2young2retire

Sound familiar?  You are (blissfully) unaware of the aging process until one morning, you are standing at the bathroom mirror brushing your teeth as usual, and whoa! this strange person stares back at you.  Your eyes may be as sharp as ever, the expression in them the same, but your features seem to be slouching [...]

Maybe you don’t think of yourself as someone who joins a rally in the street brandishing a hand-lettered sign and shouting  slogans.  Me either.  Whenever I get an email alerting me to a social action that requires me to actually show up, I find myself wondering if my physical presence really matters, say, at a [...]

As an involved grandparent blessed with good health,  I’m frequently asked to provide childcare.  Beside the fact that I love being with my grandchildren, this allows me to see the daily lives of young families up close.  And what I observe gives me cause for concern.  Children seem to have far more on their plates [...]

Is assisted living, or its even less appealing twin, housing for the elderly once known as the nursing home, in your future?  I am amazed at how many people, even those who seem to be doing everything to stay healthy and engaged in life, see this as inevitable.  It is as if they have absorbed the rhetoric of [...]

Judith Broder, a psychiatrist who now enlists therapists to provide free counseling to returning veterans and their families
Timothy Will, a former telecom executive who brings broadband – and profits – to economically distressed farm communities in Appalachia
Henry Lui, a [...]

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged, sang The Beatles.  Fast forward a few decades and an entirely different world, Get Back could be the mantra for the 350.org, a group of environmental activists including author Bill McGibbon, Van Jones, founder of Green for All and most recently, Obama’s point man [...]

…to show appreciation and common humanity.  That is the core message of this heartfelt and often heart-wrenching  documentary, The Way We Get By, about the Maine Troop Greeters, a group of elderly residents of Bangor, Maine, who meet troops on their return from active duty in Iraq, offering smiles, handshakes and a cellphone to make [...]

About half of our friends still split their year between Florida and some other location, but we’ve dropped dual residency and I feel all the better for it. When you turn the key in the lock of a home in South Florida, it is always with the slight trepidation that the hurricane shutters you [...]

Families are pulling together as layoffs and downsizing take their toll.  That’s the silver lining in an otherwise dark economic time.  Case in point, our unmarried daughter, downsized last year from an investment bank and working hard to turn her sideline music business into a living.  She’s visiting us right now, looking for an apartment [...]

Every morning for the last six months or so, when I open my email I find a number of requests from total strangers who want to ‘friend’ me (yes, it’s a verb now). Sometimes we have someone in common. But just as often, the person found me via Friend Finder and was motivated by something [...]