Happy 25th anniversary, my darling Shonnie. We’ve created a wonderful life together filled with love, intentionality and adventure, and I look forward to the next 25  (when I’ll only be 106)! A few highlights from our 2.5 decades together: 1995:We meet while training for the 1996 Austin Motorola Marathon. 1997: We enter a committed relationship…

Was I cranky? No doubt.? Judgmental? Absolutely. Disheartened? Unquestionably. And I’d been unconsciously operating out of this frame of mind for months. Yeah, yeah, I know, given the pandemic, America’s veer toward authoritarianism, war crimes in Ukraine, and the state of our ailing planet, it’s easy to feel discouraged and even drift into depression without…

Saturday morning, alone in the mist and drizzle. Stillness envelops me. No sound but my footsteps, the drip of the moisture from the trees, the occasional songs of the birds.

“Don’t trust anybody over thirty!” My rallying cry during the Sixties, when I was twenty-something, seemingly bulletproof and forever young, living as though those days would never end.

In Knoxville in 1983, I screwed up my courage and began therapy with a local psychologist, John Hoover, a tall, brawny man with an engaging and amiable manner. I immediately had the sense that I could trust John and that it was safe to share my innermost thoughts and feelings with him.

January 1, a new year, some might say a clean slate. During my wild impetuous youth, the first day of the year typically meant horrendous hangovers and, at some point, the hair of the dog. In recent decades, however, January 1 has often been a day of tremendous importance to our family.

Shonnie and I were recently interviewed for the BedLoveBeyond podcast, this episode about couples with significant age differences (Ours, by the way, is 28 years.).

When the Avett Brothers began to sing “No Hard Feelings,” Shonnie walked over, embraced me, and without exchanging a word, we began to slow dance to the music.