80 year olds appreciate unusal anecdotes. The NYT obituary for critic Michael Feingold tells of when Feingold, then an undergraduate senior at Columbia asked Professor Robert Brustein if he’d write him a letter of recommendation for the Yale Drama School. Brustein agreed. Some time later, Feingold reminded Brustein and asked him if he had sent in the recommendation. Brustein told young Feingold to look at the newspaper the next morning. He did, finding that Brustein had just been named dean of Yale Drama. According to Feingold, Brustein wrote the recommendation, received it and read it, and then – taking his own advice – admitted Feingold to Yale.

80 year olds read books. I just finished Nadine Gordimer’s “A World of Strangers”, which I enjoyed. She is such a good writer – probably why she won a Nobel Prize, right? “A World of Strangers” was written in the 1950s. A young English man, 20-something, is sent to Johannesburg to work temporarily for his family’s small publishing business as a sales rep for South Africa. He is given the name of an old school years friend of his mother, who is now the extraordinarily wealthy and hospitable wife of a mining magnate. He also meets some black and coloured men (in South African terms), and befriends some of them, who are active opponents of South Africa’s British colonial government. He meets a couple of young women, both divorced, one through his mother’s wealthy friend, one an activist also in contact with many blacks. Each of the women, different from each other, feel estranged from South African society and feel their lives have been wasted. As an Englishman, Toby (that’s his name) looks at South African society different from any of his South African friends and so Gordimer, writing in South Africa, is able to give a different perspective of Johannesburg society than you might otherwise be familiar with. This is the fourth Gordimer book I have read. The others were “The House Gun”, “My Son’s Story” and (the best that I have read) “The Lying Days”. I recommend them all.

Other than that? Trips to the bakery, the post office and the hardware store. Conversation with a locksmith who was not totally successful in solving one of our problems. Beginning to think about flight reservations for our trip to Portugal next summer. Forty five minutes on the stationary bicycle watching Episode 3 of the Danish series, “Post Mortem”. And working on my Dvar Torah to be given tomorrow at the Adas Israel Havurah.