I’ve never been much into my birthday. And with the deeply disturbing events in Afghanistan, along with the troublesome rise of the Delta variant, an individual’s birthday at the moment would seem entirely insignificant.

On the other hand, we all of us continue to live our lives day by day, dancing as fast as we can, so as it just so happens I turned 72 on August 22, I thought I’d both share some random thoughts on the aging phenomenon AND check in with you on your experiences with aging.

I refuse to fall into the pre-fab categories of age, gender, religious bent, political choice, etc.

Bonnie and I are on our way down to the Dominican Republic (or THE DR, as they say) for our first visit to the movie set of NYAD.

Wait, let’s just stop right there. It’s almost surreal to have a motion picture about oneself underway. It’s a gigantic other layer of unreal to have the sublime Annette Bening playing you. Add to that the esteemed Jodie Foster playing Bonnie. Then the director team are the hugely talented filmmakers Jimmy Chin and his wife Chai Vasarhelyi, who won the Oscar for best documentary for their gripping film Free Solo. Just my opinion, their current doc The Rescue, the harrowing tale of the boys’ soccer team facing death in an underground cave in Thailand, is even more dramatic than Free Solo.

My brother would have turned 69 today, August 31. But Sharif died young, twelve years ago, after surviving the hardships of living on the streets of Boston all his adult life.

Sharif was born William but changed his name to Sharif. My mother Lucy blamed herself for not recognizing his mental illness from a very young age, but to be fair to Lucy it was an era when we didn’t automatically interpret eccentric behavior of a child as illness.

I am close to silenced when I observe a family where the father is fully engaged, elated to be with his children, proud of his children. My two best friends, Bonnie and Candace, had affectionate, fun fathers — men of high moral standards, men who put their children first and chose to spend time with them above all else. goes here

The headlines are urgent these days. The unfathomable multiple mass shootings. State governments turning their backs on women’s rights with their anti-abortion laws. Ukraine suffering continuing losses that grip us day by day.

But today is World Ocean Day and, just as we each one of us finds a way to push onward in living the best lives we can, we cannot forget the gift of breath our majestic oceans give us.

Just as we have in recent years seemingly come to a deadlock on almost every front in this country, Democrats vs Republicans light years apart, we are not at all equally divided on today’s two crucial and emotional issues: gun safety and a woman’s right to govern her own body.

We are just back from our visit to the set of NYAD, the entire film being shot in the Dominican Republic.

How very surreal to immerse ourselves in the world we lived out loud for so many years, this extraordinary cast and crew now living it out loud themselves. Annette Bening is not Annette on the set. Jodie Foster is not Jodie. They are Diana and Bonnie, from the names on their trailers to the announcements for them to get to the set.

Today Major League Baseball gets under way and Bonnie and I had a chance to head out to Dodgers Stadium the other night for a “freeway series” pre-season game between the Dodgers and the Angels.

I’m not a baseball fan. After all, the word “fan” derives from “fanatic”. I’m an Olympics fan, a tennis fan, and an NFL junkie. But I do appreciate almost all sports and as far as baseball goes, I admit that I usually only pay close attention at the end of the season, for the American and National League Championship Series and the World Series.

Bonnie has now said her final goodbye to her warm, most special mother, Lila. Gone now, in peace, leaving her wonderful family in utter awe of both her life and her person, at 95 Lila lived to its very fullest what she called “such a lucky life.”

Novak Djokovic, it can be argued, is the greatest tennis player to ever play the game. The impending Australian Open, slated to start this Monday, January 17, the first of the year’s four Majors, has the potential to seal that stature for the Serbian champion. Wait, let me not use the treasured word “champion” in this case. Let us instead refer to Djokovic as a “winner”, not a champion.

I would venture to say that most of us tourists who go to Egypt are focused on the time of the Pharaohs. We are seeking the awe of Ancient times. It has been suggested that it must have been aliens who built the Pyramids, that humans of that early era — 5,000 years ago — -simply couldn’t have moved those multi-ton boulders without machinery, without even simple pulleys. But in fact humans did build them and it flat out blows your mind to stand in their shadows and contemplate just what they did and how they did it.

It was eight years ago today that I stumbled up onto Smathers Beach in Key West, after 52hrs, 54mins of continuous swimming from Havana.

I earnestly don’t want to spend the rest of my life casting back to that triumphant moment but for two reasons I allow myself this day every year to bring it all back to life.

Description The commentaries have rung out around the world since Oscar night. My own immediate reaction matched many. We know the definition of assault. Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock. He should have been thrown out of the building. Point blank.goes here

I just can’t stop crying.

A river of tears.

My Teddy and I have said our final goodbyes

None of us can live forever and Teddy was sixteen, very old for an 80-pound dog, age 112 in human years. With his hind legs slowly failing over the past couple of years, through the injections and laser therapy and all manner of meds, I thought I was all the time saying a long good-bye. But I was kidding myself.

With Teddy every day, every night, since the pandemic swept the world in March 2020, I had the exquisite privilege of ushering…

September 11, 2001 • It is a morning like any other. I am dressing for my morning workout, the news on the television. Bonnie is already in the garage, working out her first client.

I catch a glimpse of a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center Towers, but it doesn’t register. Maybe I think it’s a promo for a new disaster movie. Then the sound of the news becomes clear. This is now. This is real.

I was enraptured pretty much every minute of the Tokyo Olympics. When you go from the badminton players feathering that shuttlecock to the dressage horses dancing with such precision to the hurdlers gliding down the track to the divers twisting and turning without as much as an inch-high splash to the built swimmers powering over the surface to the volleyball players leaping and then deftly touching the ball into an open space, well, it’s all pure magic to me.

It’s just over a year now since the passing of the extraordinary Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
And with the recent terrifying anti-abortion, anti-women, moves in Texas, no doubt similar affronts to women to follow in several red states, we are desperately suffering the loss of Ginsburg’s Supreme Court leadership.
Already one brave doctor in Texas has gone against the new state mandate and performed an abortion on a patient, past the absurd new six-week period of that mandate. Women in that state are contemplating nine-hour (one way) drives to Oklahoma for their chosen procedures. The governor of Texas has posed the beyond absurd proposition that they will eradicate all rape in his state, rather than find compassion for women raped and now forced to carry that baby to term. It sickens me to even hear the words. No abortion rights for women in Texas, after a pregnancy has exceeded six weeks, even in cases of rape or incest.

You can find all of my essays on my page on Medium by clicking the link below. Thank you so much for reading them!