I’ve crossed the line. I am officially old. I now wear my reading glasses on a chain around my neck. Nothing says old like wearing your readers around your neck.

One could say nothing says old like needing reading glasses, but since that starts around age 40, and 40 is the new 30, that is hardly old.

When my eye doctor first told me I needed reading glasses, he suggested I go to the dollar store and buy a bunch and leave a pair in every room of the house. Good advice. That’s exactly what I did.

At work however, I only had one pair. I don’t think the company would have appreciated my randomly leaving reading glasses around the office.

Somewhere along the way, weather became WEATHER and became a national past time, akin to a major sporting event. We’ve got all kinds of ways to keep track of weather now. There’s the old school way, your local evening news. Well, truly the old school way would be opening the door and sticking your head out to see what the weather is like and figure out what to wear for the day.

But now, you’ve got an app on your phone, you’ve got weather alerts on your weather app on your phone, you’ve got the weather channel on tv, you’ve got an assortment of AI support in the form of Siri, Alexa or Cortana. So truly, knowing the current and future weather by the minute is now at your finger tips.

Used to be that the protocol for tipping was very clear. First of all, tipping was mainly for when you dined in a restaurant.

You would dine in at a restaurant where a waiter or waitress, waited on you. They reviewed the menu with you, answering any questions you might have, they described the specials. Then, they took your order and gave it to the chefs in the kitchen who prepared your food. The waitstaff carried your order out, sometimes requiring great feats of balance, and placed it on the table before you. They periodically checked in with you to see if everything was ok, refilled a drink, and repeated the process should you desire dessert.

For all that effort and attentiveness, we tip them. We also tip them because generally they are not paid well by the restaurant and so they rely on the tips to earn an income.

The good Lord gave us all talents of one kind or another. And while we very much appreciate the talents we do have, it’s the ones that we haven’t been given that really can rankle us.

For example, I love music. I love listening to music, dancing to music, and singing to music. Of those three things, I can listen very well. I can dance better than Elaine Benes. But I can’t sing.

I was not aware that I lacked that talent for a fairly long time. I would sing my heart out when at home listening to all kinds of music-I was especially fond of musicals and would sing along to all the albums we had: Sound of Music, The King and I, Oliver, Mary Poppins, South Pacific, Oklahoma!. I would sing at church on Sundays. I would sing in the car listening to the radio.

Covid wrought more than a few changes and adaptations to our daily lives a few years ago. Not the least of which was the inability to get to a barber or hair salon for the three or so months we were all in quarantine.

For me, this meant taking the plunge with going silver (note that I said silver, not gray, as silver sounds so much more sophisticated). I had been contemplating it for a time anyway and between lockdown and my colorist Karen moving to FL (I miss you!), it seemed like as good a time as any to take the silver plunge.

For Ernie, this meant that his hair grew. Pre-Covid, Ernie always wore his hair pretty darn short. A very close cut. In barber parlance, I think it would be like a 1 or a 2. For those of you unfamiliar with barber parlance, think Kevin Costner in The Body Guard. Not quite military buzz cut, but super close.

Let’s talk meatballs. Being Italian-American, I know a thing or two about them. Amongst my peeps, It’s its own food group, along with pasta (aka macaroni for us old schoolers). Not sure there is a better food pairing than macaroni and meatballs.

Growing up it was dinner twice a week: Sunday and Wednesday. You made enough every Sunday to have it again on Wednesday.

When I went to work for IKEA, I discovered this thing called a Swedish meatball. Everyone raves about IKEA’s meatballs. Say to anyone that you work there and they will ask you about their meatballs. Do you get a discount on the meatballs? Do you eat the meatballs every day? How great are those meatballs?

Ummm. Yes, I get a discount on the meatballs. No, I don’t eat them every day. And I wouldn’t know, since I never had one.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how much it costs to buy a pizza these days? I mean, I know we’ve had some inflation and whatnot, but I would love to see the data on the overall rate of inflation vs pizza inflation. I would say pizza inflation beats overall inflation by a mile.

It used to be an economical take-out dinner option. In fact, pretty much my entire life from the time I can remember has been a pepperoni pizza on Friday night. We were a family of 7 back when I was a kid and two pizzas fed us all pretty cheaply. I continued this tradition with my own nuclear unit family. And it’s one that continues into Empty Nesterhood.

Let’s talk about the C word. No, not that C word. The other one. Also goes by The Vid and Rona. Yeah. That C word. Covid.

Ernie and I managed to avoid its clutches for the first two years. Quarantining initially like everyone, wearing masks, getting vaccinated.

It wasn’t until March/April of last year, when we went to our first public event, an NCAA March Madness playoff game at the Wells Fargo Center, when Ernie caught the bug. And then he kindly gave it to me three days later. We’re all about sharing in this family.

Ernie fared ok. Me? Not so much. 3 days into it and I developed bronchial spasms such that the doctor prescribed Paxlovid and a nebulizer inhaler. Paxlovid did the trick and eventually we both were all better.

For those of you who know me, it comes as no surprise that Ernie and I are avid Philly sports fans. Phillies, Eagles, Sixers. Flyers too, but not as much. I find watching hockey on tv hard to do…where is that puck? I know I am not alone in that, because for a time they tried to use a graphic that highlighted where the puck was, but that was just distracting and didn’t really work out well.

The other day a quote from our second President, the irascible John Adams, came across my fb feed (ever the history nerd, one of the sites I follow is Plodding Through the Presidents). The quote was “Thanks be to God, that He gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

I immediately shared this with my siblings, laughing as I texted, who does this remind you of? Only our entire family. Grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins. The whole shebang. This is a trait that is so dominant in that side of our family, that an uncle who married into the family used to say, “You can tell a Morroney, but you can’t tell them much.” (Morroney being my maiden name).

Go Go, Slow Go, No Go. Have you heard of this expression? It refers to your retirement years. Theoretically, the first third of your retirement years, your ‘young’ years are the Go Go period. This is when you have the most vitality, energy, all your joints are in good working condition, and your overall health is good.

Mr. Magoo. That’s the best way to describe our taxi driver. We had just arrived at Termini train station in Rome. We got into the taxi line and it wasn’t a long wait before we were in a taxi and on our way.

Our driver seemed like a very nice older gentleman. He was likely in his mid to late 70’s. He had a thick head of white hair, was quite short, and had a nice smile. He spoke no English. He also could not drive.

We’ve all heard the phrase that describes the Italian approach to life philosophy. La Dolce Vita. Having just returned from a trip to Italy, I witnessed that wonderful approach first hand.

The taking it easy, slow living, enjoying being in the moment, with good food, friends and family. Being Italian-American, with both sides of the family tree from Italy, this may resonate even more deeply with me.

However, to La Dolce Vita, I would add another approach to life philosophy that I also witnessed. I call it, Eh. Eh might actually be a component of La Dolce Vita.

What is Eh you ask? It’s a shrug of the shoulders, a lifting of the hands, a facial expression that all conveys a ‘no big deal, it is what it is, not gonna worry about it’ feeling.

When we were little kids, the adults always used to say, “Don’t run away from the bees. They won’t sting you if you just stand there.”

I thought this was the worst possible advice ever. It truly made me doubt the common sense and overall intelligence of adults. I absolutely ignored what they said and ran like hell any time a bee came near me.

That is how, I believe, I had managed to avoid ever being stung by a bee my entire life.

That is until about 2 years ago.

Sticking with last week’s Boston theme, this week let’s go bowling in Brocton.

Brocton, MA is a hard-scrabble, rough and tumble, blue-collar town on Boston’s south shore. Or it was, I should say, back in the mid to late ‘80’s when we experienced it. It’s sometimes referred to as the ‘City of Champions’ because it’s the hometown of two successful boxers of whom you may have heard: Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler (put a pin in that for a sec).

We just got back from a quick trip to Boston. We used to live there when we were first married, back in the mid to late 80’s. This trip triggered some PTSD on not one, but two fronts: accents and driving.

Heed my advice. Pee before you leave. No matter if it’s a 15 or 45 minute drive to where you are headed. You never know what might arise to turn that 15 or 45 minute drive into 5 hours.

Case in point: I was headed from work one day when I decided I would not take the time to pee. I really didn’t have to go and I was in a bit of a rush to get home. I was working at the National Constitution Center in Philly at the time, so I was looking at a 45 minute to an hour drive, depending on traffic.

“There’s a place, where the boat leaves from

It takes away all of your big problems

You got worries, you can drop them in the blue ocean

But you gotta get away to where the boat leaves from”… Zac Brown Band

Ernie and I were cruising down the Overseas Highway on our way to Key West from Miami. The beautiful May sun was shining a warm, golden yellow. The skies were cerulean blue, with some wispy clouds sitting softly in the sky, as if put there by the delicate touch of a painter. The sea was a spectacular aquamarine that reminded me of the Caribbean.

“Ah. Life is good today,” I thought.

Have you seen or heard about the latest food trend? Girl Dinner? Apparently, it’s on fire on TikTok. I don’t have or know how to use TikTok, so I heard about it the old-fashioned way: through my newsfeed.

It’s described as something the opposite of a guy dinner, ie, protein, starch and vegetable. You know, something we used to just call dinner. Not sure when the genderization of mealtime took place.

Last week we took a brief look at the aging process, prompted by a recently published study which tried to pinpoint an age, a single, magical point in time, at which people no longer feel young.

This week, let’s pick up that thread and explore further what aging is really like, shall we?

We’ve already established that it is more of a process that starts out slowly, creeping up on you subtly, by degrees, like a patch of crabgrass that slowly but surely subsumes your beautiful garden if left unattended. But, whereas that crabgrass can be eliminated, no magic elixir has yet to be developed to halt the aging process, despite what you see in your social media feeds.

Hyaluronic acid and Botox only get you so far.