The Happiness Check
May 15, 2017 By
Pepper Evans
I received a milestone-birthday gift from a dear, longtime friend. It was a generous monetary gift that came with a caveat: I must spend it on myself. No college tuition help, no car repair, no electric bill—I had to spend it on something that
made me happy.
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The Trials of a Top Dog
January 12, 2017 By
Flora Davis
We live in a hierarchical society. Which is too bad because I’ve never wanted to be anybody’s boss or to order anyone around. That mindset may be fairly common among women of my generation—I’m in my 80s. The one time in my life when I clearly
was top dog, I didn’t like it at all.
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New Names for Today's Households
October 22, 2016 By
Pepper Evans
As I wrote in a previous blog about older kids returning to live with their parents, it really wasn't that long ago that it was okay, respectable even, for a young adult to live at home until marriage. Then it became almost unheard of in my generation. And now, everything old being new again, 85 percent of college grads return home before flying solo, according to
Time magazine. Sociologist Katherine Newman, author of
The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (2012), says it's a global issue.
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They're Baaaaack!
October 03, 2016 By
Pepper Evans
I was intrigued to read a Gallup-poll finding that 14 percent of 24- to 34-year-olds are living with their parents, and more than half of 18- to 23-year-olds are still at home (or are back there again).
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Homesick
August 15, 2016 By
Pepper Evans
Two friends of mine recently experienced something you don't hear about often: grieving the loss of their childhood homes. For people who spent a long stretch of their formative years at a single address, the childhood home is a repository of memories, an emotional scrapbook of sorts.
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Aging in Place: Is It a Pipe Dream?
May 11, 2016 By
Flora Davis
On surveys, most older Americans say they want to age in place: to stay right where they are in the home they’ve lived in for years. Whenever I hear that, I wonder whether they realize just how difficult that can become. As time passes, house and yard maintenance begin to seem overwhelming; stairs can become impossible to climb. Friends move away or die, and once you have to stop driving, isolation looms.
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Age Is Just a Number
April 20, 2016 By
Flora Davis
I live in a retirement community that’s age-restricted: you have to be at least 62 to move in. A 50-something friend asked me the other day why on earth I would want to live in a place that has only one age group.
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Should I Stay or Should I Go?
November 07, 2015 By
Bob Bostock
While enduring the long and miserable winter of 2014-2015, my thoughts increasingly turned to getting out of New Jersey for someplace warm. A brief visit to Charleston, SC, in March—where I had to go out to buy some short-sleeved shirts—made me ask the question The Clash posed in 1982, “Should I stay or should I go?”
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My Greatest Fear
July 29, 2015 By
Flora Davis
From my living room window, I look out on a pretty little park—and the nursing home across the way. I know someone who lives there but I haven’t visited her, I’m ashamed to say. The place scares me because it reminds me that there might be a nursing home in my future.
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Grace and Frankie (Season 1, 2015), 13 episodes, available on Netflix streaming
June 18, 2015 By
Pete Croatto
What’s nice about
Grace and Frankie—aside from seeing Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda stretching their comedic wings—is how it looks at the golden years with reality and humor. That theme runs throughout the first 13 episodes of the series. Even when the show veers toward the farcical, we root for the title characters—two not-quite friends whose lengthy marriages come to an abrupt end—far more than we recoil at their actions.
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Going Nuclear in a Family Way
May 18, 2015 By
Flora Davis
I grew up in a nuclear family—parents, kids and that was it—but I had the impression that practically everyone else in America lived in three-generation extended families. When grandparents grew old, I believed, their grown children automatically took them in, and everyone lived together like the Waltons on television.
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I Lied to My Father on His Deathbed
January 29, 2015 By
Bob Bostock
My generation has been called the sandwich generation, people in middle age who bear some level of responsibility for their children and their parents. While reliable statistics are not readily available, it is estimated that almost half of people in their 50s and early 60s find themselves in this demographic.
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One-Way Conversations
January 15, 2015 By
Flora Davis
I often talk to myself, and for a long time I couldn’t figure out why. I never did my thinking out loud before my husband died. I wondered: Do I do it now because I live alone or is this typical of aging?
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Empty Nest
November 12, 2014 By
Bob Bostock
Early this spring, one of my Facebook friends posted a photo of a robin’s nest that had appeared in a lilac bush outside her porch. A few days later, she posted another picture: the nest now had two beautiful, blue eggs resting in it. And then, a few weeks later, a photo of the nestlings, their necks extended to the sky, their mouths wide open waiting for their next meal. This was followed, predictably, by a final image—the nest was empty again.
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How The Golden Girls Shaped My Feminism
October 27, 2014 By
Megan Kearns
A child of the '80s, I grew up watching TV shows like
Murder She Wrote and
Love Boat. Living with my grandparents for six years clearly influenced my television viewing habits! My favorite series of my childhood—and still one of my absolute favorites as an adult—was
The Golden Girls.
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The Doomed Experiment in Intergenerational Living
April 23, 2014 By
Pepper Evans
I recently picked up Katie Hafner's Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir (2013). All it took was a glance at the book jacket for me to know that the author was telling part of my story along with her own.
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