A 71 year-old man and his wife come to see an elder-law attorney. The client was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.  As a result, he is retiring at the end of this year.  His wife is 13 years younger and still working. They have a house and modest savings.

Fortunately, he has a long-term care insurance policy, but it is limited to five years of coverage.  As of now, the husband needs no assistance.  He and his wife are considering selling their house and moving to a condominium more suited to him once the Parkinson’s becomes more disabling.

The attorney advises him to transfer the house and all of their savings (other than the husband's IRA) into his wife's name.  She will revise her estate plan, which currently gives everything to her husband, to leave their assets in trust for him in the event she dies first.  

The trust will be under her will, which is a safe harbor in the Medicaid rules.  He can qualify for Medicaid once his insurance runs out and be a beneficiary of the trust, but the trust funds would not have to be spent down. The lawyer also advises the clients to execute durable powers of attorney and health care proxies.

This slightly edited case study comes from Harry Margolis, one of the premier attorneys specializing in elder-law. Recently I visited his Copley Square offices in order to discover new developments in the practice of law on behalf of older people.

Margolis is one of some 5,000 attorneys across the United States who specialize in elder-law. Massachusetts alone has 600 of them.

Not every elder-law attorney can offer the view from Margolis’ office. As we talked about his work, I looked out on the beautiful cityscape below. Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, the Sheraton Hotel, all shone in the afternoon sun, some of the scene mirrored in the soaring John Hancock Building.

The brief case study of the man with Parkinson’s and his much younger wife calls attention to the complexities of health-care planning. The advice given by this lawyer takes into special account an important change in federal law that took effect last year. As of 2006, it has become harder to qualify for Medicaid.

Previously, if you had children you were allowed to give them half of your assets and then spend down the other half by paying for care. Now, however, you can’t give anything away until five years after applying for Medicaid.

The effect of this law is to encourage people to give away their assets earlier. These days, Margolis encourages parents to give their children money well before the time when the older generation might need nursing home care. That, he observes, is contrary to the advice that he used to give

Nowadays he also frequently advises people to buy long-term care insurance. This he does with greater confidence than formerly, for two reasons. First, the policies are better than they used to be and, second, as noted, it is more difficult to qualify for Medicaid.

Fortunately for  planners, there is now a greater variety of ways to pay for care. For those with low incomes, the adult foster care program may prove a valuable resource. In one model, if you are eligible for Medicaid, you can move into someone’s house and the state will pay your caretaker.

In other instances, family members can be paid to take care of you. If an adult child, for instance, were to care for both parents, he or she would receive two levels of tax-free pay.

How best to benefit from home ownership is another area for legal counsel. Reverse mortgages, says Margolis, are sometimes appropriate. However, compared to some other possibilities, “it’s an expensive way to borrow money.”

Frequently, a home equity loan makes more sense. This lawyer judges it a good idea at least to open up a line of credit, even if you don’t actually draw on it.

One variety of the latter approach is a home equity loan that remains private, perhaps among family members. In this arrangement, an affluent grandson, for example, might lend the money. With careful documentation, this choice might prove beneficial for both parties.

A new instrument favored by Margolis is the family protection trust. Rather than giving money outright to your children, you put it in a trust for their benefit. This device can protect them from their creditors. It can also guard the money if they get divorced and, if the child dies, the funds stay in trust for the grandchildren rather than a spouse.

For those older people who worry about adult children or grandchildren with disabilities, family protection trusts can prove especially helpful.

If you seek more information about elder-law, I recommend the electronic newsletter that Harry Margolis sends out. One can sign up for it without charge at Margolis.com. You can also find a nation-wide list of elder-law lawyers by consulting NAELA.com.

Richard Griffin

On June 6, 1944, better known as D Day, a young Benedictine monk named Paul looked up to the skies and out to the Solent that leads to the English Channel, where he saw the greatest invasion force of ships and planes ever assembled. From his vantage point, Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, he witnessed a show of modern military force that could not have contrasted more sharply with the ancient peace of monastic life..

At that point, this young man seemed highly unlikely to figure in a love story that would carry him far beyond monastery walls and eventually to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he now lives. Paul was the name he had taken in religious life and has kept ever since. But his original name was Jeffrey, and last year, when he published a memoir of his life’s journey, he called it Jeffrey’s Story. .

His becoming a monk when still a boy was largely driven by his mother. She was an Englishwoman who had separated from her husband; she brought up her only son to be a priest, to the exclusion of all other vocational choices.

A bizarre photograph reproduced on the cover of the book shows the author, at perhaps six years old, dressed in a chasuble and the other vestments of a Catholic priest, his right hand raised in blessing. His mother also arranged to have the boy receive letters “from Jesus,” ghostwritten by Carmelite nuns whom she knew.

Jeffrey’s father, Fernand Meyvaert, was Belgian, a merchant marine sailor. After the death of the boy's mother in 1938, his father wanted him to become a Belgian citizen and therefore give up his cherished British passport. The young boy, terrified, fled to England.

Fernand died at sea in 1942, much to his son’s bitter regret later on. He dedicates his book to “the father I so wish I had known better.”

Paul stayed in the monastery for twenty-five years, committed to a life of prayer and increasingly distinguished scholarly work. But during much of this time, he suffered tension and fatigue that, in retrospect, might have raised doubts about the genuineness of his vocation to that life and to the priesthood.

In 1957, he met an American woman, Ann Freeman, a young scholar specializing in medieval history. Ann made several visits to the Isle of Wight and Quarr monastery where she discussed her research with Paul.

Over a ten-year period, they exchanged some sixty letters, at first focused on scholarly issues but gradually becoming more personal. Looking at the letters he wrote to Ann when he was a monk, the author remarks that by the end of 1963, “a note of deep affection becomes discernible.”

Of course, he felt torn between his monastic commitment to God and his growing attachment to Ann. She also felt this tension because of her respect for the life he had chosen.

In his memoir, Paul describes how it felt: “There is a chasm between thoughts on the one hand, thoughts that I must stay on the right path, and feelings and emotions on the other.”  

Gradually, however, they were to understand their love as compatible with the religious ideals they professed. Both came to see how their intense personal feelings for one another could be reconciled with the ideals to which Paul had been committed for a quarter century.

In his latter years at Quarr, Paul enjoyed the good fortune of having as abbot a compassionate man who interpreted monastic rules humanely. Dom Aelred Sillem recognized Paul’s dilemma and enabled him to leave the monastery at a crucial time.

That happened in 1965 when the abbot approved Paul traveling to London so that he could see Ann, a reunion that─contrary to the abbot’s expectation─led to the couple’s traveling together to the United States and later marrying.

Given Paul's unfamiliarity with the “real world” and the short time between his departure from the monastery and coming together with Ann, their chances of becoming happily married might have appeared slight. Yet, their enduring love has held and brought them much happiness. Of their relationship Ann has written: “We grow closer and closer together in deepening oneness.”

Similarly, Paul’s prospects of professional success appeared limited. However, though without even a college degree, he went on to a remarkable scholarly career, and served as director of the Medieval Academy of America for ten years. His wife, too, has had similar success as a scholar and they have collaborated on various projects and raised a beloved daughter.

Now in his 85th year, Paul Meyvaert looks back with gratitude to the way his life has turned out. Referring to the father whom he knew too little, he writes:  “I like to think that many of the qualities that make up my temperament, a temperament that has enabled, and still enables me, to live a deeply committed and affectionate family life, as well as a productive scholarly life, I owe to the genes my father has bequeathed me.”

Richard Griffin

Catherine, a neighbor encountered at a local restaurant, was obviously not feeling at the top of her game. At age 85, she appeared before us for the first time holding a cane, an instrument needed to help keep her balance. As she moved unsteadily toward the table where her husband, their niece, and she would sit, she muttered back at us: “Old age is the pits.”

Her sentiments, though far from original, shook something in me. Of late I have been experiencing some unexpected physical distress myself. Who could have expected a long dormant wisdom tooth to become infected at this stage of life? And why did that oral stirring lead to other irritating complications?

I t is not so much any single problem that gets to you but, as Catherine’s complaint implies, a succession of things. My age peers and those older than I often feel themselves caught in a irreversible sequence of ailments impossible to escape. If only I had not taken that fall, they think, or suffered that allergic reaction, things would be much better for me now.

Old age is indeed the pits for a whole lot of people. However, this simple statement does not get at the full range of later life. Being who we are is much more complicated than that. Along with the suffering of bodily existence there often comes the growth of a different perspective.

Surely Catherine herself takes a more nuanced approach to life than any one statement can convey. Even as she walked away, I could detect something jaunty behind her complaint. While expressing distaste for the small humiliations of advancing age, her smile suggested that she finds something appropriately ridiculous about the whole thing. At the risk of reading too much into a single gesture, I judged her to be looking at life in a larger perspective.

Catherine, I suspect, knows how later life, with all of its physical trials, is a time for appreciating the rich complexity of existence. Wife of a minister, mother to ten sons and daughters, she has done a lot of living. Her years have taken her through uncountable experiences that have left their mark. Probably she spends much time in her eighties laying hold of this richness that lies in the events of her earlier life and their meaning.

Like so many others, Catherine most likely sees later life as a favorable time for taking care of her soul. She would probably embrace the advice of  the writer Elizabeth Lesser: “We should cherish those moments when we have an awareness of our life being something more than it appears to be.”

This spiritual reality is what I feel strongly every time I get together with friends for meditation. They are older men and women with long experience of the spiritual life and people familiar with the various religious traditions of the world. They have learned how to draw on this wealth to enrich their daily lives.

Members of our prayer group are not strangers to suffering either. One of our number is currently living through a severe test of memory deficits. His courageous response to this problem inspires me and others in the group. The loving support given him by his wife moves us all: just last week he said of her, “She is my memory.”

For these companions of mine, the life of the spirit remains the central reality of later life. That is why we meditate together sitting in silence before a lighted candle and waiting upon the stirrings of the spirit within us. Nothing dramatic happens but we come away from the experience feeling peace, or strength, or interior light.

But spiritual exercises do not always produce such reassuring feelings. Suffering happens there too. Some people, as they attempt to reach for meaning, taste bitterness. The dark night of the soul is not reserved only for the great mystics of the religious traditions. Everyone serious about spiritual life encounters times of inner dryness and temptations to lose heart.

In the face of an uncertain future, we keep returning to hope. People committed to the spiritual life have no special understanding of why we suffer. The “pits” are something we all have to encounter sooner or later. But perhaps it makes some difference how we see our life.

If we envision it as a spiritual journey, our life takes on a meaning that can help place the pits in a perspective. Admittedly, those sufferings remain both unwelcome and not fully understood but at least they can yield some meaning.

As Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite gurus, once wrote: “Aging is the turning of the wheel, the gradual fulfillment of the life cycle in which receiving matures in giving and living makes dying worthwhile. Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be understood, affirmed, and experienced as a process of growth by which the mystery of life is gradually revealed to us.”

Richard Griffin

Some pleasures in life are mostly reserved to those of mature years. Garrison Keillor is one of them.

The host of Prairie Home Companion came to Boston one Saturday in late February to stage one of his radio shows and, the next day, to perform at Sanders Theater across the Charles River.

At the latter site, I saw Keillor, my first sight of one of the greatest humorists America has produced. He came on stage hulking in a tux, his feet encased in red sox and sneakers. Listening to the radio, you would never know how tall he is, six-four or higher. Mop-like, a lock of hair descends over his forehead, threatening to obscure his right eye.

This native Minnesotan, at age 62, has a surprisingly small face. If I emphasizethe man’s looks, it comes from fascination at finally seeing someone after years of only hearing him. Some 65 years ago I had a similar epiphany when I was taken to New York for a live broadcast of the hit show “Information Please.”

My surmise about Keillor’s humor being largely accessible to people of a certain age finds support in a panoramic sweep I made of the Sanders Theater audience. Most people, it seemed, had white or gray hair, with some of the guys having precious little at all.

Garrison Keillor’s view of old age, however, would delight few of its boosters. Here’s some of what he wrote for Time Magazine on the occasion of his 60th birthday: “Even if you're positive-thinking, hopped up on Viagra, and your face has been lifted and stapled to make you look like a feral lemur, nonetheless one day you'll look like something from the lost lagoon and have the sex drive of a potted plant. Nature doesn't care about your golden years, it's aiming for turnover.”

If I wrote like that, I might get high marks for clever style, but would I keep any readers?

Most of the time Keillor restrains such somber thoughts, however. His view of life also has more of the ironic about it than the pessimistic, and he often goes for the sentimental.

Nostalgia, of course, is his chief stock in trade. On the air since 1974, Prairie Home Companion itself is a sophisticated tribute to the old days, the time when he, along with the rest of us, grew up and blundered into knowledge of life.

I remember first listening to it, wondering what kind of show it could be. Who was this fellow from the upper Midwest regaling us with often corny jokes and country music? At times the program sounded as if it was on the level, the real life product of small town America, but one had to wonder.

His characters, like Pastor Ingkvist and Dorothy Myrtle, are convincing types of an earlier society filled with home-grown stereotypes and personal eccentricities. Keillor gets mileage galore out of the mythic population of Lake Wobegone “where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children above average.”

Where would we be in later life without humor like his?  As one of my favorite spiritual writers, Kathleen Fischer, says: “Humor reveals that there is a more in the midst of human life.” It gives us a perspective enabling us to make fun of the ridiculous enterprise that our lives so often appear to be.

Keillor shows himself especially adept at holding up to gentle ridicule the ways of grassroots religion. Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility hits off the Catholic parish nicely, and the Lutheran code of behavior that keeps citizens, both young and old, within the confines of decency gives an entertaining edge to small-town community tales.

What Keillor does best is spin stories. Who can match his timing, his ability to build suspense, the way he can bring out the pathos in a situation without direct statement of it? With his genius for narrative, he reminds us how storytelling is the best way of learning, the ancient art that has most enriched the history of the world.

With the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the visiting entertainer did a riff on some of his favorite poems, including bits and pieces of them in an ongoing monologue accompanied by music. The lines all shared the theme of “gather rosebuds while ye may,” a subversive motif that pervaded poems once innocently recited in junior high school.

Later, he fitted poetic passages between the sections of Ottorino Respighi’s suite “The Birds.” Some doves perched on a telephone wire the poet imagined witnessing his own burial. “Please don’t take him away,” the birds cried, “please don’t take our daddy away.”  

On my way out the door after the Pro Arte concert, I spotted Garrison Keillor standing, head above the crowd, and edged close enough to shake his hand. “Thank you for coming,” I said to this man I consider a cultural icon. “My pleasure, my pleasure,” he rejoindered, these words entirely without trace of his signature irony.

Richard Griffin

Entering my favorite book store, a few weeks ago, whom did I see standing in front of me but George McGovern? He was in town for the Democratic National Convention and had just finished giving a talk about his new book The Essential America. Before leaving the store, he was at that moment free for conversation.

This former senator, now 82, looked natty in a well-tailored suit and seemed in vigorous physical condition. His engaging personality emerged quickly as I introduced myself and told him of my disappointment that my vote for him as president in 1972 had not proven contagious, at least outside of Massachusetts.

About Senator McGovern we were right, of course, as the famous Massachusetts bumper sticker later reminded people from less enlightened states (all 49 of them). “We Told You So” said our boast, as we rubbed it in the face of those who had chosen Nixon.

In doing so, they passed up a man of sterling virtue for one whose vulgarity of brain and heart continues to find expression in the release of further Oval Office tapes. While recently reading some transcripts, I felt renewed dismay. Talking to a fawning Henry Kissinger about the State Department’s policy toward Uganda, President Nixon says: “Screw State! State’s always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them.”

And admonishing Kissinger about receiving the presidents of the Ivy League schools, he uses typical profanity: “SOBs (he did not employ this euphemism) − I wouldn’t have seen them.” Sentiments like these found Nixon’s tongue a familiar launching pad.

Recalling one of the substantive issues on which he made little headway during his campaign for the presidency, I told George McGovern of my appreciation for his having alerted the nation to Watergate. Had Americans taken his warning seriously, we would have saved ourselves from a serious threat to the Constitution− though, of course, such a move would have deprived the nation of some great television.

In a season when candidates’ military service has become an issue, I expressed admiration for McGovern because of his record during World War II. At age 23, he served as pilot of a B-24 bomber that flew 35 missions over Germany in those horrific days. Fortunately he escaped the fate of one of my friends, Ned Handy, who was shot down and did austere time in Stalag 17, the notorious German prison camp.

Incidentally, during his campaign McGovern made no mention of his outstanding military record. In fact, he told Stephen Ambrose, the late historian who wrote about him years after the campaign, that he had never discussed his war experiences at any length while involved in electoral politics. A natural modesty about his accomplishments seems to fit his character.  

This encounter with the man who ran in 1972 made me think above all of the Vietnam War. One of my strongest reasons for hoping against hope for his election to the presidency was confidence that he would stop the tragically ill-conceived United States participation in it. Nixon promised the same thing, but he escalated the conflict and it dragged on for years more, accounting for a total of 40 percent of U.S. casualties.

He preserves his place on my honor roll of fine candidates−Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Al Gore−all of whom were well equipped for the White House, if not perhaps for Mount Rushmore. In voting for each of them (Adlai twice), I managed to amass an inglorious streak of losses, although I am quite prepared to defend my choices, especially that of George McGovern.

George McGovern has worn remarkably well, proving himself a man of character and learning who continues to hold strongly to the solid traditions of this country. The country’s betrayal of such values causes him ongoing regret.

In an interview given to a web agency called BuzzFlash he says about the Iraq war: “It makes me furious to see people like that [Bush, Cheney, Richard Perle] beating their chests on how patriotic they are, waving the flag, glorifying God while young Americans are needlessly being sacrificed in wars that they have devised.”

I cringe at the possibility that the electorate of our nation will once again buy a mess of pottage and entitle the current administration to preside over us for the next four years. Massachusetts already knows better than to vote that way, thus losing for us the chance to see those dubiously entertaining ads that fill the television screens of living rooms in those states judged swingable.

The unexpected personal encounter with McGovern reinforced my view of our current need of leaders who bring to public life high ideals and respect for the best traditions of our country. It takes wisdom to steer a nation through the complexities of modern life and that wisdom is currently in painfully short supply.

Richard Griffin

When Ned Handy heard about the allied invasion of Normandy, 60 years ago this week, it was thanks to a wireless radio that a fellow prisoner had built without the guards catching on. The news produced backslaps and quiet laughter among the captured Americans as half-suppressed joy spread through their barracks.

This happened in the third month of Ned’s captivity in the notorious German prisoner-of-war camp called Stalag 17. A top-turret gunner and engineer on a B-24 bomber, he had been shot down on April 11, 1944 on a raid over northern Germany. Luftwaffe fighter planes knocked out three of the engines, forcing the pilot to limp along with only one rapidly failing engine.

Forced to bail out along with other crew members, Ned landed in a field and was soon captured by farmers and several soldiers. The farmers beat him with tool handles and pieces of wood and might have killed him had it not been for the women who yelled at them to desist. “I’ll remember always the yell of those women,” says Ned now.

Then he was transported, by forced march and by railroad, to Austria where the grim prison camp was located, not far from the Danube River and Vienna.

These harrowing adventures and many others are recounted in Ned’s just- published book, “The Flame Keepers: the True Story of an American Soldier’s Survival Inside Stalag 17.” I found the book fascinating to read and recommend it to everyone interested in World War II and stories of human courage in the face of mortal danger.

I admit having the advantage of friendship with Ned, as a result of frequent workplace contacts when we both worked in the Cambridge city government almost 30 years ago. Strangely enough, I never knew anything about Ned’s wartime experiences at that time and I feel deprived for not having discovered them till now.

My friend will be 82 years old next September, yet this is the first book he has written. For this project, he had the advantage of significant help from his wife, an excellent listener and editor, of whom he says “She has a terrific blue pencil.”

He also benefited much from his co-author, Kemp Battle, a former publisher who has an intense interest in military history. “Kemp’s input on how to tell a story was invaluable,” says Ned. Seeing the book through 12 drafts over a three year period was no easy task, the writers freely admit.

Ned recalls that life in camp was grueling, with food scarce and continual threats from the guards a menace. Until the latter months, Ned’s main activity each day was digging a tunnel under the fence toward the outside. Of course he did not work alone but was the crew chief of a team of other prisoners. Keeping their project secret from the guards required constant vigilance, with the risk of discovery carrying mortal danger.

In general, the treatment given the American prisoners was influenced by the requirements of the Geneva Convention. Ned and his fellow airmen also benefited from the organizing skills of the Americans who had been imprisoned before his group arrived. Acting democratically, they had chosen leaders for barracks, group, and compound, all of whom reported to a senior manager.  Still, the prisoners had to suffer constant deprivation, brutal cold in winter, relentless pressure, and fear of an unknown fate.

About the effect of Stalag 17 on his fellow prisoners of war, Ned says: “If they went in iron, they came out steel.”  That would seem to be the transformation in Ned himself. On entering the prison he was only 21 years old; on his release 13 months later, he himself had been transformed.

The first steps toward that release came in April of 1945 when the guards led the prisoners on a 120-mile hike away from Stalag 17 and the advancing Russian armies. Before linking up with American forces, the group took refuge in a forest and the guards gradually disappeared. One day Ned was able to get away for a long walk in the countryside.

Coming to a beautiful meadow, he sat down and described in a small blue notebook how the prison experience had transformed him interiorly. He did not know how he had survived, by contrast with all the American warriors who had not. “I resolved to try from then on to live, in their honor, a life that would serve others rather than me,” he wrote.

In his early 80s, Ned shows remarkable vigor, his health flourishing and his personal intensity apparently unflagging. Only the hearing in his left ear is diminished, this the result of a pistol whipping by a malevolent Stalag 17 guard.

Of his present life Ned says, “I never think of myself as a senior.” His good health allows him to pass as considerably younger, even to some doctors. He feels ready to take on further responsibility, the next chapter in a life marked, not only by heroism but by dedication and service to others.

Richard Griffin

When friends asked earlier this summer where two other family members and I were going for vacation, I took some glee in answering: Des Moines. Not bothering to disguise, much less suppress, East Coast snobbery, they would almost invariably guffaw and sputter incredulously: Why?

At the risk of violating the unspoken rules governing attitudes of regional superiority, let me confess ─ I like Des Moines. Beyond that, I like the state of Iowa which that city serves as capital.

This I affirm without even being a candidate for president. When I behold prominent Democrats and ambitious Republicans swarming around the cornfields, I reflect on how transient and forced their feelings for Iowa are. Unlike me, they will soon shift their affections to New Hampshire and other early-primary states.

But my enjoyment of Iowa will continue. Vacation days there will continue to provide entertainment of a high order. Every time the sight of this land appears in the airplane window, I feel thankful to be back among the welcoming people who live in middle America.

If this approach seems irrational, let me ground it in two realities. Friendship and fine art are what primarily attract me to Des Moines.

Nick, my friend of some four decades, is a native of that city. As a gracious host, he has the know-how to give his guests an insider’s appreciation of the place. He can tell you all about the city squares and their chief buildings, and escort you to the hidden enclaves where the local nabobs live.

As a former priest of the Catholic diocese there, Nick can also provide the lowdown on the local ecclesiastical situation. Of course, you would have to share my weird tastes to be interested in this kind of news. But, you still might find human interest in some of his tales of local clergy.

While still a seminarian, Nick looked to be in line for some form of preferment. For a time, it looked, for all the world, as if he could be sent to Rome for theological study and later to become a monsignor, or even a bishop. At least, I tell him this.

That situation resulted from him having worked for the then reigning bishop, Edward Daly. When still a schoolboy, Nick worked on the episcopal grounds, ran errands, and served as the bishop’s chauffeur.

That preferment, however, came to a tragic end in 1964 on the tarmac of Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome. There Bishop Daly sat in a Boeing 707 with a priest assistant when it veered off the runway and crashed into an earthmover, killing the two clerics and dozens of the other passengers.

A year later, Nick recalls, the diocese of Des Moines received in the mail a glass eye, a grisly relic of the bishop’s companion.

Besides friendship, opera also attracts me to Des Moines. Again, friends show themselves aghast at my choice of musical venue. My obvious addiction to this art-form seems to them a weak excuse for traveling over almost half the country to hear people sing.

But they do not know about the pleasures provided by the Des Moines Metro Opera Company. After many hearings, I consider it one of the finest regional opera companies in America, well worth the trip.

This year’s performances on three weekend days included Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bizet’s Carmen, and Verdi’s Otello. The company likes to program each summer a contemporary work, a warhorse, and a challenging classic. This season’s trio admirably filled that scheme.

A characteristic feature of DMMO performances is their intimacy. The theater seats only some 500 people, and virtually every seat affords you a fine view of the players. That makes it easy to identify with the action, even when you read the supertitles above the stage.

And after each performance, the singers come to the lobby where they are available for conversation and photo taking. To me, it’s a rare pleasure to talk with people, many of them young and aspiring talents, about their work. We asked Desdemona, for example, about the challenges of singing with her head forced back from the bed almost to the floor while her husband Otello strangled her. Not easy!

By now, Nick has taken me to some twenty operas, all of them worth attending. This guy from Boston has become almost an annual fixture as I absorb the pleasures of seeing a wide array of heroes, heroines, and villains. In imagination, these figures people my inner world as I recall the moments of ecstasy and awe-full tragedy.

No, I have not been to Paris this summer, nor Rome. Admittedly, the cuisine is usually better in both sites than in Des Moines. Friendship and opera, however, make Iowa rank high for me. Yes, I have lost points from the literati back home. But what’s wrong with appearing naïve and simple-minded?

Richard Griffin