There’s a magical age where society quietly lowers the bar, then hands you a lawn chair and says, “Sit. You’ve done enough.” That age, as I am in the process of discovering, seems to be seventy. Seventy is when the universe stops asking and starts excusing. You don’t quit  things anymore — you are medically exempt . Take lifting anything heavy, for instance. At seventy — as the late, great George Carlin observed in It’s Bad for Ya,  his final HBO stand-up comedy special — you

Came across a playful, made-up noun the other day that I hadn’t seen before. The writer, d’un certain âge, complained that she had lately been victimized by a “shart.” Took me a second or two to grasp that a shart must be an abominable concoction halfway between a shit and a fart. As a verb, the same pliable (semi-liquid) appellation means to accidentally expel feces while breaking wind. I’ll leave the adjectival and adverbial forms to your imagination. Not the classiest of t

Contributed by Hyman Weisbord, who annually leaves his Laurentian home and hides out in Thailand to escape winters. He won't share the location of his hideaway. There appears to be a beach not too far. Intimacy lives in the mundane. You might be tempted to call it mundane when I first asked my cleaning lady what type of mop she preferred to use when washing the hardwood floors of my house. I was asking from experience, and perhaps to establish comfort, egalitarianism, familia