I turned 63 this year. How can this be? In my mind, I’m perpetually 30. When I was 30, my innocent look and ageless skin meant I’d still get carded. I was living like a free spirit—taking weird jobs…standing buck naked in the middle of a room full of clothed people. Really. My joke to myself was that every morning…
What does the concept of “home” really mean to us? Does it mainly refer to a place that gives us a feeling of utmost security in our surroundings? And, whatever it might mean, as we age, is it possible to transfer our sense of home to another spot on the map? In my mother’s case, circumstances are forcing her to…
I used to love listening to my grandmother talk. Raised in Ohio but a Southerner for the bulk of her adult life, she had a quirky accent. When she came to visit us in New York, my younger brother and I would jump onto her bed every morning and demand that she read to us. This gave us more time…
I’m at one end of the couch, my 88-year-old father at the other in the living room of his condo in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We could easily pass for strangers, but not because of our limited contact since he moved here from New Jersey 28 years ago. Encroaching dementia has estranged my father from me as well as from himself.…
I didn’t start doing crossword puzzles because I thought they would provide long-lasting benefits for my brain. They were simply fun to do, especially on the train during my daily commute to work. Completing a puzzle as I rolled into Grand Central Station set a positive tone for me. No matter what happened that day, at least I had one…
When I arrive at my job, several people run to the door to hug me. During each day, at least one person falls out of her chair, someone bursts into tears, and several people fail to complete their assignments. My co-workers drop food on the carpet, flip upside down into headstands, and make fart jokes. Half of them interrupt me…
For a long time, neuroscientists have regarded video games as a form of brain candy. Played in excess, they were thought to erode short-term memory and attention span, and lead to other kinds of mental decay. And it’s been well documented that multitaskers—particularly older multitaskers—perform worse on cognitive tasks than those who live by the old Zen adage of “eat…
With all the warnings about hot flashes, wrinkles, decreased libido, age spots, and so on and so on, nobody ever tells you about the possible fringe benefits of menopause. I don’t recall reading anywhere about the sudden transformation that I experienced when my ovaries halted production. I’d been painfully shy my whole life—I always had a few close friends, but…
On the day my father died, my grandmother disowned me. I guess her grandchildren were too painful a reminder of her lost son. I was only 14, too devastated to care. As the years passed, though, I did begin to care and to find it unfair that she could just dismiss us from her life. At 23, I walked up…
