11/12 Called my mom, and unusual is perhaps only the speediness with which my dad hands over the receiver to her so we can speak. I have no consolation to offer, her heart and her circulation are not doing what they are supposed to do, and she has severe arthritis. All that while being the same girl she must always have been. My mother, who, twenty years after the war in which she was born, went to Germany and found a man there. – Getting old is nothing for cowards they say.