Near the end of the month my big sister sometimes sends me a friendly reminder: time for another Dad-check. A Dad-check is my contribution to a family fund that supports my father, who’s 95. I wish I could say that my sibs and I wrote our Dad-checks in a spirit of gratitude for all that
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I’m having trouble getting started. “Give me a snappy lead,” my editors have urged for years. “Your first sentence should yank the reader right into the story.” But when that story is your own obituary, coming up with that clever, catchy, come-hither opening line is daunting. On the plus side, I’m working with what we
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“Burger Bash” screamed the banner in front of Sonora’s Perko’s restaurant. The new McDonald’s at Standard suddenly doubled the Tuolumne County availability of Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese (750 calories before you get to the XXL fries and the two-gallon Coke). Then Jimmy Buffett’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise” blared over an oldies station: “I like mine
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As this column goes to press, genealogists are getting a big boost. The long-awaited 1940 U.S. Census became available on April 1. This is great for those who have had a difficult time finding family members who lived during that time. For privacy reasons, later censuses are not yet released. The 1950 census is expected
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To do this job, says Bob Anderson, ‘You gotta be a little horsey.’

I used to envy people who could take that sentimental journey back to the old home place. You know, sleep in your old room with the sports trophies still on the shelves and the Pink Floyd posters still on the walls. Hang out in the backyard and reminisce about epic Wiffle Ball games or the
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Ol’ Leadfoot has surrendered his car key. My dad got into a little fender bender down in Dallas recently and knew at last, the way an aging slugger who whiffs at a pitch he used to wallop into the cheap seats knows, that it was time to call it quits. I tried to cheer him
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I began to get the question as soon as I turned 65: “What’s on your bucket list?” Life expectancy tables say I have less than two decades left before I shuffle off. So friends are wondering whether I want to skydive, cliff dive, scuba dive or dive headlong into any other death-defying, irrational pursuits befitting
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I’m 67, a widower, father and grandfather and a survivor of shingles, bad knees, periodontal disaster, hypertension and cancer, not to mention exposure to other dangers of my age and era from the Vietnam War to LSD to homophobia, the latter only because I choose to cruise these hills in the pink Miata that I
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It’s a great workout, but at my age, I can’t help picturing myself gasping, collapsing and being hauled, half-frozen and ghastly gray, to the ER, where they would know what happened just by looking at me: another middle-aged, snow-shoveling heart-attack victim.