“Remember, you’re no spring chicken,” she said. Eighty-one at the time, she was one to talk. ¶ I had just soared over the handlebars of my mountain bike, landing so hard in the dirt that I pulverized several bones in my left hand. Those bones turned out to be critical tools in the act of typing, which is how I earn my living as a writer. ¶ It was July of 2008, one of the crappiest years on record, and not just for the stock market. I’d recently been wait-listed for a journalism opportunity I’d long coveted, the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, followed by another rejection for a tenure-track teaching job. In between, summer pneumonia sent me to bed for a week with a fever so high I passed out. ¶ I was forty-four then, and despite all the setbacks, I mostly still a spring chicken. So my mother’s comment raised my hackles, as only a mother’s scolding can. ¶ I was my parents’ midlife “accident,” the youngest by far of their four kids. I was so different from the rest of my family, my mother told me once, half joking, that I might have arrived from a distant planet. While we loved each other deeply, my mom and
