Welcome to Dynamic Aging 4 Life Magazine!

We’re a community of people who are changing the paradigm of aging by challenging the stereotypes of aging by sharing TRUE stories about aging dynamically, to explore what’s possible, inspire one another and empower by example.

Writing My Way Home

Writing My Way Home

I was already in my sixties when I first began to write my memoir The Coconut Latitudes. The last of my closest family members had died and I was just beginning to consider (and worry about) my own mind failing me as I aged, and whether our family story would die with...

read more
Forgiveness and Gratitude

Forgiveness and Gratitude

After losing my beloved husband of 65 years in 2016, I remained in our beautiful home overlooking Rose City Golf Course in Northeast Portland. Our six children, their spouses and children – and even their children – had loved this home for 31 years, too. Why leave,...

read more
You Can’t Make New Old Friends

You Can’t Make New Old Friends

I retired in 2020. It had been six months since the death of my first husband, the father of my children, and eight months since I lost my husband. I had to admit a lot of changes had taken place and retirement was one more big adjustment. I told myself I didn’t need...

read more
Ranger’s Walk Across America

Ranger’s Walk Across America

I joined Ranger Kielak for a 9-mile walk yesterday in the final week of his Walk Across America to raise money for charity. Ranger’s journey started in March 2024 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with a goal of walking 3,000 miles through 10 states to raise $100K for...

read more
Why Don Fay Writes Senryus

Why Don Fay Writes Senryus

People ask what inspires the senryus that I write. Not with humility, but with the truth, my senryus are to some extent inspired by a basic ineptitude that I have. My high school English teacher graded my essays and creative writing with two grades: one for content...

read more
The Time to Say Yes

The Time to Say Yes

Fourteen years into retirement and I just figured out I’m allergic to a firm, structured, committed schedule. I’m in awe of my retired friends my age who volunteer on the same day at the same place for 10-plus years or take the same fitness class on the same day each...

read more
Pushing the Envelope

Pushing the Envelope

This May I turned 86 and my list of things I want to BE, DO and HAVE continues to grow. I guess I thought someday the list would dwindle or disappear. But it hasn’t. My curiosity keeps pushing the envelope to discover what is possible – physically, mentally,...

read more
My Body, Myself

My Body, Myself

When I graduated from high school in 1970, the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” hit the shelves and caused an instant sensation. Young women like myself, who up until then had only brief and whispered discussions about sex, could read in bold print and see explicit photos...

read more
A Lifetime of Protecting Dolphins

A Lifetime of Protecting Dolphins

As a child, I was always fascinated by the ocean and marine life, especially whales and dolphins. I grew up in Walnut Creek, CA, a few hours from the coast. My mother shared her love for the ocean and made sure her children spent lots of time at the beach. Weekends...

read more

Editors’ Notebook

Library Serendipity

The NY Times Book Review recently featured what it called, The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. That’s so far, of course. There’s a lot of century left. But as well read as I feel I am, I noted I had read just a fraction of the 100 deemed “best.”

Odd bodkin, I thought. Scanning the enthusiastic descriptions by writers, critics and book lovers of the selected tomes I puzzled over why I hadn’t read more. I certainly have had time over a lifetime of reading, and especially since retirement.

Then it dawned on me.

I’m a peruser of library shelves. The vast majority of books I read come regularly from looking at the latest acquisitions at libraries. Some books come my way via recommendations from amigos, too. But it’s all serendipity. Traditional book reviews – often long-winded and/or written in archly academic language rarely grab me. I need to read a few pages of a book to get interested.

This often results in walking out of the library hefting a half-dozen books – or more. Not all get read fully. But each has intrigued me sufficiently to take it home for a closer look. I recently checked out six books including the The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde’s classic was on the new book shelf because it’s a local book group’s selection for this month. After 10 pages of difficult reading, it went into the return-to-the-library pile. Then I picked up Generative Artificial Intelligence: What everyone needs to know.

And the other four? Self Defense for Dummies, The Horse: A galloping history of humanity, My Mamma, Cass: A memoir (by Cass Elliot’s daughter) and Keeping The Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation (a book about the Scopes Trial).

It’s undoubtedly a lot easier to look online for the New York Times book lists, and Goodreads, and Amazon books. But getting up and out of the house, making a destination with the library, having spontaneous conversations with librarians and library users are all part of the curiosity muscle we can exercise in the world of Dynamic Aging.
Especially since my reading and interests are eclectic, which is why it’s so much fun scanning the library shelves. A quick look at the artificial intelligence book already gave me several nuggets of useful information about AI. Ditto for the self-defense tome. The Scopes Trial book is a gold mine, describing the struggle between science and religion from a century ago. It’s a lot like what’s happening in the U.S. today. I am having trouble putting it down, as I weigh whether it’s time to drop in at the library again today.

Maybe I’ll see you there?

by Michael J. Fitzgerald

More Stories

Dragon Boat Paddling: Life After Alzheimer’s Caregiving

I am a 92-year-old competitive dragon-boat paddler living with my partner Anne Clark, 81, in a retirement community with a view of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. Anne and I are members of the Portland Golden Dragons paddling team that practices on the river...

Turning Down the Volume

When I was growing up, I loved language. I remember reading James Herriot and how beautifully he described the life of a veterinarian. And A Tale of Two Cities in the 9th grade launched my love of great literature. When I reached college, my love of writing and...

9260 Miles From Home

Neighbors, friends, and even the mailman ask me why I'm traveling 9,260 miles from home this winter, enduring at least, if lucky, a 22-hour flight followed by a grueling five-hour car ride to travel the last 100 miles to the village where I stay in Bali, Indonesia....

The Day A Shark Spared My Life

My first thought as I awake each morning is often “I wonder how the surf is today?” At 45, I was late to start surfing but was hooked the moment I took my first wave. I feel lucky that I live in Los Osos on the Central California Coast, close to the ocean and just a...

My Journey to Find a Spiritual Teacher

I did not move to Thailand in 2005 looking for a spiritual teacher. It simply happened. In the summer of 2005, my husband, 13-year-old son, and I relocated from our suburban home in Northern California to Bangkok for my husband’s job. Although excited to be living in...

Art Encounters Age

It’s rather common knowledge that past age 90 or even before, one is in the realm of “patch up.” This includes eating and drinking more carefully, and dealing with various infirmities that seem to clock in regularly with age. I’m in that category at 96+ but besting it...

Just Ask

I have had a fulfilling career as a speech and language pathologist for the past 40 plus years. As my husband climbed the corporate ladder and our family moved around the country to meet opportunities for him, I was always able to continue to follow my passion and...

Saved By The Whisper of My Heart

I remember like it was yesterday, but it was 46 years ago. At 13 years old, I watched my 39-year-old mother die of a heart attack. Even at that age, I heard from someone, somewhere, that women’s symptoms present differently than men when having a heart attack. I...

Staying Clear of the Slippery Slope

My father died at 69 of a heart attack. Rumor has it his father also died at 69 of a heart attack. When I turned 69, I worried each time I had the slightest chest pain. When I turned 70 and didn't die, I celebrated by getting a tattoo and have gotten another each year...

I Turned Old – Overnight

I went to bed on St Patrick's Day 2023 in a rosy glow after spending the evening with good friends. When I woke up the next morning, I thought I was drunk. I couldn't walk straight, my hearing was off, and as I discovered when I drove my car, my thinking was off....

The Miracle of Reconnecting

When I retired in 2020 at 70, I began a campaign to reach back in time to try to reconnect with people who had been important to me earlier in my life. I sent out 10 letters to people who had touched my heart but with whom I had lost contact along the way. Since we...

Finding My Purpose in Retirement

Retirement is one of the hardest jobs I’ve had. I’ve had a lifetime of being extremely productive and busy. My career path, starting in the 70s, was an explosive rise to the top. I made a ‘how-to’ film in college: “How to Have an Orgasm,” which was distributed to...

Dynamic Aging with Osteoporosis

I still feel about 42, even though it’s been around a decade and a half since I was that age. I’ve loved every year so far, but in my 40’s I felt like I’d grown into my skin, my brain and my sense of self. I’ve always remembered an essay by Carol Shields in her...

Sound Aging

The first time I noticed it was hard to hear was in 10th grade. Voices started sounding fuzzy, and sometimes I couldn’t understand teachers when they faced the blackboard. A screening test showed mild hearing loss, and given I had measles as a young child, the...

The Joy of Collaboration

Like many of us, I experienced several losses at the beginning of Covid which made the isolation especially hard to deal with. Professionally, I was a Marriage and Family Therapist and Clinical Art Therapist in private practice for over 20 years. It wasn’t an easy...

For the Love of Pat

I don’t know what the odds are of a couple to actually have a marriage that really works. My wife, Pat, and I were married for 68 years before she died earlier this year from COVID-related issues. The last three or four years were more difficult because she was...

Lost and Found

In April 2023, two months shy of my 87th birthday, I called a friend to tell her where I was hiking and then drove to the trailhead. On a lovely spring morning, I started up a familiar trail that was covered in snow. Still, I made my way up the steep climb to the top,...

One Degree Hotter

At age 63, when most of my friends were retired or actively planning to do so, I enrolled in a three-year doctoral program. It was a 25 hour-a-week gig on top of my full-time job, only worse. It was an unpaid gig and it would drain my bank account at a time when I...

Stubborn

If someone had suggested, even two years ago, that I would be choosing to live in the independent living portion of a senior community, I would have thought, “Well, they obviously don’t know me!” New Year’s Eve 2022 I moved into a lovely apartment on the third floor...

Never Too Old to be a Krank

One of the best Christmases I ever had was when I was eleven years old. I opened the sliding doors and saw two bicycles, one for me and one for my brother. Now I could "ride bikes" with friends and get a job as a paperboy. And I have never stopped riding since....

Finding My Tribe

I looked around at the group of cyclists shivering in a parking lot at 8 a.m. on a chilly fall Saturday in Orinda, CA. “What the hell was I doing here?” I asked myself. I wasn’t a cyclist, but I had agreed to join my friend Val to train for a week-long bike ride to...

My Parkinson’s Journey

I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease at 62. By that point in life I’d become convinced of the close brain-body connection, and what may possibly bypass it. Thirty-eight years before this diagnosis, I had a significant experience one evening while meditating: I was...

Moving Down the Road

After a lifetime of dreaming, a couple years of scheming and two weeks of intense searching, my wife Christina and I bought our Winnebago Travato this spring. It’s a beaut. A shiny gray 2022 Class B recreation vehicle with low miles in very good condition. After a few...

Reprioritizing Life After A COVID ‘Hard Stop’

It had been a crazy, relentless last few weeks in California. I was ramping up my coaching business, teaching virtual fitness classes, hiking daily, taking multiple dog walks, all wedged in with lunches, dinners and visits with family and friends. On Friday night we...