I want to be open to new things. Really I do. But I need to find a way to:
1) relax about falling behind in my email correspondence.
2) make peace with never speaking to a live person on the phone ever again
3) become best friends with the robotic check-out

The first item is a real chop-buster for me. Email, once such a great convenience, has now become something of a drag for me. It feels like, every day, I fall farther and farther behind. I do my best. I answer emails on my Blackberry in bed at night right before I turn out the lights, my husband hinting that the light play of my thumbs over the keyboard is deafening and oh-so-unsexy. And sure enough, first thing in the morning my thumbs are dancing again. I am behind.

Prescription phone-ins undo me, and if I don't have my glasses on, it's like I never used a phone before because I can never find the pound sign.

Robotic check-outs at the drug store are an ordeal. Whenever I glide my purchases over the sensor incorrectly that lovely robot woman voice chides me loud enough for the whole store to hear. She makes it sound as if I am shoplifting the shampoo. Lovely.

And, don't look now, but I think my zip disc is open.

I read in the New York Times about the man who risked his life when he jumped onto the tracks and used his body as a shield to save a young film student's life from an on-coming subway train. The story ran on the front page where it rightly heralded this truly extraordinary act of selflessness.

I have been thinking all day about how I would act in the face of a crisis -- an event that hits with no build-up and no warning. Would I look around for help? Or would I jump in and offer it myself? I have some sense of how I respond to those crises that build over time, but not how I would act in a split-second lay-down-your-life-literally-on the tracks crisis.

Mr. Autrey is a role model who has me thinking about how I might jump in to help in a situation that is slightly less than five-alarm. Giving back in any way is a form of jumping on the tracks to help someone who really needs it.

Happy New Year!

When you found your AARP card in your mailbox, did you want to bend, fold, or otherwise mutilate it? There must be some mistake, you said to yourself -- right? That's certainly what we both thought, and then, a few things happened to change our mind. Buffy's parents who were living in a house with a spiral staircase were refusing to move to more senior-friendly housing; Kate's mother had a stroke and came to live in her dining room. At more or less the same time, both of us realized that this AARP mail drop wasn't such a mortifying event after all. It was kind of a wake-up call, a call to action. When we got in touch with our parents' choices and our new role as potential caregiver, we decided to look at our lives and figure out how we wanted to live the next half of our lives.

We're best friends, Kate and Buffy, who met the first day of college almost 40 years ago (yikes!). Kate lives in New York. Buffy moved out to California over 20 years ago. But through visits, letters, phone calls, and now through e-mails we've managed to keep in touch in a virtual place midway between coasts that we call Our Own Private Iowa (Idaho having been taken). In this place, we've shared the ins and outs of our lives: the challenges of raising kids, the up and downs of keeping our marriages going, and growing our careers. When these things happened with our parents, we called an Emergency Session in Our Own Private Iowa. We had to figure out this Getting Older Thing and quick. We started by looking for a book that would help us navigate the ins and outs of our mid-lives. When we failed to find "the" book we were looking for, we embarked on a voyage of research. We browsed the Web, read magazines, rented or bought audios, videos and DVDs, ever more consciously shared our fears and our dreams and began to develop ideas for how to plan -- and live -- the second half of our lives with style, wit, and a dash of imagination.

As we looked over our findings, we began to feel like seniors in high school, poised between two of life's grand phases -- in this case, between the Age of Responsibility (Family, Career, Kids) and the Age of Something New and Exciting (Empty Nest, Traveling or Second Careers.) We call it Coming of Age... All Over Again. And now that we've started, we can't stop talking about it. And we love to talk about it online. Please drop in to Our Own Private Iowa here on MySpace and join us as we talk everything to death: work, play, hobbies, sex, kids, parents (we call them Super Seniors), friends, travel, money, home, and giving back to the community. We talk about exercising your body, your mind, and getting in touch with your Inner Guidance Counselor. We have tips, exercises, thoughts, suggestions, and just plain good talk. So pull up a comfortable chair and Come of Age... All Over Again, with Kate and Buffy.