![]() George and two buddies from Pennsylvania are visiting an exchange student pal and his family in Turkey, and getting a great tour. This is the rock formation in Cappadocia, with its ancient catacombs and eerie wind-blasted towers, which George pronounced as "Martian -- beautiful and slightly spooky." We told him we had stayed in the hilltop hotel in our epic visit in 2012, On Wednesday he was at Topkapi and Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia. We expect a full update when he gets back.
Michael
4/20/2022 02:26:21 pm
Beautiful!!! Love the pics - especially the Philly Love Half Marathon one. Thx.
George
4/21/2022 09:09:27 am
Michael: You remember the future co-captain from way back in Phila.
Lulu Wilson
4/20/2022 02:30:17 pm
Love it Pop! Xo
Altenir Silva
4/20/2022 05:28:24 pm
Dear George: Amazing pics.
Andy Tansey
4/20/2022 05:56:59 pm
Cool! Perfect in variety and number in these days of so frequently too many pictures for any to have meaning. In this case, each one is huge! Woo-hoo! 4/20/2022 06:23:21 pm
It is great when the grandchildren are grown and starting out on their life’s path. I wish that I had traveled during my college summers rather than working in industry. Although a learned much more about people than metallurgy those summers, travel would have been more broadening.
George
4/21/2022 09:19:48 am
Alan, these are different times. My summers in college were spent as a copy boy at the NY Daily News and Associated Press -- sometimes double shifts. $1.20 an hour -- and then at Newsday. Trips? Jones Beach or Wildwood Sate Park (LI) were great. It's a blessing for that small part of the population that can do stuff like this -- considering the poverty and downright disasters in so much of the world. I should have made that point right away -- the good fortune. Now the trick is to use the insights and experiences for something positive. Be well, GV
Ed
4/20/2022 10:33:32 pm
Wonderful, thanks for sharing. There is a special joy in grand children.
Randolph
4/21/2022 06:58:09 am
George,
Laura Vecsey
4/21/2022 08:16:17 am
The love of life, learning, travel and adventure passed down from you & Mom. Great post!!
GV
4/21/2022 10:10:24 am
Thanks to Ed, Andy, Randy, Altenir for your comments.
Ed
4/21/2022 01:02:03 pm
Forgive a bit of grandfatherly pride. At 15 she went to China, on an exchange program, to learn Chinese language and culture. The program was not designed well, she was in a class of Chinese students wanting to learn En*lish, and the family were business people, never at home for comversation. She returned home after one semester. She had learned some Italian, from a fellow student and some Chinese.
bruce
4/21/2022 02:27:44 pm
george, Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God! Then I would wake into keening grief all over again. Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days. After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy. Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s. Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone. ----- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html Jan. 30, 2023 Categories
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