How to Take up Hiking When You’re Almost Dead

The “O” circuit 2018 This year it became official. My wife will no longer drive to JFK Airport. The traffic jams on the VanWyck Expressway are so bad that I can no longer ask anyone I care for to drive me to JFK and subject themselves to that kind of frustration without paying them good money. I took the Trailways bus from my home town of Rosendale, NY (about a 2- hour ride) to the Port Authority bus terminal in mid-town Manhattan. From there I took another hour-long bus ride to JFK via the Airporter bus that runs hourly from the Port Authority, Grand Central, and Penn Station to JFK so that your wife doesn't sue for emotional distress. I caught a 10: 30PM flight to Buenos Aires Argentina, via Sao Paulo, Brazil. I flew on Latin American Airlines and 14 hours later arrived at the Ayers Recoleta hotel in the toney Recoleta section of the city where tango was born. As usual, when traveling to a South American city, I heard the typical precautions: I would most c

By the winter of 2004 I was almost dead. My daughter was in college; my older son was in his mid-teens and getting into the teenager thing; my younger son was 12 and starting a rock band. The US had made a full-scale invasion, which they called a "liberation", of Iraq. I was in the depths of my despair and cared little about anything besides getting through my day as painlessly as possible. My wife had taken up racquetball. She and her friend Joanne played several times a week and we're passionate about the game. She worked hard at her racquetball game but, to her chagrin, she could not hold a candle to either me or our 12-year-old son on the racquetball court. We played frequently throughout the winter. It was good exercise and a great calorie burn. During the months of January and February the fingers in my left hand started tingling. I wasn't sure what to make of this. Perhaps it was just cold, and my circulation was poor. I continued my wretched ea