropped the torch that he now carries.  I’m not sorry I dropped it – in the interval I learned what else I could do - but this vivid reminder of time’s passing was saddening, knowing as we all do that the older we become the closer we are to the end.



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

In Loco Parentis

It’s not seemly to brag, and if I were the man I’d like to be, I’d never do it.  But I must confess to telling my children about a recent and unexpected academic honor.  In the past, I’d tell my parents, my father really, for I was such a scapegrace as a teenager that I had no honors to report to my mother before she died at the lamentable age of 47, when I was 19.   So it was my father who became my outlet for bragging.  He didn’t mind.  In fact, he was pleased.  But he’s been dead for 35 years.  Since his death I’ve had to tell him in imaginary conversations.  So this time I told my children instead of my father.  This gives a new meaning to in loco parentis.

But in fact our children have been acting a bit like our parents for some time, a monumental role reversal.  This is especially true of our daughter, who, with her family, lives in the other wing of our building.  It was our daughter who insisted that we move permanently to New York.  We reluctantly followed her advice and we’re now glad we did.  She calls us every day.  “What’s up?” she usually asks us after we say hello.  My impression is that she wants to make sure that we haven’t gotten ourselves into any trouble.  She’s right to do so, for it will be she who’ll be in charge if we become incapacitated.  As a palliative care social worker, she’s supremely qualified to do so.

Our son, living in California, is necessarily less involved in our day-to-day lives.  He mainly confines himself to advice regarding our investments.  He graduated summa cum laude in math, earned a PhD in economics, and has succeeded in his business ventures, so he’s well worth listening to.  And occasionally we take his advice.  He also encourages us to fly business class.   My wife and I feel we can’t afford it, and so far we’ve continued to fly cattle class, but his advice calls to mind a late friend who told me “if we don’t fly business class, our children will.” 

At the moment, neither of our children reaches for our hand before we cross the street.  We're still able to live without assistance and to organize our lives ourselves, but if the time comes when we’re no longer able to do so, I for one won’t resist our children’s efforts on our behalf.  Many elderly who become incompetent fight nonetheless to retain their autonomy.  Not me.  I’ll be glad to let go and allow our caring and sensible kids to take over.  And if they weren’t so busy, I wouldn’t mind giving them a few of my chores right now.



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Fathers Always Pay

Hotel Montefiore

Jerusalem

  

My late friend, a professor of sociology at Barnard College and at the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was a rich man.  One evening, he met his son and his son’s colleague for dinner.  When the son’s colleague excused himself to go to the washroom, my friend asked his son, “who’s paying?”  The son, who like his father and his colleague, was also rich, responded, “fathers always pay.”

Ever since hearing that story, I’ve followed that maxim with my children, even though both of them can well afford to pick up the tab. I thought of it yesterday when we met our son and daughter-in- law for breakfast.  It was no ordinary breakfast.   

Our son and his wife had come up to Jerusalem the night before to stay at the Hotel Alegra, a boutique hotel in the village of Ein Kerem, so as to help him recover from his grueling flight from Los Angeles, from which he had arrived last Friday, and to give the two of them a mini-honeymoon, away from their children, who were staying with her parents in Rehovot. 

The Hotel Alegra is housed in an old stone mansion, named for Alegra Bello, a Jewish girl from Mahane Yehuda, who in the 1920s eloped with Jebra Francis Rahil, a Christian from the village of Ein Kerem, after she converted to Christianity and after her family disowned her and pronounced her dead.  In 1930 she and her husband returned to Ein Kerem and built the mansion that the locals called “The House of the Jewish Girl.”

The hotel is set within lush gardens, pools, and little waterfalls, and a more romantic spot is hard to imagine.  It’s a perfect place for a honeymoon, even for a one-night honeymoon, and as I sat with our son and our daughter-in-law I remembered our own honeymoon, at the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, different in almost every possible way from the Hotel Alegra, with almost all the differences in favor of the latter.  Judging from our own experience, honeymoons are wasted on the newly wed.  We struggled to find topics of conversation, as we sat opposite one another, each of us essentially a stranger to the other, from whom we couldn’t escape for even an hour.  Our son and daughter in law, married for 12 years, were at ease with each other and fully able to enjoy their surroundings.

Our breakfast at the Hotel Alegra was served in an arbor near a little waterfall.  First came freshly squeezed orange juice, followed by an amuse bouche of yoghurt and granola.  Course after course appeared, with the grand finale a thin pancake dusted with sugar.  I’ve never eaten such a good breakfast and as I was doing so, I wondered who would pay the bill.  In fact, the hotel is so luxurious that no bill appeared.  It was our son and daughter-in-law to whom it must have been presented at some point during their stay.  I would have been happy to pay it, though, since the breakfast was so delicious and it’s not every day that we can spend an hour with our son and his wife.  But it was awfully nice that they pampered us and even nicer to learn that fathers don’t always have to pay.

To see all four of us, click on the photograph.