According to recent statistics (if you can believe statistics these days) a shocking 85% of landline users have jumped ship in favour of cell phones only. Phone companies are encouraging subscribers to relinquish them so that the expensive copper wiring can be better utilized. Furthermore, they don’t want to be bothered with servicing us! As one of the remaining 15% “hardline” users, I am gobsmacked…
As someone who is already a fan of books by New York Times best-selling author Kristin Hannah, I couldn’t wait for her newest release, The Women. It’s a story about the war in Vietnam during the late sixties and early seventies when thousands of people were dying for a dubious cause. Sadly, no one acknowledged or appreciated the contribution made by the women at that time,…
In the interests of hospitality, we try to keep a generous assortment of cold beverages in our fridge for when visitors drop by. There is one drink, however, that never fails to elicit very particular preferences—Coca-Cola®. Most of our friends will drink any brand of wine or beer, but everyone has very specific tastes in that miracle beverage that in the good old days contained…
There was a time a few years ago when I questioned whether as an aging boomer, I was getting too old for jeans. That short-lived brain-lapse soon evaporated when I realized that baby boomers were the heart and soul, the very essence of jeans culture and we deserve to be buried (or cremated depending on your preference) in our treasured, weathered, and finally soft, vintage…
Having just spent an entire day on phone calls and chat lines attending to billing and maintenance issues with five different service providers, I am ready to slit my wrists. Trying to resolve issues with the telephone company, the gas company, our cellphone provider, our satellite radio service, and our home security provider, I was left feeling exhausted, angry, and frustrated that everything had to…
Lyn Slater is a retired professor at Fordham University in New York, a former social worker, model, fashion icon, writer, social media influencer, and advocate for positive aging. She is also one of us— a baby boomer. After following Slater for years on Instagram and Facebook as the “Accidental Icon”, I was delighted to hear she was working on a book about aging so I…
Are you still enjoying the internet? Does it still excite you the way it once did or has it become a chore, an onerous and exhausting exercise you devote countless hours to simply because it’s there demanding attention? Do you mourn those wasted hours on Instagram and Facebook absorbing useless information and following vague threads to a questionable end? I signed on to Substack last…
Neil Sedaka was right. Any kind of breaking up is aways hard to do. By the time boomers reach retirement age, most of us have experienced at least one painful breakup. Many of us are veterans of multiple breakups. When it happens, we feel like we will never recover but inevitably we do. We put ourselves back together and often find someone else to love….
When I read three books in a row by the same author, then you can be assured I love her writing. After reading and reviewing her two diary-styled non-fiction books a couple of weeks ago (Went to London, Took The Dog and Love, Nina) I went looking for other books by Nina Stibbe and came upon the fictional One Day I Shall Astonish The World….
Not all of us get it but most of us do—that extra layer of fat distribution around the middle that accompanies menopause and turns our body from a feminine hourglass shape into a rectangle (me!), a pear, or an apple. In my youth, when I was slim, I naively thought it would never happen to me but it did and I’ve been fighting a losing…
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding is one of the few diaries I’ve had the opportunity to peek into (even though it was fictional), but reading the inside story of other people’s lives is probably why I enjoy memoirs and biographies so much. I’ve just finished reading Went To London, Took The Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway by British writer Nina Stibbe. While…
Get a bunch of old boomers together and you will notice we are frequently called upon to complete each other’s sentences. Not only is it because we’re that in tune with one another but more importantly, we either can’t remember what we wanted to say, or we can’t remember an important name/fact/movie title/song relevant to the conversation. It’s like we have gaping moth holes in…
Whether he’s ranting on CBC’s Rick Mercer Report, entertaining on This Hour Has 22 Minutes or otherwise sharing his informed opinions on politics and contemporary Canadian lifestyle, Rick Mercer is a national treasure. Before retiring from his RMR show, I doubt I missed an episode in the fifteen seasons his show was on the air. Mercer’s newest book The Road Years is an homage to all those years…
“Men want to be him and women want to be with him.”. That’s how New York Times writer Elizabeth Vincentelli described the Jack Reacher character played by Alan Ritchson on the new Reacher series streaming on Amazon Prime Video. She also described him as a giant tenderized side of beef. This should give you a pretty good idea of why the action series based on…
When I read Bonnie Garmus’s New York Times’ best-selling debut novel Lessons In Chemistry, it reminded me of the old Monty Python phrase, And now for something completely different. The story begins in the 1950s and it reads a bit like an old-timey television show. The plot eventually evolves into a chemistry-themed television cooking show, but getting there takes some time. Elizabeth Zott is a highly motivated,…
When I first heard that the Canadian government has mandated free sanitary products in government and public buildings I found myself saying a silent thank you on behalf of all women. One step forward. Would anyone expect to encounter a washroom not supplied with toilet paper to attend to our personal sanitation needs? The same guidelines apply to other sanitary products. Half the population would…
Much as I have enjoyed reading Barbra Streisand’s nearly thousand-page opus My Name Is Barbra*, its sheer volume and level of detail had become tedious. So, about two-thirds of the way through, I switched to a nice little book I downloaded from the library called “Breaking And Entering” by Toronto Author Don Gillmor. It turned out to be the perfect diversion. I’ll return to Barbra later….
Timothy Leary’s rallying cry for hippies of Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out has new meaning these days. Turning on has lost some of its rebellious cachet now that weed has been legalized in Ontario and boomers are tuning in on a different frequency. If you’re like me, many boomers are now committed owners and users of hearing aids. Just as surely as we all…
I’m taking a few days off to celebrate the holidays. In the spirit of reduce, reuse, and recycle, but mainly because I’m feeling lazy, here’s an encore version of an earlier New Year’s post, with some minor modifications: The reason I never make New Year’s resolutions is that I cannot deal with the stress of inevitable failure. Sure . . . I’d love to lose…
There was a time when I could eat pretty much anything I wanted without consequences. In the mid-sixties when I worked for Bell Telephone in the Maclean-Hunter building on University Avenue, my friend and I used to order mashed potatoes with gravy and dessert with every lunch in the cafeteria. Then, without an ounce of shame or regret, we treated ourselves to a butter tart…
We spend an incredible one-third of our lives in bed, whether our own or someone else’s. That adds up to almost thirty years in bed, and that investment of time deserves a good mattress and good sheets. We recently updated our mattress to one of those trendy memory foam thingies which I’m still somewhat ambivalent about, and thought I deserved some new sheets to go…
Specifically, who’s afraid of driving after dark? We are and most of our friends are, which means that most boomers are now reluctant to drive once the sun goes down. We used to think our parents and their friends were joking when they said they didn’t like to drive after dark, and now it’s us. When did it start? How has it affected our lives?…
Sorry to touch on a sensitive subject, but my friend Margaret has already written hers and even has her tombstone in place. I think it’s about time I did the same thing. Now that we’ve updated our wills and agreed on where we want our ashes interred, I suppose we should tie up the final loose ends. What kind of funeral or celebration of life…
The Covenant of Water is the second book by Abraham Verghese that I have read and it was just as fascinating as his earlier book, Cutting For Stone. At more than seven hundred pages it was more than I could read in my allotted twenty-one days from the library, so I bought the hard-cover edition on Amazon so I could finish it at my leisure….
Every Saturday I look forward to reading Vinay Menon’s Opinion column in the Toronto Star. He’s replaced the late and unbeatable Gary Lautens as one of my favourite light-hearted newspaper-reading pleasures with his gentle humour and wry observations on everyday life. Reading last week’s “Chatting up strangers is good for our health” column reminded me of a blog I posted nearly ten years ago that…
When I open a book with a boomer-aged main character, written by an author I have previously read and enjoyed, then chances are very good that I’m going to enjoy it. The Librarianist by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt is such a book. I loved his earlier book French Exit. I read it a few years ago and can vouch for that book being infinitely better…
Those new parking machines that have replaced real human parking attendants are driving me crazy. Is it because I’m old and incompetent, or just plain stupid? The grumbling and sweating start while I am still walking across the parking lot toward the scary, big, green and black machine. Will it grant me permission to occupy a space for a few hours? Will it perform its…
There is a new attitude in the workplace and I’m envious. We’re all familiar with the quiet quitting phenomenon. Employees have embraced the practice of doing the minimum amount of work while still managing to keep their jobs. It’s a variation of work to rule. The new slant on this slacker attitude is called lazy girl working. Get a job with minimal demands that allows…
The Last Gift of Time, Life Beyond Sixty by Carolyn G. Heilbrun is a little book that some readers may not have the patience to read, but if you do, you will find it enormously enlightening. Heilbrun was a retired Professor of English Literature at Colombia University. She wrote the book twenty-five years ago in 1998 when she was in her seventies. I recently came…
You would think that by age seventy-six, I would have nailed my personal fashion style. Alas, I am still a work in progress, but who is ever fully confident in everything they wear all the time? Even Angelina Jolie found herself struggling to define her personal style when she recently launched her own clothing line. We always think we would look better if we just…
Lump is a wonderful book for women, written by a man, Nathan Whitlock. The title refers to the dreaded “C” word but this fictional story is not about the ravages of chemotherapy and other treatments, but concerns the ravages of family life surrounding a woman with the diagnosis. The bonus is the author is from Hamilton, Ontario and the story is set in Toronto. New…
Are professional sports affecting your love life, or am I the only one? Last Sunday I saw a good movie advertised and suggested to my husband that we go on a cosy date to take in the matinée. Like Pavlov’s dog, my taste buds were already drooling at the thought of warm, buttery popcorn and an icy Diet Coke. He looked at me like I…
My world as a retired baby boomer is shrinking. Traffic problems in the Greater Toronto Area have become such a nightmare I’m reluctant to go anywhere. It seems easier to spare my nerves and stay home. Our choked road system has reached the point where I often decline opportunities for social outings rather than deal with the stress of traffic to get there. The volume…
If you can get past the seemingly unhappy subject matter and appreciate the great writing, then Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey is a wonderful read. You will appreciate it even more if you have ever been through a painful divorce because that is what this fictional, humorous book is about. The bonus is the author is Canadian and readers will relate to the Toronto…
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