The Postscript: Lucky squirrel

My husband, Peter, and I went to our first concert in the park last night.

We brought our folding chairs and ate food from the food trucks. The weather was perfect, and the music was good. But upstaging the band were a pair of juvenile squirrels in the trees overhead, challenging one another to feats of greater and greater daring. I half expected to have an adolescent squirrel land in my lap.

It had been a long day.

We had just come from the funeral for one of Peter’s cousins, who died of ALS. It was a somber occasion, as he was an otherwise healthy man who, until recently, ran marathons and t...