On Becoming Seventy-Seven
I dunno why, but I’d long dreaded the day, August 10, 2013 when I was to become seventy and officially old. I had long ago overcome the ignominy of taking the two dollar senior citizen discount at the movie theatre, and the snide, “…for a man of your age” that I was starting to get far too frequently. I’d even avoided taking a punch at the sales clerks who had begun to refer to me patronizingly as “young man” or, worse yet, “young fellow”. I had also begun to say with weak, gallows humor that, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore” as a way of signaling that my time was growing ever...On Aging
I posted on September 1, 2009 a somewhat whimsical piece titled “Getting Old is Not For Sissies”. Read it again if you like, but a short summary is that I was whinning about the things I could do in my youth that are now far out of reach, and the subtle, and not so subtle, changes in the landscape of my body. Every thing I said then, I double down on now, three years later…and more. No, I’m not going to give you an itemized list of the things that are going awhack in my physiology, but I will tell you that the pace is accelerating. I know there’s a word in the English language that means “to accelerate at an accelerating...Time is of the Essence
I was on a summer reading binge in my 12th summer (I was determined to win first place in the Bookworm Club at the local library) when I ran across a short book about a boy who’s father was a time and motion expert. “How keen is that”, I thought. A father who studied time. Unfortunately the father had difficulty separating his work life from his home life, as many of us do. He insisted on applying his expertise to achieving time efficiency in all individual and family tasks. For example, he was convinced that one of the great time wasters was inefficiently toweling off after the daily bath or shower. You probably have had those thoughts too. So he made...