In the mid-1950s I had a summer job working evenings at a Foster's Freeze at the then-minimum wage of $1 an hour. I had attended grammar school in Beverly Hills and was going to Beverly Hills High School.

Although Beverly Hills was and is well known for its celebrities and fabulous homes, I lived in a part with modest single-family homes and nondescript apartment buildings. The celebrities and the wealthy lived north of Santa Monica Boulevard and the really big names and wealthy lived north of Sunset Boulevard.

I lived south where Beverly Hills almost ends. There were four grammar schools—two in the wealthier areas and two in the middle-class type areas—but all students went to Beverly Hills High School, which was like a private school.

That summer a club I believe called the Executive Men's Club of Beverly Hills was offering an incredibly reduced price (like $10 a month) for teenagers who lived in Beverly Hills. . . .

There are now six pills in the morning and four pills at night. There are pills to help me sleep and pills for high blood pressure, pills for anxiety, pills for heart failure, pills for coronary artery disease and pills to lower cholesterol. On the weekend, I set out my pill case and carefully place each of the ten pills in their allotted slots.

It takes me about ten or 12 minutes and I hate every minute of it.

I had always prided myself on how few pills I took, given my age. I’d see other people, people my age more or less, sit down to meals and go through the ritual and I felt, foolishly, morally superior. . . .

(Photo by Myriam Zilles on Unsplash)

by Mitchell Stephens

on Leaves and their fate

(Pondering,

not for the first

or last time,

aging.)

Click here to watch video.

What movie would you want—along with an iPad and electricity —on a desert island?

click here, and answer or see answers in the comments.

      You know the song. You probably like the song. Most do. I did.

      In fact, in an article on Judy Collins for this website, I called “Send in the Clowns,” written by Stephen Sondheim, “a song that makes it hard to imagine that there could be a better song.”

      But I have listened to it some more. I have thought about it some more.

      And I want to apologize. I was wrong.

      It is indeed possible to imagine numerous better songs than “Send in the Clowns” because there is an awful line in an important place in “Send in the Clowns”. . . .

(See the comments for an account of Sondheim’s own position on this song and the play it is from.)

We’re supposed to leave at 6.

      I am ready at a quarter to 6, sitting on the couch, waiting, waiting. My wife is almost ready, she says. It’s 5:50. And then she’s just about ready, at 5:58. At 6, she’ll be just a minute.

Then it’s 6:03 and then she needs to find her sunglasses and then it’s just about 6:05. We finally leave the house at 6:09, but who’s counting?

      I am, of course.. . . .

My grandchildren think I am a really cool person because they think my generation was a really cool generation.

Indeed, we were rebellious, outrageous and colorful. Our music still plays all the time everywhere, and the grandkids know the words. They have heard the stories about us heralding in the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the Disability Rights Act, etc. They hear us tell stories about how we fought to end the unjust Vietnam war that was killing our classmates.

We marched, demonstrated, defied, rebelled and enjoyed being nude. It was all about freedom to be and do whatever we wanted.

And part of what we wanted was to do drugs. . . .

What am I writing about?  Oh yeah: That tendency we formerly middle-aged people have to . . . draw a blank, to forget, you know, a lot. Not only the name of that neighbor we bumped into outside but why we decided to go outside in the first place. Or, to put it more kindly, that annoying habit that names in particular but facts in general have of slipping from our aging minds.

      I’m writing, too, about that tendency many of us who reach ripe or over-ripe ages have to suspect that such recollection-fails might be indicative of incipient neurocognitive disorder: the dreaded dementia.

      But here’s a surprise: I’ve stumbled upon, of all things, some good news . . . .

Fifty-one years ago, I attended my first gay pride festival in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Bette Midler sang “You Got to Have Friends.” We sure needed them. At that time, queer people had no legal protections. We could not be out as teachers, could be evicted, and were often physically attacked late at night with no police protection. Same-sex sexual activity was only legalized in 1980 in New York. 

Those of us gathered that day danced on the shoulders of activists a generation before, including Harry Hay of the Mattchine Society and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon of Daughters of Bilitis who organized in the 1950s to counter police entrapment, McCarthyism, and the American Psychiatric Association labeling us sociopathic….

There are three men and one woman on treadmills, a woman and two men on ellipticals, one man on a stationary bike, a woman on a rowing machine and two women and two men on something called a “nu-step,” which, I am later told, is sort of a seated elliptical.

From my treadmill in the left side of the cardiac rehab class, I observe them all carefully, or as carefully as I can without falling off the treadmill during my jog. Who looks in better shape than I am? Who seems to be recovering more quickly from their heart attack?

At the hospital, when I was told I’d been referred for cardiac rehab, I jumped at the chance. Well, as much as I could jump following an attack that had almost killed me. . . .

There was a time

—not that long ago—

when doing something

required leaving

your home.

Click here to see this “idea video” by Mitchell Stephens

On the bedroom wall, across from the chair I use for taking off and putting on my socks and shoes, I’ve hung an ink-paint reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

I first saw the famous work about 50 years ago, hanging over the fireplace mantel of a new friend, Ken, one of the most remarkable people I have known. He died two weeks ago, after experiencing sustained physical pain during the end of a singular life of existential suffering, intense sentiments, exalted thoughts and peak experiences.

Ken frequently spoke of “my great teachers”: Nietzsche, Jung, Beethoven, Wittgenstein and Nikos Kazantzakis….

   C’mon man, “I sing the body electric”? Like far fucking out. I mean everything was electric, right?

    And those leaves of grass? Whitman was smoking the good stuff for sure. Then there was that guy Thoreau out in the woods protesting the war.

     Which is all by way of saying when Mitch posed his question about the origins of hippie thought, Thoreau and Whitman came to mind.     When he suggested I write a few paragraphs on the subject I jumped at the chance to … outsource it to ChatGPT. (Hey I’m not doing this for credit, just getting the info out there.) ….

Click for the introduction to this series: “The Roots of the Hippie Idea.”

Stillpoint

A Visual Poem

Rumination On Living With Chronic Pain

Click here for this video by John R. Killacky

I’ve been trying to figure it out: Are these campus protests like our campus protests? How are they similar? How are they different?

And does any of that matter?

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded an end to an unjust war. I was one of them. (A few years later, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded concrete movement toward racial justice.)

We chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and painted signs and erected barricades and marched and held teach-ins and wanted our colleges to stop collaborating with a government that napalmed a far-away nation? . . . .

Judy Collins turns 85 today, May 1st.

I saw her in concert ten days before this birthday at Symphony Space in Manhattan, just blocks from where she has long lived on the Upper West Side. And her guitar playing, piano playing, her singing were all—as before, as expected—lovely.

That voice was and remains extraordinary, as luminous, as unmuddied, as comfortable at high elevations, as any in folk or rock music. Judy Collins wrote some good songs, but she discovered and sang, always wonderfully, some of the most important songs of the second half of the twentieth century. She is a woman of impressive talent but also extraordinary taste….

Joe Biden would be 86-and-two-months old when his second term ends—if he is reelected in November and Trump doesn’t stage a more successful insurrection. Donald Trump himself—a comparative youngster—would be a presumably still-corpulent 82 at the end of a second term.

These sure sound more like nursing-home ages than productive-member-of-the-workforce ages. And, you would think, it would be useful to have someone with their wits about them in the big job.

Indeed, I had recently begun to think that I myself, at the age of 74, ought not to be president—due to some annoying short-term memory issues….

Question: How many Boomers does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer: Four.  (One to change the bulb, and three to talk about how good the old one was.) 

Young people often marvel at the path we’ve travelled.

They could not conceive, for instance, of party lines. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, about three blocks from the Chicago city limits. This was the 1950s. We had a telephone, of course, but it was on a shared “party line” with a family down the street.

Which meant that if we wanted to make a call, we’d pick up the receiver and either get a dial tone or hear the conversation that our neighbor was having with someone…..

Many of the great puzzles of the universe

have been solved by humankind.

But we still Know little about

what goes on in a human mind.

Click here for this “idea video” by Mitchell Stephens

I have worked a job since I was 12 years old.

My first job was painting the horse fencing around my dad’s 900-acre horse farm in Pennsylvania. I was paid 25 cents an hour. In high school I worked at a nursing home as the breakfast and lunch cook.

After college, I secured a plumb position in Dr. James Watson’s (yes, the DNA guy) lab at Harvard, working for a young professor named Mark Ptashne. While there, I was able to take business courses.

Eventually settling in Vermont, I secured a job at the local hospital….