This morning I wrapped up an article about a new friend, Susan McNamee. Susan, 67, lives in Denver. In her teens, all she ever wanted to do was be a mom. She was a self-described ‘unpopular pudge’ in high school…

My friend Susan stared at me in disbelief. “You’re going to do what?” She was incredulous. “Go to Africa alone and climb Kilimanjaro at sixty?” She paused for a deep breath. “ALONE?”

The four Indonesian boys, all small but ranging in age from 12 to 14, led us along a tree-lined path. The fenceposts to either side of us as we left the island village were sprouting trees, a testament to the proliferating growth of these many islands…

It was 1977, in Winter Haven, Florida, my home town. My parents had sold our farm and were now living in a fifth-wheel camper, parked in a campground. Next to us was a golf course…

Several weeks ago, a woman commented on an article I’d done about getting older vs. getting old. She told a story about taking a bad fall over a concrete curb, sitting there for a few moments, and then moving on…

The phrase “aging gracefully” implies that there is a way to age disgracefully. If you’ll pardon my badly-disguised chuckle, I’m so happy to be aging in the first place, given our times, that the idea that there is a way to mess…

After I signed my life away on the waiver, which tells you that you can die, of course you can, I leapt into this class with the same abandon as I do most new sports. Look, I’m about as graceful as a drunken camel. What I do have, which gets me through…

Reading today’s title, you might want to throw your wine glass at me, but I assure you, there’s a method to my madness. I found it while considering a speech that many of us have heard, or read, from Nelson Mandela, as written by Marianne Williamson in 1992…

Should you read your parents’ letters? Are their journals and private musings cathartic or potentially devastating? I face this question right now, and it’s a big one. A while back, after moving to Eugene, Oregon this past year, I saw an article by a fellow Sixty writer…

Two days ago, I received a note from a reader who follows my writing on a couple of different platforms. It caught me by surprise, if for no other reason that it is so very easy, sitting here in relative isolation and still under the corner of the heavy quarantine…