Every morning now, I am watching Kim’s face as it goes through the process of healing itself from the traumatic faceplant that she inflicted on it on Thanksgiving day. The real cause for thanks that day was certainly not the fall or its cause (digestive distress due to her bariatric surgery…now over three years ago) or even the concussion and broken nose that she suffered, but that her ER doctor told her there was nothing…
When I lived in Toronto, Canada for two years, I heard more Canadian colloquialisms than I remember hearing anywhere else. My time in Canada was an interesting few years that was a mixture of how to survive a remote distance existence (the kids were still in the Metro NYC area) and yet I needed to be onsite and resident in Toronto and all the other big cities in Canada (Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, primarily, but…
Way back in 1991 I discovered Utah. I had been to Utah a few years before to ski with a bunch of my gang from my Latin America Division. We had rented a cabin at Sundance, the quirky ski canyon in the lower Wasatch Mountains that was owned by Robert Redford. He named it after his breakout role as the Sundance Kid in the 1969 classic Paul Newman / Robert Redford film, Butch Cassidy and…
The 1989 Academy Award choice for Best Picture was a story of aging, friendship, racism and antisemitism in the socially turbulent era of WWII through the 1970’s. The Deus Ex Machina of the story is Daisy’s (Jessica Tandy) inability to drive safely after she drives her Chrysler into the neighbor’s yard, giving rise to her son Boolie (Dan Ackroyd) hiring Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman) to drive her wherever she needs to go. I have not…
We are approaching a year since we got Buddy. When he came to us he was only a year old, so sort of half grown. He weighed 5.5 pounds and survived on a diet of kibble and some canned dog food that his prior owners preferred. Kim has always prepared meals for our dogs. It is something she likes to do as part of bonding with her dogs. Both Cecil and Betty very much appreciated…
Yesterday while Kim was going in and out of the front door with some holiday decorations, there was a sudden thump sound and she unexpectedly swore audibly. I did the usual, “Everything OK?” lazy man outreach from my chair across the room. When she said, “This thing fell down”, I had no idea what she was talking about so I decided I probably needed to get up to investigate. What had happened was that the…
Like so many of us in this moment, I am still struggling to make sense of the world in this new configuration. For instance, we spent the last two years and more, watching all the literal trials and tribulations around the indictments and even a few convictions of Donald Trump, the man who is the president-elect of the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the one that has the largest economy and represents…
When you get to my stage of life you spend a lot of time thinking about seasons. I watched a nice movie the other day called The Last Rifleman, starring Pierce Brosnan as the last member of the Royal Ulster Rifles Regiment from Northern Ireland that landed in Normandy on Sword Beach in 1944. After his wife’s death, he “escapes” from his managed care facility to travel by car, bus, train and ferry to get…
I literally just finished my piece titled Getting Too Damn Hard about the changes imminent to the American home ownership dream. Aging and the path forward is on my mind, as it is to varying degrees with almost everyone I know and encounter. I have a hard time taking it too seriously when a 30-year old Stretch-U kinesiologist tugging at my edema-prone ankle talks about the woes of getting older, but others more of my…
I am quickly coming to the conclusion that it is simply getting too damn hard to pursue the American Dream in the way in which we have all grown up to know it. What I am talking about is independent, free-standing home ownership. There are many reasons for this conclusion, but I will start with one and ramble from there. This Dream is predicated on what used to be one of the key differentiators about…