Thinking of Our Parents’ Generation

Not everyone could go to college during the Great Depression in the U.S. I am thinking of a friend of the family who had to work in a family business and take care of elderly parents. She married late, went back to college in her 80s and was one of the most emotionally intelligent people I know. She died at the age of 102. Legally blind, she had a volunteer reader from the Upper West Side community in New York reading her Solzhenitsyn’s huge autobiography in her final days. She also took up oil painting.
Formal degrees? No. Wisdom? Yes, absolutely. We were blessed to have known her!