Archives for September 2026

For those about to or contemplating retirement, there’s no shortage of advice, so I won’t be the first one to warn you that the end of a lifelong routine can take some getting used to – or worse.

If you’ve already retired you may be nodding in agreement. It’s well known and studied endlessly, when you stop working it can change brain health, as well as pose a risk of cognitive decline and depression.

Kidding! Not really kidding though. When you stop using your brain to create, communicate and socialize with fellow workers, it’s an abrupt change to the entire pattern of your life. You cannot assume the transition will be a piece of cake.

Studies of retirees find that their verbal memory (recalling a set of words after a certain amount of time) declined faster post-retirement compared to when they were working. I can vouch for that effect when I’m unable to come up with a name or a term that used to be top of mind.

Experts believe the key is having a plan, and they don’t mean taking a long vacation on an island and then coming home to figure it out. In fact, they recommend setting up your plan while you are still working so that you can dive right into retirement on day one. You want to pivot directly into the new lifestyle, not wallow in some rudderless state.

Volunteer work and staying social is key according to experts. If social contact declines the chance for depression onset increases. Trying new activities and acquiring new skills can stave off the isolation that can set in when you don’t have a workplace anymore.

It sounds counterintuitive to say retirement is work, but if you don’t have a plan for how to use your free time and stay engaged with a community, your brain is just not going to find life very challenging or rewarding. After working for 50 years or more, that would be borderline tragic.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His most recent mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

I’m wondering if through the years, some of these sayings have changed because our world has. For example, “You better eat everything on your plate. There are starving children in Korea.” Do parents now say the same things to their kids except change Korea to Africa? I suspect these quirky expressions become part of our boomer DNA and then one day, these valuable words just automatically leave our lips to be passed on to some unsuspecting child. I have made a short list of some from my memory bank. I am sure you will recognize many of them.

“You made your bed, now lie in it.”

“Smooth move Ex-Lax!”

“If the shoe fits, wear it.”

“Don’t kiss the boys or you will get pregnant.”

“If I have to stop this car….”

“Were you born in a barn?”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

“If they jumped off the bridge, you would too.”

“Children should be seen and not heard.” (would Dr. Spock object to this?)

“If you had another brain it would be lonesome.”

“You’re so far back in the woods you can’t see the trees.”

“This too shall pass.”

“Waste not want not.”

“Don’t be a tattle tail.”

“Close the door, I don’t pay good money to heat the outdoors.”

“Either in or out.”

“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

“If you cross your eyes they will stay that way.”

“Wear clean underwear in case you have to go to the hospital.”

“Be home before the street lights come on.”

“If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.”

“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

“You would lose your head if it wasn’t attached.”

“Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

OK, you’re it, now it’s your turn…..

From the Best of BoomSpeak, February 2010

Joyce Welling believes that once a hippie, always a hippie. She continues to be on a magical mystery tour, dipping into the pool of our collective nostalgia.  

Hey, it’s my stuff and you can’t just take it!

I worked long and hard and I may have failed utterly, but these are my failures and you may not use them to create something of your own. Worse, you may not take my successes; you may especially not take my successes as they are unutterably precious to me. You may not take a part of my work, or a bit of my work, or a byte of my work, or cut with your sharp scissors a section of my painting, or make a photocopy of my drawing, or download a painting of mine to use in your collage. You may not take a clever or bright turn of phrase of mine or, yeagods, an entire block of my writing, and pass it off as your own or bury it in your text as neat and snug as if it were yours.

Sure—all creative artists glean inspiration from their environments and from other creators. But to blithely steal, to download, when it is oh so easy to do so, and to run with it—that is not what inspiration is all about. Inspiration may include copying when you are a student. Fair use enough! But to be inspired by someone else’s work – by a painting or an essay for instance – does not have anything to do with copying that image or downloading that image by means of any current or future technological device.

The great books, the great paintings, the great any things, have powerful unmistakable voices. Putting together a pastiche or collage or crazy quilt of pieces of someone else’s work does not constitute creativity. It will lack a voice. And if you do not know what a voice is, I feel for you, I really do.

Just because it is easy to do so does not mean it is okay to click, copy and download anything on this web site that I have created to use in your creative product. I am old and cranky and probably idiotic, but I slaved away in school, slaved away in soul-deadening jobs and now I write and now I paint and, like it or not (I don’t really care what you like!) my creative output is mine. I paint my own pictures. I write my own essays. My voice, for better and for worse, is my own. Now run along and get yours!

Excerpted from full essays at Flying Falling Floating.

From the Best of BoomSpeak, 2008 

Surrealist painter and writer Mary E. Carter shows her work (including goose girls, chicken ladies and not so winged creatures) at Flying Falling Floating. The former advertising copywriter is also a published book author.

Weed. Grass. Pot. Smoke. Ganja. Reefer. Herb. Dope. Bud.

Whatever you called it, you can’t deny baby boomers were all over it. It was our drug of choice back then and you’d be lying if you said you never even tried it once. Okay, maybe a tiny minority of boomers never lit up.

Back then you had to put a towel under the door so that your parents, dorm mates, or your neighbors would not know you were inside getting high.

Contrast that with what’s happening now. More Americans aged 65 and older are using cannabis (so that’s what it really is!) than ever before. It increased 46 percent between 2021 and 2023, so you can assume it’s still increasing in 2026.

Boomers are rediscovering cannabis in retirement and women and wealthy boomers in particular are a big portion of that renewed interest. Why not you say? It’s legal so the risk factor is gone. No one is going to break down the door and toss you in jail. Then there’s the analgesic effect. Aches, pains, and sleep issues often plague the over-65 population and many boomers are convinced that weed/gummies can help.

For those of us boomers who have difficulty remembering what we ate for breakfast or the name of that speckled bird that comes to the feeder every morning, the other draw of the ganja is that it can help with memory function. The THC component of weed has been shown to  enhance neural communication between the cerebellum and hippocampus.

In other words, boomers with pain, sleep and memory issues may find there really is some therapeutic value to pot, but there needs to be more research on the potential negative effects.

One way to look at it is that you survived cannabis use in the first go around in your twenties, so if it can help you remember where you’re hiding your stash in your eighties, go for it. And you don’t have to hide it anymore or put a towel under the door (unless you have neighbors adjacent).

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His most recent mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

For me and my four sisters, laughter was always the string that tied us tightly together. Letterman had nothing on our daily coffee-talk banter or our silly family holiday gatherings. Get us together and we could laugh about mostly anything. However, many of our shared fits of laughter over the years did not always come at appropriate times. One of my earliest memories is when the five of us lined up in a pew during Lent to hear The Stations of the Cross in the old dark church in Sparrows Point. Anyone who is familiar with this Lenten ritual, knows full well that when the priest says with severity that Jesus was beaten, scorned, and nailed to the cross, the proper response is certainly not unbridled laughter.

Or there was the time we were at the dinner table and we were being sternly scolded by our father for something we had done earlier in the day. The proper response, again, was not uncontrolled laughter laced with guffaws of disrespect, but the angrier he got, the harder we laughed.

Then there was the time the old lady down the street slipped on the ice, or my sister backed into my mother’s car, or the time our brother forgot his lines in the school play. Each time, as inappropriate as our laughter was, my sisters and I relished this bad behavior with a fervor.

So appropriate it was, oddly enough, when four of us erupted into a frenzied burst of raucous laughter at the fifth sister’s funeral. We stood by her coffin, clearly aware of the sadness and sorrow of this scene. Yet in the midst of the solemn prayer service, all we needed to trigger a fit of girly laughter from days of yore was a simple exchange of glances among us. That’s all it took. There we were, standing with our heads bowed in front of the large group that gathered, and the laughter exploded from every pore. We knew our sister was laughing with us, which made us carry on even more. As it turns out we were spared any reprimands from friends and family, as they thought we were hysterically crying, which I guess is what we were really doing on the inside.

Every time my sisters and I think back to that coffin-side moment, darned if we don’t burst into one of those fits of uncontrollable laughter. I don’t know what to say about it except, I guess you had to be there.

From the Best of BoomSpeak, vintage 2007.  

Susan Pompa is a PR lady born and raised in Baltimore.