Notes From A Bear's Journey

     When you first read that title you may be thinking of the wild and fractured history of MGM's (now an Amazon company) Leo the Lion which roared before every movie presentation (the new 3-D version is a pretty cool update to our times).  And then you may reflect on that semi-macho, semi-casual greeting often used by guys with a quick nod of the head as in "hey man."  But altering that title was somewhat of a lure by me, a wordplay of sorts to pull you into that popular 70s song by Australian singer Helen Reddy: I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar  which became a bit of a rallying cry for the feminist movement (think  Gloria Steinhem ) perhaps because the next line of the song was: In numbers too big to ignore.  Women had arrived   on the scene.  But despite the inroads of those times (think civil rights), women have yet to achieve income equality with men; breaking that  glass-ceiling has proved to be quite difficult with little mor...

      Baby again, he told my brother, this on reaching the age of 98.  The higher dependence on others, the bodily controls diminished, the balance and senses destined to continue their decline as well.  And nowhere was this similar scenario more evident than in the ending of the  book  by Steve Gleason, the star NFL player who came down with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and painstakingly wrote his life story down letter by letter using only an eye-recognition program .  Imagine yourself "talking" but only capable of doing that at 1/10 your normal speed because you have to "type" each letter of a single word, add a space, then type another word, a slow version of texting on your phone with one finger (Gleason long ago lost the ability to physically talk --or breathe-- on his own).  But by the end of the book, his only means left of communicating, his eyes, were now being affected.  He could no longer blink (a serious problem which req...