There is something both beautiful and sad about Barbara Crooker’s poem “Surfer Girl.” And it’s something beautiful and sad that I’ve experienced this past week at our cottage on Lake Otsego. Getting old, someone said, is not for sissies. And my siblings and I can testify to the truth of that statement as we live into the reality of being middle-aged. Water skiing – my substitute for Crooker’s surfing – didn’t hurt this much when I was half the age I am now. Nor did running…or sleeping on the less than perfect mattresses that furnish the cottage. And, quite frankly there are a lot of things like that. And so as I...

Fifth Friday Film Forum: Catching Fire Spoiler alerts: If you haven’t read Catching Fire or seen the film, you may not want to read this. I have to admit that when I first read Catching Fire and realized that Suzanne Collins was going to send Katniss and Peeta back into the arena to compete in another Hunger Games, I was disappointed. What seemed such a brilliant plot element in the last book suddenly seemed tired, as if Collins was a one-trick pony. But that feeling soon disappeared. Although there is indeed a second round of the Hunger Games competition in Catching Fire, the plot both inside and outside of the arena was different enough...

Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...