THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE who sent good wishes regarding my father and grandmother. My dad’s at home now, says he feels great and hasn’t needed even a single pain pill.

My grandmother’s doing well, too. She was in the Lakeshore Rehabilitation Hospital in Birmingham. It was a terrific place, really. The rehab was excellent, and the people were extraordinarily nice. However, Lakeshore was originally a sanatorium for TB patients, and in fact it’s the very place where my grandmother’s mother died in 1928, when my grandmother was 14. She remembers going there with her brothers and sisters and seeing her mother wave from a window, since they weren’t allowed to meet in person for fear of infection. (Once her mother went off to the sanatorium, she took charge of raising her four younger siblings). That, plus the absence of any close family nearby, made staying there a bit difficult for her, and I think she’s better off here. The place she’s staying now even has cats, which she likes very much.

And thanks to the people who sent donations, but don’t send them on my account. I don’t need them to pay medical bills and I’d rather you sent any donations to a tsunami-relief charity or something, not to me.