All salable, marketable, rammed-down-our-throats evidence to the contrary, sex is not just a young person's pastime or pleasure. Sure, it is all hard bodies, tight buns, firm breasts and lush, thick hair in popular portrayals of passion, but in real life geezers do it, too.

A new study from the New England Journal of Medicine featured in this article in the Washington... more

I recall some research I studied while in college that reported on how it is in the nature of young children to mimic the behavior of those a couple of years older. There was film of kids at play, and the follow-the-just-a-bit-older-leader compulsion was remarkable ... and very funny.

With no little awareness of the power they had over the littler ones, the older kids were often tempted toward silly extremes to encourage monkey see/monkey do, and the smaller monkeys never failed to comply.

Apparently, this... more

The assumption of total responsibility for the raising of grandchildren may come fraught with issues, as we saw in the last post.

Often the situation can rise suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving grandparents not only emotionally unprepared for wearing the parenting hat again after maybe many years and ideas of a completely different sort of senectitude, but also dangerously short on extra resources.

According to a 10-year-old... more

A story that popped up in the course of today's research about grandmothers raising children ended up taking me all over the place in a search for information.

According to the report, one in twelve American kids is in the care of a grandparent, usually a grandmother. That is a huge number of grandmothers taking on the parental role all over again.

The US Census Bureau puts the figure at around 2.5 million grandparents presently... more

Maybe it is just my age that has me cranky over the blog today in the Huffington Post that goes all tut, tut over the generation now hanging at the mall and tsk-tsk over those of us who came before, but I'm having one heck of a time working up a good 'poor, little darlings' over the thought that someone actually considers them to be the, "the first generation I know that doesn't embrace a future more golden... more

I came across a blog today in the Huffington Post that reminded me of how widely perceptions swing over the course of living life.

In the post, a "magical young woman" somewhere in her teens whispers a question toward the writer that gives her pause for thought: When did the future go from being a promise to being a threat?

The blogger, ... more

A comment from John on yesterday's blog put me in mind of something that should follow a post about an Invasion of Granny Accusers. (Thanks, John!)

My oldest child was born just ten days after my 18th birthday, so we are close enough in age to be siblings in some families ... the gap between my second and third child is 32 years, so 18 is an eye-blink ... and we look very much alike, although she is... more

So, there I was, standing on a pretty pathway in the middle of Pamplemousses Gardens watching Cj dash away a few meters to give her space to run as fast as her little feet could fly back into our arms with a squeal and a giggle, when some geezer Brit invades my world with a brash and strident, "Are these your grandchildren?"

Okay. So she wasn't brash or strident ... she was actually a bit shy and over-compensatingly... more

There's no doubt that I live in a rarefied climate and that life in the 'real' world is on a daily basis much different than the one passed here on this little rock in the middle of a big, blue sea.

One significant difference is the fact that the total population of Seychelles is only 85,000 which makes us roughly the same as a small town in America. There's more distance involved, so we're not so much in each other's pockets, but everyone does read the same newspapers, listen to the same radio station and watch... more

I have very early memories of sunny, windy San Francisco days at Playland at the Beach that feature me standing in front of the Fun House staring at the huge maniacal laughing clown (To this day I fear clowns.) while pulling bits of cotton candy from a buffeted ephemeral mass and stuffing them into my mouth as my mother cautioned strongly against getting my hair tangled up in the sticky cloud of spun sugar.

The sensation of sweetness melting on my tongue, the so-very-pinkness of the mini-nimbus, the lack of substance that... more