• Mark Twain on “the wisdom of age”

• Older voters champion “preserving democracy”

• According to a study, beginning in 2011, of the 70 and older population in the United States, the percentage living with dementia (through 2019) has declined.

• The late Jerry West on being “a wolf” among “dogs.”

Yes, they are adorable and cute and smart.

And it is indeed remarkable that the little one’s already walking and that her sister is still in first grade but reading at an eighth-grade level. Not to mention that the older one is the star of his little league team and the younger one already knows all the state capitals and did I know that one was in the school play and another has jumped from elementary school directly to Harvard or just won an Oscar? 

It’s terrific that the grandchildren are now the new centerpiece of your life. It’s great that you get to pick her up two days a week after school or that you zoom with the twins every Saturday afternoon. It really is wonderful that you just took a trip with them or are planning a trip with them. Lovely you’re taking them with you to Paris or you’re flying out to Denver or driving to Vermont to see them. . . .

Before we got to seventh grade no one paid much attention to what we were wearing to school. Then sometime around our 13th birthday we noticed that we had become junior members of society, and for the next six years we were expected to, and we expected ourselves to, look like something.

      Later, that something acquired a name: preppy; but at the time we didn't call our sense of fashion anything; we just wore it. It's tempting to believe that southern culture had something to do with our fashion statements, as the preppy clothing stores around the college campuses trickled down to the high schools.

      But for boys entering their teen years, southern culture included a new factor: there were those young ladies to be impressed. Guys in rumpled t-shirts and smelly sneakers were not likely to end up in the slow-dance embrace of an eighth-grade girl who had spent the hours between school dismissal Friday afternoon and after-the-game hop engineering her hair and picking out the perfect skirt and sweater combo. . . .

    We know so much. About most everything. We are proud of our knowledge and experience, delighted to pass along what we know to younger generations, and puzzled when we get responses like: “Yeah, OK.”

    So, today’s topic focuses on what we need to know and understand about Generation Z. These are folks who were born between 1997 and 2012, age range today of roughly 12 to 27.

    Look up “Gen Z” and you’ll find a treasure trove of information about this age group that we know and love, but about which we actually understand very little.

    These are our grandchildren. These are junior-high and high school students and athletes whom we watch playing sports and playing music, occasionally reading, excessively online, trying to find the right mix of entertainment and achievement. . . .

The first time I saw Kinky Friedman was at Max’s Kansas City, a seedy, storied music club in New York City. That night was also the first time I ever saw Billy Joel — Kinky’s opening act. Both had just released debut albums, but it was Kinky and the Texas Jewboys that we left excited about and wanting to see again. (And Billy Joel? Meh.)

When I heard the news that Kinky had died June 27 at the age of 79, I was saddened but also stunned. Kinky’s songs had been part of the soundtrack of my life since my mid-20s, and with his death it somehow felt like a part of me had just been lost.

The night at Max’s was late 1973 or early ‘74. I was an editor at Country Music Magazine . . .

On the Saturday before the 2016 election, my friend Neil passed away. A week or so later, his widow, our friend Linda, joked that if her husband hadn’t already died, the election results—Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton—would have killed him.

I can only imagine what Neil would think and feel about what has happened since that dreadful 2016 day. How impossible it would have been for him to imagine that we would have elected an idiotic, swindling, incompetent, racist charlatan. How unimaginable to him those awful four years and their terrible culmination, in pestilence and finally violence.

And what would Neil think about that same cretinous liar, the one who had fomented an insurrection, a convicted felon, a court-affirmed sex offender, being on the verge of getting elected again—and having the support of a partisan, Constitution-bending, corrupt Supreme Court? . . .

I have tremendous admiration and gratitude for Joe Biden's past performance, and will be forever thankful for his victory over Trump in 2020.  However, I am even older than Biden and I have to say he is giving credence to the adage: there is no fool like an old fool. 

If he stays in the race he is making every day from here to November 5, not about Trump's clear threat to democracy or other important issues, but a daily health report on Joe Biden. . . .

I returned a library book to my daughter’s middle school library the other day. The book was taken out in 2001. My daughter graduated from that middle school in 2003.

We found the book stuck among her old Harry Potter hardbacks and her Anne of Green Gables paperbacks. The books were diagonally across from what had been her old closet, which is still full of a variety of now ancient stuffed animals, including a zoo’s worth of beanie babies. In a corner of the closet is her guitar, which she stopped playing at age eight or nine.

Facing the bookcase, by the side of the bed is the end table with two drawers’ worth of drawings, writings, tests, book reports and other ephemera, from first grade through the end of high school. On the wall is a felt pennant from high school senior year, still exhorting the Chapel Hill High School Tigers. . . .

This is an excerpt from Robert Reich’s wonderful Substack.

How old is too old?. . .

In 1900, gerontologists considered “old” to be 47. Today, you are considered “youngest-old” at 65, “middle-old” at 75, and at 85, you are a member of the “oldest-old.”

I ask with some personal stake. Last week I turned 78. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and I can do 20 pushups in a row. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz.  

Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma add at least a decade and a half. Beyond this is an extra helping.

“After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. . . .

The New York Times—still the putative “paper of record”—failed the headline-writing test in its lead story, a hugely important story, Tuesday morning:

Supreme Court Says Trump Has Some Immunity in Election Case

The lead to that Times story is less wishy-washy:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that former President Donald J. Trump is entitled to substantial immunity from prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the last election, a blockbuster decision in the heat of the 2024 campaign that vastly expanded presidential power.

How did “substantial” become “some” in the headline? And, while I know headlines must be concise, “in election case” seems a whole lot weaker than “trying to overturn the last election.” . . .

If Donald J. Trump EVER is to be held accountable for his treasonous actions fomenting the fatal January 6th rebellion to overturn the 2020 presidential election, he must NOT win a second term as president in November.

This became ever more apparent today after a divided Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Presidents (in this case involving only Trump) enjoy immunity from acts they took while in office.

Such a ruling, flying in the face of lower court rulings and showing the heavy influence of the court’s Trump-appointed cheering section, means that any action against Trump may be delayed until well after November, pending new lower court findings. A Trump win, therefore, will allow the worst president in our history to simply order his new Justice Department to stand down—and thereby set him free of all federal charges. . . .

Did you sort of get the feeling Thursday night that he let us old guys down?

That now people might look at men who are around his age or almost his age and think of us as doddering, lacking vibrancy, occasionally confused and generally ineffective.

Or did he just confirm their preconceptions about us with that performance?

Actually, it’s true that some of us some of the time do have difficulty finding the right word. We have to pause and wait for it to come to us. And sometimes it doesn’t.

Some of us some of the time can’t think of the right thing to say when we need to say it and some of us some of the time get confused about what happened when and some of us some of the time have found our speaking voices diminished to a unpleasant rasp. . . .

One of my treasured friends in journalism was the late Frank Jackman. Frank, an ex-UPI overnight editor, was the Washington Bureau news editor of the New York Daily News when I was the paper’s White House correspondent and later national political correspondent.

He once told me how, when he was a kid in Massachusetts, he saw President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a campaign stop—and how FDR’s aides would lift the paralyzed president out of his car “like a sack of potatoes” and lock his leg braces so he could stand at a podium to address the crowd.

By mutual consent, no one in the press ever photographed this, and if they did the pictures would never have been published. And back then Roosevelt’s infirmity never became a real campaign issue.

Just imagine if FDR had been running against Donald Trump. . . .

(photo ©Frank Van Riper)

      As election season is in full swing, I thought I’d share some horse sense for your amusement and, I hope, edification for those running for office.

      Equines are herd animals. Group dynamics and hierarchy are important to them. There’s always a top mare, and horses are quite content to follow the leader of the pack.

      However, reconfigure the group in any way, and leadership is up for grabs. Size, tenure and age don’t matter; taking charge with a few nips and kicks delivers the appropriate gravitas. . . .

High diving has always been my passion—see Taking the Plunge. But as I approached my "older" years I refrained from taking high plunges.

Well, here in Milos, Greece with my daughter, Mariah, and granddaughter, Phoebe, I decided to take a high dive off the limestone cliffs into the Aegean Sea. The sea has been very rough these past two weeks, but today is the last day for me to dive. . . .

Click here for video of Melinda’s cliff dive in Greece.

(Written before last Thurday’s presidential debate. For an update on the debate, click here.)

 I was hanging with a bunch of guys—hanging on zoom, in the contemporary fashion—the other night. This was a group of very politically alert guys, all younger than I am. And suddenly I realized we hadn’t discussed the elephant on the calendar. 

      Thursday night the two serious candidates in what is arguably the most important U.S. election in history—with the possible exception of the previous one or the one before that or Lincoln versus Douglas—will be debating.

      “Hey, we all have some important TV to watch Thursday night,” I said, or something to that effect, to open a conversation about Biden’s prospects. Instead, it opened a very different conversation . . . .

Willie Mays, arguably the most electric, graceful—and certainly one of the most joyful and competitive—players ever to wear spikes, died May 18 at age 93.

  Though I grew up in New York, I never saw him play in person for the New York Giants at the old Polo Grounds. But etched in my memory are black-and-white replays of “the Catch” during game one of the 1954 Giants-Indians World Series when, with the score tied 2-2 in the eighth and runners on base, Mays robbed Vic Wertz of an extra-base hit with an incredible basket catch of a long fly ball near the Polo Grounds’ scoreboard.

The Giants went on to win the game 5–2 in extra innings and eventually the World Series. “The Catch” was rightfully called one of the greatest plays in baseball history.

This was during the glory years for N.Y. baseball fans, when the city boasted not one but three major league teams: the New York Yankees in the American League and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Giants in the National League. . . .

My friend Bruce can just sit. He is an early riser. I’m not. And most mornings, when he’s visiting, I’ll wake up to find him sitting on our couch—phone-less (he barely knows how to work his), book-less, magazine-less, newspaper-less, word-puzzle-less; immersed in silence, just looking straight ahead.

      Bruce, a retired professor, certainly reads, mostly Victorian novels. He keeps up with current events, through the PBS NewsHour and his local newspaper. He goes to movies, plays and concerts. His conversation is lively and wide-ranging. But often—and Bruce says he can do this for hours when home alone—he just sits and thinks.

      Bruce has what my in-laws used to call in Yiddish: ziztfleisch, sitting flesh. He doesn’t need to be busy cleaning, cooking, rearranging or even fidgeting. But it is more than that: Bruce doesn’t need distractions. . . .

Music has bookended my life.

Growing up, thanks to the wonderful albums my parents owned, I fell in love with music. I have fond memories of my dad relaxing in his living room chair on the weekends, smoking his pipe and singing out of tune to the live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

I, on the other hand, was smitten by new folk, especially that of Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary, and rock (especially starting with the Beatles), doowop and soul/R&B. 

After my parents made me study piano ('til I whined long enough to get them to let me quit), when I was 13 I decided I wanted to play guitar because I idolized my summer camp’s  charismatic counselor who played that instrument.  

I got my ‘rents to buy me a six-string acoustic and taught myself more in a few months than I’d learned about piano in a year and a half. . . .

Link for ROB GELBLUM’s music.

When I was eight years old, my mother tucked me and my brother into her 1958 Imperial convertible and drove us 2,021 miles to Mexico. 

Random as it was, I soon learned that my father was flying into Acapulco to meet my mother for a quick divorce. 

Our last dinner together was at a restaurant in the El Mirador Hotel at La Quebrada, which was perched on the top of cliffs where the La Quebrada cliff divers dove off of 100-foot cliffs into the sea below. . . .