Fifty years ago this summer, the country was in the throes of dramatic change.

            While I was raising a log cabin in an alternate lifestyle community, all heck was breaking loose in the nation's capital. Do you remember where you were on Aug. 9, 1974, when you heard the news that President Richard Nixon was resigning in disgrace?

            I sure do. Along with a  long-haired homesteader buddy,  Charlie, I was nailing down cedar shake shingles, up on the roof of a log barn we were restoring—as far from DC as we could get. My first wife and I were in "Deep Western North Carolina, " in a remote mountain valley building an intentional community that we Back-to-the-Landers called "Hogwild." . . .

      I’ve always thought about tying our living room decor together someday by adding a set of small matching couches. We can afford to do it and were finally ready to start looking recently when it hit us. Not tomorrow, but probably in just a few years, we’ll be moving to a smaller place and no doubt needing to ditch much of our current furniture.

      We surely won’t have a family room then so we’ll already have one extra couch. Do we really want to have three extra sofas?

     My back hurts.

     Not the lower back, which hurt last month, but more the upper back, sort of behind the chest. It started hurting the other day. Not a big deal, really, more like discomfort or maybe just stiffness than actual pain. The good thing was, it took my mind off the ache I’ve been feeling in my left hip. Which helped me move on from the soreness in my left knee.

     Of course, and I know it, I shouldn’t complain. I’m in pretty good shape. I’ve recovered very well from a heart attack at the beginning of the year. I run four or five times a week, albeit slowly, but I’m running. I lift weights. I do pushups. I can hold a plank for a couple of minutes.

     I don’t need surgery for anything and I haven’t replaced a knee or a hip or needed PT to recover from replacing a knee or a hip. 

     And yet, almost every day, something hurts. . . .

Maybe, at first you don't even notice it.

      Your attention is drawn primarily to other items in the frame: the 1936 black-and-white portrait of grandfather Charlie Rush, the pot of flowers, the '60s era Polaroid camera, the splash of afternoon sunlight on log walls—and then maybe you notice, there in the background, the old guitar.

      If I told you it's "the James Taylor guitar," that would certainly get your attention—for the '40s era musical instrument has a tale to tell.

      When James and I were kids, 10 and 12, respectively, we were buds . . . .

      OK, look, I may be 74 years old but that does not mean that I am no longer a passionate woman. Passion fills my being often and I am not slowing down. In many ways, I am even more passionate now than when I was younger. 

      As a matter of fact, it is often easier to be passionate at my age than when I was younger . . . .

     I’ve seen Springsteen several times, including a couple of shows before he became “the Boss.” Saw Joplin in San Francisco and Simon and Garfunkel in Forest Hills. Saw The Doors as an opening act

     Was there for Creedence, the Mamas and the Papas, Itzhak Perlman, Queen. I’ve seen Dylan live at least several times.

     And when I was younger, saw Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and a lot of others at Murray the K’s shows at the Brooklyn Fox. The Drifters, Ben E. King, the Shirelles, Jackie Wilson, saw them all.

     So, yeah, I’ve seen a reasonable amount of live music, been there to hear the unmediated sound, to feel that pulse of in-person excitement, to share that frisson only live music can offer. ...

      To be clear: the offending term wasn’t uttered by a dirty old man—or a dirty middle-aged one, for that matter. No, the speaker was a 30-something woman at a hospital information desk.

      I wasn’t necessarily expecting “ma’am.”  I’ve been called “sweetie” or “darlin’” most of my life by diner waitresses. That’s not so bad. But in a hospital setting, it always bothered me when nurses would address my then 80-something dad that way.

      Barely being covered by a hospital gown is indignity enough at any age, but the false familiarity always seemed disrespectful. I’m sure they meant only to express warmth and compassion, but the widespread practice always struck me as patronizing….

Our generation, at least those of us living in this still functioning republic, was mostly denied full exposure to full-on "two-plus-two-makes-five" dissembling...until 2016.

A Video

This video proved particularly difficult to cobble together. It discusses five compulsive and remarkably shameless and destructive liars—two of whom were also among history’s most bloodthirsty dictators. These five men, therefore, displayed different varieties and degrees of malevolence but a remarkably similar—and similarly untiring, pervasive and unconscionable—mendacity. I hope I was able to make that clear.

Click here for the video, as well as links to some of my my other video efforts.

      Among my favorite souvenirs from more than 20 years of covering national politics for the New York Daily News are three odd rectangular cards: 2’’x 3” plastic sandwiches. Each was imbedded with electronics and I had to use the correct one each day at a turnstile to enter Chicago’s International Amphitheater near the stockyards and cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

      These entrance passes marked the first time such security measures ever were used at a convention—not surprising since all hell broke loose during a convulsive convention week in which, as a national commission later charged, Chicago’s finest engaged in a violent “police riot” against noisy, hairy, disruptive, largely unpleasant but also largely peaceful protestors.

      For a 21-year-old wet-behind-the-ears political journalist, it was almost literally a baptism of fire. . . .

I often have to update information at a medical appointment. The questionnaire sometimes asks about my hobbies. I usually answer: reading, running and walking, and yoga. But for the last seven years, caregiving for various family members, including the canine variety, has taken much of my time.

      I think that’s my hobby—or my vocation—in retirement. 

Like many partners, I’ve cared for my spouse—in my case, through two bouts of leukemia, a stroke and several surgeries. I’ve learned how to administer medication via a port, flush a line, clean a wound with saline, wrap it with Coban tape and check a medicine pack when it runs low on batteries.

      In other words, I know about things that I never wanted to know or never even knew existed. . . .

     Sometimes when I have a night at home alone, I time travel. My mode of travel is music.

      Sometimes I travel to the 1970s, sometimes the 1980s. I was born in 1961, so my music coming of age largely happened in the mid- to late 1970s. Over the years, I’ve sometimes felt cheated that I wasn’t older during the ‘60s to experience the Beatles, but I’ve made peace with that and have embraced the ‘70s and ‘80s as my decades—bad hair and clothes and all.

      To travel to the ‘70s, I select the “70s Rock Radio” station on my Pandora account. Within minutes, I’m back in middle school (America’s “Sister Golden Hair”) or high school (Kansas’s “Carry on Wayward Son”).

      Hearing the Commodores’ “Brick House” sends me to my high school cafeteria, . . .

      Do you have a bucket list? Are there specific places you wanna go, specific things you wanna do, before … well, you know?

      The term itself is actually fairly recent, with Merriam-Webster finding the first known use only in 2006. Since then, the term has been popularized by the 2007 movie The Bucket List, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two terminally ill men who decide to list things they want to do before they die.

      It’s also been popularized, I think, by the growing number of people in our age group, folks in our sixties, seventies and eighties, who are thinking more and more about how much time they have left and what they haven’t already done before they kick the bucket. . . .

      I can’t say I’ve ever sat down to scribble out a “bucket list” per se. 

      Yet somewhere in my head is a jumble (jumbles increasingly are us) of things I’ve never managed to do that I would hope to do previous to, well, being dead—the bucket kicked, doing being done.

      I’ll begin by getting a couple of things straight: No jumping out of airplanes (like Bush senior). No climbing anything higher than Bear Mountain. No wild, drunken anythings.

      But travel—more travel!  But challenges! (Though not too challenging challenges.)

      I would, for example, “like to spend some time in Mozambique,” where, hear tell, “the sunny skies are aqua blue” . . . .

What Revolution Is It, Anyway?

That we are in the midst of a major communications revolution is hard to miss nowadays. Individuals who only had a decade or so to get used to sitting at their desks and accessing an overwhelming collection of information, products, news and entertainment can now sit in a restaurant and involve themselves in what has grown to include much of the world’s available supply of information, products, news, entertainment and people. We have begun to divert ourselves, socialize with each other, educate ourselves and update ourselves in ways that did not exist when anyone over twenty today was born. Our old communications machines – typewriters, music discs, film, landline telephones, wireless transmitters and the printing press – have been overthrown or are tottering.

But what exactly is perpetrating this revolution? . . .

As the grandmother of three teenage girls, I have trepidation about their futures growing up in America. A hateful tenor toward women and anti-women rhetoric out in the open is now mainstreamed. Women’s rights are being pulverized by a male-dominated anti-female political movement. 

Jessica Calarco, author of “Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net” writes, “Compared with its economic peers, the United States lacks social safety net programs for women: programs like sick time, vacation time, health care, affordable day care and maternal leave.”

Women hold nearly 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs and they are struggling, ignored and often vilified in the political arena. Demeaning treatment and mean-spirited comments and policies against women have accelerated in this country.

I personally have experienced this. . . .

      Now that they’re over, I’m sensing that a lot of you have come around on the Olympics.

      There was a time when all I’d hear was: “too jingoistic,” “too commercial,” “made for TV.”

      I never bought that. I have not been to the World Series, the Super Bowl, the World Cup or any other of those high-priced, one-sport finals. But I did manage to obtain tickets to four Olympics: Montreal, Barcelona, Atlanta and Beijing. The first with friends, the rest with family, always with my wife, who is not otherwise a sports fan.

      I had the pleasure of bringing my mother and mother-in-law once each, my father-in-law twice. Our kids accompanied us three times.

      It invariably took a lot of finagling to secure the tickets. . . .

Donald Trump, as we have well learned by now, is a champion of a somewhat arcane epistemological theory. This theory holds that what is valid—what, as a logician might phrase it, is the case— is what the beholder would like to be the case.

      Then-President Trump wanted it to be true, for example, that he had triumphed in the 2020 presidential election, ergo he did win. And the fact that all the various officials and courts that examined the evidence involved did not see it that way meant the election was stolen from him.

      Recently the former president has been focused on crowd sizes. He wants, understandably, to have drawn the largest crowds. Indeed, that is a particular point of pride for him. Therefore, he has.

      And candidate Trump certainly does not want his crowd sizes to be diminishing due to the length, lack of focus and tediousness of his recent speeches. So, they aren’t. . . .

Dear Senator Vance,

I’m a childless cat lady and I’m actually happy! And, oh yes, I’m also a Democratic voter in the battleground state of North Carolina.

Nothing galls me more than Republican men judging my choices in life or worse, thinking that unmarried women do not have value and are miserable.

I’m an Emmy-winning television producer whose lifelong work has been to educate, inspire and advocate important issues. I’ve done that without a married partner. I had a lot of interesting and well-educated boyfriends along the way but none were marriage material for me or me for them. . . .

From the new “breaking” event to the women’s broad jump, the exuberance of the Paris Olympics has inspired me. The competition undoubtedly has been fierce, but it’s also been joyous, filled with fist bumps, high fives and hugs for teammates and competitors alike.

Snoop Dogg, torch carrier, personality and super fan, summed it up in an interview with NBC’s Mike Tirico Thursday night: “It’s about bringing the whole world together.”

I’ve loved the Olympics, particularly in summer, since I was a kid. That’s when I learned, in 1960, that 100-meter and 200-meter gold medalist Wilma Rudolph was one of 22 children and had overcome polio as a kid to become the world’s fastest woman.  That story left an imprint.

Today, in 2024, as well, the subtext of the games remains resilience . . .

Like many of us, I sometimes have a love-hate relationship with tech. And right now, I’m hating.

But I’m not a Luddite, really.

Like many of us, I marvel at the ability to zoom with someone on the other side of the world. I am pleasantly flabbergasted at being able to FaceTime from a Greek island and enthralled that I can listen to any music I want to listen to whenever I want to listen to it.

I am thrilled I can look up the name of the co-star of 1956’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” when I can’t think of it and I’m really happy I can post photos of my beach trip that anyone can be jealous of and yes, I’m very grateful I can help create a blog where people can see what I write and I can read what others of my generation have to say. . . .