This morning, thinking again about a lovely event I attended last week, I realized another perk of living a long life: you get to see your children retire. You might even get to sit and listen while people you don’t know talk about them and their accomplishments. You get to listen to them as […]
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Four birds sat in a tree. Three of them decided to fly. How many were left in the tree? (A small math problem taken from a Lebanese friend’s fb page this morning.) But you wanted to hear about that storm in Texas. It was 1985. Our friend Maria Daoud had come home with us […]
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Monday had a special feeling from the beginning. This was the day we were getting vaccinated, all of us here, residents and staff, except for the energetic young mother who cleans my apartment on Tuesdays and Charlie down the hall who limps every step of the miles he walks up and down the halls every […]
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What You May Learn If you were compulsive before you came, you will be compulsive when you open your suitcases in the retirement center. Determination to make these rooms feel like home instead of a hotel will lead to the recurrence of the back pain that has already turned you into a drug addict. The […]
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One thing some of us have more of because of the COVID-19 pandemic is time to think. And the daily news provides us with ample substance for thought. Thus I have been thinking about many scattered topics. Some of them relate to things I said to myself (and confessed in my book) […]
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I have a question: is there anybody out there for whom 2020 is the year you dreamed of? Or planned for? Or, ok. . .just expected? I don’t mean to be silly or to rub your face in your disappointment, but I just want to establish that I am not the only one who is […]
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Two or three days ago I got a note from someone who had just finished reading Helping Yourself Grow Old. She wrote: “What you said about dealing with old age, works too in dealing with a pandemic.” Really? I guess I hadn’t thought of that. But it’s reasonable, because old age is definitely a pandemic. […]
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Two weeks ago everything was coming up roses for me and my new book. Though the existence of a new virus for which the world was ill-prepared had shown its ugly face in Seattle, I was getting on an airplane headed for the far side of the country, excited about every author’s dream—a book tour. […]
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People who have read Helping Yourself Grow Old are already asking if I am working on a sequel. The answer is that I can’t even think about another book, because I am too busy trying to make this one fly. But the other day I posted on facebook, feeling a little bold and saying so, […]
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