The Burrow

The original elder blogger, Ronni Bennett, died on Friday night.  The world is a lesser place since then. When The Burrow began in 2009,  I was a trapeze artist without a net.  I was putting my real self out into the real world with no real idea of what I was doing.  Dooce , Little Cuter's favorite blogger at the time, set out some rules that seemed reasonable; don't write about work  came from being fired after doing just that. Though Big Cuter said you are way hipper than you think you are, Mom , I couldn't believe that anyone was interested in what I had to say. Then I found Time Goes By .  Written by a Jewish girl who loved living in Greenwich Village until she was priced out and forced to move, the blog took a personal look at growing older.  Mixing life experiences with deep research and a wicked sense of humor, she separated the sense from the nonsense. Using her skills as a television producer, she gathered facts and presented them in a most ap...

Ronni Bennett's blog is the template for living well and growing old at the same time. She's a no-nonsense former New Yorker who left Greenwich Village for first one, then the other, Portland. She made a new life for herself, all on her own. She's one of the women on whom I'm modeling my old age. Every once in a while, she types a line or two that stops me in my tracks.  In  An Old Age Better Than I Expected  she writes about her surprise at being  alive and vibrant and spirited and vital as she works her way through her eighth decade. Leaving behind the shoulds, the expectations, the to do's of her younger years, she's free to explore and create and do what she wants when she wants.  And then, there was this: I am done improving myself. Self-help be damned. I am what I am and so I shall remain. I started to laugh, wrote a comment on the post, and came right here to share my own thoughts on the subject. Taking my place at the keyboard, I watch a woman ...

As a very young and very new social worker on the neurology service of a major metropolitan cancer hospital,  I was befriended by the Chief Resident.  He was short, dark and handsome and enjoyed the fact that my office always had a bowl of hard candy on the visitor's table.  I enjoyed the fact that he could sit silently in my office, quiet with his own thoughts, but there, reminding me that I was not alone. His wit and his compassion and his willingness to actually listen to the patients were added bonuses.  He was, in short, a mensch .  For those of you unfamiliar with hospital hierarchies in the 1970's, a brief tutorial may be in order. Basically,  it was all about power.  Hospitals were color coded. Maintenance, janitorial, food service, nurses, assistants and physicians of all levels of training and certification, all the ancillary services -- each had its own color or style and, except for pediatrics, where Winnie the Pooh was popular across bo...