Tag: sixty

T.G.I.F.: Speed…

Live & Learn23 Comments

I’d been away from New York for over three months. I returned to the city in the fall of 2018 only to discover that my local barbershop had turned into a Baskin-Robbins. Why do changes in the landscape accelerate as one ages? You take a quick shower and another Duane Reade opens. You wake from an afternoon nap and there’s a new president. The second you hit sixty, life becomes the unstoppable bus in the film Speed.

— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir (Gallery Books, May 6, 2025)

Notes:

  • NY Times Book Review: The Brash, Working-Class Londoner Who Redefined New York’s Restaurants
  • Wall Street Journal book excerpt: Keith McNally: “I Had No Chef, No Toilets and No Budget. But I Was Determined to Open Balthazar.”
  • Photo Credit: Pixabay

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn17 Comments

Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

—  Mary Oliver, from “Am I Not Among The Early Risers” in West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems (Mariner Books, April 7, 1998)

Notes:

  • Image Credit. Andreas Kuehn.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”