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.

Here’s a definition of retirement that may not be what most of us envision when we contemplate the blessed moment when we turn in our employee ID badges: Bowing out of the workforce means having the time to take care of your aging parents. This is not my situation, but it is, thank goodness, my
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When life threw me an emotional punch, trips to the barn were sure cures. Still are. Horses, I’ve learned, can be damned good therapists.

In keeping with my specialty of Adventures in Aging, and inasmuch as our Friends and Neighbors theme this time is Love After 50, which of course translates to Sex After 50, which is naughty, I’ll tell you about my nasty teeth. They’re rattling around in a jar in my bathroom, all 16 of them, discolored,
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It was my dad on the line, obviously distraught. He thought Mom might be having a stroke. I asked if he had called Simone, the woman from the elder-care service we had contracted with last year. He hadn’t thought of Simone. He thought of me. I told him I’d get there as soon as I
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My mother introduced me to the ukulele. I think I was 7 or 8. I  can still see her leaning against the kitchen counter in our house on  Newport Street in Denver. A Chesterfield smolders in an ashtray. She’s strumming her ukulele, waiting for the soft-boiled eggs to cook. It was years before I realized
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In the long-ago days when I could stay up past midnight, I once found myself on the wrong side of the dead-bolted door of a West Philadelphia row house at 1:30 in the morning. I started pounding. The door shook. The house shook. Either the door or my hand was going to break, but I
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The result of this ambivalence about work is a culture where people both complain and boast about how hard their noses are pressed to the grindstone.