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We may not have gone many places over the last few pandemic-era years, but the offers now are starting to ramp up for the rest of summer and even into the early Fall. If you are handed an invitation to friends for the weekend or a night or for dinner or brunch after being locked in for several years during Covid, be grateful. Show your gratitude with a small and thoughtful hostess gift.  But it’s another task to add to your to-do list. At this age, what the heck do you bring?  We all have too much stuff and are...

  What’s perfect? Few things in life are except maybe the solution to a math problem. There is only one answer. The right one.  Perfect is rigid and usually subjective. It implies that there is only one way to do something without faults or defects. How does that affect creativity if there’s no room to fail? What a crazy standard! Whether the design of a building, a dress, a work of art, a person’s looks, a meal, a guest, a friend, a dinner party, a student or child, a family gathering, holiday, the expectations are dizzying. And try as we...

  We all have limits of one kind or another.  You won’t pay more than X dollars for a pastry while I won’t pay Y dollars for valet parking. And what’s your limit on a haircut and coloring?  You might not buy a car manufactured in Germany or China or go on a vacation to Russia or Florida because of your political beliefs. Someone else may never or rarely come to New York City because they think everyone there is loud, bossy and rude.  You might not visit a certain art museum because it took down a neighboring building you...

  Who’s on your speed dial? Hundreds, maybe thousands of names. Many are obsolete.   We feel it’s time to dial it down. Yes, it’s hard to do but most of us can take a giant leap toward simplifying our lives by culling many contacts from our speed dials and from our brains. They’re taking up too much real estate.  Speed dial, it isn’t anything that you did. We’ve had some wonderful years together, but enough contacts are enough.  In an age when we’re trying to declutter and tidy up our lives as instructed by Marie Kondo and those who...

  “Respect yourself,” as the song goes by the American R&B/gospel group, The Staple Singers, and protect yourself. We protect ourselves as best as we can as we age because we are determined to stay mentally and physically healthy for as long as possible. And if we’re living alone, there are special precautions that we try to take.   When young, we had a sense of impatience, adventure, excitability and a lack of perspective and often the circumstances that only the young possess—a laissez faire lifestyle. Fast forward to today. Those of us of a certain age have had to...