The Birthday

Sunday's a big literacy day around these parts because Husbandman goes out and brings back the NYTimes, the paper of record. We get coffee, curl up on the couch. After a cursory look at the front articles, we work on the crossword puzzle in the magazine. We almost always finish the Sunday puzzle and then we work on the reading. I like to read the magazine first. The q and a page with Deborah Solomon. Love that. Love the piece where people talk about the odds and ends in their house. I love the last page called "lives," because the stories are fairly extreme. I always read the piece about doctors trying to diagnose some odd health problem. I wish my kids would be doctors so that I could advise them when they're diagnosing.

Then I move on to Frank Rich, letters to the editor, and then the vows story. Then I move over to the front section, and then the book review. I usually end with all the blurbs about all the people getting married. My best reading today was from the magazine. Roman Vishniak, photographer, didn't exactly follow the code of journalistic ethics when he photographed Jewish people in Poland before WWII. He made up captions for the photos that were not true. But he was an excellent photographer who left some great pix behind. We can see those pix in 2012. Not sure where. But let's track them down. And let's go see them together. Because we're all in this together.