Essays & Media

The air has been a sickening color since Monday. I’ve tried to stay inside because my face, head, and lungs ache and it’s hard to breathe. I wore a mask the few times I needed to leave our building. It felt weird to remove the mask when I went inside the grocery store, the physical therapy office, the senior home where my mother-in-law lives.

Waking up.
Because as I age, each day is a miracle. I survived horrible asthma and a surprise bout of cancer in my fifties, but all of us are surviving something these days. We joke about starting our conversations with “organ recitals” in which everyone lists their aches and pains before we can proceed with real conversations.

I began hosting New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, in 2018, and have interviewed over 180 authors so far. It was tough to choose just 5 top books, but in looking over all those interviews, I remembered how much I loved reading these books, all set in the United States long before the 21st century.

What about the Third Reich is so appealing that books and movies are still being made about it? And why do we keep wanting to hear more about Nazi lies, Nazi attacks on anyone they hate, and Nazi humiliation of those who don’t agree with them?

Back in the day, I knew not to compromise my colleagues by posting stunning views on Instagram like they do now. No photos of anything including gorgeous desserts, and everything I’d say would be too vague for anyone to figure out where I was going or where I’d been. You’ve got to play it cool and quiet in this business.

We started at a family-owned garden center about 30 minutes east of my daughter’s Colorado home. I couldn’t get over the amount of development that’s taken place in the thirty odd years since I lived there, much of it “little boxes on a hillside and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.”

My flight to Denver landed later than expected, nearly 10:00pm last night. I was tired because it’s an hour later in Chicago. It was a fifteen-minute wait for a rideshare. I sat in someone’s abandoned wheelchair watching a sudden rainfall (luckily, DIA’s pick up area is covered). I scrolled through Instagram, did a couple of Spanish lessons on Duolingo, breathed the mountain air.

We walked around the charming city of Turin for three full days, often holding hands and feeling blessed. It’s a special vacation, and we’re enjoying every moment. Love the architecture, the cobbled streets, the cacophony of languages, the murals.

Just got to our hotel, and it’s pouring outside, so we’re resting a bit. Today, we rode into Paris on the train from Eze, an enchanting village on the Riviera.

No question about it — it’s heavenly to be in this sunshine-filled area of rolling hills edged by the distant, not always visible Alps.

Federico picked us up in Turin and drove us through meandering hills and valleys down to the Piedmont region of Italy.

We leave this charming place at noon, so I’ve been sitting in the inside part of the courtyard sipping a variety of hot drinks and watching the rain fall on the lemon trees.

Turin is a beautiful city filled with gorgeous buildings, many museums, a grand and relatively newly built opera house, plenty of palaces and plazas (piazzi), and Cesare Lombroso’s horrifying early 20th-century collection of drawings, photographs, criminal evidence, prison handicrafts, and criminal sculls, some artistically-recreated with skin, features, and hair.

On our 3rd day in Italy, we hopped on a tram to see more of Milan, intending to stroll through the cultural district. We did a little of that but then entered the first museum we saw (The MUDEC) and spent the entire morning wandering through a beautifully curated exhibit on the art movement known as Surrealism.

We took the train from Milan’s central station and cabbed to an old hotel in the heart of Turin. It’s set in what was once a 19th-century home for young men and located on of Turin’s many charming piazzas.