Monday:  

Oh Freedom!

You wake up and begin reading—leisurely!—what passes, in the third decade of the 21st century, for a newspaper: that Krugman-plus-Spelling Bee digital amalgam much talked about by your already retired friends: Hmm … the government is worrying now about “forever chemicals”? Alright, I now have time to take the time to find out what the hell these “forever chemicals” are!

Drink your coffee. Damn, savor your coffee. And revel in the absence of that feeling that has been with you since they started assigning homework in second grade: that feeling that there is something you have to do that you do not want to do.

It’s gone….

I’ve been given a great gift, and now I’m trying to figure out how to unwrap it.

I met with the cardiologist the other day, exactly three months after I had an almost-fatal heart attack. He told me, again, how very close I had come to not making it. And he told me as well that if I had gotten to the ER even five minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have made it. And then he added, maybe for the first time, or maybe it was the first time I really listened, that the doctors who feverishly worked on me after I got to the ER thought at several instances I wasn’t going to make it.  

But then, in a reasonably quick segue, the cardiologist began telling me how very good I am doing now, 90 days out….

Click here for video

One of several experiments in “idea videos” by Mitchell Stephens on this site. See also a video of ideas in a very different style by Eiko Otake, John R. Killacky, and Brian Stevenson.

It has, I am well aware, a lousy reputation.

      It is not just that the last minute tends to be frantic; it’s that it often gives birth to the half-assed, if not the wholly inadequate.

      And, yes, I also realize that people my age—a particularly advanced one, as ages go—are supposed to have learned, if nothing else, that putting off something, something unpleasant, has a way of poisoning the entire period of procrastination with that anticipated unpleasantness.

      So—on this day, April 15, Tax Day—I want to announce…that….

Judy and I have been with our internist Mitch for more than 30 years—hell, we shot all three of his sons’ bar mitzvahs—and Mitch and his wife Susan now are grandparents.

Still, it came as a shock a few weeks ago, after Judy and I each had had our annual physicals, to hear Mitch say he was going to retire in the fall.

Certainly, he was entitled. He is about to turn 70 (though he’ll always be a kid to us) and would be leaving (one assumes comfortably) the thriving multi-physician practice that he and his partners had built on K Street in downtown Washington.

“What are you going to do now?” Judy asked….

Twenty-eight years ago, I had spinal cord surgery to remove a tumor at C2 that left me with Brown Séquard syndrome. My right side has no sense of touch or temperature. My left lost proprioception. I have no kinesthetic connection to the ground. 

After six weeks in the hospital, I was sent home in a wheelchair….

We all know we should get enough sleep. But as we get older, we sleep less and less and frequently sleep badly.

And chronic sleep deprivation can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia and staying awake at night worrying about chronic sleep deprivation. Lack of adequate sleep can contribute to increased risk of heart disease and serial yawning during presentations on exchange-traded funds by your financial advisor.

(photo by Rehina Sultanova, Unsplash)

This website would like to officially apologize for its recent foray into the overtly up-to-the-minute, the decidedly topical. Our stories on the death of the writer John Barth, the Republican presidential candidate and the solar eclipse were, we insist, just momentary lapses from our traditional focus on existential kvetching about being, somehow, old. We will now return to our regular diet (Mediterranean, low in sodium, high in Omega-3s), but cannot promise that we may not again stumble into the annoyingly contemporary.

(photo © Frank Van Riper)

Well, we drove from the outskirts of New York City, to Ithaca, New York, and then further north to get under the total eclipse, then northeast to a town called Old Forge, New York. That added up to about seven hours of driving.

Old Forge had become our destination that morning because it was possible to read the various weather forecasts, which uniformly foretold clouds, as allowing that there just might be a break in those clouds in the neighborhood of Old Forge in the neighborhood of 3 p.m. on Eclipse Day.

And there was indeed some blue in the sky when we arrived….

(photo by Joshua Rosenheim)

I have too many books.

They fill a long wall in the family room and are jammed into available corners of the living room. They dominate two sides of the office, a number of shelves and populate bookcases all over the house, including on the landing between the sets of stairs. They are stuck in nooks and crannies wherever we have found a nook or a cranny.

These are, of course, real books, not flickering lights on a technologic marvel where you can adjust the font and the brightness. They are not words you hear from a disembodied voice while doing the long drive to the beach. These are tangible books, where you can feel the pages as you turn them….

As a professional couple, raising two daughters, my wife and I did little in the way of volunteer work. At the end of each year, we gave a few thousand dollars in charitable contributions to the needy and less fortunate, a way of lowering our taxes a little and making us feel a bit more generous.

One year in my 60s, I joined members of my chorus in singing with homeless women at a Boston lunch place for them. And a couple of times long ago we served the homeless on Thanksgiving with our younger daughter.

But that was about it. Volunteering was not a significant part of our lives.

Now, two of my favorite hours each week are spent at the Falmouth Service Center, a remarkable support program on Cape Cod for those in need.

With the death of the novelist John Barth, the 20th century—the century in which I spent the bulk of my life—experienced one of its numerous belated endings.

In his review of Barth’s “Giles Goat Boy,” written way back in 1966, New York Times book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith noted the book’s cold-war critiques and its allusions to Joyce, Nabokov and the Beatles, among others. And Barth’s fiction or “metafiction”—which moved, in his heyday, from a modernist bleakness to post-modern razzamatazz—was as buffeted by that century’s larger literary currents as anyone’s. John Barth was peddling prime, grade-A 20th century.

I doubt I ever enjoyed a novel as much as I did “Giles Goat Boy” upon its appearance about two-thirds of the way through that century…..

What streaming series can’t you stop talking about?

Click on “Read More” below to answer and read other answers.

“ “Imagine this: It’s 25 or so years after Sam Spade has sent Brigid O’Shaugnessy up the river because he wasn’t going to play the sap. Now it’s the early sixties and “The Maltese Falcon”’s private detective is retired and living in a small village in the south of France when six nuns are mysteriously murdered. It’s absurd, of course, except it’s actually the plot of a series on AMC called “Monsieur Spade”…. --Neil Offen

When I launched my website, “Could You Be a Kidney Donor?”, at the age of 70, I thought I wanted simply to encourage people to consider living donation. By sharing my story of donating a kidney to my son, plus information and resources, I was hoping to make a difference and maybe even save lives. Not being very tech savvy (I can hear my husband chuckling as he reads this), I had to learn to speak a new “language” in my 70s.

But I think now that subconsciously, I also had another goal: to inspire other people, particularly those of retirement age—and especially women—to get outside their comfort zones for what they believe in….

(Photo above is of Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers)

By “they” I mean almost everyone.

I leave my umbrella under the table at a restaurant and the waitress chases me half-way down the block to hand it to me. I show up in hiking boots at some out-of-town park and two different locals discuss the merits of the various trails. My bike tire feels a little flat—and the guy at the gas station offers to pump it up himself.

Okay, I’m an optimist, with an eye for the bright side. And okay: there’s Donald Trump and robo calls and road rage and those jerks in the comments on one or another website (not this one).

But it sure seems as if people—not everybody but most people—are extraordinarily nice nowadays. And I live in New York City….

Neil Offen told me his Muhammad Ali story years ago and it remains one of the best things I've ever read about him. For my part, I met the Champ twice, years apart, and each encounter had a striking effect on me.

The first time was around 1980 in the U.S. Capitol Building. I was on the hill covering who knows what when someone in the Senate Press Gallery hollered “The Champ’s in the building!”

Ali had been named by then-President Carter as a roving international goodwill ambassador and was making the rounds. You literally could hear pens drop in the Press Gallery as we all forgot what we were doing and raced downstairs to see the Champ….

Featuring a video with footage of the last US total eclipse

This is an argument for managing to get yourself into the “zone of totality” on April 8th and doing your darndest to avoid clouds (crowds are fine). And it is arguing – if somehow it is inconvenient for you to do so this time around – that you should feel shitty, cause it is a really, really cool thing to do and, given the significance the sun and moon undoubtedly had in your life, a pretty important thing to do. And there won’t be another total eclipse in the United States for twenty years.

When I was 12 years old back in 1962, my mother died, and I stopped eating. Because of my lack of food, I developed amenorrhea—I no longer had my period. I was told I would never have children. No one had ever heard of anorexia.

Fast forward to my college years and being introduced to a psilocybin experience. That night, under the influence of mushrooms, I had a period. Two years later my son was born….

The old saying goes “There’s lies, damn lies—and statistics.”

Today, I would amend that to the following:

“There’s lies, damn lies—and Republicans.” to

Now that the once-respectable GOP has been transmogrified into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump--a lying sack of shit who also happens to be a traitor, a rapist, and Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping‘s useful idiot--the future of serious two-party government in this country is in dire jeopardy.

(photo © Frank Van Riper)

So, you now take a lot of medications. Pop some pills at breakfast, during dinner, before bedtime. But have you had a chance to look at the warnings that come with all your prescriptions?

I’m pretty sure this is what they say: Dizziness and headaches may occur when taking this medication that you are taking for

dizziness and headaches. You should not drive, operate heavy machinery, or listen to talk radio while taking this medication until you can do it safely and not scream, “Are you fucking kidding me?”