“Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.” Joan Didion, Blue Nights My wife and I have grown quite comfortable in discussing death—both in the abstract and in our particular cases. I highly recommend the advantages of becoming conversant about death.   It’s going to happen whether or not we talk about it in advance. We have experienced death and, like all others of our generation, we are hearing of death’s inexorable approach toward more and more friends and family.  The Way of Zen is ..read more

This post is by my wife, Susan Haworth, from her blog at CambiosCoaching.com   I recently had dinner with someone twenty years my junior who used the phrase senior moment to describe an incident where her memory failed her. This is a phrase I don’t use so I was both amused and annoyed that someone barely entitled to her AARP membership would use such an expression. What intrigued me was the acceptability of making such a stereotypical comment. I dare say, I wouldn’t say to a friend of color that I was running on CP time. The difference, of course, is that I am not and will never be a per ..read more

My wife and recently returned from a road-trip to our former hometown where several of the people we visited were our age or older (we are both in our 70’s).  We both noted afterwards how frequently we heard our friends say something like, “Our children think we are too old to do such and such, ” or “My daughter think I’m old enough that I should consider doing such and such.”  When does advice become abuse? We asked ourselves, at what point does this kind of usually well-meaning advice by children towards their elderly parents be a form of over-controlling or bullying?  Wherea ..read more

Do You Lie About Alcohol? At my annual physical for many years I had essentially the same conversation about alcohol with my doctor. Doctor:  Steve, how much alcohol would you say you drink? Steve: [pause] Oh maybe 2-3 drinks a day, 4-5 days a week. Doctor: You really should  consider cutting that back some. Steve: OK. I will. I promise. (Sure thing, doctor) A truthful answer would have been: Steve: 4-5 drinks a day, 7 days a week. (That’s two times what I admitted to) Doctor: You really need to cut way back, or even abstain altogether.  You’re consuming a very harmful amount o ..read more

May 12, 2021.  Exactly two months ago I quit drinking (alcohol, if it needs to be specified).  More on my decision to quit drinking and how I went about doing it will be grist for my next post.  Here I’ll summarize my attempts to research alcohol consumption in the US, especially by boomers. I wanted to find out if my drinking put me in a lonely class of boomers who drink too much.   It turns out I was not the only Baby Boomer who was consuming too much alcohol too frequently–who was suffering, in other words, from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD).  [I note at the outs ..read more

March 5, 2021. Alameda, CA.  As we baby boomers age, it is time for us to equip ourselves to deal with death.  We have all experienced death in one form or another–parents and other relatives, friends, associates, famous people….and pets.  My wife and I marked the second anniversary of our dear pet Yoko’s death today.  It was remarkable to me that on the day of our commemoration, a number of others connected with me, purely coincidentally, with inspirational messages about the deep impacts of deaths, or impending deaths, of pets.  I had been planning a post about the ..read more

I am not the only elder baby boomer to attempt to do some writing at this stage of my life. I assume I am also not the first to discover the dastardly impact of “writer’s block.”  I have started three separate posts since my last published piece nearly 6 months ago. In no case did I make it to the “publish” key.                             I discovered in the case of my writer’s block, that the more time that passed, the more impenetrable the block became; the ..read more

It’s been nearly a month since my last post.  Did you miss me?  I suppose I could say I was side-tracked by the continuing pandemic, the racial and political mayhem encircling us, or the calamitous outbreak of wildfires in our neighborhood here in the Bay Area of Northern California.  But none of that would be true. In fact, the reason I haven’t posted in so long is because of good old-fashioned writer’s block.  I had been planning to write about neurogenesis and synaptogenesis (the ability of the human brain to grow new communication channels and ways of doing things).&nb ..read more

For eliminating the scourges of racism, misogyny, nationalism and materialism, and for making our institutions of governance, education, the economy, and religion fundamentally more beneficial to the public:  MEN, STEP DOWN! Thought Experiment Albert Einstein unraveled the theory of relativity as a brilliant thought experiment, not experimentally in a high-tech lab utilizing the scientific method.  So, in the spirit of Einstein, I ask you to seriously engage in the following thought experiment:  Imagine how the world would be different if men  (mostly White) were no longer ..read more

Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) at the Edmund Pettus Bridge On July 17, the US lost Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), one of the real giants in the American Civil Rights Movement for 60 years.  As a young man, Lewis stood fiercely at the fulcrum of the strife between those demanding equal rights for all Americans and those who fought tooth and nail to preserve a status quo in which White privelege would extend its 350 years of ascendency in this country. A large number of us stood mute, believeing we were not racist while our silence preserved the centuries-old racist structures. Civil Rights ..read more