If we are eighty or approaching it, we have stuff.  It is the result of years of living.  Some of it is important to us and some of it we have forgotten we even own.  That stuff is found in the dark corners of our closets, attics, and basements, and stays there out of inertia. 

It seems to me that I meet the word ‘dream’ everywhere I turn these days.  Women are to have their dream weddings, people are to move into their dream homes, and young people are to find their dream jobs.  I assume by this it is meant that the dreamed item will be perfect.  That is an awful lot to ask of a wedding, a house or a job. 

I have found the word 'culture' has come up a great deal lately in newsprint and conversation. It has made me think about how culture has changed in the three-quarters of a century that I have been around to observe it.

This was the heading that screamed from the top of an advertisement for a local retirement community.  The picture below the headline showed a gray-haired woman in a beret (a beret?) playing a lute while a goateed gentleman leaned on a railing looking on admiringly.  They were smiling at one another in mutual admiration. 

I had a very independent child for whom the words, ‘I do it MYSELF,’ trailed her throughout her twos. Right shoes were put on left feet; cereal bowls overflowed as the milk drowned the cornflakes and swept over the table; clothes were picked with no attention to color, but only to an inner two-year-old sensibility; and carloads of people waited patiently as she struggled to clip her seat belt on her own.

One of the most common complaints I hear when there is a gathering of people around my age, is the difficulty they have in understanding the accents that proliferate in our diverse and outsourced world.  I understand the complaint, as I have spoken to help desks from Singapore to Romania in my quest to get help with a computer and found myself struggling to understand directions spoken with a heavy accent. 

We older people really do not need a cruise director to run our lives.  We really don’t.   This idea seems to run counter to every idea currently in vogue with those building institutions for the over 55 set. 

The history of one’s family is a tricky business as it tends to be told through the lens of those who follow. It may be celebrated for the wrong reasons, be ignored completely, or in some cases changed beyond recognition. 

My desk is inherited from my grandfather, my grandmother having bought it for him in 1955 when it was already an antique.  I have no idea how old it is, but the leather top is intact, and the wood burnished to an aged gloss, wear showing around the drawer handles where many hands over many years have pulled them open and shut.

A great many things have changed since my youth, but some things, regrettably, remain unchanged.  This was brought home to me at a recent local performance of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. 

I am getting very good at waiting. This is not some wonderful character trait for which I am to be admired, but is simply due to my stage in life.

Many years ago, my grandfather retired to his garden in Northern California. He had put himself through college working 40 hours a week as a gardener, and it had engendered a life-long interest in this activity.

One of the pleasures of being a certain age is that alarm clocks do not rule my life anymore.  I seldom wake up to an alarm, and then only for a special event or to get up in time for a flight somewhere.  Otherwise, I sleep until I wake up.

At my age words are now taking on an interesting twist. I do not understand whole conversations that my grandchildren are having. Over the years I have made it through sick (but one is not ill), baaad (but it is really good), and wicked (not evil but great.)

The British and their former empire have a name for the day after Christmas.  I have long thought Americans needed a name for the 26th, as it marks the end of what many find a season rife with expectations hard to fulfill.

I love this picture.

At this time of year, we celebrate the birth of a baby who grew up to change the world.  Painting upon painting has been created, song upon song have been sung about this event.  We have firmly fixed in our minds the picture of a small, innocent human ensconced in a straw filled manger.

We do not live in an over fifty-five community officially, but it might as well be. All our neighbors have gray hair and the only children in evidence are visiting grandchildren.

I have recently realized that our lives are lived in a series of brackets.  These are a series of befores and afters; before the first job after the last job, being single then being married, before the baby then after the last one leaves home, before that move then after that move.  But one bracket that I am in the middle of just occurred to me the other day --- before the car and after the car

I am probably one of the last people on earth that knows more about soup and how to eat it than is necessary. I even have silver flat ware from my grandmother that includes two kinds of soup spoons --- one for cream soups and one for clear soups. And not only are the spoons different, but the bowls from which those soups are eaten are different too.