The other night, I suddenly was struck by the paucity of older male family figures who are left to me. My blood line of elders are slipping from this world, and with it, the familial connection to someone who's been through it, and can reflect some wisdom on what they did to navigate life's passages.

In 1941, on a small island 25 miles off the Italian coastline, two political prisoners would pen a secret manifesto that would come to define the next 75 years of European history. Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi looked in horror at the devastation of World War II, in which authoritarian regimes threatened the entire continent and beyond.

I snuck a couple of hours to watch the game with my kids last night. That's what I really want to write about--the Cleveland Cavaliers game last night. How the Cavs hung in there against the Warriors, fighting their way back to an even series. Of LeBron James, never the most elegant of players, yet a persistent and often unstoppable force of nature.

The previous September, a friend and I spent Rosh Hashanah on the large rocks outside the remains of Sutro Baths. At the end of the 19th century, the Baths had been a large complex of salt water swimming pools. In its heyday, it was impressive enough, that Thomas Edison is purported to have filmed the functioning baths in 1897.