In my mid-30s I gave up cigarettes. Last week, in my mid-50s I gave up “overt” sugar — cookies, candy, cake, pie, and ice cream. Just like when I quit smoking, I’m still in the one day at a time mode, hoping that in time I will lose my fondness for my abused substances. Maybe it’s me in the moment thinking this, but I always think I preferred a good piece of apple pie to a cigarette — even back in the day of cigarettes.

For those who have given up cigarettes, you know that at first you stand next to smokers to get some second hand smoke and you think it smells good. Over time you join the ranks of the obnoxious people you used to hate by thinking cigarette smoking actually smells bad.

Has anybody out there given up sweets permanently? Does the equivalent thing eventually happen? Do you look at the dessert tray and get to a point where you’re disgusted by the empty calories that can do so much damage to a body? That’s what I’m counting on.

Just like a smoker can’t halfway quit, I know I can’t halfway quit my love affair with sweets.

Meanwhile, my family, friends and coworkers should beware … either be really nice to me or stay out of my way. Withdrawal is ugly.

In a woman's life, certain events mark a special passage that you think about for the rest of your life. The big days are the births and weddings of your children — and another one really is when your child goes to college. Especially when the last child goes.

Saturday was that day in my life. That day Jared took residence at Christopher Newport University (CNU) in Newport News. It was about as perfect a day as it could be.

Jared and I had our own goodbye and conversation, which was nice, but then it was time to pack the bags in the car and go.

After we left the dorm, we drove to Fredericksburg for an outdoor Styx concert where we joined other family members for a beautiful night. It was an awesome, fun concert and a beautiful evening.

Before I reveal the next part of the story, it's important to know a few things about CNU:

        * The logo for the school is a sailboat, (being near the beach and named after Christopher Newport).
        * The students there are called Captains.
        * Everything there is themed around sailing and captains.

I can sing along to several of Styx songs even though beforehand I couldn't probably name one hit without help. So the big song of their evening was "Come Sail Away." Bittersweet as it is for Mom, Hollywood couldn't have given me a better score to remind me it's Jared's turn now to be independent. As Styx sang, I thought of Jared:

I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea,
'Cause I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's in front of me,
On board, I'm the captain, so climb aboard,
We'll search for tomorrow on every shore,
And I'll try, Oh Lord I'll Try, to carry on....

A gathering of angels appeared above my head 
They sang to me this song of hope
And this is what they said,
Come sail away, come sail away, come sail away with me, lads.

So many people fight aging in a physical way like no generation before has had the opportunity or maybe the will to do. Let's face it, nobody wants to look in the mirror and see that the years have gone by and the physical beauty of youth is lost.

There's another beauty of youth that is overlooked so much because it's not as easy to see. It's real, just goes by less noticed. It's the beauty of the young mind or the young spirit. Young people like to play. You never need to remind a young person to play more computer games, or skateboard more, or joke around more. You remind them to work: do homework, hang up their clothes, walk the dog.

As you grow up and have kids, and jobs and bills, it's no wonder people forget how to play. They don't have the time to. Many people seem to lose the ability to chill out, relax, and enjoy. There's truth to the adage about all work and no play...  It's like they grow 

up, and the life and spirit gets sucked out of them somehow in the process.

When I was younger there were two older people (like my age now) that were so different from the rest of the grown-ups I knew. One was my Aunt Frances, a mother of six children, married to the small town grocer. Aunt Frances never worried about money and the fact she didn't have much, or worry about anything at all as far as I could tell. She was unflappable. She knew and loved just about everybody in her town of 10,000 people. She giggled at any of the jokes her kids told her but could never tell a joke without messing up the punch line — then she'd laugh that she messed up the punch line.

Nancy Carson was the mother of an old boyfriend and she was just incredibly lovely — interested in everything in the world, positive about hearing about anything anybody else had going on in their lives, and busy volunteering at many different charities. She was well off but completely unpretentious and liked people from all walks of life. Nancy saw beauty in so much that others took for granted. When I was in my 20's she made me wish I was in my 50's so I could be like her.

Both women seemed ageless to me - in spite of their lack of cosmetic surgery or overt attention to physical aging. It wasn't that they played like they were children, but they found joy and stimulation in hobbies or pursuits and never forgot to enjoy life. They had a lift to them — an interest in other people — they weren't perfect people but they were interesting and fun to be around. And they were both unforgettable.

It's funny that looking back - it never dawned on me that people were old or young because of a wrinkle free forehead. It was their spirit that was young.

Have you noticed that “It's My Pleasure” is the new mandated customer service slogan?

About a year ago I attended a training event where the speaker told the group how to achieve better customer service. He cited his love affair with Chick-Fil-A for having their order takers say “It's my pleasure,” to every customer in the drive-thru line. I don't frequent Chick-Fil-A all that often and took note.

I've noticed recently that’s the slogan du jour instead of “Have a nice day.” Everywhere I go these days people say without enthusiasm that it’s their pleasure to sell me a taco or a burger or yes, a "chick filet." Today I found it humorous to be in line inside the Taco Bell and look over at the wall at the drive-thru window and saw in huge print the flyer looking for 100% participation with THANK YOU and IT’S MY PLEASURE written huge and bold.

When customer service becomes mandated in such a false way it has the opposite effect. We can play the game in the world we live in that we don’t know that robots are being robots, but we know it. All this makes “corporate” look stupid that they don’t believe that the people they hire in the window aren’t capable of an honest and simple interchange with the customers without being told to say the most trite sayings. I like it when I have a real conversation with somebody that feels like an honest connection between the two of us. By mandating the canned ham lines corporate has taken away our chance for that to happen.

Who are these customer service experts and how dumb do they think their employees are? And how dumb to they think their customers are?

Maybe I was dumb enough to think that “Have a nice day,” was a nice way to say good bye, but I’m not dumb enough to think that my $4.27 purchase caused them all that much pleasure.

When you're 55 years old, new experiences don't come along often. This marks my first time seeing birds from near birth and watching their new lives unfold in front of me.

On June 8th, we moved in to a new home that had a bird's nest built on a speaker on the covered lanai, just a few feet away from the windowed back door. With ease, I had a clear shot, or a "bird's eye view" of the home and the three babies inside. On our first day, the babies looked like newly hatched fuzzballs with big open mouths, and the parents looked like every aspect of their existence was to protect and feed these newbies. Mom and Dad perched on the ceiling fan a few yards away when they weren't hunting for food or sitting with the nest.

Day by day, the birds changed in appearance dramatically and a week later the birds were stuffing out of the nest. It was harder to tell the difference between the babies and the parents from appearance. I checked on them regularly - about every awake at-home hour every day, but the big babies stayed overflowing but attached to home. This morning my husband saw it first, and told me the babies were perched on the ceiling fan.

From the "take time to smell the roses" life mantra, I took an extra half hour and enjoyed immensely watching the babies take flight for the first time. For the first several minutes. the three babies stayed attached to the fan, sometimes flapping wings but never taking off. The parents flew close by. Eventually one baby flew about five feet, looked shocked (truly did) and flew back to the safety of the ceiling fan. They sat on the ceiling fan for another five minutes. As nature took its course, they did what they are built to do and the fun began. The family of five flew all over the back yard, flew up and down, practiced nosedives, flew back to the nest and out again, flew in more circles, ventured a bit further then back. They did it together as a family, and it looked like more fun than a trip to Disneyland.

I don't know what the afterlife brings, but if I could choose to come back as something I'd choose to be one of those birds, and I can only imagine the fun it would be to find out the purpose of wings.

Have fun, my little birdies!

Last week was a time for this boomer woman to have fun with my favorite boomer women. Besides meeting with seven of my grade school and/or high school friends for a Hilton Head vacation, I shared my car on the way down with Nora Ephron. The writer of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” is technically a little older than a boomer, but I’m claiming her anyway. Listening to her audio book of “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” Nora had me laughing out loud telling stories about herself as a woman with some years on her. We are nothing alike, yet so similar. She’s a Jewish woman living in Manhattan. I was raised Catholic and mainly lived my life in one suburb or another. Nora had me laughing mainly over the things women can relate to — like the depths of an unorganized purse or losing “the love” for a politician we had high hopes for. 

Nora and I arrived to join with Dana, Betty, Debbie, Kathy, Suzie, Sue and Barb. At our core, we are the same women who went on trips together in our teens and twenties. But now we’re grandmothers. I still remember the hot foxes we were, turning heads at 27 in Chicago. In those days we felt older (comparatively) because we’d known each other since we were in single digits. We didn’t realize then that in the future we’d think 27 was young. Now we show pictures of the daughters and sons who got married last year or the grandchildren. We used to get together sometimes and crack up about our past funny stories from school but they are so long ago that they don’t seem as relevant any more. When we get together at 85, I'll be thinking about when we were all healthy and in the thick of life in our 50s at Hilton Head. Age is relative. Even my 6-year-old granddaughter probably feels old compared to her little brother.

All of us have full lives outside the relationships we have with each other, yet there is a special bond with the girl who was your first best friend, or your old roommate or your biology project partner. These people knew you before you had a professional life, children, spouse or any common sense whatsoever. These were the people that it was so easy to laugh at a joke with for at least an hour. These were the people who knew where you came from. The ones who knew all the same nuns and teachers and the values you were raised with that’s in the deepest center of your existence. These are the people who you know you’ve been able to count on for as long as you have memory. You don’t think you can count on them — you know it. 

Life is not a snapshot — and these are the people who see the whole picture.

HILTON HEAD, SC

Eight “Bad Girls from Cincinnati”  (as editor Ray McAllister has dubbed me and my group of high school friends) are sharing a two-bedroom condo in Hilton Head till Sunday.

For any of you still fortunate to know your high school friends, you know that I’m blessed to still have them all in my life and great to be in Hilton Head, so that's not the subject of the blog because that’s too obvious.

As more people could make the trip (which is a great thing), this condo now ended up with wall-to-wall air mattresses. As with any group of eight, there will be camps of people with different thoughts on a subject. In this case, one camp might want to see about getting a second condo in the area for additional bedrooms. The other camp is the one that says it’s more fun to all be together.  If we were in our teens still the decision would have been made already (cheap always won out) or in our seventies (our backs would win out) but in our fifties the jury is still out.

So, last night around 1:30 a.m. “Bad Girls” sleeping all around me in the living room, I got a coughing jag and couldn't figure where to go or what to do about it. I would have had cough drops in my purse if I wouldn't have listened to a book on tape on the way down by Nora Ephron making fun of disorganized purses — so I cleaned out all the random things in my purse at a rest stop, which included the cough drops. Every time I got up I figured I was jiggling my air mattress buddy, Dana. Then I was afraid I’d make sleep noise if I fell asleep. The air mattress was really comfortable but my paranoia got to me. Finally I fell asleep and figured I’d take the late shift of sleep — the 3 to 9 a.m. shift of sleeping.

Reading this back, the light bulbs of solutions are coming quick. Tonight I get the tub.

Fifty-five years ago on April 20, 1955 I was a “welcome home” baby. About 10 months earlier my dad was released after several years in a tuberculosis hospital.

As a child, I always loved my birthday date. Yes, I loved my birthday for presents, attention and cake like all kids do, but I mean I loved April 20 itself. Do all people love their birthday dates? In my case, my birthday in Ohio, where I grew up, was after winter finally passed and where we had about the longest way to go till winter hit again. And April is such a pretty word — as compared to January, February, September, October, November and December kind of names. And the number 20 is a nice round number so it sounds important — not like 13 or 14 or some random not rounded out kind of number.

As I grew up, I still liked April 20 for those reasons, but when told about famous people in history who share my brithday, Adolf Hitler was never mentioned. What's up with that? As years went by, a few relatively insignificant actors like Jessica Lange and Ryan O’Neal finally showed up which helped balance out the singular famous April 20 person, Adolf.

The Columbine shooting occurred on April 20, with other near-miss tragedies such as Oklahoma City and Waco on April 19. I'd finally grown up enough to be less shallow about it being on or near my birthday at that point, but watching such tragedies on TV was shocking and awfully sad.

Last year I found out 420 is the slang for April 20 being national marijuana awareness day. Just interesting. Rumor has it that this started because a group of California high schoolers used to meet at 4:20 pm after detention every day to smoke pot. Now the day is the most official marijuana day of the year. 

This year I get a kick out of turning 55 — since I was born in 1955. Mentioning this to Ray McAllister he said that this year is a cool year for boomers in that all boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are somewhere in age between 46 and 64 — the only year that this will occur. That's so cool! 

For those who know me, random stupid things like these occupy the most important parts of the brain leaving nowhere for the truly important things.

Americans seem to have differing views about who should pay taxes in this country. In a simplistic way, rich people think poor people should pay more of their share in taxes; poor people feel rich people can afford to pay more taxes and therefore should do so. You can conclude that what both sides have in common is they both want other people to pay more taxes so they can pay less.

I believe that all capable Americans who want to share in the benefits of taxes should pay taxes.  Not equal in dollars spent, but  a flat tax of equal percentage or as near to that as possible. Notice I said capable Americans. For a variety of reasons some people won’t be capable of being self-sufficient.

But some people choose to become more capable than others, and we need to encourage and offer legitimate incentives for people to succeed. America should remain a land of choices, as much as possible. Some will choose to drop out of high school who are capable of more education and career choices over a long life. Their lives will be hard and it will cost a lot more for society to care for them throughout their lives. Others will work hard in school and in work. I believe all people should have incentive to enjoy a better lifestyle by applying themselves more. In the process, productivity with individuals leads to productivity as a society.

In our future we might not be the manufacturing economy we once were, but if more people choose to contribute instead of dropping out, our country will invariably be of value to the world economy in the future. We will be using our collective talents in new fields — maybe energy, telecommunications, maybe the medicines and sciences or in more ways than you can classify.

I think there is a correlation between taxes and incentives in our society. We need to keep people motivated to go out and earn a living for themselves and grow throughout their lives and entrepreneurs to benefit from the risks taken and encouraged to stay in business and provide employment.

I think all capable Americans should have skin in the game and pay taxes. Myself included.

For nearly 20 years I’ve worked with many small companies with advertising for our magazines and with their advertising and marketing in general. From this view I see where common marketing mistakes are made, dollars are wasted and how people can simply and practically improve their advertising impact.

Common Mistake: Not spending your first dollars getting the proper visuals — photography and logo. (Logos will be discussed in a future blog.)

Regularly I see that people will buy advertising in whatever they can afford — some print here and there, a website, business cards, phone book, etc. When I come in to work with them on their ad, I find that they have no images for us to work with. Frequently there’s no logo and no photography illustrating what they do, or the images they have are of poor quality for reproducing in print or for telling their story visually. They might be spending $3,000 (or much more) per month on advertising, but “saving money” by not paying for logo design or photography.

What's wrong with this?

One of the many goals of visual advertising is to brand your company or, simply, to have people see your message, learn who you are, remember who you are and feel comfortable doing business with you. All of us are bombarded with messages continually, and if a company has different messages, photos and logo attempts in each ad — no common thread throughout all of them — it doesn't register to customers they’re learning about the same company each time they see your advertising.  It ends up looking like $3,000 monthly advertising for lots of companies rather than one.  Additionally, advertising should encourage the public to do business with you — and it’s easier to create a great ad when you have good visuals to begin with — and bad ads become invisible.

Let’s look at a sample case study showing how things would be different with the basics done first.

Case study of a start-up business spending money on photography up front:

Two brothers with years of part-time personal training experience are taking a space of their own and looking for growth to do this full-time. Currently their clients are solely from referral or word-of-mouth.  Money is limited for advertising now, but they hope to add to that more as they get going. The first moneys they will spend will be on a photographer.

They have a boomer male client and a boomer female client who have lost more than 100 lbs. each, willing to be testimonial models. The “before” shots they have show out-of-condition, not vibrantly happy people. The “after” images will be the cornerstone of the brothers’ advertising/marketing campaign. The photography will show the models doing what they are passionate about now:  the man playing golf and the woman lifting weights — showing their new active lifestyle. The brothers are looking for a professional photographer to capture the difference in the couple’s current emotional (more confident, determined, happier) and physical states. (Professional photographers have the equipment to get crisper, better reproducible images, know how to use lighting and should get the “money” shot you’re looking for.) They believe this is the inspiration that will make new prospects hire them — so they can be transformed, too.

In their location, the best image of each model will be blown up and converted to wallpaper and hung in a prominent entry location. These images will appear at the end of each email they send out, with business cards possibly and with every ad they run. As they add to their budget, they want to keep the consistency of these same two images in everything they do. Again, they want inspiring images that lead others to take action.

By spending about $1,000 up front, they will coordinate all their messaging. When our graphic designer works on their ad, they will give us what we need, and it will be the same image that they give to the other advertising graphics people from other magazines, newspapers, etc. When they’re spending $3,000 per month, they will be running a COORDINATED campaign, as compared to a smattering of this and that. The public will begin to learn, remember and feel comfortable with only one company.

Can you see how that $1,000 of up front photography used in a coordinated way makes all the other moneys spent down the road make sense?