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New York City has charmed and delighted me since I was a 13-year-old, and my father took me there for my first visit. That was more than a half century ago. From then on, every time I visited NYC, I felt that catch-your-breath thrill at the sight of being in its environs. For a girl raised in St. Louis, Mo., Manhattan was a jumble of all kinds of unexpected wonders:  Buildings reaching to the sky; fast-moving, underground subway rides; the Staten Island ferry and the majesty of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor; the wonder of looking down and...

We’ve been deluged with articles, books and movies about the difficulty of caring for an aging parent. There are many physical and emotional needs that a caregiver must tend to like a gardener to keep plants alive.    That’s all well and good, but we’ve also heard about caregiver burnout. Most often it’s a daughter who becomes the main person in charge, especially now as unemployment shrinks and more of the very old live longer. I’ve quickly learned what my peers who assumed this role earlier found as I become an expert: We’ve stepped into a crazy land. It’s a...

Nora Ephron’s mother’s advice that everything was worth becoming copy certainly makes starting a new decade all so much more palatable. I get to write about what I’m feeling and experiencing even if my angst sends shock waves through my now aging body. And I get to offer a sort of public service announcement to my fellow aging peers who haven’t yet hit my age and a new decade.   Well, there’s good news to share all around. First, my aging parts really make it a bit easier to tolerate the numbers going upward. My poorer eyesight makes it harder to...

Valentine’s Day is upon us, bringing glee, insecurities and sadness, along with a slew of romantic images on social media and television, and in every retail store. Look around and there are frilly nightgowns, ties, candy, red wine, flowers and cards everywhere you turn. And hopefully you like the color red for it takes over. For those with a significant other, it’s a time to let the person know how you feel with hearts sent by Cupid with arrows, messages with lots of exclamation points and a special gift or two. For those who are perfectly comfortable with singlehood the...

Most of us know about the Big Dig; that was the major demolition in downtown Boston that was planned in 1982 with construction work starting in 1991 and not being completed until the very end of 2007. Few thought the timeline funny. But we’re talking about a different kind of dig, a verbal one known as sarcasm, which most of us have used to criticize a friend or family member, usually unwittingly, though sometimes deliberately. In an attempt to be funny, we end up sounding snarky, sometimes hurting the recipient of our barbs. Or sometimes the intent is to be...