Reading
One of the unexpected benefits of these last ten months spent basically nesting at home is all the time I’ve had for reading. Not traveling my normal 100-150 days a year has cleared a lot of time. There’s also been a lot less time watching sports, since I find it virtually impossible to get excited about what feel like sanitized, made-for-TV contests in empty stadia. Besides, there’s been something distasteful to me about these athletes getting tested multiple times a week when for so long everyday folks had difficulty finding places where they could find out if they were Covid-infected. So in an unintended form of protest I simply found myself watching sports less and having more time to read. I’ve always been an avid reader. As a kid I split my time between baseball biographies (“The Lew Burdette Story”) and American history. For my bar mitzvah I was thrilled to receive two tomes that I cherished and still have: Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports and William Manchester’s account of the JFK assassination, Death of a President. I can easily call up the emotions I had as a young teen during a rare conversation with my otherwise distracted, engineering-oriented father...Read more