It's Better to be over the Hill Than under it - Tapa dura

Several years ago, when sixty-five-year-old Eda LeShan was invited by Newsday to write a regular column on getting old, she felt insulted and panic-stricken. "I still inwardly perceived myself as a thirty-five-year-old child psychologist and parent and family-life educator. What did I know about old ... What I didn't know as I started writing was that this was the beginning of the most important emotional adjustment to the final stage in my life: Acceptance. Writing the column finally taught me that looking backward is for cowards; the real test was: Could I deal creatively with the present, no matter what the inevitable aspects of aging were, and could I anticipate each day ahead?" The best of the columns that inspired this joyful change of perspective in one of America's favorite educators, family counselors, and writers are now collected, for the first time, in It's Better to Be Over the Hill Than Under It. A cornucopia of observations and anecdotes, options and strategies, these selections brim with the special empathy, frankness, integrity, and humor that have been the LeShan trade-mark for the last forty-five years. Presented in three sections, entitled "Loving and Living," "Memories," and "Growing and Changing," the seventy-five essays range from An Open Letter to the Tooth Fairy ("Please leave my first teeth under the pillow.") to Nothing Is Simple Anymore ("We who are getting older are not getting paranoid; it is really true that the world is now against us.") to Divorce After Sixty ("It's never too late to nourish a marriage worth saving."). All the intricacies of human affairs are touched on: love, friendship, marriage, money, work, health, sex, retirement, holidays, grandparenting, children, and more. Throughout, in what is a lesson for us all-no matter what age-- Eda LeShan encourages us to continue to love and to grow and to keep our minds and imaginations receptive and alive.