Category Archives: Aging

One final entry …

This will be the final entry in this blog. As regular readers know, Mrs. R. and I have spent a good deal of time in the hands of the medical profession in the five months since Thanksgiving. She has had a number of issues, including three operations. She faces nothing life threatening, other than the […]

Change: Arnie Goes High Tech

From The Arnie Chronicles, the semi-fictional biography of Joshua Bateman Arnold. For those of you who are relatively new to this blog, I must introduce Arnie — Joshua Bateman Arnold, about whom I haven’t written since last November.   He is my neighbor and a retired long haul trucker. He’s also a widower, and Mrs. R. […]

Fantasy: The Case Of The Dead Battery

“Harry. We got a dead battery. Get the crime scene tape. And call the coroner.” LAST FALL MRS. R AND I were in Seattle on our annual retirement trip to the great northwest. Mrs R. grew up in Seattle. She graduated from West Seattle High and later from the University of Washington, these days known […]

Stroke: Best Defense Is A Healthy Offense

“Experts say that fully 80% of all strokes are preventable.   No kidding — 80%! “ HERE’S A NAME YOU DON’T HEAR EVERY DAY: Johann Jakob Wepfer. He was a Swiss pharmacologist and pathologist who lived from 1620 to 1695 — a remarkable life span for a person of that era. To put that in historical […]

Aging: ‘Dying Young Only Looks Good in the Movies’

Journalist Regina Brett put it all in perspective. When she turned fifty, she wrote, “After having breast cancer at forty-one, I’m thrilled to grow old.” BACK IN THE EARLY 1960’S, before Mrs. R. and I were married, we were both employed at a large defense-oriented research firm in Northern California. The staff was a well-educated […]

Aging: Nerves and the Driving Test

“…you can do everything else right, but if you commit any one of eight critical errors … the test is over and you flunk on the spot.”  Last April I posted a blog about seniors, their automobiles and their driver’s licenses. I wrote, in part, “…to a certain group of seniors, a car is not […]

Legacy: For Gosh Sakes Leave a Paper Trail

“Just a week later the man was dead, and after a short interval, Bernie screwed up the courage to go through his brother’s papers. ‘Riley,’ he told me later, ‘it was a disaster.’ Death. Okay, I just lost half of the small audience I had. The remainder are realists. Some people are obsessed with the […]

Health: When Life Overwhelms

“It was through [Louella’s] column and other news stories that I came to know about Wynn. My Mom would read me her syndicated reports in the newspaper…” by Dave Riley In the mid-1940’s, when I was a grade schooler at Mary Snow in Bangor, my Uncle Wynn Rocamora was a very successful agent in Hollywood. […]

Aging: At 106 Octavio Orduño Was Still Biking the Streets of Long Beach

“Smoke?” he replied indignantly. “I don’t smoke.” by Dave Riley When I was in my twenties and just back from military service in Germany, I moved to the Monterey peninsula on the California coast and rented an inexpensive place on the corner of First Avenue and Carpenter Street in Carmel. The accommodations were, to put […]

Senior Finances: The Pension ‘Advance’ Scheme

  “We ended up paying more in interest with our pension advance then we would have paid if we simply paid off the interest over time on our existing debt load.” by Dave Riley OKAY, I KNOW THIS HAS BEEN quoted to death, but I’m going to use it anyway. When asked why he robbed […]