“How are you?” “Fine, yeah. Not much going on.” “Work okay?” “Same as usual.” “How are the kids?” “Good. They’re good.” It lasted maybe four
Last week I was making focaccia and Emilia, who is nineteen months old and apparently has strong opinions about baked goods, reached up both arms
I am thirty-eight and I have, in the last few years, been watching my parents retire. The watching has been, on every external measure, a
There is a particular conversation that older adults sometimes find themselves having with their adult children, around the dinner table or in the kitchen after
Nobody can tell you with any certainty what jobs your children will be doing in fifteen or twenty years. Not the futurists, not the consulting
There is a particular kind of loneliness that occurs in big cities that the wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, mostly missed because
I told my father last weekend, calmly and without blame, that I had spent my childhood feeling like I had to earn his full attention.
There is a particular kind of internal capacity that one finds, on close observation, in almost every adult who grew up in the 1960s or
The standard cultural framing of the loneliness of aging tends to focus on being alone. The framing assumes that the worst version of late-life loneliness
There is a particular kind of person in their sixties with no close friends who has arrived at this season not by accident but by
The grandparent who quietly becomes the favorite isn’t the one with the candy drawer or the open wallet — it’s the one who pulls up a chair when a seven-year-old starts talking and actually waits to hear the end of the sentence.
The parents who hear from their adult kids every week aren’t the ones who insisted on it — they’re the ones who built a phone call that doesn’t cost anything to answer.