For me, and perhaps for you, one of the more difficult emotions to deal with is anger.
My father used to get angry a lot. If he was worried about money he stormed around the house and the rest of us stayed out of his way. When I asked for something he didn’t want to give me he shouted. When I broke the glass table in the living room . . . well, I won’t go further into that.
Read MoreToday I drove 77 miles North from Los Angeles to attend the first 100th birthday party I have ever been invited to. I stopped at a drug store to buy a card for Bill, the birthday boy. Finding no greeting cards for a 100th birthday, I bought two cards congratulating him on his 50th birthday. The cards were funny and turned out to be a hit.
I have been a guest at Bill’s birthday parties for more than twenty years. At first there was a dinner at the home of one of his two daughters, but in recent years Bill has lived in a bed, mostly reading or sleeping, in an assisted living facility. He was born in 1914, before the start of World War One, and has been a friend of my father’s for more than 80 years. My father will celebrate his own 100th birthday in five months, and I’m looking forward to mine on March 5, 2040.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid I earned comic book money by pulling dandelions out of the lawn in our back yard. My mother paid me one cent for each dandelion. A comic book cost ten cents. So every week I would try to find twenty or thirty dandelions to yank out. I liked comic books. One time I wanted to make a lot of money, and I remember talking to my mom in the back yard on a hot Sunday afternoon for more than three hours while I pulled out 600 dandelions. I think that was the day my mom stopped paying me a dandelion-pulling fee and I had to find comic book money elsewhere.
But here is the catch. I only earned a penny if I pulled out the whole dandelion, including the root.
Read More