I have almost no real memories left of my mother. She’s been gone exactly half my life. Like water passing over a stone year after year, the edges of her existence have become soft and hard to grab hold of. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to will a memory into being. I pick an event or a period in time and ask my brain to call it forward....
Almost everything I know about my family and where they came from was told to me by my father. While my mother didn’t talk much about her past, he readily shared his life. Always over a meal; always accompanied by a history lesson. There were stories about his childhood, meeting my mother, losing his eye in a tragic work accident. But the majority of his tales, the ones he told...
There’s so much noise around turning 50. Does one deny being a half-century old? Embrace the achievement? Fight like the devil to turn back the clock? Without question, this age instigates a new chapter with bigger stakes and a growing sense of urgency. Given our youth-obsessed culture and my own compulsion to stay young, I wondered how honestly I could write about this milestone. Fifty on Fifty is my experiment.
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