Cooking the NYTimes and Other Assorted Retirement Activities

I'm preparing to celebrate the annual trip around the sun tomorrow, which always feels like an opportune moment to step back, savor the view, and see if you're ready to address a couple of life's big questions with the advantage of another year of wisdom under the belt. First, of course, is determining what Life's Big Questions are.  For that, I turned to the Google.  Here's what I found:  https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-10-big-philosophical-questions-most-people-wonder-about .  There were a bundle of other sites as well, most with a Biblical bent.  Not all of the Life's Big Questions are ones that I found myself pondering at any point during this last year, but a couple were. 1. What is the meaning of life? I actually witched around this one with significant angst during my adolescent years and landed on something my maternal grandmother told me:  "You are here to leave the world a better place than it was before you were born."  The ongoi...

You know those movies where the protagonists are women of a certain age? Where they sit around drinking until their tongues loosen up?  Then they titter dirty little secrets about sex, or lack thereof, and the predominantly female audience is expected to titter along at the women and say something akin to oh, my, goodness aren’t they a hoot?  I want to be just like that when I get old. Dearest Hollywood, that is not the real world. When you dare to reconnect, this is what I've learned about female protagonists who season with age. Yes, life includes the wonderful places you've visited and still intend to see.  It's about your children and their spouses and the incredible grandchildren they've gifted to you.  It's about what you learned at work, the impact you made, the impact you continue to make, the legacy you have left behind. It's also about how you've rolled around in the dirt.  How you've been plowed under by the avalanches.  The pain, the ...

If you're not familiar with Krista Tippett's On Being , allow me to encourage you to click on the link.   The On Being Project focuses on "tools for the art of living."  It is about as far removed as possible from the Project that subsumed me earlier this week: On Being Crabby. In the rearview mirror years of my life, I spent way too much time being crabby.  The small things got under my skin and burrowed their way into my soul, often in record time.  There they took up residence, remaining and welcoming in all the other small things that I permitted to get under my skin.  And in retrospect, it took way too much time for me to work my way past On Being Crabby. Fortunately, for the most part, the On Being (Perpetually) Crabby Project is a thing of the past.  So much so, in fact, it now takes me a while to figure out a name for  this emotion that is just bugging the bejeezus out of me.  What is this?  I'll ask myself.  Wh...