New Horizons by Max Roy

        Living With The Plague Here in the middle of the year 2022, we are entering the second (third?) year of the appearance of this virus that has already killed over seven million of us on the planet. We have witnessed the miracle work of our scientists and researchers who have miraculously found medicines in mere months, instead of years, that have saved the lives of many more millions. We have seen how Israel has turned that whole country into a pilot test for us as to better ways to tackle this unseen enemy seeking to strangle us with the very air we breathe. We have seen how Sweden has opted to allow the virus free reign regardless of the cost in lives which statistics have verified, an approach Trump toyed with in the U.S. Where are we at now? In the developed countries many have now had three shots and are working on a fourth, at least for the more vulnerable. In Israel they are delivering their fifth. It is clear that our booster shots have only a limited-time effectiv

                        Light and Shade The quality of our lives seem to contain alternating waves of good and bad, hard and soft, light and shade. If we are lucky enough to appreciate that this is the nature of existence, we can bear much better with the shady parts of our lives. We can have faith that whatever it is we are having to bear with, no matter how painful it may seem at the time, the good times will roll around again. And the good times can be so good, so full of richness, pleasure, joy, lightness and brightness, that they are worth any price we may ultimately have to pay for   the good fortune we have the luck to be earning. The dilemma we have to cope with is that sometimes we do not realize that what we are passing through are the bright times, the good times, the best times, that we will ever experience in our lives. That only comes with survival and retrospection. I remember that I left home at the age of eighteen to spend a year of work and study in Israel. I di

       Preparing For Take-Off-#2 I first wrote under this title in the spring of 2016. Here we are in June 2022, and it appears to me the subject deserves a responsible reprise. Now six years later, and my Bride and I approaching our nineties, the subject at least needs a re-think. Way back then we were crooning over our blessings, and counting our fingers, expecting one or two of them, at least, to drop off. We had had a few health scares and we believed we were acting sensibly and appropriately in totting up final scores. Well, look at us now! Life is just too much fun to consider handing in our papers, and as organisms, we keep on keeping on. Don’t get me wrong, we are occupying a full platoon of health care providers. They are busy keeping our scorecards up to date. But so far, we appear to be more make-work projects than serious tests of the system. When we last focused on these issues we recounted the background of a study of couples facing terminal illness on the part of o

                  The Atlas of Your Life When you look back at your life, do you have an inkling of the chart you have drawn with your comings and goings? Do you have an insight into the atlas of your heart, what it was that drove you down the pathways you have actually charted? Wherever you are on that pathway, take a moment to check the atlas. Are you anywhere on the trail you originally intended to forge? Is all that for the better or is it time for a course correction? We can be the master of our own fortunes, ….or can we? When I was wee one, my ambition was to be a cub-reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press. In those days the Press was one of the great newspapers in the world, with many of the world’s notables opining for us in its pages. I had stories to tell, messages to send, and I wanted to send them. I never even got close to that, distracted by my struggles to right the world’s ills, and ambushed by my drive to assemble some semblance of a professional status, I veered far

                        EXTRAORDINARY! That’s what I think of the lives we have lived. Overcome with gratitude, approaching our ninth decade, it’s hard to believe that it’s really true. Who could have foretold our fate when we were youngsters, raised in humble circumstance, encircled by ethnic prejudices, troubled by whether opportunities might be available to us. My father, with no formal education, went from shoveling coal, to being an engineer by dint of home study, supervising a vast industrial plant. I became a professional economist, working my way through college, raising a family, and improved the lives of thousands, even millions, consequent on my work. We were born at a time of world economic depression, which we felt deeply in our own environment growing up. We grew up into a world war , with nearly one hundred million victims, to say nothing of the devastation, the damaged and tortured lives of survivors. And we learned of the genocide of our European kin. And yet

         “Makin’ Whoopie”* With Life! My Bride and I are approaching our nineties. While we are still full of vim and vigor, we have noticed a certain flagging in the energy we have available to maintain our activities. We have noticed a plague of forgetfulness on occasion, and an inability to call up the words for things, words that we normally know like the back of our hands. Yes, we notice some changes in the skin on the back of our hands as well. The truth is that we are actively on our guard for signs and symptoms of the dreaded diseases of old age. I will resist the urge to quote statistics because they can be so depressing. We seek out activities that will exercise our minds; puzzles, solitaire, crosswords, as well as the activities that will exercise our bodies. We are on the warpath against senescence. More than anything we are on our guard for signs of neural degeneration in its manifold forms. We know that damages begin to occur in the brain long before symptoms appe