It was that time of the year again. Or more exactly, that time of the HALF year — time for my six-month checkup at the office of Terrible Tony Tramontano. In case you don’t know, Terrible Tony is the head hustler at his cardiology practice at our hospital. At least he’s the head ...

I’m sure there are lots of people my age who are perfectly in tune with the 21st century. But I’m not one of them. It’s the new technologies that done laid me to waste, advancing light years in mere decades and leaving me in the dust. Luckily, I don’t need most of it, so I don’t ...

Last week I wrote about the difficulty of telling Clair Bovee a joke. To be more precise, it’s easy to tell her a joke — it’s just almost impossible to make her laugh. Not that she lacks a sense of humor — she has a great one. But therein lies the difficulty, because she only laughs ...

My Sundays are as ritualized as a medieval monk’s. Of course, my rituals are radically different from theirs. I don’t pray, meditate or painstakingly copy manuscripts. Nor do I sing Gregorian chants, tend to a grape arbor or trim my tonsure. And best of all, I don’t subsist on black ...

I don’t think I’m unique among old peeps when it comes to having no idea what happened to the world I used to know. OK, there’s some hyperbole in that statement. Obviously, in a rational sense, I know exactly what happened. The low-tech, mechanical, person-to-person world of my ...

An old boxing adage, maybe the oldest, is “They never come back.” It means when pugs retire, it’s for a good reason, namely, they’re no longer at the top of their game. In fact, au contraire. And that’s why almost every boxer who came out of retirement, hoping he still had his ...