Did you know I dated the Homecoming Queen at the big high school I graduated from? I was a nothing, never allowed at the popular lunch table, stuttered my way to the lower half of my high school class and never made the varsity high school basketball or football team. What …
I’m no expert in how to handle traumatic experience. I was victimized two times while in grade school. I kept both of them secrets for decades. I mean I told no one. I locked them away. In middle age, almost as a surprise to myself, I shared with a loved one what happened to …
It isn’t how far or how fast I go up the mountain. It’s whether I get started. I’m blessed with living on the side of a mountain. Twenty years ago I could go out my back door and hike the 22 miles up to Lake Tahoe. Five years ago I made it to a bubbling …
Sherry and I were walking our way through the county roads of Iowa going from the northern border of the state to the south when we came upon a farm auction not far out of the little town of Boone. Pickup trucks and dusty cars lined either side of the road, and the miked …
Carl Jung is one of my three favorite psychologists. What he said about aging has got to be true. “A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which it belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have …
Monday, October 22nd, 2018, 11:10 a.m. My name is Amy Beth Baker, I’m five years old and I’m a black German Shepherd. I am the guard dog for Sherry and Don and my pals, two white Swiss shepherds, who prefer to play more than protect. I stare down packs of coyotes, chase …
I went to high school with a class of 900. One of them was Jim Stevenson. He was bright, good looking and sensitive: a boy that might grow old and do great things. Two years after graduation, he died in combat in Vietnam. When I think of aging, I think of Jim and others cut …
As long as I can remember, I’ve had this nagging fear of being around people. I stuttered as a kid (a friend told me last week I still do), and I always thought I was letting someone down, although I wasn’t sure just who. I tried to mask my fear. Years ago I drank …
Back in high school, I had this old, old journalism teacher by the name of Ms. Keefe. She was brutal when it came to curbing my creative writing talents. I had a weekly column in a Chicago suburban newspaper that she had set up for me. I was to write interesting stories …
You know how it feels when you visit friends you haven’t seen for years, and by golly, they look so much different than you remembered? Yet, when you see a friend almost every day, it’s hard to detect how he or she has aged at all. It’s the same with yourself. I don’t notice …
