Let’s pretend you-know-who doesn’t exist today. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for the early days of this blog, back when I had a writer-crush on Jon Carroll.
The San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote five days a week, and his average was…well, it was astounding. I always read him, and I was rarely bored or disappointed. If you write five days a week, you will file a lot of columns about nothing in particular, and yet, even these were pretty great. He wrote about his cats a lot. He wrote about the persimmon tree in his yard. He wrote about getting caught skinny-dipping on a backwoods trail. He wrote about his daughter, a performer with Cirque du Soleil. And even among these always entertaining pieces, he wrote a fair number of straight-up bangers. I remember, in the early days of this blog, linking to many-many of them. They were such a pleasure to read. He was on my mind recently because a friend is dealing with the decline of a parent, and the piece he wrote about his own mother’s death was such a masterpiece, I wanted to reread it, maybe pass it along. (You can’t do that anymore without signing up for yet another email, which I simply can’t do, these days, especially for something I’m sending to someone else. Here’s yet another call for some sort of mid-grade newspaper collective gift-link arrangement, similar to the NYT’s or WP’s.)
Time marches in only one direction. Carroll left the paper in 2015 and had a blog for a while. Blogs are a pain in the ass, and after a while it tapered off, as 99 percent of blogs tend to do. (nancynall.com — still blogging after all these goddamn years!)
Anyway, it made me google ol’ Jon, and I found this interview with him, published just this week. He’s 81 now, and not writing, but still alive and kicking. Part of the reason he’s not writing is:
What is difficult about being your age?
I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.
On the positive side, Apple has wonderful accessibility options. I have a tablet that has very big type and I can sort of read it. I use voice-to-text technology for texting (it doesn’t work for email, alas), and I occasionally depend on the kindness of friends such as Nancy Friedman, who has helped me with this interview.
I can see my garden. I can see colors. I’ve always loved observing birds, and now, well, one of the things about birding that people don’t talk about is the sound. If you stand in the middle of the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and cup your ears you hear a constantly changing cacophony.
What else is difficult? I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes about 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago I developed diabetic neuropathy, which means that my feet hurt all the time.
But he’s still Jon:
I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it. We play cribbage and talk about horses.
Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.
Bless him. And bless NN.C reader Nancy Friedman.
Newspapers — good ones — always had room for a writer or two like Jon. That was one of things I loved about them, the way you could just stumble across a column like his. Alan used to work with a guy named Ralph, a copy editor. At his retirement, a colleague talked about how Ralph also once wrote a weekly column called Mr. Cheap. It was all about entertainment to be had for free or not-much. One day Mr. Cheap went out to eat in Melvindale, a working-class suburb here, and witnessed a woman changing her baby’s diaper on the restaurant table. He ended up writing a hilarious dunking on ol’ Melvindale, just an over-the-top roast of the place. And Melvindale? Went insane over it. On the public-access cable channel, a crawl ran over all the programming for days, giving viewers the number to call to cancel their subscriptions. Was anyone in The Detroit News management worried about this? They were not. It was all funny. There were hundreds of thousands of subscribers then. There were many pages in the paper. They had to be filled somehow.
OK, then. The weekend is looming. The forecast: 90 degrees on Saturday, 96 on Sunday. And 98 on Monday. Kill me now.
brian stouder said on June 19, 2025 at 2:07 pm
Sounds like a great weekend is on the way; and you’ve always been a hot chick!
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Julie Robinson said on June 19, 2025 at 2:42 pm
Hi Brian–long time no see!
Nancy’s forecast sounds very normal here. AC people have been out three times in the last month, as the units on both sides of the house needed help coping with the heat.
The Jon Carroll piece is painful and familiar to read. There was a parking lot incident earlier today where the car couldn’t be located. There was a computer incident where approximately 50 tabs were open, because she doesn’t remember how to close them. On and on. This is a rare week without a medical appointment for one of the three oldsters here. Is rapid loss or slow decline better? It’s a subject I’ve been debating with myself.
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NancyF said on June 19, 2025 at 2:44 pm
Thank you for this, Nancy! I’ve forwarded it to Jon’s wife, Tracy Johnston, who will read it aloud to Jon. (And if you have a link to any of Jon’s columns, just copy the URL, paste it into archive.is, and hey presto! But don’t tell anyone I told you.)
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David C said on June 19, 2025 at 3:02 pm
About a year between serious decline and the end seems right to me. That’s what it was for my dad. He was doing well until he caught Covid. He’d had a mild heart attack but was soon as active as he ever was. Things went to hell in a handbag soon after he recovered. The year after was enough to adjust to the inevitable, say our goodbyes, and be relieved he didn’t linger too long. The process was years long for my grandparents. It was difficult on them and all of us.
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Bob (not Greene) said on June 19, 2025 at 4:08 pm
I had not heard of Jon Caroll until I began following this blog, what, some 20+ years ago (man, that was quick), and I would seek his columns out after that. I loved his writing as well, and his ability to make the mundane funny or insightful.
I don’t know why, but I remember one about the well-choreographed charade, carried out by both parties, of going through the motions to sign credit card receipts, like they actually meant something. It was very clever, I thought.
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Mark P said on June 19, 2025 at 4:39 pm
Getting old. Tell me about it. On second thought, don’t bother, I can see it already. I just had knee replacement (June 10) and for the last week and a half I have been regretting not inventing that time machine so I could tell myself not to do it. I’m very slowly improving, but I’m pretty sure things would look a lot better if I had done this five or ten years ago. It turns out that a few years actually make a difference. Before the surgery, my doctor and I were talking about the fact that I was pretty healthy. I mean, aside from the pulmonary embolisms, the splenic artery aneurysm, my prior heart issues, two rotator cuff repairs, a quadraceps tendon repair, and, of course, two worn out knees — now one worn out knee and one artificial knee. I’m scheduled for cataract surgery in a couple of weeks, so maybe my vision will improve. I tell myself that my cognitive abilities haven’t been too compromised, although I am having more trouble remembering actors’ names but to hell with them.
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Brandon said on June 19, 2025 at 9:02 pm
It’s been hot here too. Right now it’s 82 degrees.
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Jon Carroll said on June 19, 2025 at 9:48 pm
Thanks, Nancy, for the kind words. The column you reference about my mother was called Thirteen facts about my mother and it ran on the front page of the Sunday paper, which back then was a pretty big deal. Alas, I can’t find it at the moment.
Jon
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Dave said on June 19, 2025 at 11:31 pm
Have I posted that I had cataract surgery this spring? Mark P, I think you’ll be very happy with the results, I wasn’t expecting to see this well and regret that I was told it would be a risk to spend the extra money to have both distance and close vision, which would have eliminated the need for reading glasses.
Biggest surprise, quite honestly, was discovering how gray my 75 year old hair is. Looking through cataracts, it still looked mostly blond to me but now I can see it for what it really is.
I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t had many of the other afflictions some of you discuss. My brother-in-law, only 62, has had a knee replacement and is getting a shoulder replacement in September. My cousin, only six months younger, has had one of her knees replaced and one hip replaced.
Rapid decline or slow decline, which is better, my maternal grandmother had a slow decline, my father had a quadruple bypass at 58 and lived another 26+ years, only declining in his last year-and-a-half. My mother, as I’ve said before, lived in dementia for several years, that was terrible.
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Deborah said on June 20, 2025 at 6:47 am
Wonderful post Nancy.
If I go when my dad did, I’ve got 6 years left. My mom died when I was 14 so I’ve long surpassed her life span. No body part replacements yet except for cataracts, which greatly improved my ability to enjoy color.
My stamina is the thing that has degraded the most. I’m working on a design project now that wears me out. I used to do 6 or 7 of them simultaneously before I retired and I’m just a consultant on this one. I can’t imagine how I managed to remember to eat back then.
The uncertainty of these times related to politics doesn’t help, my anxiety level is off the charts.
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Suzanne said on June 20, 2025 at 8:17 am
Ah, life! What I didn’t expect from my senior years is the daily looking forward and realizing there isn’t all that much forward to see. The future was always a wide expanse of possibilities but now, it’s like heading to an event that you’ve been planning for years and suddenly, it’s here. You realize you aren’t quite ready and want to cross a few more items off your ‘to do’ list before you leave but the plane is taking off and you are on it.
My cancer dance with the grim reaper a few years ago made me confront my own mortality in real time which has changed my thought processes immensely, mostly in a good way I hope. What I still find difficult is slow decline, quick decline, a good few years in our dotage or horribly debilitating disease leading to death is not something in our control for the most part.
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Alan Stamm said on June 20, 2025 at 8:21 am
R a l p h ! What a consistent delight to work with and share adventures with. He’s 85 now, no doubt as witty and snarky as ever.
Thanks for the memory.
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nancy said on June 20, 2025 at 8:30 am
Well, this is weird: For some reason the SFChronicle website just let me in, and now I’m surfing the J.C. archives. I remember this piece in particular, about how the early death of a friend prompted him to quit a job he hated. Relevant passage:
I was at the time commuting from Berkeley to a job at the San Jose Mercury News. I worked in the promotion department for a large, blustery man named Mr. Stern. He used to leave early and hide under the stairs to see if anyone tried to sneak out before 5. It was like working for your vice principal.
I showed this to an editor who appreciated good writing, who was also a San Jose native. He, too, had worked for Mr. Stern! And remembered him as a pretty good boss. Which goes to show…something. But it made me laugh.
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alex said on June 20, 2025 at 9:23 am
Greetings from Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, where we’re vacationing with my 97-year-old dad who forgot to bring any shirts. So instead of doing touristy things this morning we’re trying to find a Walmart so he doesn’t have to wear the same nasty shirt for the rest of the week. At least he remembered his passport.
Also with us is my brother and his kids. Bro went to play golf with one of the kids this morning and just called to tell us that they won’t let him in without a shirt with a collar, so since I’m the only permitted driver on the rental car I have to go take one to him.
Adios…
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alex said on June 20, 2025 at 9:38 am
Back from that chore…
Anyway, aging is a weird combo of both slow overall decline and rapid declines in our various capacities. My vision and hearing seem to be taking a crap, not to mention my short-term memory, and my stamina, while never great, has never been less. And what’s to look forward to? Vacations like this one.
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Deborah said on June 20, 2025 at 10:06 am
Oh yeah, hearing, I forgot about that one. I now have hearing aids and I hate them. They’re super tiny and hard to get into my ear just right, plus they make my ears itch tremendously. I’m probably allergic to whatever they’re made of, in that delicate area of the ear canal. I don’t wear them that often, only when I’m with other people, since I’m retired I spend a lot of time at home (different homes) and my husband and I spend a good portion of the time saying “what?”. Only he thinks he doesn’t need hearing aids.
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Jeff Borden said on June 20, 2025 at 10:18 am
The death of our beloved dog, Cosmo, last month made me grimly aware of my age, but in a somewhat different way. I’m 74. My wife will turn 80 next week. We realized it was quite likely any dog we got as a puppy would probably outlive us. And we wondered if we had the energy to raise a pup with all its needs.
Yet I never felt more alive than when I was walking through our expansive neighborhood park or at the dog beach on Lake Michigan. We both believe another dog would benefit both physical and mental health.
It sucks that age is affecting our decision.
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Jenine said on June 20, 2025 at 11:03 am
Aw, Jon Carroll is so great! I loved living in the Bay Area in the 90s and feeling like I was in the same world as he was.
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nancy said on June 20, 2025 at 11:05 am
Jeff, consider adopting a senior dog from a shelter. There is a disturbing number of them in most, mainly because an owner had to go into assisted living or, of course, the cemetery. Many are very well-behaved, housebroken, and just need their own assisted living to play out their string.
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Jason T. said on June 20, 2025 at 11:37 am
I worked my way through college, in part, as an employee of the university library, and one of the things I enjoyed during slow periods (and there were many — I was on the overnight shift) was visiting the periodical department and reading the out-of-town newspapers.
And you’re right — every one of them had one or more local columnists, usually one writing humor, one writing about politics, one writing about entertainment, one writing about people in the news, etc. Even the lame ones were interesting, because you got a little bit of the flavor of Dallas or Seattle or Milwaukee or whatever.
We got both San Francisco papers and Jon Carroll in the Chron was the best. (The Ex, if I remember correctly, carried William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s column, which shocked me when I saw it — you mean William Randolph Hearst Jr. was still alive?)
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Bob (not Greene) said on June 20, 2025 at 1:04 pm
I found the column I was referring to, so I enjoyed it again:
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/jon-carroll-3300113.php
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Julie Robinson said on June 20, 2025 at 1:20 pm
Amen to getting a senior dog, Jeff. My mom is now on her third cat since she got “too old for another animal”.
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Little Bird said on June 20, 2025 at 1:23 pm
My eyesight is going bad faster than I thought. I can’t read or type without reading glasses. I can’t see the TV (or the subtitles) without my prescription glasses, but I can navigate the world around me more or less okay. I’m only 50!
My hearing is okay in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be any loss, I just have a really hard time filtering sound and processing it sometimes.
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Jakash said on June 20, 2025 at 2:53 pm
Bob (not Greene) @21,
Thanks for posting that swell column. It’s dated Dec 11, 2007. I was thinking about the stupidity of signing credit card slips years before that, and I was thinking about it 2 days ago.
“I was given a piece of paper to sign. … It’s just economic theater.” Not very entertaining theater, either. The fact that this went on in 2007 and for a long time before that was ridiculous. The fact that it continues today, in some places, is mind-boggling. My brother, decades ago, used to sign “Mickey Mouse” or “Snoopy” or whatever the hell he felt like. Never, ever, turned down.
We’ve had fraudulent activity on two separate credit card accounts in the last 6 months, resulting in cancellations and new cards being sent. (And we’re careful — really!) Uh, neither of those instances had anything to do with a signature on a piece of paper! In one, our card number was used at a movie theater in Spain. Since we’ve not been to Spain, that was a head-scratcher, but at least it made it easy for the credit card fraud department to figure out that something was amiss…
Bottom line: D’oh! to all of it. 🙂
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nancy said on June 20, 2025 at 4:01 pm
As soon as you mentioned that, I remembered Gene Weingarten wrote a column about this, too. And here it is. It’s pretty amusing:
The Personal Signature — long an essential element of commerce and the epistolary arts, once universally accepted as a means of establishing or verifying identity, routinely customized with artistic panache in what for some is the only creative act of their lives, historically popular as a tool for forensic and psychiatric diagnosis — has died. It was as old as literacy, nearly the age of civilization itself.
The exact day and time of death could not be determined, but the demise was confirmed recently over a 12-day experimental period when this writer paid $611.49 for services and merchandise in 17 different transactions at locations across greater Washington, D.C. … without once signing his own name. Instead, he put down increasingly improbable — indeed, preposterous — pseudonyms at restaurants, gas stations, banks and retail stores; these were written on slips of paper and on electronic signature-capture devices using pen, plastic stylus or forefinger. At no point was any transaction challenged or even momentarily delayed. The “signatures,” such as they were, proved to be as beside-the-point as Scarlett Johansson’s elbows.
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Dexter Friend said on June 20, 2025 at 4:01 pm
I only recently began using reading glasses at age 75. The doctor keeps sending me for tests, heart tests, lung exams, blood tests for everything, but they can’t find anything wrong that’s sort of over the top. Type 2 now for 31 years, my slow weight loss regime shredded 157 pounds away, but I am still trying to lose these last 8 pounds, which I will do. Trying to lose weight via exercise never worked for me, I just must curtail all food intake. I mean, my size 58 jeans now make me ripe for a weight loss ad, as I now can wear a 38 inch waist pant. Yesterday the neighbor lady was sunning and yelled at me , asking if I “was alright, because you lost so much weight”.
I wanted to say it’s that damn tapeworm that unfortunately didn’t die in my brain like Kennedy’s did, but was ravaging my guts. I didn’t, I am the king of small talk so I humored her with the boring truth. I lost 24 pounds since last Juneteenth so she noticed. I try to avoid her and her family, they are loud and they irritate the fuck out of me. Her son makes his motorcycles loud as possible and the noise rattles my windows. Cops? Yeah, right! They don’t care about such bullshit.
Rejoice, Detroit denizens, as your Detroit Tigers are the best team in baseball, by far.
The Pistons failed, Washington’s young skinny QB destroyed the Lions , but these Tigers are for real. Here’s old age kicking in: I was invited to a Tigers game recently and had to decline. I don’t walk at all without canes and/or a rollator. I just believe I might fall and ruin the day for my friends.
And also, Black Lung is in the news, as the administration has rolled back measures of harmful coal dust in mines, forcing miners to work in brutally unsafe areas. And…pollution standards for smokestacks nationwide are being reduced , enabling much more pollutants into the air we breathe.
Coal mining areas voted for Trump.
And do not worry about the USA and Iran…Trump will have it solved “in 2 weeks”.
Heard that 2-week shit before?
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Sherri said on June 20, 2025 at 4:15 pm
The signature as identity verification still lives on in vote by mail states. In close elections, a major effort of campaigns is “curing” ballots, which is contacting voters whose ballots have been rejected and getting them to verify their ballots.
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Mark P said on June 20, 2025 at 4:33 pm
Suzanne — Maybe the most significant thing I have realized about getting old is that the range of possibilities has narrowed. When you’re young, you will live forever and have infinite time to do the things you think you might want to do. If not tomorrow, then next year. Build a log cabin in Alaska? Maybe one day. Change career? Sure, why not. Now, at 75, I realize that there are very few possibilities beyond the single path I find myself on. I have two dogs, one middle aged and one getting old. I love dogs, and can’t imagine not having one, but I would never adopt a puppy because I can’t be sure I would outlive it. My mother died at 90 and my father at 82, but my older brother died at 70, so I don’t think I can count on much longer. Shit, 90 is only 15 years away.
I would love to move to the Denver area, where I have friends. I have looked at properties and small house kits, and it’s possible. But my wife is stuck here and can’t imagine moving, despite the fact that we really have nothing and no one to keep us here. Having friends around can make a big difference.
As to losing weight — you would all look at me and think I’m skinny, but looking at myself in the mirror made me feel a little disgusted at myself. I used to be a serious runner. I’m not supposed to have that pot and those love handles. There is a way to lose weight. My knee replacement was 10 days ago, and I have lost 10 pounds. My appetite just went away. The same thing happened a few years ago when I had rotator cuff repair and quadriceps tendon repair within a week. I really stopped eating after that. But I don’t suppose many physicians would suggest major surgery just to lose 10 pounds.
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alex said on June 20, 2025 at 4:39 pm
In my county, you sign a touch screen with your finger when you vote. Wonder how that compares with my written signature on file or if it will ever become an issue with a Republican election judge when I request a Dem primary ballot.
I notice fewer places are requiring finger signing now that most of us have chip cards that work with a simple tap (except when the fuckers don’t).
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Deborah said on June 20, 2025 at 4:42 pm
My signature has changed a lot over the years. Now that I hardly ever handwrite anything anymore, my handwriting is so shaky. And when I have to sign on a screen with my finger, it’s completely unrecognizable as my name.
Gonna be a hot one this weekend, not looking forward to it with no air conditioning in our place. Sunday we’ve made plans with a friend visiting Chicago to go to Millennium Park, I’m dreading that when the heat index for that day is going to be 105º. I don’t have any summer clothes in Chicago because I’m usually in NM. So tomorrow I have to go out and buy a few summer things so I don’t pass out from heat exhaustion at the park.
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Jeff Gill said on June 20, 2025 at 5:06 pm
Alex, voting was what I thought about as I scrolled through today’s rich offerings; they’re scrutinizing signatures very carefully this last time, but to what standard I do not know. If I attempted to replicate Trump’s executive order signature, I wonder what the pollworker would say?
Hat tip to Jon & his amanuensis NancyF. You’ve motivated me to write better over the years, not that I’ve come close to your standard of wit & grace. But I second your comment about stopping on hikes and letting your ears do the walking on regular occasions. Even half-deaf there’s quite a bit going on one can tune into, especially shortly after dawn in a woodlot or forest edge.
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Colleen said on June 20, 2025 at 5:48 pm
Mark P — agree about the narrowing of possibilities. I find myself missing the me of my 20s, when I was just a bunch of unformed potential. Now….not so much. This is how the story turns out.
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David C said on June 20, 2025 at 6:04 pm
Now that I’m wearing hearing aids, I thought I’d be hearing so much more when we’re out walking. Most of the time, I end up hearing less because the wind rumbles in them. They’re not much good when things get crowded and noisy either. As much as I paid for them, I was hoping for more. They’re good around the house, but out in the wild I usually don’t wear them. When these crap out, I think I’ll go with OTC. I’d rather be disappointed by $700 hearing aids than $6000 hearing aids.
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Julie Robinson said on June 20, 2025 at 6:57 pm
This afternoon I found out there is still a place where signatures matter; when you want to redeem or transfer stocks. Mom wants to have her one big account transfer to me when she dies, called DOD. We have to fill out an application and then have a Medallion Signature Guarantee, which you get at your local financial institution.
For another one we have to declare the certificates lost and pay a $42 fee before that can happen. She never had any certificates as this came down through two generations and no one can even remember what the company was called back then.
When we check in voters, we do ask them to attempt to match the signature on their ID as closely as possible, because we don’t want them to have to go in person to cure their ballots. And it’s really, really hard to do on a screen with your finger or stylus. The smart folk (usually young) are those who have a distinctive line with a curve instead of an actual signature. They can sign the same thing over and over, and it matches perfectly.
Dexter, congratulations on such an amazing weight loss.
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Deborah said on June 20, 2025 at 8:02 pm
David C,
My hearing aids cost $1,500 at Costco. The audiologist that I went to in Chicago at Northwestern Medical recommended that I get them there because my hearing loss is so far on the mild side, my left ear is worse than my right. I control them through my iPhone, I’m constantly adjusting them when I go somewhere where I’m around people, which might seem rude to people, that I’m looking at my phone when they’re talking. As I said I don’t wear them at home.
I had to get the domes (the part that goes in your ear)changed after the first month because the ones I started with didn’t fit right. I’ve had them 4 or 5 months now.
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Sherri said on June 20, 2025 at 8:39 pm
My mom has expensive digital hearing aids, and they do help, but not dramatically. She’s been wearing hearing aids for decades, had surgery on her middle ears 50 years ago to address a problem with her hearing, and struggles to understand conversation. Plus, she, too, has macular degeneration, and gets shots in her eyes for that.
My parents have been doing pretty well, but I think we’re not far from the point where they can’t stay in their house much longer, since they have to be able to drive to live there. Right now they’re still mowing a big yard (over an acre!), but this year was the first year they didn’t plant a garden. My dad resisted knee replacement when he should have done it twenty years ago, and now at 87, I’m not sure he can do it.
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Dave said on June 20, 2025 at 8:56 pm
My wife wears hearing aids, they cost several thousand dollars, I don’t exactly remember how much but without them, she’s nearly deaf. Her hearing went almost all at once, in a year’s time, she went from hearing well to saying, “What”?
We were in a bad car wreck in 1991 and her ears starting ringing within a year or so after that wreck, she’s been listening to that now for some 33 years. I’ve often wondered with no proof whatsoever if that somehow, someway, did something to her eardrums or something, guess I should do my own research? 😉
My ears ring, too, which I blame my railroading days for, exposure to loud noises and all of that, it started a couple of years after I retired. I can ignore it sometimes and other times it seems so very loud. There’s no cure.
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NancyF said on June 20, 2025 at 9:29 pm
Here’s a non-paywalled link to Jon Carroll’s “Thirteen Things You Should Know About My Mother,” which was originally published on Mother’s Day 2005: https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/carroll/article/OUR-MOTHERS-OURSELVES-Essays-written-by-2636557.php
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nancy said on June 21, 2025 at 10:40 am
A couple things stick out to me in that list of 13 things. First, that she was from Grosse Pointe — hey, that’s where I live, albeit in the GPG, i.e., Grosse Pointe Ghetto. And that a stray ash from a cigarette was enough to make her dress go up in flames, immediately. I wonder how long before DOGE disassembles the safety rules that keep dresses from being instantly combustible and we start seeing this stuff again.
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Sherri said on June 20, 2025 at 9:57 pm
My mother had otosclerosis, where there is abnormal bone growth in the middle ear causing the stapes bone to not vibrate as well and not conduct sound. This tends to run in families; her father and one of her brothers also had it. The only treatment is to replace the bone with a prosthetic, which helps but doesn’t completely restore the hearing loss.
So far as I know, nobody in my generation has exhibited the problem.
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Mark P said on June 20, 2025 at 10:58 pm
Sherri, I’m not sure I could recommend total knee replacement for someone 87 years old. My mother waited until she was in her 80’s to ask for it, but my orthopedic surgeon said she was too old. She did find another orthopod who said he would do it, but she never did. It’s a good thing she didn’t because I think the recovery would have been long, hard, and painful, and she would probably not have reached a full recovery. I’m 75, and I probably should have had it done a few years ago. My case is not normal, though, because several years ago I tore my quad tendons completely away from the kneecap and had to have them reattached. Now when I do PT, the muscle is so tight it feels like I’m going to tear the tendons again. I’m having trouble getting my range of motion back. But even aside from that, the recovery is painful and stressful, and it requires real dedication to keep going. I’m not positive at this point that I will have my other knee done, although a friend had had four (!) total knee replacements and has sailed through recovery on all of them. She’s 77.
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Deborah said on June 21, 2025 at 7:35 am
My mother in law had a hip replacement in her 90s, then she lived to 102. I think it was just one hip and she sailed through it. She was quite something.
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JodiP said on June 21, 2025 at 9:01 am
That testament Jon Carroll wrote about his mother is incredible. I liked the numbered paragraphs–and how this implies so much more unsaid.
One of the best classes I took earning my social work degree was a class on aging. It was a summer class and about half were retired Jewish folks from Florida auditing the class. It profoundly impacted the way I look at aging.
I was in my mid-20s, and I will be 60 this month. I don’t really care for the crepey skin cropping up, but otherwise appreciate the knowledge I have.
What we all are really talking about is living with disabilities, of course. Most people will have some sort during their lifetime.
It can happen suddenly, as did to a friend of mine who had a really serious stroke last year at the age of fifty two. She remains paralyzed on her left side. She is a long distance athlete, and will compete in an adaptive triathlon later this summer. She did her first lake swim since the stroke a few days ago. She’s long been a part of a gym community that has been instrumental in retraining. I know it’s also helped her emotionally so much as this is a huge part of who she is. She began all this activity when she was 40.
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Sherri said on June 21, 2025 at 11:26 am
My impression is that recovery from hip replacement is easier than from knee replacement. My dad had hip replacement surgery in 2019 at 81 and he came through that great.
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Jakash said on June 21, 2025 at 1:00 pm
That was a funny Weingarten column. Thanks for the gift link, NN. Some choice signature choices he mentioned, for those not clicking on through: “Eleanor of Aquitaine,” “Dreadful Ennui,” “Severe Bronchitis,” “Generic Signature.”
Hey, Scarlett Johansson’s elbows may be beside-the-point to him, but I imagine she appreciates them…
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Julie Robinson said on June 21, 2025 at 1:40 pm
The knee is a more complicated joint than the hip, or so I’ve been told. Friends and family members who’ve had one or the other all had more positive experiences with hips than knees.
And here’s where I put give two thumbs up for strength training. I was sure I needed both a hip and a knee replaced. The knee hurt all the time, and I’d done extensive rehab a few years back. Doc said when the pain is unbearable, that’s when we hit go. The hip was intermittent, but when it hurt it was pretty bad. After 20 months of twice a week strength training, I almost never experience any pain. I’m overjoyed and flabbergasted by this, as I was a skeptic.
We’re really lucky. Our trainer works from her garage and lives two blocks away, so it couldn’t be any more convenient. She also charges whether you show up or not, which ups the motivation!
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Dexter Friend said on June 21, 2025 at 2:07 pm
Dad sold Sonotone hearing aids from the 1940s until 1962. The Fort Wayne office was in the Gettle Building, but Dad made his dough on the road at homes, also holding “Hearing Centers” in The Auburn Hotel and in Celina, Ohio. Also, deaf oldsters came at all hours to our house getting batteries changed.
No one in our family had any hearing loss except my late uncle when he turned 90.
The VA requires a basic hearing test just to get the veteran established into the system. I had to to take a test locally and also one in Battle Creek as part of my initiation into VA healthcare.
Jeff Borden, we both lost long-time companion dogs this year, my Pogo on January 6. I am sure a new dog would outlive me if I got a pup and I can’t walk well enough to exercise an old dog properly, and these Reels with dogs just kill me. My daughters in the Columbus area and also in Port St. Lucie have multiple dogs but are too far away.
Judging by tombstone engravings, I should have between 6 and 11 years to go before the lights go out. Scared as hell of dying as a youth, now I see how old folks sometimes tell family “I want to go home…” Not 123 Elm Street either, the one with palaces full of rooms in the sky.
Oh, heh…I brag up the Detroit Tigers and last night they shit the bed and are getting creamed again right now down in Tampa. I am a jinx.
One thing I am thinking seriously about is getting a new car. Not a new used one either. I am finding it a pain to keep checking car fluids all the time in these hoopdees I always drive. So just when I am almost there, ready to jump…a UM economist comes on TV and says wait! Wait, prices will come down! He said he was ready to buy new also, but is waiting to see, as he believes the tariff increases already planned or are in place will go away. So I wait. Goddam cars are too expensive for fixed income septuagenarians anyway.
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JodiP said on June 21, 2025 at 4:03 pm
Confirming what Julie said about strength training. I tweaked a knee a couple times and cycling and weight training strengthen the supporting muscles. The few times I have slacked off, I get some pain, enough to go back. It’s just overall really good for your mind and body.
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Jeff Borden said on June 21, 2025 at 5:06 pm
I’ve been to the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab in Chicago twice now. Once, for treatment of my arthritic left knee and most recently for tendonopathy in my left wrist. For both, occupational therapists prescribed various exercises. Both times they’ve worked well, though the wrist issue comes and goes. I’m trying to go to the gym 4 or 5 times per week just to keep everything running properly. I wish I’d been doing this all my life, though my friends who were runners in their youth are now dealing with a lot of ankle, knee and hip issues. Exercise does work.
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Sherri said on June 21, 2025 at 5:22 pm
I’m a huge advocate of strength training, obviously. Even if you do end up needing joint replacement, having done the strength training will make the recovery go smoother.
My latest powerlifting adventure will be live-streamed on YouTube! Sunday, June 29, 8 am EDT, I’ll be competing at Nationals in Atlanta, on Platform 1: https://youtu.be/Fqt5SzOt6Dc
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Deborah said on June 21, 2025 at 6:56 pm
I’m sitting in our place near the lake and dying of the heat, with no air conditioning. So much for cooler by the lake. The sun comes in on the west, even though we have closed the blinds on that side, with floor to ceiling windows across that whole space, it’s brutal. Only a small part of the windows open, we have 2 fans blowing directly on us. This all reminds me why I’m not usually here in the summer, the humidity is unbearable.
Jeff B, I’ve been to the Shirley Ryan Ability Lab a number of times for PT, love that place. I worked on the graphic design of it, the conceptual part of it, before I retired. I’m quite proud of the way they carried out the design. The architecture company I worked for designed the building.
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Suzanne said on June 21, 2025 at 9:14 pm
Well, now Trump bombed Iran.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/live-blog/israel-iran-conflict-rcna214241
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basset said on June 22, 2025 at 7:13 am
Dexter, be ready for a lot of confusing complications if you buy a new one, lots of menus and different levels of clicking and selecting. We got a new Toyota back in May and I still don’t fully understand it.
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