Crabby Old Lady and Ronni Bennett need a couple of days off from writing to catch up with some personal business. Meanwhile, they will rerun a couple of golden oldies from TGB, but today is the weekly posting of Don Murray's Now and Then column in the Boston Globe. You should read it. You should read it every week. Here is last week's Time Goes By story about Don Murray:

Thanks to Jill Fallon, whose Legacy Matters Weblog you should make a regular stop, Crabby has discovered 80-year old Boston Globe columnist, Donald Murray. His weekly column Now and Then, published on Tuesdays, addresses precisely what Crabby's alter ego means with her banner tagline, "what it's really like to get older." Recently, Murray wrote of coping, after 53 years of marriage, with his wife's Parkinson's disease:

"In trying to adjust to a marriage of daily visits, I have learned many things about Minnie Mae and myself. We do not have to speak but only touch to communicate. When she can speak, we often meet in memories recalled, in familiar expressions, in her quick wit that suddenly flashes out of her unfamiliar passivity."

In another column, after noting some of the technological advances during his 80 years, Murray concludes:

"I am struck, however, that for all the convenience, how essentially unimportant these improvements have been for a man. The homemaker's lot is far different and yet, even there, life is about birth and death, sickness and health, caring and the end of caring - not a microwave."

In the past, the Globe has allowed the most recent four of Murray's columns to be available online without a paid subscription. Crabby noticed this week, that it has been reduced to three, but if you bookmark his page, you can easily keep up with what Crabby Old Lady believes is the best regularly-scheduled writing she knows of on the reality of getting older.