Summertime and the living is easy—but not for a Mini-Mart cashier at a rest stop on the Mass Pike.
That was the assumption I made when I stopped there for an iced coffee on a hot, sunny Saturday last month on my way to visit family in Connecticut.
The store was packed. A long line of customers in a hurry to be somewhere else snaked its way around the junk food displays, inching slowly toward the older woman on the other side of the counter.
“What an awfully hard job,” I thought, as I watched her selling lottery tickets and sodas.
The weather outside is beautiful, and you’re stuck inside. You’re on your feet all day, under constant pressure from impatient, sometimes rude people. You’re exhausted at the end of your shift and you don’t have much of in the way of material reward to show for it.
But even as I was creating this scenario in my head, I still was able to take in the attentive cheerfulness with which she waited on those who preceded me.
It’s pretty clear to most baby boomers that they will be creating, either by choice or circumstances, a very different kind of retirement from their parents, for whom it simply meant, stop working. 
There are many advantages to living on Cape Cod, especially in August when the weather is glorious and the North Atlantic is finally warm enough that you can ride the waves on a boogie board without succumbing to hypothermia. 
When tea became trendy, I gave in and, with a sigh, supplemented my grandmother’s depression glass dishes with a few pieces from the new array of tea service paraphernalia available in gift shops. 
As I rushed home to catch Andre Agassi in the final stage of his transformation from tennis celebrity to endearing human being at the US Open last month, I was looking forward to the tennis, but dreading the commercials. 
Today you enter the Boott Cotton Mill at the 
If you’ve decided to launch a new business venture, you’ll find plenty of books telling you how to go about writing a business plan, securing financing, setting up payroll, etc. 
Every summer at the Nauset Regional School here in Eastham, Massachusetts, the 
All of us—young, old, middle-aged—whether we like it or not, practice ageism, at least to some degree. It’s far less obvious than most other prejudices, but it is nevertheless there in how we think about others and, most importantly, how we think about ourselves. The idea that we’re too old (or even too young) to do something is rooted in our own prejudices about the limits that age imposes—limits that are reinforced by the broader ageism that permeates our culture.
