I may have told this story before, but it bears repeating.  When I headed a teacher’s union, years ago, I defended a black member whom the school district longed to dismiss.  Her hair, greying enough to appear dusted with ash, surrounded a leathery face that seemed incapab

There’s a reason why women don’t earn as much as men, and discrimination isn’t the cause.  It stems from a female’s cultural role as a caregiver. In fact, 81 percent of people who tend to a family member in the home are women. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mothers and

When a person reaches “a certain age,” doctors begin to examine him or her with an eye to senility.   One of their tests requires a patient to draw the face of a clock and insert the required numbers.  I tend to fail because I prefer hexagonal clocks to round ones a

Our president, Donald Trump, is doing a great job of alienating most of the world.  Certainly, he earned us no goodwill when he refused to shake hands with  Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, and, arguably, the real leader of the free world. Beyond insulting an ally, he p

Recently, my mother celebrated her 100th birthday.  I took her to lunch at a restaurant we’d frequented over the years.  The proprietor doesn’t open in the afternoons, but for us he did. To make the occasion festive, I brought a  balloon and birthday cards sent by my friends wh

I’ve  always been a cautious driver and age hasn’t improved my courage.  Knowing  my reaction times are slowing,  my hearing fading and my periphery vision narrowing, I take extra precautions, which include driving at the lawful speed even if the road ahead is

“Getting knocked down is one thing—being a coward is something else.” So says, Sally Field who knows a thing or two about getting knocked down. She won her first Academy Award for her performance in the film, Norma Rae, (1979) but it was a role for which she was not the studio�

I surprised myself this morning and not pleasantly. After spending weeks trying to renew my mother’s handicapped parking placard with the Department of Motor Vehicles, I found the one I’d obtained earlier in my glove compartment. Now I had two placards with different numbers. What

Being 80-something, I get it when Democratic campaigner Joe Biden talks about record players, or President Donald Trump quips he will “tape” a program to view later. Both men are septuagenarian, kids by my reckoning, but old enough to be comfortable with earlier norms. Yes, it may

Being an old person in the tech world that the young have created can be disconcerting, like trying to navigate sand dunes on roller skates. For assistance, I pay one guru to manage my hard drive and storage and two additional gurus to keep me out of bogs in what we lovingly call the