The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan (1939) - an excerpt

In the time of your life, live — so that in good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. Be the inferior of no man, nor of any man be the superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle, but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret. In the time of your life, live — so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

I'm Getting On with the Years and So are You . . .

Before I turned Golden Boy last year, I prepared myself for it by buying and reading up on books dealing with the middle age (reckoned by various sources as between the ages of 35 - 65, so I'm right smack in the mean, or is it median? However, Chicken Soup for the Golden Soup is meant for those sexagenarians - 60 year olds for you). I sure need a roadmap to navigate that part of my life's journey. If, as they say, life begins at 40, then I will be 11 this November. :-)
Time Flies by Bill Cosby. Filled to the brim with wit and wisdom. A sampling:

• I wear glasses, primarily so I can look for the things that I keep losing.
• I am just like any typical nuclear physicist. My office may look messy, but I know where every atom is.
• "Don't worry about senility," my grandfather used to say. "When it hits you, you won't know it."
• I remember my wife's birthday because she announces it well in advance and momentously, the way astronomers announce Halley's Comet.
• Instead of writing it (a message) down, I decide to keep it in my head, perhaps because of all the room for it there.
• I am not a physicist, but I'm sure that the theory of the conservation of energy was discovered while watching an eight-year-old pretend to work.
• In my old neighborhood, a boy stopped playing when he began to lose his pulse. And then he became the referee.
• Never let the younger people know that you think a compact disc is a sturdy spine; and never say to them, "That was before your time," because the last full moon was before their time.
• In spite of the profound love I have for my wife, sex at my age has become exhausting, which leaves me yearning for a younger body, or longing for a good nap.
• If you put a boyish face on a man of seventy-three who can't bend over, you have a new kind of centaur - and the horse's ass is the man who had the surgery.
• What I pray is that all the parts of me do not shut down all at once. What the man of fifty has to avoid is an orchestrated falling-apart.
• Immortality is a long shot, I admit; but somebody has to be first.
• There is a saying that goes: Youth is a gift of nature; Age is a work of art. Well, I hate to disagree with Confucius or Hallmark, but if age is a work of art, the artist is one who belongs in the subway and not in the Louvre.
• Memory has a sugarcoater and we can never remember pain. (If women could remember pain, we would be a nation of single-child families)
• You can teach an old dog new tricks. You just don't want to see the dog doing them.

When My Parents were My Age, They were Old (Or Who are You Calling Middle-aged?) by Cathy Crimmins. Very funny justapositions between our parents' middle age and our middle age like: while our parents start to go gray and dye their hair, we begin putting highlights in ours to enhance its natural shine.

Body checklist for the mature: you use tweezers in places you've never thought before, you notice that dim lighting makes you look at least three years younger, sucking in your guts starts to feel natural, when you play sports you care less about winning than about finishing the game without getting hurt.

The Big Five-Oh! - Facing, Fearing and Fighting Fifty by Bill Geist.
Bill Geist takes comfort in the statistics that everyday 11,000 hits the big five-oh (one every 7 1/2 seconds). He starts his book with 50 ways to tell you're 50; here's some :
takes three times to call own kids by correct names, can't read menu, plays air-guitar to unplugged songs, ear hair, can't see own dick, leaves turn signal on, says "eh" and "huh" a lot, falls asleep (rather than passes out) at parties.


Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Went out into the Real World by Maria Shriver. Armed with her Kennedy toothy trademark, Maria Shriver gives us a mouthful to wish we'd known before it's too late for us: pinpoint your passion, no job is beneath you, who you work for and with is as important as what you do, your behavior has consequences, be willing to fail, superwoman is dead...and superman may be taking viagra, children do change your career, marriage is a hell of a lot of hard work, don't expect anyone else to support you financially, and have lots of laughter in your life.