Because I wanted it to be true. — I’m an old retired lawyer, but I’m also a techie. At the beginning of this whole internet thing, I pieced together my computers from parts. I built web pages, owned many domains, and, in my misspent youth, even engaged in some low-level criminal activity in seedy online neighborhoods where you…

Getting a glimpse of my future — I don’t resist aging. I embrace it. I order senior plates in old-people restaurants. I drive with my blinker on. I play pickleball, talk with other old people at the park, and celebrate colonoscopies. I’m looking forward to the day when maintaining my house becomes too much and I can…

A Story about Lawyers — In Oregon, where I live and practiced elder law, you can’t disinherit your spouse. If you try, your spouse can choose to have your will or trust ignored and instead receive a percentage of what you owned at death, with the percentage determined by how long you were married. An…

Oh, to be fifty again, that grand and silly age. — I was old and out of work — fifty years old — and old wasn’t what employers were looking for. Being unemployed and having a lot of time on my hands, I signed up to study aging in a post-graduate gerontology program at my local university. I did this because…

Turning heirlooms into garbage, one storage unit at a time — After the children left, my wife and I lived alone in a large house with a swimming pool. It was a maintenance nightmare. Every morning we would get out of bed and get to work fixing the things that had broken, fallen apart, or collapsed during the night. The upkeep…

In the jail visiting room, he was competent and businesslike, but there was something a little off about him. — When practicing elder law, I collected the phone numbers of other lawyers I could turn to when my client needed expertise that I didn’t have. I had a divorce guy, a personal injury guy, a tax guy, and a criminal law guy. Part of my practice was filing or defending…

I’m an old man. Seventy-three, to be exact. Several times a week I join a circle of wisdom — a gathering of old men — for an unfocused discussion of sports, barbecue, our failing bodies, and the deterioration of civilization. Some of these men are a little older than I…

I have written that the two most important things in my life are weather and lunch, and I’ll stick with that. But the third most important thing is hobbies. And I’ve had a lot of them. Wikipedia defines a hobby as “a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically…

“We have to talk,” Ulysses said, as we sat outside the Dairy Queen finishing our soft serve. Coming from my wife, that could only mean trouble, but coming from my thirteen-year-old grandchild I had no idea what to expect. “I like this ice cream cone,” he said, “but I know…