“Consider yourself ‘piratized,’” said the nurse as she finished taping a patch over my right eye.
Only four years after retirement, I sometimes think about legacies, asking myself, “Have I contributed to anything lasting?”
As I exited the library, the display of cookbooks, each with “chocolate” in its title, stopped me cold. I’d been struggling to think of Christmas gifts I could make. The books provided me an instant answer. This year I would make truffles.
One adage I’d love to disprove is that the older you get the longer it takes for your body to heal from an injury. But so far experience has done nothing to persuade me that it isn’t true.
We often work hard to ignore other people, whether we’re in a rush, fearful of taking the first step, or lost in the imaginary conversations we’re carrying on in our heads.
In my last column I wrote about being dumped onto hard soil by a horse. As a result, I learned to drive one of those carts at Costco.
Doing research is one of the most exciting parts of writing a novel, though some people – including me — might say that sometimes my research goes too far.
A week ago Ana died. Heart attack? Stroke? Something that took her fast.
If you see me coming your way you might want to change direction. That is, unless you don’t mind me taking your picture.
Maybe you’ve seen the commercial on TV. Christie Brinkley and Chuck Norris – Beauty and the Beast — team up to show off their buff bodies and persuade viewers to buy one of the machines they’re exercising on.
Even if scientists have shown it takes more than six steps to connect any two people in the world, experience tells us that the small world factor is always at work.
Visitors to Paris might fall in love with the Mona Lisa, the houseboats on the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Champs-Elysées. I fell in love with the “macaron,” which is not to be confused with the mound of baked coconut and egg white that in this country we call macaroon.
Good neighbors are invaluable. But that’s the conclusion to this story, so let me start at the beginning.
Thanksgiving has passed. We’ve all expressed our gratitude for family, friends, turkey and stuffing. Or have we?
Those of us over age 50 can finally feel good about being boring.
I observed my birthday in August. ‘Observed’ as opposed to ‘celebrated.’ I stopped celebrating at 60. In contrast to the kind of celebrations birthdays dictate at age 21, at a certain point they call for less concern over parties and gifts and more time spent in reflection.
A month ago, a friend of mine who is an experienced traveler, sounded disappointed when I told her my husband and I had turned to a travel agent to help us plan a trip to Europe. However, recently she changed her tune when she realized that things can go wrong when I’m traveling even a few miles from home.
More than five hundred people went sleepless in Seattle the last week in July. I was one of them.
In June my husband and I set out to explore Central Washington. It was the first road trip we’d taken in years.
It’s not just civic leaders who leave a hole in a community when they die. Michael O’Neill, who passed away June 19, knew more about the lives of a long list of Bellevue residents than political leaders know about most of their constituents.
I need to find my inner Energizer bunny soon. I just read “Move a Little, Lose a Lot,” a book by James A. Levine, M.D., which says, in so many words, “Sitting is the new smoking.” I went for the book after reading an article in a recent issue of “The New Yorker,” for which Levine’s work was the inspiration.
I don’t mind telling people that I’m helping plan my 2014 high school reunion. It’s only when I say, “It’s our 50th,” that I have a compulsive need to whisper, even if I’m not in a public place.
You wouldn’t expect someone who’s retired to need a vacation, but when my writing instructor at the University of Washington announced that we’d have two weeks off for spring break, I decided I wanted a real vacation, one that involved leaving home.
