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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...