The current economy results from many factors, the most significant of which is the impact of the closures in March due to COVID-19. While the economic recovery sputters along, Americans are differentially impacted, with working mothers and Black Americans falling significantly behind. Of the over one million Americans who stopped working or even looking in…
Category: Aging
Friendship While Quarantined
These months have passed quite slowly. For the longest time, I kept thinking I had stepped into another plane of the universe, as in the movie Contact. Perhaps if I looked closely enough I could find the wormhole to return to pre-March 14, 2020. What didn’t happened was actually a life-changing happening. The quarantine extended…
Boomers Unite
Up until a week ago, I had not even given much consideration to my age or any societal implications of my health. Being active has been a choice many Boomers made as much for enduring youthful delusion as for a healthy lifestyle choice. Then, boom – the Boomers became the “elderly” and in some countries…
Are You Afraid to Die?
Today while participating informally in the church coffee hour, I was waiting in a short line for the regular coffee (our church attendance was only 44 today as it was pouring rain and windy), two gentlemen were chatting. One of them turned to include me in their conversation and opened with a real conversation stopper.…
Bus Station Musings
In a moment of despair, floating through the shadows of self-doubt and mental emptiness, I remembered childhood bus trips to the City. At that time, exploring the world, I was freed from the emptiness of waiting at home, reading in my cardboard refrigerator box, caring for action but enduring the sluggishness of an unstructured summer…
Death of a Child, No Matter the Age
My son-in-law, Simon, disappeared on August 9. While he and my daughter were divorced, he was the father of our very first grandchild and he remained always in our thoughts, if not in our lives that frequently. It has been an exasperating and frightening time as we all grappled with the why of his disappearance. …
The Clock
Many years ago, maybe in the early 1990s, I self-gifted an oak, chiming clock to match my small home office suite. I have cherished this clock for many years, packing it carefully through three moves since that time. Several months ago, the tic toc pendulum continued to move like a metronome, but the hands of…
Verdant
Each morning the omnipresent email nag delivers the “Word for the Day.” Since the pursuit of learning is a lifelong endeavor and to preserve cognitive function, with a coffee cleared head, I read the word, commit it to memory, and use in a sentence to ensure it remains in my central brain-data repository. Today’s word…
Insomnia
It’s late. I don’t want to check because it will make me nervous. I have suffered from insomnia since I was 7 years old. Once one is out of elementary school, this is a useful trait. I could study well into the night. I was able to read many books, mostly for entertainment. As an adult,…
King Lear’s Message: Aging and Children
Raising children, taking care of aging parents, continuing professional education, working in high-level administration of an agency…all have given way to retirement and relocation. Living at the beach has provided beautiful sunrises and sunsets best enjoyed with strong drink. My three children are successful professionals and I have two wonderful grandchildren, one on each coast.…
