A gay boy and his deaf uncle connect through the unspoken experience of being outsiders in a family It was a warm evening and we were eating outside on my grandparents’ rarely used patio. We gathered at Nanny and Papa’s, my maternal grandparents’ home for Thanksgiving, the High Holidays, and…

Summer 1974, Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good” playing on my Chevy Bel-Air’s AM radio on a humid Ohio afternoon. …

Learning from my twenty-something housemates — For those of us of a certain (middle to senior) age, Meg Ryan’s classic scene from When Harry Met Sally made an indelible impression, along with the older woman’s comment just after Sally faked an orgasm in a booth in a crowded deli: “I’ll have what she’s having.” Today, at…

What does it mean to be relatively healthy in my 60s? — I was lying on a gurney at Massachusetts General Hospital under a heated blanket, my stomach gurgling and growling after two days with virtually no food: one day of a liquid diet consisting of chicken broth and unsweetened lime-green Jello, and a second day of no food, limited water, and…

A sixty-something gay man’s visit to Provincetown — I was at the Boatslip, an indoor/outdoor bar in Provincetown’s West End, feeling like I was in a time warp. I hadn’t been to a gay bar in years, had rarely stood in a crowd since Covid. …

My love-hate relationship with creative writing — Writing is for me both physically and emotionally painful. An anxious, restless man, I find sitting for more than 15 minutes to be extremely difficult. The physical act of writing, my body hunched over notebook or tensed over laptop, leads to backaches, a stiff neck, a tight gut. Am I…

A writer struggles with his inner critic — You should be writing more. You should be writing better. If you were writing more, you would be writing better. Most successful writers have an agent. Most successful writers have published books, and have an agent, long before they are 58. I am over the hill, closer to 60 than…

What I’ve learned in my seven decades on the planet — As I age, I am the sum of my life experiences, a card catalog with ever-expanding drawers — thick, dusty, the cards gone yellow. As I age, memories pile up like sediment, layer upon layer, some of which I’d like to forget but I am blessed or cursed with a…