Memoirous

So yesterday I bought a ticket to Ann Frank’s house, making an upcoming trip seem all the more real. This year I will be turning 60. Some establishments are already giving me a senior discount. This is a good and sobering thing. It means I am getting closer to the abyss. A friend who has been in Florida for 4 months doing parent care put it succinctly: You can easily imagine a death conveyor belt—and we are on it. Of course we are from the day we are born, but it only becomes more real the older you get. A big reason to start in on that bucket list. So yesterday I bought a ticket to Ann Frank’s house. Actually it started with purchasing an airline ticket to Amsterdam, leaving Chicago June 5. I will take my bicycle with me, and God willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll end up in Stavanger, Norway where I have another ticket. All together I will be gone 40 days. The online research is the easy part—executing the plan is freaking me out. More so now that I have commi...

I used to wonder: What is fascism? I realize most eight-year-olds don’t spend their time puzzling over such matters, but I was not your typical kid. I used to save news clippings of super serious events in a Girl Scout Handbook. A baby repeatedly bitten by rats, a slew of kids mowed down by a drunk driver, Beth Ann Mott—a girl who was snatched and later her body recovered. I wasn’t obsessed, yet I dwelled with these things, like how I reread The Diary of Ann Frank , always pausing near the end to contemplate: In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I think there was a bit of the time traveler in me, the history detective. If only we could go back in time and “fix” things or jump over a particularly devastating moment. Change the trajectory, the course of human events. Rewind that moment in the opening intro to Wide World of Sports where the skier flies out of control, crashing—send them back to the slopes, in pursuit of victory. I just...