Dr. Bill Roiter

It’s 1965. I’m 15 and getting my first kiss from my first girlfriend. WOW! Now I’m a man! I am also generally happy, although often angst-ridden, and so clueless that I believe I have conquered my world. This sweet memory is so strong that I can almost smell my girlfriend’s overpowering Shalimar perfume. All I have to do to recall this memory is hear The Lovin’ Spoonful play “Do You Believe in Magic” and I am right there.

We all have those special songs that tie us to memories we have tucked away in our 50-plus year-old brains. And that’s good, because familiar music triggers memories of the past. This link to positive (and sometimes negative) memories is so strong that advertisers use it to connect our memories— the fond ones— to their products. I expect that you think of ketchup when you hear Carly Simon sing “Anticipation, Anticipation is making me late, is keeping me waiting” (1971). What comes to mind when you hear Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” (1968)?

It turns out that these music memories can improve brain function. Caregivers have observed that Alzheimer’s patients who do not even recognize family members recall the lyrics of songs when they’re played. Mute patients may even sing along until the song ends and then revert to silence again. These observations have spawned much research and also a foundation that focuses on this area — The Institute for Music and Neurologic Function. >

What does this mean for those of us with generally healthy 50+ year-old brains? When we stimulate our brains with familiar music, we put them to work. Memories do not reside in one place in the brain; parts of them are stashed away all over the place.

Remember my Shalimar perfume memory? Scent is stored in one part of the brain while the Lovin’ Spoonful’s voices are kept elsewhere. This past February, Petr Janata of UC Davis published an article in the Cerebral Cortex Journal, “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories,” and reported that “hearing a familiar song resulted in the activation of several structures that have been implicated in a variety of sequencing tasks and music studies.” In simpler terms, music makes your brain dance.

Could it be that my apparent unimaginative selection of memory music is not a sign of premature old age but rather an exercise for my mind? I haven’t found research suggesting that listening to Sonny and Cher sing “I Got You Babe” strengthens my brain and expands my mind, but I like to believe that it does.

So maybe it’s helpful to give you a Top Ten list from 1965:

1. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction / Rolling Stones
2. Yesterday / Beatles
3. Turn! Turn! Turn! / Byrds
4. I Got You Babe / Sonny & Cher
5. Help! / Beatles
6. Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter / Herman’s Hermits
7. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ / Righteous Brothers
8. Downtown / Petula Clark
9. I Can’t Help Myself / Four Tops
10. Help Me Rhonda / Beach Boys

What songs evoke your pleasant memories? Enjoying the music you know exercises the brain, as does making new memories with new music. So, “Keep On Dancing” (that’s The Gentrys, 1965!).

Check out Bill Roiter’s book, “Beyond Work.” Click here.

Steven M. Forman

Lots of baby boomers who can afford to are moving. From north to south, from cold to hot. Boomer Steven M. Forman has written a new novel about one of them, Boston detective Eddie Perlmutter, whose knees tell him to retire down to Boca Raton. But is it paradise of sunbathing and golf? Hardly. Here’s an excerpt from “Boca Knights“.

The membership at Broken Sound was diverse but they all had two things in common. When the members were young they were all “wannabees.” Now they were all ustabees (you-stah-bees).

“I ustabe a heart surgeon Eddie,” said an octogenarian.

“That’s awesome, Dr Goober. Hey, let me get that golf bag for you.”

“Yeah, open heart surgery.”

“Wow. You driving or riding Doc?”

“Driving. Angioplasty was my specialty.”

“Balloons, right?”

“I guess that sums it up.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“It was. I held life and death in my hands at one time. Can you imagine that feeling Eddie?”

“As a matter of fact I can, Dr Goober.”

“No, you can’t. You’re a bag boy.”

“Actually, I’m the head of security here, Dr. Goober.”

“Is my golf bag secure?”

“Looks that way to me,” I said, rattling the bag for him to make sure.

“Good. So what does a security officer know about the power of life and death?”

“I ustabe a police detective, Dr. Goober. “When I had my gun aimed at a suspect, I had the same power you did with your scalpel.”

“I didn’t know you ustabe a police detective.”

“Everyone ustabe something before they got here, Dr. Goober.”

“Yes, that’s true,” the former heart surgeon said reflectively. “Everyone ustabe something,” he paused a moment, “I ustabe a heart surgeon you know.”

“I know, Dr. Goober. Well, hit ‘em straight.”

“It would easier for me to open a chest cavity,” he drove away, deep in thought.
__________________

“Where you from Mr. Shankman?”

“Philly. I ustabe a lawyer.”

“Do you know Dr. Shapiro? He’s from Philly?”

“Know him? I sued him.”
__________________

“I ustabe in business back in Chicago,” short and dapper Louie Lipshitz told me. His pure-white hair was slicked back and always in place. His golf clothes were coordinated, and his tan was perfect. He wore a big gold Jewish star around his neck.

“What kind of business, Mr. Lipshitz?”

“I sold African-American beauty supplies.”

“To African-Americans?”

“No, to Koreans. Of course to African-Americans.”

“Isn’t that an unusual profession for a white Jew?”

“I think being a white Jewish cop is even more bizarre.”

“Good point.”
__________________

“I ustabe a dentist.”

“Painless?”

“Not really. I hated every minute of it.”
__________________

“I ustabe a proctologist. No stupid comments please.”

“Hey, what do you think I am? An asshole?”
__________________

“I ustabe in ladies underwear.”

“I’m sure you still are, Mr. Krinitz.”

“Yeah, but don’t tell my wife, Eddie.”

“You told me you were single.”
__________________

“I ustabe an anesthesiologist.”

“I thought so,” I said stifling a yawn.
__________________

The male members were amicable and cheerful, for the most part, but there was something about them I found unsettling. These former captains of industry and highly respected professionals appeared to have lost their individuality in this homogenized environment. They blended together in a leisure universe of white hair, sunscreen and tightly scheduled fun. They reminded me of old thoroughbred race horses that had been put out to pasture as a reward for a winning career. They could still remember the thrill of the race, but their racing days were over. I don’t know why this bothered me. It didn’t seem to bother them.

They were a friendly, active fraternity with a camaraderie that reminded me of the tight knit cliques in the North End. The big difference was that the North End groups developed their sameness growing up, while the Broken Sound groups developed their sameness by growing old.

The female membership at the East Course was a different story. I was completely out of my element with one group known locally as Boca Babes. The “Boca Babe Look” was an unmistakable combination of chic clothing, beauty parlor magic, and surgical surprises. Under the professionally applied makeup and carefully selected designer clothes were good nose jobs, bad nose jobs, good boob jobs, bad boob jobs, good lip jobs, bad lip jobs, and face lifts that stretched the imagination.

The “Boca Babe attitude” was equally unmistakable. Boca Babes didn’t act as if they appreciated the idyllic lifestyle they were living. They acted as if they were entitled to this lifestyle. I don’t know if this attitude was developed by over indulgent parents in childhood or later in life by luxurious husbands, but it was a pervasive force at the course and impacted everyone it touched.

For the most part, there was a pleasant working relationship between the gophers and the golfers at the East Course. There was no relationship or appreciation, however, between the help and the Babes. Most of the time the help was invisible to the Babes until something wasn’t perfect. If something wasn’t perfect, someone had to pay. I tried to understand the Boca Babe mentality so we could co-exist. Unfortunately, I was only able to surmise a few things.

First of all, I learned not to waste my time analyzing Boca Babes who were second wives. They were easy to understand. Instead, I focused entirely on the majority of Broken Sound’s Boca Babes—the elder first wives. I concluded that they had married wisely, cared for their children faithfully, and waited patiently for this part of their lives. Their children now had children, and their husbands had the joys of golf and the comfort of sexual indifference. There were no serious demands on the time of these Boca Babes, so they were free to pamper and entertain themselves. Less than perfect was not in their plans for the day.

After careful analysis, I decided that the best way to deal with Boca Babes was to avoid them. That was not always possible.

Talia Carner

One thing about us boomers that no one in any generation can deny: we are not just inventive, not just energetic … but we are undefeated. This doesn’t always matter, but when storyteller Talia Carner hurt herself on a ski slope, it mattered big-time. We’re only as old as we feel.

Not a cloud in the sky. The air is crisp and cold, neutralized, devoid of any smell from a world that is not just pure white and powdery. I fill my lungs. In the silence, all I hear is the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of the snow scrunching under my skis. Swoosh to the right, swoosh to the left, what freedom! My body leans forward over the tips of my skis, pumping up and down as I serpent the slope. The mountain is mine, the world is mine, the moment is mine.

Except that all is suddenly shattered in a violent flip that unleashes a cloud of white dust. At once, I am hurled forward, sideways and upward. In a stitch of time everything blurs. My head whacks the packed powder. The line bifurcating the blue sky and white earth is tilted sideways. The sharp twist is my knee. The popping sound is my ski that releases a split second too late and goes flying over my head. When it lands a moment later, I am no longer near it; the momentum of my fall propels me downhill. My body is tossed over moguls. My left leg, already twisted, locks under me. It digs into the snow.

In the flurry of my spill, I’ve lost my hat, goggles, mittens, poles. In the silence that ensues, I hear horrible groans, and I realize that they are heaved out of my own throat.

Downhill, my husband and two daughters, their backs to me, pause above a new set of moguls. They must be figuring out the lay of the hill. They’ll take off in a minute, and I’ll be lying here for hours, all alone with my pain. Not hours, merely minutes, as in my mind’s eye I can see the sharp tips of unaware skiers perforating my skull. I put more force into my groans than I believe myself capable of, hoping the wind will carry it. And it does. My family freezes in stunned poses, then hurriedly remove their skis and launch a penguin-style uphill dash.

Still lying on my side, I manage to release my locked leg and rest it on top of my well one. I hyperventilate. The adrenaline pumps through my veins. Now my head is in my daughter’s lap.

“Shhhhhh,” she says, her fingers stroking me the way I used to do to her when putting her to bed. From somewhere, the garbled sound of a walkie-talkie is getting near. My husband bangs on my other ski to remove it, sending a jolt through me. My other daughter takes a guard position several feet uphill to warn skiers from running into me.

“A lady had a yard sale and hurt her knee,” the ski patrol says. I begin to laugh. Suddenly I feel good, relieved that I won’t be forgotten on the mountain. The knife in my knee has subsided a couple of notches to a throbbing that threatens to lash out in fury should I attempt to test it.

A young man with blue orbs and chiseled cheeks bends over me. His lips are carved as by a sculptor. “I’m John,” he says. I give him the kind of smile I wouldn’t have dared at a bar. His expert fingers search my knee, tenderly, but manage to extract a couple of yelps from me. I clamp down on them. Hard. For the first time I understand women in the delivery room showing bravery; their OB/GYN must look like my John. “Pain is a good sign,” he says. “The ligament is not completely torn. May I check your back?”

I smile. Check anything you want. His fingers climb up my spine one vertebra at the time. “It feels good,” I mumble, “Don’t stop.”

Someone collects my “yard sale” items. John wants to know how old I am. Oh, no. Just half an hour earlier I had sworn I would never again reveal my age. I tighten my lips. “C’mon, Ma,” my daughters urge. “C’mon, Ma. Go for it!”

I sigh. “Okay,” I tell him, scrutinizing the blue of his eyes to detect dimming of its brightness. But John takes my information well. No disappointment, I notice. He asks me about my medications. Must I also tell him about my hormone replacement therapy?

A few moments later, he introduces me to Josh. Blue orbs over chiseled cheeks. Carved lips. How has God made two with the same perfection? I sit up with as much dignity as my condition allows. “How do I look?” I whisper to my daughter and fluff my hair. Earlier she had remarked that the spongy part of my goggles was disintegrating. She brushes what I know looks like charcoal powder from my cheeks. “You look beautiful,” she whispers. The men lift my leg and rest it between two wooden boards. I stifle a scream as the top of the splint carves into my hip flexor. My leg looks like a hero sandwich with wilted lettuce.

My husband’s cell phone rings. He answers it and walks away, but I can hear his business voice thundering along the open slope, riding the mountain, taking away from my moment as the center of his universe.

I smile at my angelic saviors. “You’re terrific, guys.” I read their name tags. One is from Milwaukee, the other from Oregon. Twins separated at their parents’ divorce, I figure, except that they don’t know it. “How do you feel?” they ask in unison. “Wonderful,” I reply.

The stretcher is padded with a comforter. Josh tucks its edges like I’m a papoose. I stare at a bright, delirious sun. I am happy to be snuggled like this, saved from the slope, spared of any worldly responsibilities. Josh suggests my daughter put my goggles on my face. Like a coolie, he takes his spot between the two handles, positioning my head downhill. As he begins to ski down with the stretcher behind him, I hear the familiar swoosh, swoosh, except that now it is right below my ears. The powdery spray of snow from Josh’s skis sprinkles my face. I had just colored the gray away, and now my hair is flecked with white snow. The bottom of the stretcher is flexible, absorbing every ridge and bump of the slope. My injured knee protests each assault with its new vocabulary, but I tell it to shut up.

We come to a stop. John and Josh hover over me, four eyes so blue that for a second it seems that the sky peeks at me through holes in their heads. Just as I am about to inquire about the selection process of emergency services personnel, a third identical head pops above me. “I’m Judd,” the young man says, “and I’ll take you to the hospital.”

He can take me anywhere he wants. My husband, who has followed Josh and John’s tracks, kisses me goodbye and promises to meet me at the hospital after he sees to my equipment. I dismiss my daughters. “Go enjoy yourselves while your Mom is in the hospital,” I say, and they grin at me.

My three J’s slide the stretcher into the back of a Suburban, reminding me of the hundreds of rides my dog took in this section of our truck. I sniff for her smell, but of course, this is not the same vehicle. And as if to confirm my brilliant observation, my glance lands on a series of cartoons taped to the ceiling. I am just one of many who have taken a ride here, lying on their backs.

The cartoons are all of injured skiers. I laugh softly, when my knee sends me a painful reminder that nothing is funny. You’d better face it, I tell myself. Time to hang up your skis the way you once hung your ballerina shoes. Finito.

But as the Suburban pulls away, I catch through the windows the sight of white peaks against the pulsating blue sky, and I want to run back. Tied up like a mummy, I miss the freedom of the outdoors. I imagine my daughters back on the slope and realize that in their certainty that I’d be fine, so I shall.

I close my eyes. “I will return,” I say to the white mountain that will forever remain a part of my internal landscape. “I promise.”

© Copyright 2009 Talia Carner. Used by permission of the author.

Visit Talia Carner’s Web site!

Many of today’s most popular actresses and actors are … well … a little young, yes?!? But our boomer generation has its own icons. Most of us are probably content to just see them on the big screen, maybe even to fantasize from time to time about meeting them. But Amy Ferris has taken it a step further. She has just published a whole book about her fantasy, and given us an excerpt. It is called “Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis.”

Please raise your hand if you have ever had a fantasy of marrying George Clooney.

I have taken a poll among my many curiously deranged, off-balance girlfriends who very often find themselves dancing or, in some cases, swaying to the beat of their own iPod in the middle of the night.

Each one, honest to god, has a similar fantasy. Mine goes like this.

Tossing and turning, more tossing and turning, and more . . . tossing, and more . . . turning. You slip out of bed and find yourself standing in front of the bathroom vanity mirror: the puffy droopy eyelids, along with the ever-so-slightly sag in the jowls—and you can understand on a cellular level how Faye Dunaway was able to turn herself into a radioactive trout. First it was the eyes. Let’s pull and tuck them tightly (adding the glamour of Scotch tape) so that they appear to no longer be in the center of the face. Let’s take the nose, which at one time was so perfect and straight, and now expand the nostrils so they can hide canned goods in case of a nuclear meltdown. And now the lips—it’s always such a tragedy when the mouth starts to take on the form and shape of a six-lane freeway. Why, oh, why do we women do this to ourselves? Really, what is the point? Because we want to get hired as the ingénue, the sexy hot babe. Hey, I’ve got news for you—we are sexy hot women, but we’re all botoxing ourselves into non-expression frenzy mode. I mean, really—what is so sexy about a shiny forehead that only seems to move when you jerk your arm?

Back to my fantasy.

I go into a bar.

There are a few scattered customers. Mostly drunk out of their gourd, mumbling, wobbling, and peeing in their pants. I order a Cosmo, straight up, which really means cranberry juice with a twist of lime. I get up from my bar stool and saunter over to the jukebox. I play Laura Nyro and Rickie Lee Jones. I, for one, want to hear women sing about rejection and pain and unrequited love and abortion and guys named Chuck E. who, yes, are in love.

And then he walks in.

Makes himself comfortable at the end of the bar. Orders a beer. Fiddles with his brand-new, sleek, black, sexy iPhone. He looks at me. I look at him. He looks at me again. I mouth, “Hey . . . want my number?” in perfect Italian. He looks at me in his Clooney kind of way, eyebrows tilting up, eyes looking down . . . a smirk . . . he nods. Then he slides the iPhone ever so gracefully—landing right in front of me. I punch in my ten-digit number and add a smiley face with a wink, sliding it right back to him.

“Hey,” he says, “you have three 7s in your number. That’s lucky.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. That’s me, Ms. Very, Very Lucky.”

Nine months to the day I give birth to our first child, whom we name Dolores Claiborne Clooney. She dies three days later under mysterious circumstances. Then I fall into a coma. And stay in a vegetative state for eight years. The only people who seem to visit me on a regular basis are Robert and Mary Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s parents, who petition to adopt me. I vaguely remember hearing someone—possibly a nurse or an attendant—saying that George thanked me at an Oscar ceremony. He didn’t mention me by name, but he did refer to me as “his coma girl.”

Boy George releases a single that same year, “Coma, Coma, Coma, Coma Girl,” and experiences a huge comeback post-jail.

I end up on the cover of Time magazine, as “Vegetative Person of the Year.”

I wake up from my coma; George and I inevitably divorce. Amicably. I open a fast-food vegan restaurant, called Vegetative Taste, with a drive-through for hybrids only. It becomes a franchise, and I am awarded the Nobel Prize.

I am jarred by the sound of an alarm clock.

My husband, upon waking, turns to me: “What’s with the Scotch tape?”

He cannot relate at all to my fantasy life with George.

Order Amy’s new book, Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis.

Gary Morgenstein

Is there sex and love after 50? If you’re like baby boomer Gary Morgenstein, who went to his Jewish temple one day and saw a drop-dead gorgeous woman and asked a friend “Who’s the hottie?” and the friend said “That’s our rabbi,” the answer has to be yes! That’s where the story starts in this excerpt from his new novel, “Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman: Sex And Romance In God’s House.” Gary says it bears a remarkable resemblance to his own hopeless romanticism.

Joss Katz was in love again. But this was way different than the 30ish woman with curly brown hair reading a Jodi Picoult novel on the F train, who’d met his dimpled smile as if he were Michael Myers. And certainly far different than the Verizon customer service representative who sounded a little like Halle Berry as she explained why it was probably his cheap Radio Shack phone, not their ultra-sophisticated equipment, which was picking up talk radio from Belgrade.

No, hello, this was true love, right here in God’s shrine.

Rabbi Thalia Kleinman’s white teeth glittered as if beacons before the Ark, her fingers snapping like she had Van Morrison on the radio and a Macallan, one cube, in her hand. Now Thalia shut those close-knit Karen Black eyes (Joss was dating himself, he was 53) and rocked back and forth on that lithe, five-four frame, diamond studs popping out beneath the wavy shoulder length brown hair caressing her narrow shoulders.

Thalia put her arm around Elizabeth, the dough-faced bat-mitzvah girl who looked as if she’d just seen Joe Biden in the shower. Imagining that slender arm around him, Joss tilted in his seat, his yarmulke skiing down the slope of his sweating forehead and skipping off his beaked nose before he caught it with a plaintive stare toward Heaven seeking forgiveness, the Rabbi’s email address, something, it’s been a tough year, Lord.

Now Thalia rocked left and, like wire monkeys, the congregation at the Park Slope Reform Synagogue rocked mirror right. Joss glared at the men, suspecting lustful motives beneath their sacred shawls. He cued God with a nod to watch a heavy-set man with particularly lascivious eyes who might need to be felled with a heart attack tonight.

The music stopped; Joss’ heart played Hendrix. With a light wave reminiscent of a beauty queen riding in the Rose Bowl Parade, Rabbi Kleinman induced the congregation to rise, inviting Vivian and Doug, the parents, to come up and read the Haftorah with their daughter.

Thalia stepped back to give the proud couple room. Her smiling glance roamed the congregation. For a moment, Joss felt they made eye contact. Thalia looked at him like he was a shoe and patted a faltering Elisabeth encouragingly on the shoulder.

From three rows in front, his ex-wife Ellen hurled another one of her death ray, this-should-melt-your-flesh looks that she’d been firing since he slithered into shul 30 minutes ago. Joss relished feeding her paranoia, a woman who believed her every thought was a vault and the world had X-ray vision. Yes, spite was a wondrous thing, especially for a divorced man whose wife told him a year ago she didn’t want to be married anymore and didn’t want to waste time trying to fix their 25-year marriage — her exact word, “waste,” as in the contents of some toxic dumpster.

As the service broke up, Ellen blocked his way down the aisle; she knew exactly what Joss was planning. Once upon a time he believed that couples married for so long had the ability to hear each other’s thoughts. Then he realized it was only a skill women possessed. Witches, most of them.

To order Gary’s new book, click here – Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman: Sex And Romance In God’s House

Life in the Wrong Lane by Greg Dobbs

BoomerCafé co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs has a new book out. It is called “Life in the Wrong Lane,” because that’s where Greg — a longtime producer, then correspondent for ABC News, now a correspondent for HDNet Television — has spent most of his life: in the wrong lane, trying to get into places when smart, normal people are trying to get out. He thinks you older boomers might appreciate this excerpt from his coverage of the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, when he and a cameraman named Art were trying to sneak into the besieged South Dakota settlement at night.

The sky had cleared. There was snow on the ground, but a starry sky and a bit of moonlight. In case you think that’s good news, think again. It wasn’t bright enough to actually help us see the barbed wire. It was just bright enough to make Art and me stand out against the white snow. That meant we had to stay just below the ridgelines if we could, even though that’s where the drifts of snow were deepest. But if we didn’t, we were sitting ducks. Or hiking ducks, if anyone was watching.

The trouble with crossing through barbed wire at night, with or without snow on the ground, is that you never know whether you’ve merely climbed to the other side, or crawled into something. This fact didn’t occur to me until we did precisely that.

We had crossed through three or four barbed wire fences uneventfully. It wasn’t easy because at each one, I’d have to put my equipment down in the snow, crawl through while Art held the strands apart, take each piece of gear Art handed me over the top, hold the strands apart for him to crawl through, then pick everything up and start out again.

This time though, we never got that far. I put everything down and with Art’s help, crawled through. But before I could grab hold of the first piece of gear, something grabbed hold of me. A dog. He had my cuff in his mouth. In an instant, several more were barking wildly and racing to join the fun. I could hardly see them, but I didn’t need a good look to have a fair idea where I was. It was some kind of dog pen, and all the dogs were all over me, growling and barking and snapping at my pants.

Greg Dobbs

I’ll tell you this: you can get through a barbed wire fence mighty fast when you want to. Just grab the top strand with your gloved hands, pull it down, and pull yourself over. You will lose a little skin. But that’s better than losing a leg. And you don’t even need Art’s help.

After that, we were scared. Not just that we might stumble into another dog pen, but that there surely must be some feds hotfooting it toward the noise of the dogs. So we decided to get as far from the pen as possible, as fast as we could.

What that meant was, we couldn’t carry on along the hidden ridgelines. We’d have to cut straight across the reflective fields and take our chances. That’s when we got caught.

The first sign was maybe a hundred yards ahead of us, at the top of a hill, silhouetted in the dark night. A lone figure, erect, like a statue at the top of a treeless slope, the barrel of his rifle standing out against the night sky. He seemed to be peering right down at us. If he was a fed, he was just waiting to clamp on the cuffs.

We stopped short and whispered to each other. Fed, or Indian, or angry rancher? No way to know. But it didn’t really matter. Whoever he was, he wasn’t acting real friendly.

We could cut fast to the left or right and hope to outrun him. We were weighted down with tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment, but who knows? Maybe in this deep snow, we could move just as fast as he could.

And maybe we couldn’t. Furthermore, outrunning him might not be our biggest risk. What if he shoots at us? Could we outrun the bullet?

So we decided to surrender. After all, if he was an Indian, he’d probably help lead us back to Wounded Knee. If he was a rancher, he’d probably read us the riot act and tell us to get the hell off his land. And if he was a fed, well, we were just journalists. Sure, we were trespassing, and sure, we had illegally crossed a government barrier, but if this was an agent, what would the government do to us except slap our hands and send us home?

“We’re journalists and we’re not armed.” I tried to keep my voice calm as we took maybe a dozen steps in his direction. But he was calmer than I was; he hardly moved. And he didn’t say a single word back to us. So now, Art spoke.

“I’m Art Levy. I’m a cameraman for TVN. My partner is Greg Dobbs. He’s a producer for ABC.” And with that, we took another dozen steps toward our captor.

But he didn’t respond. Nor move. We could still make out the shape of the rifle’s barrel.

“We’ll put our hands in the air, just to show you we mean no harm.” Art seemed to have the right idea now. Just as we could only see this guy in silhouette, maybe that’s how he saw us. And all our protruding equipment, which just as easily could have looked to him like weapons as TV gear. Picture me, walking along with this long tripod sticking out front. In the darkness of the night, it looks like a long gun. “Just give us a few seconds to put all our equipment down.”

We set everything down in the snow. That should reassure him. And we put our arms in the air. That should too. And we took a few more steps. He didn’t take even one. This was beginning to worry us. It’s bad enough to get arrested. Worse still to be captured by some nut with other things in mind. But that was how it seemed to be shaping up.

“Look.” My turn again. “We’re going to keep coming toward you, slowly, unless you tell us to stop. And we’ll keep our arms in the air. But we want you to see us, and we want to show you our press credentials, and show you that we don’t have any weapons.”

He didn’t say not to, so we began stepping through the deep snow. One tall step after another, closer and closer to the mysteriously still and silent figure. Remember, it’s a dark night. We’d have to be nearly nose to nose to make out more than just his shape.

Which is what it took. It wasn’t until Art and I were just a couple of yards from this stoic figure that we could see that he wasn’t an Indian. Or a rancher. Or a federal agent.

This guy had four legs. We were surrendering to a Black Angus bull. With a long horn that stood out above his head like a rifle.

We were so shaken, we apologized.

It’s easy to order Greg’s new book. Click here – Life in the Wrong Lane

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When I started having nightly dreams that my mother was cutting my long dark hair, I knew it was time to move out of my Egyptian-Jewish parents’ Brooklyn home. The year was 1968. I was eighteen, and I had tried leaving twice before— once when I went off to college just after high school, and a second time, the following year, when I came close to renting a studio apartment on a quiet street in Manhattan. Each of my earlier attempts had ended in failure: the first when I returned from college without completing my freshman year; the second when I allowed my mother to talk me out of making the move.

This time, I kept my plans to myself, locating a cheap, fourth-floor, rent-controlled walk-up, not far from Brooklyn College. The building, one of three identical brick structures that lined the street, had a dim central lobby with two worn staircases on either side; on each floor, four apartments opened out from a small, dark landing. My apartment was in the top right corner of the building, with a bedroom to the east and a living room facing south. I envisioned mornings watching the sunrise over the college clock tower, afternoons drinking tea, and evenings of quiet study looking out into the sky. I signed a three-year lease and surreptitiously transported my books and clothes.

“How, Joyce, can you do this to your mother?”

The voice was that of my mother’s best friend, Suze, calling me a month later, as soon as she had heard the news. For my mother had tried to keep my departure secret. That her only daughter was living in an apartment by herself was a shame, a sign of the family’s failure. But Suze must have sensed something wrong, must have questioned my mother until she confessed.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said to me.

Slumped on my narrow mattress on the floor, I had no words with which to answer this woman I had known since childhood. I could see that she was right; my behavior was killing my mother, or a very large part of her dreams for me. Yet I was certain that to have remained at home would have been to court my death, the devastation of my dreams. For while my family hoped I would marry an Egyptian-Jewish man, keeping house for him and raising children who would themselves marry other Egyptian Jews, I cherished another ideal: the life of a writer, an artist, an independent woman— a woman who took lovers perhaps, but never a woman who settled into the domesticity and despair I could see had engulfed my mother.

But for a young girl, or as my mother called me in French, “une jeune fille,” to live alone, without husband or parents or other relatives, was among the greatest transgressions our Egyptian-Jewish immigrant community could imagine.

“You should be finding a husband,” Suze said now. “You should be out enjoying yourself. Instead you will be in your filthy apartment cleaning your filthy toilet.”

We both knew it was not the filthiness of the apartment that was at stake. I was the one who was filthy, I was the one who would never become clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed. The only explanation for my actions must be that I had given myself up to indiscriminate sexuality, refusing all respectability. I was “une femme perdue,” a lost woman, “abandonée.” How could I explain? It was not sex that I was after, not really.

Yet I was indeed “une femme perdue”— adrift in an uncharted and terrifying New World, without bearings or direction. It had taken all my strength to make the move, all my energy to shut the door against my mother’s grief and my father’s shame. Now that I was in possession of my apartment, what was I to do in it? Most days, I lay on my mattress, unable to rise, afraid to walk outside, paralyzed by the enormity of my offense, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I had done. Authenticity? A life of freedom and creativity? It was all I could do to brush my teeth each morning and take a shower in the, indeed, filthy bathroom.

The apartment I had imagined as a sunlit nest loomed now as an alien darkness, inhospitable and cold. Mold grew in the kitchen sink and cockroaches prowled the hall. The empty living room— without furniture or window coverings— echoed loudly to my step. Only in the bedroom, with its mattress on the floor and a few wooden crates stuffed with books and papers, could I find any peace. Yet even there I could not still the voices that told me I was wrong, bad, ungrateful, sick.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said again. “You should be ashamed.”

We are the generation that invented a new necessity: discovering our identity, retracing our roots. So it’s not unusual to hear of yet another baby boomer going back to see the land from which parents, grandparents, or earlier ancestors came. But in 1999, Joyce Zonana took it to the extreme, for she is an American Jew, with roots in Egypt. She has written a brilliant book, “Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey (Jewish Women Writers),” and allowed BoomerCafé to publish this excerpt.

After nearly three decades of deliberation, I was at last on my way to Cairo—a pilgrimage my relatives did not hesitate to call foolish, but which I knew to be essential. Several times already, I had come close: I’d contacted travel agents, learned the price of a ticket, toyed with possible dates. But then I would hear about a bombing, a hijacking, a fatal attack on tourists visiting an ancient site, and my resolve would crumble. “It’s not safe,” I would tell myself, “I won’t be able to manage there alone.” I am, after all, female, Jewish, and American—all characteristics, I believed, that would make me vulnerable in Egypt. I would be a target, an easy mark. Men would accost me on the street and follow me to my hotel; shopkeepers would suspect that I was Jewish and refuse to serve me; at the airport when I was ready to leave, officials would examine my passport, discover my nationality, and detain me. It was impossible to think rationally about what ought to have been a simple journey back to my birthplace. My family’s reluctance to reopen the door they closed nearly fifty years ago made my own desire seem like the most daring transgression. Surely I would be punished for my temerity: the terrorist who brought down my plane would be answering a call, if not from God, then from my own unconscious.

My parents left Egypt illegally in 1951, just a year before the revolution that transformed their country and led, ultimately, to the expulsion of most Jews. When the official inspecting their bags found silver and jewelry among the tightly-packed clothes, my father slipped him several one pound notes. “Every time they found something, Felix gave them another pound,” my mother has told me. Rugs, linens, photographs—for each item, a one-pound note. I was eighteen months old then, impervious to the details of this drama. But I imbibed its essence—my parents’ paralyzing fear—magnifying it as I matured. At every border crossing now, I stiffen, cling to my passport, strive to make myself inconspicuous.

So when my plane lands in Cairo and I approach passport control, I am rigid with fear, certain no one will ever hear from me again. I await my turn in a tumult of anxiety. And then it happens.

I give a man behind a glass barrier my passport.

He peers at it blankly, then hands it back to me.

I am in.

I am stunned, breathless, thrilled. But there is no one with whom to share my joy, no one to hug or pat or kiss, and so I do what I everyone around me is doing: I walk onwards towards the baggage-claim area. Here, three Muslim men unroll a worn brown prayer rug beside the still-empty conveyor belt. They take off their shoes, step onto the rug, and begin a series of deep prostrations. I cannot tell whether they are performing one of the five daily prayers mandated by Islam or if this is a special prayer of homecoming, a formal expression of gratitude for safe landing. Whatever the nature of their rite, their actions mesmerize me, and I watch silently, envying their unselfconscious reverence. I want to make their gestures mine, to bend my knees and bow my head, to touch my forehead to this ground.

Egypt. I have arrived in Egypt. Around me I hear voices. “Ahlan wa sahlan!” people are saying to their relatives and friends, “Welcome!” And in the distance I see the man from my hotel, carrying a small sign with my name on it. Later, in the taxi, when I tell him that I am Jewish and that I was born here, he will smile broadly and touch my hand. “Welcome to your homeland,” he will say in all sincerity, “Ahlan wa sahlan!”

,” she was turning a tough time into a new adventure. But the trouble, she found, is that sometimes, you have to patch things up –

A few weeks ago my doctor prescribed an estrogen patch for my premature hot flashes. What woman is ever mature enough for hot flashes anyway?

In the past I’d declared that if and when I ever started having menopausal symptoms, I was not going to use hormones. I was going to grin and bear it. Or take herbs. I’d heard from a much older friend that black cohosh was good for hot flashes and Black Sabbath was good for mood swings. The most important lesson is though, be careful never to get the two confused, someone could get hurt.

Anyway, I was sure that my menopausal day was a long way away, off in the distant future, destined for a time when there would be a cream you could rub on that would not only handle raging hormones but also reduce cellulite and improve your cell phone reception.

But a few months ago, global warming became very personal. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I was standing in the grocery store chatting with a neighbor when suddenly I felt as if I had swallowed a live volcano. My face started to flush and I could feel trickles of sweat rolling down my body. The cashier looked at me with concern and asked, “Are you all right? You look really red. Like I look these days right after I fill up my SUV at the gas station.”

I nodded gently, not wanting to drench the people behind me in line like a wet Labrador Retriever shaking off after a swim. I had no idea what was going on. A stroke, maybe? Or was it those jalapenos I’d had on my pizza at lunch?!

A few minutes later, the hot flash had passed. But I had another on the way to the car. And another, then another. This went on for weeks. I tried fanning myself, putting ice cubes in my bra, and visualizing myself frigid. But nothing worked. Finally, I called my doctor.

When he confirmed that I was indeed having hot flashes, I was both relieved and annoyed. Relieved that the whole spontaneous combustion theory my husband suggested was wrong, but annoyed that it was happening to me. “ I’m too young!” I yelled at the doctor. I think he’d heard that before.

When he suggested the estrogen patch, I thought of those denim patches you use when your kids’wear through the knees of their jeans. Big, thick pieces of fabric you have to iron on, and maybe add some stitching, to make sure they stay in place. My patch, however, was small and clear and adhered with just the slightest pressure.

Amazingly, it worked. My every-ten-minute flashes only happened a few times a day. Just two times a day … until two days ago. Suddenly they were back with a vengeance. But that’s not the weirdest part. What happened to my husband was odder than anything going on in my body. All of a sudden, he became sensitive and supportive. I came home from work and there were flowers on the table and candles on the fireplace mantle. He asked me if I thought we should discuss our relationship. He cried at cat food commercials, for heaven’s sake. That night at dinner, he asked me if his bald spot made him look fat!

It was hard for me to take it all in, especially considering I was about to float away in a pool of perspiration. There’s something about overheating that compromises your ability to think straight, so it took at least two hours for me to figure out what had happened. I ran into the bathroom and pulled down my pants. No estrogen patch to be found anywhere. “Honey, come here for a second.”

Rather than grunting from the other room, he showed up immediately and asked, “What is it, sweetie?”

“Pull down your pants!” I demanded.

“You could be a little more romantic,” he said softly. “Dr. Phil suggests…”

I cut him off. “Off with them.”

He lowered his jeans and voila! There it was. The missing patch. It must have come off me in bed and hubby must have rolled over on it and had it stick to him.

Well, that’s never going to happen again. From now I’m duct-taping my estrogen patch on. And my husband’s too.

is both a boomer and a late bloomer. Why late? Because she waited ‘til her 50th birthday and then shed 50 pounds! She went on to write, “All Is Forgiven, Move On: Our Lady of Weight Loss’s 101 Fat-Burning Steps on Your Journey to Sveltesville,” and has sent this piece to BoomerCafé so other boomers with excess weight can do what she did.

This is not your typical fat-to-thin story. We’re talkin’ permanent fat removal here (if you lose it, you may find it).

One day I woke up FAT! I mean really fat.

To be clear, it wasn’t the first time that I’d woken up fat. In fact, I was born fat. I was the only baby in the hospital nursery to gain weight (babies traditionally lose an ounce or two their first week on the planet – but not me). An ominous sign! And by the time second grade rolled around, I weighed in at 112 pounds. Yikes! It was Yo-Yo City from there on in.

Now back to the future … THE morning of ALL mornings!

The day I woke up fat, I was discombobulated (more than usual). So, after my shower, instead of grabbing the towel and then my glasses, I grabbed my glasses and passed a full-length mirror on the way to the towel.

Get the picture? I did!

I was shocked to see that my fat roll had grown its own fat roll. The unexpected truth was undeniably right smack dab in front of me. I could no longer ignore the fact that the fat monster had once again taken over. I had to stop HIM in his tracks!
So, right then and there (after I painstakingly picked out the lightest weigh-in outfit I could find), I dragged myself to one of those weight loss centers where people obsess about food and the scale. I was depressed, defeated and deprived before I even weighed in, and then, when I did weigh in … whoa Nelly! Tears came to my eyes. It was, indeed, my highest number ever.

I joined the group for the lecture. As the tears made their way down my cheek, I thought, “I’m never going to make it.” That’s when I heard the voice, which I later came to realize was the voice of Our Lady of Weight Loss. She said, “If you think you’re never going to make it, you never will.” Now, I suppose we all pretty much know that our actions follow our thoughts, but when Our Lady spoke those words to me, it felt as though I had been hit over the head with a Zen celery stick. I was AWAKENED!

I shifted from deep despair to happy, in a millisecond! Our Lady of Weight Loss had snap-crackle-popped my mind into a new place. I had a deep and powerful understanding that I no longer needed to be depressed, hate myself, or be mean to myself over extra fat cells… or over a number on the scale. I let it go. And when I let it go— when I stopped being mean to myself, when I practiced forgiveness— I was able to move on!

Have you ever watched an Olympic swimmer push off the side of the pool? It is quite amazing! The thrust, the power, the determination is enormous. Often the strength of this one solitary push can propel the Olympian right to the middle of the Olympic-sized pool.

When we decide to go on a ‘diet,’ we essentially push off from the side of the ‘pool of discontent.’ We gather a vast amount of energy from not liking ourselves, being disgusted, and ashamed of how we look.
Sometimes this energy takes us half way to our goal weight. Sometimes all the way … 10, 20, 30, 100, 200 pounds lost. Then what?

Unlike the Olympic swimmer who has a plan, who is moving toward her big win, who sees herself as a champion and knows with every cell and fiber of her being that she is the victor, we only know ourselves to be losers. We are basing this attempt on past attempts to lose, which have failed.

If you want to be victorious at the game of Permanent Fat Removal, then you need to have a compelling future. You need to know where you are going, what you want, what removing those pounds means. The diet and exercise plans do not live alone. This is a holistic event. It’s about your life, not just your fat.

So I will leave you with this: don’t just improve; EVOLVE.