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 every US college campus. By 1976, […]
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 pediatrician said to have it checked again in a […]
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 road to get there. It took several years to finish […]
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 diagnosed with dementia and I 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 should […]
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 of a senior living community near the […]
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. Literally. I […]
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 […]