A MOTORCYCLE JOURNEY

Wayne Flick

Last year, my brother Wayne and I motorcycled the full lengths of Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway, visited some museums and rode the Cherohala Skyway between North Carolina and Tennessee. We spent 7 nights together, 4 in tents, and the weather was good throughout. It’s been the longest time I’ve had alone with a brother in many years.

The best parts of retirement are often adventures we never had time for in middle life. Both Wayne and I motorcycled in our youth, then we gave it up because of the risks and costs. Retirement offered us each a few years when we could again experience the constant accompaniment of wind as we rode with somewhat modest abandon through mountain roads.

Truth Is in the Air

In the last two posts I’ve described the relatively new teaching in the Catholic catechism that God is lasting truth and love. Yet truth strikes me as getting skimpy treatment in much of our lives, including at church. People often say, “God is love,” but I seldom hear, “God is truth.” So I am on the lookout for truth.

Have You Seen God Lately?

People often grow more spiritual as they move through later life, and especially for men, that growth can be halting, timid, and incomplete.

People enter Twelve-Step programs to rid themselves of addictions, and central to the method is acknowledgement of a “higher power,” which may be God for the religious, but may be something else, something people choose or define for themselves.

How To Save Your Family From the U.S. Decline

Last week the Federal Reserve published a study that made the news: between 2007 and 2010, Americans experienced a 39% decline in median net worth and an 8% decline in median income. The report is one of a series going back to at least 1989, but the new report shows an unprecedented decline in economic well-being.

Although the data are dismal, there is a lesson for Americans willing to fight: it’s time to return to the working and saving habits of American mythology where strong families work together toward common goals. Families will want to pull together into larger, more integrated economic units to help those affected recover and move forward.

An Added Burden For Boomers: Your Children’s Retirements

The Huffington Post published the following piece on May 25. The idea—parents saving for their children’s retirements—left several readers frustrated. Yet parents have always been leaving bequests for their children; this piece recommends a specific type of bequest—a retirement account or annuity, left at death. I am reprinting it here as this week’s post.

The economy is not clicking along like it should—the recovery of the last few years is slow, halting, and uncertain. The United States now has a large cadre of long-term unemployed, and many of them are in their twenties and early thirties.

Connect With Your Community at the Farmer’s Market

Good food is an important part of a good life. The food movement, as it is sometimes called, emphasizes alternatives to the abundance of prepackaged, additive-ladened food in modern supermarkets. It seeks to induce shoppers to consider a wide range of food attributes instead of just price and convenience.