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As we age, many of us have become huge creatures of habit. And when we thought about our habits--eating the same foods with the same ingredients, taking the same route when we walk or run, going to the same theaters and restaurants and often with the same people, we realized we have almost always done things the same way to some extent.  However, we've become more entrenched as we head into year No. 3 of COVID-19. It's not just because we're old, though we are. It's also because we need the rootedness that comes with knowing the old and familiar...

Grudges. We feel hanging on to one in our heads is the mental equivalent of a hoarder holding on to junk in the attic. Many of us have experienced the feeling, according to the typical definition that it's similar to anger and great hurt that lingers and is sometimes ready to boil over when provoked for different reasons. Some carry a grudge (or grudges) around like an extra 100 pounds; others lug it around in smaller quantities. Some grudges consume a person, and they become so exasperated they want to share it with others. Other grudges are dulled through the...

We’re not exactly the bourgeois bohemians to whom Huey Lewis and the News were alluding in their “Hip to be Square” anthem. However, we pride ourselves on being square yet in the know or hip up to a point.  We’re good researchers and reporters who read a lot. We loved subscribing to People magazine years ago, so we could keep up on the latest celeb gossip and palace intrigue, then about the threesome: Prince Charles, Princess Diana and Camilla.  Through the years as we aged, our interest in celeb-oriented publications waned. We’d pick up a copy of People at the...

Let history be a guide to life lessons in the future. A great idea but what if history had the facts wrong, and we could rewrite what happened? Then what? Today, everyone is rewriting history, from taking down politically incorrect statues, rearranging art in museums to reflect greater diversity and renaming sports teams, colleges and galleries in museums.  History has made mistakes. We read in the newspaper and hear on the news about how new scientific methods, including DNA, have been used to exonerate prisoners, who sometimes have been incarcerated erroneously for decades. How might their lives have been different...

When Margaret’s husband died in his late 60s, she lived through a crash course in burying a loved one. He wanted to be buried in the St. Louis zip code in which they raised their family. She met this request, and found a cemetery across from their children’s elementary school with the perfect aisle plot since he loved an aisle seat on an airplane and in a movie theater.  But eight years later, when she moved from the Show-Me State to the Big Apple (New York City) to be closer to her sisters and older son, she felt she was...