I won’t lie: moving at our age, 72, was difficult. (Or maybe I’ve just repressed how stressful it has always been.)

      After 25 years in our traditional two-story home, we recently moved to a (mostly) one-level ranch home. It’s a brand-new house, with a kitchen I love, so I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’m glad we didn’t wait until we were even older. This process does not get easier as one ages.

      The six-month downsizing and moving process seemed endless as the new house was being built and as I sorted through furniture and belongings that wouldn’t be coming with us. Having one’s house up for sale is stressful at best, traumatic at worst. Keeping the staged house perfectly clean while caring for our aging dog was challenging.

      Finally, we moved on the day that hurricane Helene came through North Carolina—you can imagine how much fun that was.

      The World Series isn’t what it used to be. It used to be, to mix a sports metaphor, the Super Bowl.

      A number of decades ago, it drew the nation’s focus, like few other regularly scheduled events could do. That was true particularly for those of us who were young at the time.  

      And yet, when I was a kid, the World Series, which starts today, wasn’t even really a world series.

      Major League Baseball, at that time, didn’t have many players from the rest of the world, from Japan or Korea or Cuba—except for Orestes “Minnie” Minoso—or from Panama, Venezuela or even the Dominican Republic. For that matter, baseball didn’t even have many native-born Black players since this was just a few years after Jackie Robinson.

      What it did have was a kind of mysterious, alluring uniqueness. …

      I recently came across the term “Generation Jones” to describe people born in the United States between the years 1954 and 1965, the subgroup of people sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. Although the term was coined many years ago by cultural critic Jonathan Pontell, I had not heard it before.

      As someone born in the early 1960s, the description of Jonesers resonated with me—I’ve often felt not old enough to be a boomer and too old to be a Gen Xer. I seemed to occupy a liminal space: too young for the British Invasion and too old for grunge; too young for “The Graduate” and too old for “The Breakfast Club.”

      Younger boomers coming of age in the 1960s wanted to fuel change—the civil rights struggle, Vietnam. We Jonesers seemed most worried about finding a good job after graduating college.

      Generation Jones refers to the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses” and “jonesing,” meaning intensely desiring something. ...

      Kamala Harris could still eke out a victory on her own. She has run a smart and robust campaign, though at times in my view one that’s too cautious.  She has had to walk a tightrope between standing with an unpopular president with whom she’s serving and showing herself to have new ideas, fresh energy, independence on international issues, and a commitment to the future.

      Harris has emphasized character—the chasm between her character and that of her opponent. Yet, too many Americans seem fixated on two issues: the economy and immigration—issues that Donald Trump has distorted to his advantage. Harris has countered with her own more reasonable economic proposals, and she has made clear that she supports a bipartisan and rather sweeping immigration bill. Yet, wrong or not, most believe Trump is more likely to fix these problems.  She also has strong and well-articulated positions on a range of other issues (women’s rights, health care, child care, and more), yet for many voters these seem secondary.

      Yes, Harris can still win. But the issue of character – and to me it is absolutely the only issue – has to stick. . . .

      Trump up 1 in North Carolina. Trump up 2 in Arizona. Georgia, 2 again.

      The polls are making us crazy. Need to stop looking at the polls. Need to stop worrying.

      But the fact is, we are worried. With so little time before the election, the thought is unavoidable: that son of a bitch might actually win. He could be president again. What had seemed inconceivable—that we could elect a racist, incompetent, sociopathic, fascistic, lying buffoon again—now seems more than conceivable. It may almost seem likely. . . .

      Our homebase is the 14^th-century walled hill town of Montepulciano, where we try to coordinate our long-term rental villa apartment with the annual celebration of the fall's olive harvest.

      From travel guru Rick Steves, we learned years back to adopt the travel concept of becoming "Temporary Locals," in which you immerse yourself in all things local. So, Lynne and I make a point to learn names, memorize local maps, attempt to speak passable Italian, dive into local lore, customs, history and lifestyle.

      Mostly it's about developing and maintaining relationships, so this time around, we could walk into Giuseppe’s shop, call him by name, and be greeted in return with "Buongiorno, Lynne y Giacomo!"

      Lynne and I came here first in 2015, to celebrate our 70th birthdays and our 20th wedding anniversary. Now, on our eighth return here—our Italian home away from home—our love for this place has only been all the more reinforced. …

      I’ve been canvassing for North Carolina’s Wake County Democratic Party, which is headquartered in Raleigh, NC. I volunteered to knock on doors at the homes of the very conservative rural farmers in the nearby towns of Zebulon and Youngsville.

      It’s Trump country! In addition to Trump signs on their homes, some even had Confederate flags!

      My mission was to break the super majority that Republicans now hold in the North Carolina legislature by convincing them to vote for the Democratic candidate that represents them in the state House. I listened to their issues. …

      I walked from the concession stand concourse through the tunnel and into that very ballpark on the mezzanine level. I was standing at the railing on the third-base side taking it all in: the iconic facade, the Bronx skyline beyond and the grass. 

      Up from my subconsciousness came a blubbering stream of tears. Then I saw the ghosts of my parents in the left-field seats where I had always pictured them on their 1946 date, when she had reached across him for a hot dog, blocking his view for just an instant while somebody hit something somewhere and with some significance. 

      No damage was done to their courtship, but he teased her about it regularly—and she rolled her eyes, for the next 30 years. …

      I’ve been a volunteer election official for the Wake County Board of Elections in North Carolina since 2016. Trump’s first run at the presidency prompted me to serve.

      After nine primaries and one run-off, eight early voting stints and eight November election days, I’m at it again. It’s exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. But I’ve never encountered what I experienced on Day #1 of this year’s early voting at my polling location.

      The lines never let up from the time the polls opened at 8 a.m. to closing at 7:30 p.m. My job was to greet all voters with a smile as they entered the polling place, answer any questions and direct them to a long table with five anxiously waiting volunteers who looked at their photo IDs, found their registrations in the voter database and gave them an ATV (authorization to vote). …

      If Kamala Harris loses this election, traditional news media will bear a substantial burden of the blame. 

      News outlets obsess on Donald Trump, assuring him the lion’s share of coverage. On Wednesday, Oct. 15, for example, the top four political stories on my iPhone for The New York Times contained the name Trump or Donald Trump. On politicalwire.com, a much-read political web hub, eight of the first 12 headlines at 7:15 a.m. contained Trump’s name. One named Harris’. 

      When not obsessively covering Trump, news outlets report and dissect polls, though data specialists themselves concede at this point that covering this horserace is largely meaningless. 

      And, worst of all, the news media regularly normalize Trump with “balanced” and largely specious policy pieces, though in truth Trump is a candidate so extreme, so unmoored to fact and increasingly so unhinged that the former chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, a man whom Trump appointed to this top position, told author and Watergate icon Bob Woodward that Trump is “now the most dangerous person in the country.” 

      I’ve had enough. …

     Those of you who believe overseas trips must be carefully planned well in advance are going to appreciate the incident I am about to recount. And you know who you are. You are just about everyone I know. (See my friend Neil Offen’s piece on traveling as you get older.) My wife and I (despite being undeniably old) are exceptions.

      We two were sitting atop a couple of not-light, non-electric bikes on the third day of a not meticulously planned ride along the Canal du Midi bike trail in France, when one of us announced that she was not having fun. “All I’m seeing is this canal,” she complained. And she was exhausted—so tired that she had to depend on the kindness of a stranger for a lift, heavy bike and all, into Carcassonne—that day’s destination. . . .

      At the end of the month, my wife and I will be heading off to Greece for several weeks.

      I’m looking forward to it because I love Greece. I love strolling down the oldest street in Europe in the middle of the Athenian Plaka. I love the hotel in Naxos where you can drink “the best wine in the universe” on the patio overlooking the cerulean blue of the Aegean and the imposing ruins of an ancient temple to Apollo.

      I love Greek restaurants where you almost have to beg for a check because every place lets you stay as long as you want—and then invariably the waiter will finally bring the check with a complimentary little dessert. I love the Greek idea of philoxenia, an almost untranslatable word that means, essentially, friend to the stranger, because so many Greeks evidently believe in the concept.  

      Yet, I’m also not at all looking forward to the trip. Part of me, in truth, wishes I wasn’t going. Part of me is really anxious about going. Part of me is scared....

      We have heard plenty of lies, hatred and idiocy from politicians in our lifetimes—we hippies, we protestors, we peaceniks, we bra-burners, we queers, we tree-huggers.

       But Donald Trump is something different in the history of our country. He lies with a frequency and regularity that makes even the craven, irresponsible, mostly venal American leaders of years past seem tame.

       I suggested in a video on this website that Donald Trump is one of “history’s most notorious liars”—who lies as frequently and as shamelessly as a Stalin or Hitler.

      News organizations, as we know, have documented many thousands of the lies presidential-candidate Trump, President Trump and presidential-candidate-again Trump has told.

      But we shouldn’t let their astounding ubiquity inure us to the harm each of these many thousands of untruths have done not only to groups and individuals but to public discourse and the political process in the United States. …

      As we approach Election Day, the hope is we get a good president. Doesn’t have to be great. Good would be good enough. Best would, really, be too much to hope for.

      But looking back, through our lifetimes, which of our presidents was good? Who was, in fact, the best one we’ve had these 70 or so years?

     Here at Writing About Our Generation, where neither of us is a historian nor political scientist, we nevertheless decided to take a stab at ranking all the presidents of our lifetimes, from worst to best, and to explain why we think they earned that ranking.

      Agree? Disagree? There is, of course, plenty of room for disagreement, so we’ll let you know, in parentheses, how our choices fared in the most recent rankings of all presidents—not just the ones in our lifetimes—by the American Political Science Association. ...

      I just visited my hometown and my mother’s grave. She died when I was 12, she was 40. I thought about the years she missed living.

      I myself am extremely grateful that I have lived a relatively healthy and prosperous 74 years. In the past three months, four of my close friends have had encounters with frightening death experiences. Three have survived but one is still in the ICU, expecting to recover.

      Life can be predictable but is ever-changing—just like the seasons. As autumn yet again comes into view, I remind myself I may have 20 more seasons where the multitude of lush greens turn into bright reds, yellows and oranges to titillate and inspire the human heart and prepare us for what is to follow. ...

(Click for previous lists of Things We Do (or Don’t) Miss)

Drive-in movie theaters

Playing hide-and-seek

The Dewey Decimal System …

And Still More Things We Don’t Miss,  including Lime Jell-O fruit salad

      When people have asked the secret of our 50-plus years of marriage, we invariably say a sense of humor. We also often say that we talk everything out.

      We’re all talkers in our family; we talk about things ad nauseam. (If we really enjoy something, it’s not enough to discuss it enthusiastically once or twice. We love to come back to the topic hours or days later and reiterate just how good that meal or show was and just how much we enjoyed it.)

      For a while, we weren’t mentioning our ability to talk things out as much. We still could at times, but sometimes the frustration and the exasperation of miscommunication were too raw. Instead, we’d gradually cool off and try to move on.

      It used to feel like a contest at times. “See,” he’d say, “I knew we saw that movie.” Score 1 for him. “See,” I’d say, “Alice heard me say that, too.” Tie score. ...

      My worst job started at 9 p.m. in the windowless workshop of my boss. Nine sleepless hours later, he fired me. No question, he made the right call.

      This took place sometime in the fall of 1972, a month or so after Kathy and I moved from Stamford, Ct., to Denver, Colo., a move that at the time was the closest I’d managed to come to a career goal.

      I’d been an English major at Haverford College and met Kathy the summer of 1968 when I worked as a bellhop and desk clerk at Grand Lake Lodge on the western entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park. She was an ”older woman,” 10 months older than me to be precise. So, when I graduated in 1971 and we got married, we'd settled in a boxy, one-bedroom apartment near her fifth-grade teaching job in Greenwich, Ct.

      I hated living in the burbs of Connecticut and quickly burned through two jobs. ...

Click here for video

A short video by Mitchell Stephens about roads, travel and the compulsion to see...more.

Filmed in Scotland

      Let me disagree a bit with my esteemed colleague. Mitch Stephens was trying to put the press’ failures into context. I’m trying to hold them to a higher standard.

      Yes, in the distant and recent past, our journalism has utterly failed the public. Still, that doesn’t remotely absolve today’s media from criticism of the way they are reporting this election now.

      Unlike in the past, where news outlets were avowedly partisan, were always speaking to the choir and their readers knew what to expect, today’s prominent mainstream media appears to be more impartial, considers itself more impartial and attempts to appeal to all segments of the political spectrum.

      So, while the bias and prejudices might not be as blatantly obvious as in past times, the framing, headline writing, sanitizing and, to use the newly coined word, sanewashing—by the press of bizarre, racist, fact-free gibberish and lies that issue regularly from the mouth of Donald Trump lets us all down. ...