"I SAID," she blared, "A PERSON COULD MAKE SHADOW PUPPETS ON THE WALLS IN HERE!" My mother was at her wit's end. Dad wasn't hearing her early morning ramblings. He wasn't hearing much of anything. The plane ride to our Florida cottage had temporarily jammed his always delicate audio so that even his hearing aids were useless. He'd spent the week deftly mimicking normal conversation in a one-sided sort of way. He could tell, he said, whether the sounds coming out of the faces around him were friendly or not. Friendly sounds got a nod and a pleasantry. More serious conversation required some cooperation – mainly strenuous attention to volume and articulation on the part of the conversee. The effort involved served as a kind of content editor – there could be no subtle exchanges about the meaning of life, for instance. Declarative statements amplified best. All of which painfully cramped the freewheeling whimsy that is my mother's trademark style.

In stentorian tones she continued "LIKE CHARADES! A PERSON COULD PLAY A GAME WITH SHADOW PUPPETS!" Dad knew some kind of gauntlet was being thrown down. He stumbled over to the dresser to find his superfluous hearing aids. "I'm not the man you married," he parried plaintively. "I can't hear you. The goddamned hearing aids. The plane ride. The rainy weather. The fluorescent light in the bathroom. The cold floor. The turn signal on the Lumina. The one-ply toilet paper." My mother was unappeased. She has long believed that my father is only pretending to get old to irritate her. "Descended from kings" she hissed to me to explain his obliviousness as we hustled around him after surgery once. "Oh for heaven's sake, Ralph," she muttered as she stomped out of the room.

I lay in bed in the room next to theirs reviewing the rules for a game of Charades. Book title. Three words. Third word Dragon. My Father's Dragon! Bingo!

My smart and beautiful sister-in-law is totally a big city girl except when she is being the most inquisitive and fearless of naturalists. She and her husband left Boston after decades of careers and kids and moved to the edge of the intelligent world in the tiniest of towns on the Florida coast. She kayaks around the endless waterways in the area and collects creatures to bring home to her kitchen aquarium. It's ok if they're slimy. She makes a terrific white bean dip and an unbelievable key lime pie involving cream cheese. She's thrown herself into volunteer work with the elderly and with the local humane society. We have in common that we both read lots of books and frequently have similar reactions to them. So she was loving Joan Didion's marvelous book about the agony of losing her husband and tending to a critically ill daughter – The Year of Magical Thinking. The thing about the book is how it sort of parses the love of the long-married. A couple of years after reading it I still quote the widow's poignant discovery that while married to John she'd never aged. In him, to him, with him, she was always the 28 year old woman she'd been when their love was new. In his absence she saw herself for the first time as the rest of the world saw her – with all her wrinkles, her frailties, no longer beautiful. It's a wonderful book about love and loss and Trish sent me an email about it at the time she was reading it:

I'm mostly through Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, and when Will asked for a synopsis over coffee this morning, I fumbled for a toehold - where to start? "Her husband died suddenly... "I offered. At which point Will asked what would I do? "Not enough caffeine yet to answer," I pleaded. "And you?" "Oh," he replied, "I'd sell the house, get a condo."

It was the most beautiful day in the history of the world. Jim and I were walking in the Marin Headlands overlooking San Francisco Bay. Our marriage had been a little rocky of late and the trip to California was meant to be healing. The scenery was spectacular and I could feel myself falling truly madly deeply in love with everything one celled and up. The oceanic feeling was upon me and I turned to Jim as we approached the edge of the rugged outcropping. I wanted to say something fabulous. Something about love and humanity and the whole excellence of consciousness. But he beat me to the moment. Putting his arm around me tenderly and gesturing toward the loveliness of the view that lay beyond the scary precipice he said:" If you fell off the edge there? You'd go ploppity, ploppity, ploppity. All the way down."