We have heard plenty of lies, hatred and idiocy from politicians in our lifetimes—we hippies, we protestors, we peaceniks, we bra-burners, we queers, we tree-huggers.

       But Donald Trump is something different in the history of our country. He lies with a frequency and regularity that makes even the craven, irresponsible, mostly venal American leaders of years past seem tame.

       I suggested in a video on this website that Donald Trump is one of “history’s most notorious liars”—who lies as frequently and as shamelessly as a Stalin or Hitler.

      News organizations, as we know, have documented many thousands of the lies presidential-candidate Trump, President Trump and presidential-candidate-again Trump has told.

      But we shouldn’t let their astounding ubiquity inure us to the harm each of these many thousands of untruths have done not only to groups and individuals but to public discourse and the political process in the United States. …

      As we approach Election Day, the hope is we get a good president. Doesn’t have to be great. Good would be good enough. Best would, really, be too much to hope for.

      But looking back, through our lifetimes, which of our presidents was good? Who was, in fact, the best one we’ve had these 70 or so years?

     Here at Writing About Our Generation, where neither of us is a historian nor political scientist, we nevertheless decided to take a stab at ranking all the presidents of our lifetimes, from worst to best, and to explain why we think they earned that ranking.

      Agree? Disagree? There is, of course, plenty of room for disagreement, so we’ll let you know, in parentheses, how our choices fared in the most recent rankings of all presidents—not just the ones in our lifetimes—by the American Political Science Association. ...

      I just visited my hometown and my mother’s grave. She died when I was 12, she was 40. I thought about the years she missed living.

      I myself am extremely grateful that I have lived a relatively healthy and prosperous 74 years. In the past three months, four of my close friends have had encounters with frightening death experiences. Three have survived but one is still in the ICU, expecting to recover.

      Life can be predictable but is ever-changing—just like the seasons. As autumn yet again comes into view, I remind myself I may have 20 more seasons where the multitude of lush greens turn into bright reds, yellows and oranges to titillate and inspire the human heart and prepare us for what is to follow. ...

(Click for previous lists of Things We Do (or Don’t) Miss)

Drive-in movie theaters

Playing hide-and-seek

The Dewey Decimal System …

And Still More Things We Don’t Miss,  including Lime Jell-O fruit salad

      When people have asked the secret of our 50-plus years of marriage, we invariably say a sense of humor. We also often say that we talk everything out.

      We’re all talkers in our family; we talk about things ad nauseam. (If we really enjoy something, it’s not enough to discuss it enthusiastically once or twice. We love to come back to the topic hours or days later and reiterate just how good that meal or show was and just how much we enjoyed it.)

      For a while, we weren’t mentioning our ability to talk things out as much. We still could at times, but sometimes the frustration and the exasperation of miscommunication were too raw. Instead, we’d gradually cool off and try to move on.

      It used to feel like a contest at times. “See,” he’d say, “I knew we saw that movie.” Score 1 for him. “See,” I’d say, “Alice heard me say that, too.” Tie score. ...

      My worst job started at 9 p.m. in the windowless workshop of my boss. Nine sleepless hours later, he fired me. No question, he made the right call.

      This took place sometime in the fall of 1972, a month or so after Kathy and I moved from Stamford, Ct., to Denver, Colo., a move that at the time was the closest I’d managed to come to a career goal.

      I’d been an English major at Haverford College and met Kathy the summer of 1968 when I worked as a bellhop and desk clerk at Grand Lake Lodge on the western entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park. She was an ”older woman,” 10 months older than me to be precise. So, when I graduated in 1971 and we got married, we'd settled in a boxy, one-bedroom apartment near her fifth-grade teaching job in Greenwich, Ct.

      I hated living in the burbs of Connecticut and quickly burned through two jobs. ...

Click here for video

A short video by Mitchell Stephens about roads, travel and the compulsion to see...more.

Filmed in Scotland

      Let me disagree a bit with my esteemed colleague. Mitch Stephens was trying to put the press’ failures into context. I’m trying to hold them to a higher standard.

      Yes, in the distant and recent past, our journalism has utterly failed the public. Still, that doesn’t remotely absolve today’s media from criticism of the way they are reporting this election now.

      Unlike in the past, where news outlets were avowedly partisan, were always speaking to the choir and their readers knew what to expect, today’s prominent mainstream media appears to be more impartial, considers itself more impartial and attempts to appeal to all segments of the political spectrum.

      So, while the bias and prejudices might not be as blatantly obvious as in past times, the framing, headline writing, sanitizing and, to use the newly coined word, sanewashing—by the press of bizarre, racist, fact-free gibberish and lies that issue regularly from the mouth of Donald Trump lets us all down. ...

Rabid partisanship, dissembling, unwarranted attacks and bigotry are not, alas, new embarrassments for American journalism. It has a lot of improving to do.

A video by Mitchell Stephens

      There’s a sign at the eastern terminus of Interstate 40, near North Carolina’s Atlantic Coast, that reads “Barstow, Calif., 2554 miles.”

      I-40, one of the longest continuous interstates in the nation, cuts right through America, through state after state, almost from coast to coast. A little more than a week before Hurricane Helene hit the mountains of western North Carolina, where it killed dozens and created unfathomable destruction, we drove through those mountains, on I-40, on the way to and from now equally troubled eastern Tennessee.

      I don’t like that part of the drive very much—even though it’s an interstate highway, the road is twisty, narrow, and you feel almost claustrophobic with the southern Appalachians hanging gloomily over you. There’s not much distance on either side of the highway and there are a couple of tunnels that miraculously were built through those mountains. How did they do that?

      Because of the engineering difficulties, the road through the mountains wasn’t completed until the late 1960s. Now parts of it are gone, but I-40 is only one of the almost numberless roads in the area that are broken, closed, impenetrable, impassable. ...

      So, two men and two women in their mid-seventies decide to walk across a skinny part of Scotland—from Fort William in the southwest to Inverness in the northeast.

      The Great Glen Way, the route is called.

      We now live, of course, in an age when people are willing to pay good money to exhaust themselves so thoroughly. And, sure enough, there are firms ready not only to provide the two couples with indoor and quite comfortable lodgings along the way but with someone to drive their baggage from one night’s stop to the next.

      Hence, all that is required of the two couples is that they schlepp themselves, along with an extra waterproof layer, a lunch and some water about seventy miles in six days. ...

Here’s some of what we have seen recently that might be of particular interest to our generation. (Apologies for any pay walls.) Send us what you have seen at WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com.

• Hard Work and Fizzy Drinks: What It Takes to Live Past 110, Sara Ruberg, New York Times, Aug. 21, 2024

• Caution! These Drugs Can Cause Memory Loss, Rachel Nania and Aaron Kassraie, AARP, Aug. 7, 2024

• Meet the Granfluencers, Nicole Schmidt, The Walrus, Aug. 8, 2024

• Who killed the Kennedys? The Rolling Stones won’t tell you anymore., Paul Schwartman, Washington Post, July 11, 2014

• Some Seniors Readily Step Back. Some Never Will., Paula Span, New York Times, July 21, 2024

• To Delay Death, Lift Weights, Alex Hutchinson, Outside, Nov. 22, 2024

Click for more

      It was, in contrast to any debate Donald Trump ever attended, a civil, even staid, discussion of issues.

      And it helped that the CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan ran a very tight ship—and that there was no studio audience to pollute things with partisan noise.

      In the end, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz had a much stronger deck from which to deal: his forceful defense of abortion rights, a Democratic economic policy that does not favor only the rich, immigration policies that are humane and fair, and an environmental agenda that backs both alternative fuels and energy independence, made a compelling case—to me, anyway—that Walz and Kamala Harris have earned the right to lead America for the next four years. ...

      I was thrilled when out of the blue I was offered a job to create an investigative unit at a local TV station.

      For more than 20 years I had been on the road producing true crime TV series. So, even though I was working as a freelance producer for major national cable and broadcast networks, at 57, I was looking forward to having some stability in my life. 

      The red carpet was rolled out when I started. The bosses sang my praises to the newsroom staff, which consisted of reporters and producers half my age. Whether it was jealousy, the fact I got my own office or I was old enough to be their mother, I was persona non grata from that day forward. It never changed in the seven years I worked there. ...

Last day in Cassis. At this time tomorrow we'll be dressing for the opera in Paris. We'd much rather be here.

      We were busy with trains, taxis, hotels, apartments, museums and tours during the first part of this trip. So much packing and unpacking. We gave ourselves a full week in Cassis, which we'd visited in 2018, and it is beyond well worth it.

      No side trips to Marseille or Aix, which we'd once considered. No formal activities at all. We briefly pondered taking a boat tour of the Calanques (stunning local fjords), but that would have involved standing in line for tickets, waiting for the boat and other unacceptable impingements on our right and desire to chill.

      We are en vacances. It is beautiful here when you step out the door. Relax. . . .

      How do you travel?

      I’m asking because my friend and colleague Mitch Stephens, the co-editor of this site, is currently traveling in Scotland, and then he and his wife will be going somewhere, although they haven’t quite made up their minds exactly where yet and definitely haven’t made any reservations.

      Not for planes, nor trains, nor automobiles. Not for hotels, too.

      They might be going, they think, to southwestern France. Or maybe to Spain. Or maybe they’ll explore more of the UK. Or maybe not. They’ll figure it out. They’ll make those reservations, just no need to do them until they have to.

      They hadn’t made their train reservation to Edinburgh and their hotel reservation in Edinburgh until something like a few minutes before got on a plane to London.

      It’s a great way to travel. It’s not, any longer, my way.

      And I’m guessing, it’s not the way many of us now travel these days. ...

      By day, I am an arts warrior, public servant, heroic crip. Open, responsive, cocksure, ambitious—I seize the public gaze as a bully pulpit. Offstage finds me enslaved by quivering muscles contorting my stride.

      After surgery, my swollen spine shut down. Gurus and saints abounded, but no roses from above. Paralyzed weeks turned into months—a flicker, a twitch, a wave, sitting to standing, six steps to go home, with wheelchair, ankle brace and cane.  

      Gestures repeat to imprint; but gravity intervenes. Syncopated embellishments focus spatial awareness, though alignment remains akimbo. With little sensation, each footstep is defiant. Only in the pool can I run with the ponies again.

      Twenty-eight years now—I still fixate on atrophy, ignoring progress. Balancing rehab and recovery, clinging to a reconnecting, physical therapy and pharmaceuticals combat lost kinesis, encouraging hope.  

      Night murmurs locate points of pleasure: behind the left knee, above the nipple. I crawl inside the softness, relishing the incandescent kundalini rush absent pain. Legs lie quiet, the burning subsides. Stillness embraces me.

      In the extra room (that we do not have), I plié and pirouette with dramatic abandon, leaving behind my imploded, twisted carcass. The tumor does not return. My pelvis aligns. Depression dissipates. Then I awake. ...

      My mood these days rises and falls as frequently as a sailboat flung between swells in gale-driven seas. The sharp twists and turns often leave me exhausted and metaphorically seasick by bedtime.  

      The true cause is neither wind nor water, but tracking polls and other analysis for the 2024 presidential election. I follow them obsessively as they fluctuate as wildly these days as the waves and wind in the eye of a major storm.

      Take Sept. 24. I probably checked my go-to political headline site, politicalwire.com, about 15 times, starting at about 7a.m. soon after I rolled out of bed. The news good, then pretty good, then worse, then good again, then pretty devastating.  

      At 7:47 came the news, from CNN, that “more than 400 economists and former high-ranking U.S. policymakers are endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris and her vision for the American economy.”  

      Chalk up one for the good guys. ...

There was so much I wanted to do and accomplish at 22. Experience motherhood, join the Peace Corps, become a psychologist.

      Instead, I became a clinical social worker; earned a master’s in social work; left my home and my religion; and moved away from New York. I was on a journey to become myself.

      I wanted to organize workers into unions, act on the stage, and start a revolution. But where would I begin now that I was 32?

      When social work lost its allure, I switched to a college teaching position. (I could start my revolution by enlightening students.) I married and had three wonderful children without morning sickness and labor pains (they were the product of my husband’s first marriage) and earned a Ph.D., too.

      And suddenly I was 40.

      When I turned 50, a line from “Fried Green Tomatoes” seemed to fit me well: “I’m too old to be young, and too young to be old.” Up until then, I had had too many moments of longing, waiting for the future. Too many days had gone by without savoring my existence. ...

      Here’s something you definitely do not want in a job:

      An understanding that the faster you drive the more money you make.

      But at the beginning of my junior year in college—a semester I spent away from Haverford College and in New York City, going to NYU—I got a job in which such a calculation clearly applied.

      I became a “hack,” a cab driver.

      It wasn’t a hard job to get: You got your driver’s license upgraded to a “Chauffeur’s License,” applied to the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, took a test on the addresses of various places taxi customers might have been inclined to go (such as Yankee Stadium: then 161^st Street and River Avenue) and sat in on a safety class (in which I learned to stay away—on two-way avenues with a median strip, such as Park Avenue or upper Broadway—from the left lane, which the instructor labeled, the “suicide lane”).

      And there I was: an English major sidling up to the dispatcher in a room on West 126^th Street very much like the one that would later be portrayed in the TV show, “Taxi.” ...