WIMBLEDON 2026

 

Dear George, 

The 2026 Wimbledon tennis championships begin tomorrow. Katja and I have watched Wimbledon since at least the 1970’s. So many legends: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Chrissy Evert, Martina Navratilova, Ivan Lendl. The list goes on and on. In the early days TV carried only the men’s and women’s finals. Now there at least 12 hours of coverage per day on ESPN, ESPN+, and the Tennis Channel. Our TVs will be running nonstop. 

Wimbledon is regarded as the world’s premier tennis tournament. It’s also the oldest. The All England Croquet Club was founded in Wimbledon, England, in 1868. In 1876 lawn tennis was added to the club’s activities, and its name was changed to the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. The first Wimbledon championship was held in July 1877. 22 men paid a guinea apiece to enter the event which was held over five days. Spencer Gore defeated William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in 48 minutes, and he was awarded prize money of 12 guineas. The Ladies’ Singles competition was added in 1884, and Ladies’ doubles and mixed doubles were added in 1913. In 1913 a suffragette was arrested around midnight when she climbed over a hedge with paraffin and wood shavings in order to set fire to the grounds. The tournament was discontinued during World Wars I and II and during the pandemic in 2020. A German bomb hit the side of Centre Court in 1940. No British man won Wimbledon between Fred Perry in 1936 and Andy Murray in 2013, and no British woman has won since Virginia Wade in 1977. 

There are 128 players in the men’s draw and in the women’s draw. The top women’s seeds this year are: 1. Aryna Sabalenka (Belarus); 2. Elena Rybakina (Kazakhasetan); 3. Iga Swiatek (Poland); and 4. Jessica Pegula. The top men’s seeds are: 1. Jannik Sinner (Italy); 2. Alexander Zverev (Germany); 3. Felix Auger-Aliassime (Canada); and 4. Ben Shelton (U.S.). We are rooting for Novak Djokovic (Serbia, seeded 7th) and Coco Gauff (U.S., also seeded 7th). If Djokovic wins, it will be his 25th Grand Slam title — the most by any man in tennis history. If Gauff wins at age 22, it will be her third Grand Slam title. Both the men’s winner and the women’s winner will receive $3 million pounds in prize money. 

Compared to the other Grand Slams (Australian, French, U.S. Open), a number of things make Wimbledon unique. It’s the only Grand Slam that is played on grass, the surface which generates the fastest tennis. The grass is cut to exactly 8 millimeters on every championship court. It’s also the only Grand Slam with a curfew (11 p.m.) Players are required to wear all-white or near-white. Women are not allowed on the court if they wear tops that show too much cleavage. It’s estimated that about 54,000 tennis balls are used each year in the tournament. Slazenger has provided all the balls since 1902. Fans can buy a used can after the tournament for about $2.50. Advertising at Wimbledon is minimal and low-key. Every morning a Harris hawk named Rufus is set free and circles the sky above the courts to scare away local pigeons. Attendees traditionally enjoy strawberries and cream, a tradition stemming back to King Henry VIII. Over 190,000 portions of strawberries and cream were served in a recent year. Traditionally players have bowed or curtsied to members of the royal family seated in the Royal Box on Centre Court, although since 2023 they are only required to do so if the Prince of Wales or the King is present. In 2024 line judges were replaced by electronic line calling technology. Demand for Centre Court matches far exceeds the available tickets (about a four to one ratio), and a lottery systems is used to sell tickets. Fans who want to buy tickets to the secondary courts normally have to wait in line overnight. 

As someone who grew up before television arrived in my hometown, having Wimbledon available in our living room is nothing short of a miracle. While I won’t watch every minute, I’m certain to watch every day. Go CoCo! Go Novak! 

Love, 

George

Sources: 

www.evanevanstours.com, “Weird and wonderful facts about Wimbledon”. 

www.historic-uk.com, “History of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships” 

www.thetimes.com, “Wimbledon 2026” 

www.wikipedia.org, “Wimbledon Championships”

FATHER'S DAY REFLECTIONS

Dear George, 

My father came down with dementia in his eighties, and he eventually moved to Cincinnati to live in an Alzheimer’s facility. I visited him regularly during his two years there, and, while his decline was distressing, we also had a mutually rewarding relationship. One day Vic said to me, “I used to be the father, but now you’re the father to me.” On another occasion, he stretched his arms out and said “I used to be this big, but now (holding two fingers together) I’m only this big.” The most evident change from my childhood years was in expression of affection. At the Alzheimer’s center my dad was always excited to see me, and we had a lot of physical contact. Hugging, holding while sitting side by side, occasionally a kiss on the cheek or forehead. This was dramatically different from my recollections of childhood. While my memory is limited, I don’t remember being regularly hugged by my parents or told “I love you.” This is perhaps not surprising since the most popular child-rearing manual of the 1940’s and early 50’s by behavioral psychologist John B. Watson warned against spoiling your children by expressing warmth. Watson wrote: “Never hug and kiss them…If you must…shake hands with them in the morning.” My parents did many good things with their children, but emotional expression wasn’t obvious. I think that both my father and I were much more able to show affection in his final years of life. It leaves me with good memories. 

Love, 

Dave

MOTHER'S DAY 2026

 

Dear George, 

My mother’s life was miserable in her later years. Drink, prescription drugs, intolerable pain which made walking difficult, loneliness, depression. On one of our late visits home her close friend Florence C. reminded me to remember Doris as she was in her younger years — a vivacious, intelligent, gifted, fun woman. My mother was 27 when I was born, 39 when I turned 12. Here are a few of my memories from those earlier years. 

Doris was a wonderful hostess. She and Vic were part of a large, congenial social circle, and they regularly had parties of all sorts at our house on the river — costume parties, music parties, theme parties of all sorts, e.g., poetry, art. Her welcoming nature extended to my friends in my teenage years who felt comfortable coming regularly to our house to go swimming. 

Mother was active and athletic. She played tennis in her youth and was one of the best women golfers at Riverside Country Club. She enjoyed horseback riding and frequented a stable near the city limits on Riverside Boulevard. 

She was devoted to our Irish Setters, Mike and Mickey.  I mentioned recently how she saved Mike when he fell through the ice on the Menominee River. On another occasion she broke up a fight between the two dogs and got a large gash on her arm. Toward the end of her life she adored her Persian cat, Lovey, who sat with her at the window. 

Mother had many interests and activities — bridge, Great Books, jazz, community theater. She planted and tended a magnificent garden along the west edge of our lawn. She had a bird feeder outside our dining room window, kept a diary of all the birds she saw, and taught her kids to identify all the different species.  

Doris was an excellent cook. Turkey, ham, geese. Potato sausage and liver sausage from Franny Bourgeois’ West End grocery store. And whitefish — the most magnificent of all. All our extended family came for dinner each year on Christmas Eve. On my last trip home before her death Doris taught me how to prepare broiled whitefish, passing along her legacy.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom! 

 Love, 

Dave

STORY-TELLING TIME: MIKE AND MOTHER

Dear George, 

Spring quarter has begun for our OLLI classes (the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute). In addition to my regular poetry class, I signed up for “Telling Our Stories, Finding Ourselves.” I thought it was a writing course, but instead it’s oral story-telling. I don’t tell stories out loud very often, so this seemed like a good opportunity. Our first assignment was to tell a story about a scary childhood event. Here’s a written version of the story I told. 

When my dad came back from the war our family moved out of town to a cottage that my grandfather had built on the banks of the Menominee River. There was only one other family on our road, so we children were responsible for entertaining ourselves. The river quickly became the center of our universe. Swimming and boating in the summer, hiking across the frozen ice in the winter. The other family — Lou Reed and his wife — lived a half mile west of us and owned a handsome Irish Setter named Mike. Lou and Mike would regularly walk down the road to visit us. Lou would chat with my parents while we children would play with the dog. I think Mike had a wonderful time because, after a few visits, he started running away and coming to our house by himself to play. Lou tried to contain him, but, after a few such episodes, he gave up, and he gave the dog to our family. 

Mike lived with us for many years. He was a wonderful dog, smart, affectionate, loyal, beloved by children and parents alike. One spring weekend we were playing in the house because, with the warmer weather, the ice on the river had started to melt and we were not allowed to go out on it. However, someone looked out the window and saw that Mike was out on the ice. Suddenly, to our horror, we saw him fall through into the water. We called our mother who was the only parent home at the time. She commanded us to stay in the house, no matter what, grabbed her coat, and ran out to the river. Mike, by now, was barely able to keep his nose above the water. As Mother got closer, she lay down on the ice and crawled to him on her stomach. Watching from the living room window, we children were terrified. If the ice couldn’t support a dog, how could it support an adult human being? Mike was out far enough that the water was over a human’s head — probably eight or nine feet deep. So dangerous. 

Mother reached the edge of the hole that Mike had created. Then, with an amazing feat of strength, she reached into the freezing water, grabbed beneath the seventy-pound dog’s front legs, and hoisted him out of the water back onto the ice. Dog and owner made their way back to the shore and then up to the house. We children were crying with relief and joy. I don’t think we ever looked at our mother the same way again. Even today, I think of this as the most heroic act I’ve ever personally witnessed. 

Love, 

Dave

POETRY FEVER

 Dear George, 

 I started taking poetry classes at OLLI in 2015, and I’ve taken them at least once every term since. That amounts to several hundred poems shared with colleagues. I can trace my interest in poetry back to Washington Grade School where we first learned to write in rhyme. Later, as a freshman at Antioch College, I studied poetry more seriously with Professor Judson Jerome who taught me to write in free verse. I was eager to be a literature major, headed for a career in writing, but Jerome convinced me that it wasn’t lucrative so I switched to Psychology. There went my poetry career for roughly 65 years. Nowadays I devote every day to writing and/or revising poems, many of them autobiographical in nature. I was shocked when I was closed out in registration from my Advanced Poetry class this quarter because of size limits, but the instructor let me in anyway. Here is the poem that I brought to the class today. 

Love, 

Dave 

                         Life Puzzles  

Marriage, that most bewildering of journeys 

Two different persons, one single union 

Like ships in a storm 

Or cats and dogs spattting 

How has this anomaly even survived?   

My wife Katja and I, born into alternate worlds 

She from Philadelphia; I, the North Woods  

Friends are mystified, think we’re alien beings 

Yet we’ve stuck together for               

            Sixty-six                         

                        Odd                                   

                                    Years   

My wife came of age on Philly’s Main Line 

A student of classics at the High School for Girls 

French Literature, Balzac and Baudelaire 

Weekend outings to the Philadelphia Art Museum 

Or Wanamaker’s for tea sandwiches and pink lemonade 

The passions of her soul: The Opera, The Symphony 

And following Queen Elizabeth and her royal clan   

Meanwhile             

        my family lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 

A house made of pine in a forest on the river 

Childhood obsessions:             

        Camping at Mason Park             

        Shooting hoops on an icy driveway 

         Trapping otter on the riverbank 

Our family’s yearly highlight:  The U.P. State Fair at Escanaba             

The demolition derby…the freak show…the Country Music Cavalcade 

And,  of course, most thrilling of all: The Green Bay Packers!!!   

So how did we get together?  — such a blur 

But she thought the North Woods romantic 

And I found the Big City EYE-POPPING!   

We’ve attended the opera every summer

Though resistant at the start,              

        I’ve gradually improved  

In August we go to the County Fair 

                which sets my heart thumping 

The goats and the sheep, bloomin’ onions, bumper cars 

My wife loves the rabbits and the ferris wheel

 If not for me, she would have missed out   

I think this must be the secret of long marriages 

Like potluck dinners, each brings different treats to the table

A COCKROACH SAGA

 

Dear George, 

So far 2026 has been mostly trouble at our house. We’ve endured a major winter storm, the death of our beloved dog Iko, my computer crashing and needing replacement, a fender-bender with our CR-V, getting closed out of my poetry class during registration, and Katja’s upcoming surgery. The worst, though, has been our ongoing battle with the cockroaches. They appeared in our kitchen about five or six months ago. For a long time we didn’t do anything about them. I thought of them as tiny little pets who would visit us in the night and play around on the kitchen counter. Then one day our fancy and expensive stove stopped working. The technician came, took it apart, and concluded that the cockroaches had destroyed the electrical system. He shoveled the corpses into a wastebasket and said that the stove would have to be replaced. That was the end of my amusement. I asked Gemini who the best exterminator in town was, and we made an appointment. 

While waiting for the exterminator, I did some investigation. It turns out that cockroaches have been around for about 320 million years. They are among the most adaptable insects, found from the Arctic to the tropics. German cockroaches, the species in our household, are social creatures, capable of transmitting information, recognizing kin, and residing in a common shelter. They eat human food, pet food, garbage, book bindings, soap and toothpaste, paper, cardboard, and fecal matter. Highly dependent on water, they are often found in kitchens and bathrooms. Females carry egg cases which hold about 30 to 40 long, thin eggs. With a life span up to a year, a single female can produce 300 to 400 offspring. Cockroaches are among the hardiest insects. Some can go for a month without food and without air for 45 minutes. Decapitated cockroaches remain active, and the decapitated head can wave its antenna for several hours. 

The exterminator’s pre-visit instructions asked that we remove everything from the kitchen and bathrooms. This was no easy matter since we have been accumulating “stuff” for the last half century. Our kitchen has 42 shelves and 5 drawers. All of them were filled to capacity with boxed and canned food, kitchen utensils, dinnerware, glassware, cleaning supplies, and miscellany. I made five or six trips to the nearby drugstore dumpster and brought home 3 or 4 dozen cardboard boxes. We worked full-time for two days to fill the boxes and move them into the dining room. We could barely move around the dining room once we’d finished. The exterminator came and concluded that we were pretty heavily infested. We signed a contract for six visits over a 12-week period. In fact, he completed his ninth visit last week. Each time the exterminator sprayed and put gel bait in crevices and niches. He put little roach traps all around the kitchen each time, and we could tell how successful the treatment had been. After the first visit there might have been 8 to 10 dead roaches in each trap. Now only 2 or 3 traps have a single dead roach. 

Close to the end, my sense is that the exterminators are going to continue till it’s down to zero. Since the end is in sight, we decided to move our belonging back into the kitchen. Because this involves decisions about rearranging things, it’s taking a lot longer to move back in than it took to move out. We started six days ago, working about four to six hours a day, and we still have a day’s worth left to move. Katja has woken up every morning with an aching back and legs, and I struggle to get out of bed. It is very satisfying though. Because we moved all the remaining boxes out to the foyer, our dining room looks more beautiful than we remember it. The kitchen shelves look back to normal too. Katja says we’re never going to do this again. I agree. All we have to do is keep these unpleasant pests from returning. 

Love,  Dave

THIS END OF LIFE BUSINESS

Dear George, 

As long as I can remember, Katja and I have disagreed vehemently about what will be done with our corpses after we die. Katja thinks we should both be embalmed and buried in caskets. I think we should both be cremated. These are our respective family traditions, and neither of us has budged a bit over the years. If anything, we’ve become more rigid. A couple of weeks ago, we got in the mail a brochure and questionnaire from the local cemetery where Katja’s parents are buried. It seemed like the time had come to make decisions about these matters, so we made an appointment at the cemetery with a woman named Bonnie. 

Katja and I planned to sit down and talk over the issues before our appointment, but, of course, we never got around to it. Bonnie met us at the funeral home lobby and escorted us to an upstairs meeting room with Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke, and water available for us on the table. After five minutes of idle chitchat to relax and size one another up, Bonnie proceeded with a series of life and death questions. When we explained our divergent views on burial vs. cremation, Bonnie said that the cemetery was completely accommodating. We can have a single plot that will hold Katja’s casket and my urn full of ashes. I wasn’t aware of it, but Ohio state law specifies that we will still have to purchase a casket in which I will be cremated. Supposedly this is a matter of proper respect for the dead (not a rip-off by the funeral industry). I joked that my ashes could be put in a paper bag. Bonnie wasn’t amused. According to state law, we would also have to buy an urn which will cost $395. 

Bonnie then proceeded to a series of questions regarding services. Options are: (a) no service; (b) a chapel service; or (c) a gravesite service. Bonnie made it clear from her tone and body language that no service was not an acceptable option. We have lost so many friends over the last couple of decades that I couldn’t imagine many attendees for myself beyond immediate family, so I opted for a gravesite service. Bonnie asked if I wanted a religious or secular officiant, and I went secular. Katja, on the other hand, chose a chapel service officiated by a rabbi. (She does, in fact, have more friends than I do.) Katja had a particular rabbi in mind, but, because she doesn’t belong to the rabbi’s synagogue, she was unsure about availability. Bonnie said the funeral home could provide a rabbi just in case. 

Having settled the big questions, we went downstairs to the casket shop. There were a lot of models, and they were all appealing. I was worried because the price range ran from $2,000 to $79,000. Katja usually goes for the high end. This time, though, she chose one of the more reasonable options. Just out of coincidence, it was “The Clifton” (which is also the name of the neighborhood in which we’ve lived for the last half century). We then looked at some grave markers. Katja said she wanted a gravestone with an angel on top, but I raised enough of a fuss that she retracted that. 

Bonnie tallied up the bill, and it came to about a year of tuition at a respectable private university (reasonable, I finally decided, since we are purchasing space for all eternity). Next Monday we will meet with Jackie to pick out the location of our plot. I suggested something close to Katja’s parents, but Bonnie said that was unlikely since they had purchased theirs thirty years ago. Katja said she wanted to be buried under a tree. While there are lot of trees in the cemetery, there is the problem of roots. I am sure we will find something we like. I don’t think we’ve ever made plans this far in advance in our entire married life. Grisly as the topic may be, it’s sort of a relief. 

Love, Dave

GOODBYE, SWEET IKO

Dear George, 

Recently we had to have Iko, our beloved miniature Schnauzer, euthanized. He had been bleeding from the mouth, and we took him in for dental surgery. However, the vet found a large tumor at the back of his throat -- an aggressive melanoma -- and she recommended that he be put down. Shocked and miserable, we reluctantly agreed. 

Iko has been such a loving companion. He slept with us every night, starting out in the middle of the bed, but then snuggling up to one or another of his humans. When I got out of bed in the morning, we've have our daily wrestling match. Iko would growl, roll on his back, kick his legs in the air, and play-bite my hands or wrists. The happiest part of his day. Then we would go for our morning walk. Iko was more of a sniffer than a walker, checking out every telephone pole, fire hyudrant, and piece of litter, leaving his marker on each. Workman arrivals were times of great excitement, and we would reassure the visitor that Iko likes to bark a lot but would never bite. The cleaning ladies were his highlight of the week. They loved Iko, and he loved them. 

We are strugling with our loss. I look for Iko every time I move from one room to another, and my biological clock reminds me of times for our walks. My exercise routine has dropped by fifty percent. Iko was a big part of Katja's and my relationship, an object of constant attention and great shared affection. We will recover but it's going to take a while.

Love, 

Dave