Ellen Finstein

Updated June 2005:

I hate to admit it, but my husband Mike and I are still living on this Godforsaken island. However, I have been known to tell people we live about 15 miles or so south of Bridgeport, rather than 50 miles east of Manhattan. Mike's still a mortgage banker, and although I remain a writer at heart I'm no longer in the workforce. Has its ups and downs, but it sure makes Sharon-area trips a lot easier to schedule.

Reconnecting with old friends like Ellen Wolfson Abelson, Joni Baker Primack, Ronna LaPato Collins, Vicki Cooper Mengele, and of course, becoming once again the last third of the perennial homeroom trio, Myra FINE Sprince, Linda FINER Sherman and Ellen FINSTEIN Levine, has been fantastic. And getting to know other, very special people like Ellen Titelbaum Barman, whom I didn't know very well at all at SHS, has also enriched my life. Mike is actually learning who's who, which is quite a task, and he can even find his way around the area, at least in the daytime.

Over the past couple of years Mike and I have become quite well-known to many in the local medical community, but we're both still here to tell about it. Surviving illness changes your priorities. We go to the nearby, west-facing beach on Long Island Sound to watch the sun set most evenings. We've gone back to our week right on the water in Dennisport, which we had given up when college expenses loomed large, and we've joined the Fenway Park brigade -- four games in 2004, three in 2005, including one against the Evil Empire. I'll always be a Yankee, but NOT one of THOSE Yankees.

The eldest and youngest of our three daughters, now 24 and 21, will graduate from their respective colleges next spring; the middle child (and is she ever...) is 22, finished college this past May and is working and living in Manhattan. No grandchildren, no one married, only one with a boyfriend on the horizon -- but we do have a grand-cat. Hey, you take what you can get.