Dear Reader...

        For quite some time now I have been communicating with my computer which I am still learning to use. I started out by writing a diary just so that I would get used to opening the machine and closing it. Bit by bit I expanded my activity by writing a letter to the editor which I then never sent but at least I had gotten something off my chest.

       Because of my, by now, rather advanced age, I am constantly confronted with the challenge of dealing with a slowly changing lifestyle. Just running to the corner grocery store becomes a slow limp. Driving I have given up over ten years ago. Neither do I miss having to bother with the problems of owning, maintaining and parking a car.

        Many years ago, when my last child left home to go to college, I established a rule for myself to get up and get dressed and go out, at least to buy the newspaper a ten minute walk away no matter how cold or wet or snowy it was, every day. This regimen I have kept up for the past thirty years disregarding the often critical, though kindly comments and head-shaking of my neighbours who helpfully point out it would start raining very soon because the weather report said so. Lately, though, because of the national drive to adopt a healthier life-style I often hear, I am a trouper.

         I live in a neighbourhood peopled with more or less recent immigrants from all over the globe, a fact I very much cherish. I have always liked to be near or with people who were different from my own environment which was German, Danish, bourgeois, proper, orderly and at the same time very creative. My problem now, though, is, that I cannot communicate with most of the people around me, young or old. I speak no Russian, Turkish, Pharsi or any of the other languages I hear around me. On the other hand I read and watch a lot of news which then I can’t discuss with anyone.

        So I have decided to start my own blog in place of an actual person sitting across from me at a café listening to my musings or reminiscences.