Stories to tell.

BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, WE'LL all have arrived in the year 2000 Like me, you probably will have faced the media's onslaught of retrospectives; the best and worst of the past year, century, millennium will have all flashed before you--like it or not. As interesting as that sort of fare can be, we decided at Contemporary to celebrate the end of an era in a simpler, we hope less predictable, way: On our end page, we launch Portrait, a new regular feature in the magazine that will profile the people at the heart of the business of long term care, the residents themselves. Who are they? Who were they? What do they have to say to us about living--or, perhaps, dying? We'll only be able to spotlight 12 over the course of the year (one in each issue), and the profiles will be concise. Still, we're excited about what we might learn. Though not all of our subjects will be elderly, many will be. Who better to lend perspective on where we've been and the progression of time?

For this issue, we sought out a centenarian. From among more than 300 nominees, we chose an adventurous woman from Minnesota. Ann Novey, 105, set off to cruise the Nile and climb pyramids at the age of 96, her nominators noted. She roamed as a child on Oklahoma's first fruit farm, managed as a single mom when few were, and danced her way through the big band era. She still wears rhinestone sweaters.

Though we don't have the opportunity to get to know well those we profile, the series brings to mind for me the phenomenon of Tuesdays with Morrie. The unexpected best seller--now on The New York Times list for more than two years--tells the true story of sportswriter Mitch Albom and his visits with his dying college professor Morrie Schwartz. "People used to come up to me in the airport and ask how the Pistons were going to do; now they tell me a story about their father, their grandfather, their kids," said Albom in a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, who turned the book into a television movie that aired early in December. "Everybody in every crowd has a story." Like the many who nominated the men and women they know for our Portrait section, we're likely to be touched by residents' stories we take the time to hear.

You'll find a resident's tale of a different sort on page 32 in our cover story, the second in our "day in the life" series of people living and working in long term care. This resident profile is rooted in the present, and it's telling not only about one individual but also about what's working and what's not in our nation's nursing homes.

Yvonne Parsons Executive editor ([e-mail])