YOUNG AT HEART -- September 2008

My mother pounded that wisdom into me as a child.

I try to abide by it.

September marks a new start for me. The Muslims have Ramadan, which began on September 1. The Jews celebrate their new year, Rosh Hashanah, on September 29. And for pagans and us nature lovers, the Autumnal Equinox on September 22 heralds a new season, full of harvest and promise.

In September, I like to hit the ground running, in business and in private life.

In business, I renew with vigor the research on my next book THE NEW IMMIGRANTS: AMERICAN SUCCESS STORIES. I'm interviewing people who've immigrated to the U.S. since 1975. If you readers know anyone who has come here -- legally --and made a success of his or her life, please contact me with names, numbers, and e-mail addresses. These people don't have to be millionaires. They do have to have built a new life in a positive, successful way.

In my private life, I continue to try to view life positively. That's a challenge. Every day, I see and hear negativity. I make a point to turn it into positivity.

Georgie Clark did that. Georgie was the legendary Grand Canyon/Colorado River runner, whose rafting company "Georgie's Royal River Rats" took paying customers down the river five months a year. I signed on in May. It was five days of rugged bliss, and she led the adventure with aplomb and spirit.

One night, over her favorite blackberry liqueur in coffee, she said, "I see the good in everybody and just forget the bad. I just forget it, pick out the good, and leave the other alone, 'cause everybody's got good and bad faults. It just depends on the person who's judging."

That's a grand philosophy.

Georgie is one of many heroines in my book YOUNG AT HEART: AGING GRACEFULLY WITH ATTITUDE.

Another is airplane pilot and instructor Evelyn Bryan Johnson. She told me a fine story.

"I had an employee that, really, I'm tellin' you, he just really bugged me. I really felt resentful toward him and I was prayin' to God to please help me get over this resentment.

"Then, I never did know such a thing was possible, right here. You know these old rubber suits like it goes divin' in the water? It was like I had one on and it started comin' up through here, up over my head, out over my arms and my hands, like someone was pullin' off this rubber suit of resentment. It was comin' off over me.

"And I was so HAPPY and I felt so GOOD."

Evelyn's voice has a musical Tennessee twang.

"I didn't know physically you could feel that good. And I just loved everybody. I've never been resentful of him or anybody else since."

It's like the slag I picked up rock-hunting. Alone I climbed a 100-foot high slag heap in Cottonwood, Arizona, a few miles from Jerome, a copper-mining boom town early in the 20th century. On top, I stood sweating and panting. All around me was a vast sea of black, a moonscape, undulating in the noonday sun. Flat and twisted shapes of rock, some as big as boulders, rose and fell, stretching for a quarter-of-a-mile.

Amid the black was color, light, and sparkles.

Some people might say, " You think that's beautiful?"

Oh, yes. This slag is a survivor. By its very nature, it's positive energy. It's fire-tempered remains of copper smelting. It's iron ore that's melted, been cast aside, and cooled into fantastic shapes.

Just look at it. Hold it. Some pieces are sharp pebbles that roll around in the palm of your hand. Some are foot-square, inch-thick slabs with swirls and twirls like the bas-relief sculpture of Frenchman Auguste Rodin. They are worthy of placement in an art museum.

Sheets of gold smear the tops and sides of the slag. Bits of copper and other minerals streak it shiny blue, green, pink, orange, and crystal. The iridescent colors make weirdly realistic pictures. I see mountains, bears, bison, birds, and even a human hand with long, slender fingers.

I just have to look at the slag in the sunlight.

That's it: seeing life in the sunlight.

The bright light, not the dark, negative light.

YOUNG AT HEART -- August 2008

During this presidential-election year, let's reflect on the world around us. How can we improve it? How can we make politics and world conditions better for the greatest good?

Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas was the quintessential American politican: tough, fair, bigger-than-life, and devoted to enriching his country. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he worked to improve American ties with other countries and peoples. He founded the Fulbright Scholarship Program, which gives students a chance to study and live abroad. He was responsible for creating the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which brings world-class talent to Washington, DC.

In my book YOUNG AT HEART: AGING GRACEFULLY WITH ATTITUDE, Senator Fulbright explained his belief that America switch to a parliamentarian system of government, in which citizens vote for one political party. The party that wins then picks the country's leaders. "Back in the 1940s, I got in trouble suggesting that we change to a parliamentary system," he told me. "Everyone else has got it right: the French, British, Canadians, and Australians. Our system is a lousy, unworkable system. It's a perfectly hopeless system, and the whole world is laughing at us. We examine every issue and say this or that can be done to improve things, except our government, our society. Part of the problem is that our country is too young to have any perspective."

Fulbright graduated from the University of Arkansas, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and attended Oxford University in England. He returned to become president of his alma mater, before entering politics. The senator advised young people to get a broad education, then to "take an interest in public affairs and change things. Americans think they're the greatest country. They've grown up on, 'We're the greatest people in the world' and therefore don't need a change. We're pig-headed. We absolutely will not seriously talk about our own system."

Do you think the U.S. should switch to a parliamentary form of government? Has any presidential hopeful addressed that? It's good debate material.

Our country has many issues. One of them is "government-ese," the un-clear language that politicians, public servants, and political volunteers use. They are in love with their own voices. I have covered politics all over the world -- New York, Washington, DC, Geneva, Warsaw, Cairo, and Lisbon. Everywhere I've heard people in power talk for talk's sake. It isn't any different here in the US.

We can change that. We can begin at home by cutting the number of words in half and simplifying our sentences. It makes for better understanding all around. Clear speech is infectious: it rubs off on our children, friends, and colleagues.

On a local level, we can take our leaders to task for their "government-ese." In my first career as correspondent for CBS and NBC Radio Networks, I had no trouble asking a politician for clarification: "What was that you said?" They usually laughed and re-phrased their answers more clearly and briefly. Fellow reporters nodded. We hated to be spun around.

A political acquaintance in Washington once confided, "We hear a question and we need time to think. So we start our reply with, 'That's a very good question. I'm glad you asked that.'" Stay alert, my friends. Call politicians on their messy language, often a sign of messy thinking. Hold our leaders accountable and demand their best. Asking them an honest question is never a mistake.

If we don't ask questions, we get what we settle for at the polls.

YOUNG AT HEART -- July 2008

So states our Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776. We Americans have enjoyed freedom for a long time. But best-selling author Nien Cheng, a Chinese-born woman, now American citizen, achieved freedom the hard way. For 6 1/2 years, she endured solitary confinement in a Chinese prison. Stubbornly refusing to admit to treason charges, she finally exhausted her jailers, and they let her go.

In the 1960s, during China's Cultural Revolution, Nien Cheng was one of many upper-class Chinese accused of treason by Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Nien came under suspicion because she had managed the Shanghai office of Shell Oil, an international company. Mao's Red Guards occupied her house, and as she watched, they torched her possessions in the courtyard and wrecked everything else. Then they took her to prison. Her only daughter disappeared. Years later Nien learned that government zealots had murdered the girl.

In her book LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI, a New York Times's best-seller, Nien meticulously details the horrendous, inhumane treatment she received in prison. She was tortured, interrogated, deprived of food, and kept in isolation. I read that book -- non-stop, in two days, and when I finished, I knew that I had to meet this extraordinary woman. We both lived in Washington, D.C., and I found her number in the phone book. She answered my call, and after I explained who I was, she invited me to tea.

We became good friends. She agreed to be interviewed for my book YOUNG AT HEART: AGING GRACEFULLY WITH ATTITUDE. Over a period of months, she talked to me for hours. "During the entire time in prison, I did not see a smiling face. I did not hear a friendly voice. Everybody who spoke to me was abusive, they were accusing me, they were shouting at me, they were calling me dirty names. They humiliated me in every way they could.

"When you live like that for 6 1/2 years, it's very easy to lose your self-respect and self-confidence. Part of my strength during that time came from anger. I was so insulted that they should accuse me of being a spy for a foreign country, against my own country. I was furious! It was the greatest insult anybody could have inflicted on me.

"Anger can make you fight. Americans won't understand this, but Chinese are very patriotic, because China's history MADE them patriotic. From 1842 to the founding of the Republic, China suffered defeat and humiliation from Western powers. The educated Chinese felt this shame keenly. They became very patriotic."

Nien's strength to survive imprisonment also came from faith in God. "I am a Christian. I believe in God. Every night I closed my eyes and prayed. Every night I'd tell God what went on today: the interrogations, everything! I asked for guidance and courage. I asked God to give me courage so I can face tomorrow, so I don't get depressed and not want to live on. Give me the courage to fight on and the intellect to fight effectively!

"I felt God's love for me. I knew that what I was experiencing -- the humiliation, the denunciation, the deprivation of life -- was unimportant, because I had the love of God. That love is more important and better than any human love. I didn't care if these people all hated me. I knew God knew the truth, that I was not guilty of spying for foreigners."

Nien is one of millions of people who have been -- and are -- political prisoners, reined in and rounded up by governments that cannot tolerate freedom of speech by its people. History is filled with stories of injustice to people who speak out. We in America know that many foreign governments today do not allow their people the very basic freedoms.

July is a good time to remember how precious the right of freedom is, and to help other people achieve it, in whichever way is appropriate. Our re-education and actions multiply geometrically. When we help others, we set off explosions, like fireworks, like "the shot heard round the world." (*) American minutemen fired that shot against British soldiers, and began the American Revolution in April 1775.

* from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" (1837).

"...By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world."

YOUNG AT HEART -- JUNE 2008

In June, the sun reaches its zenith, and darkness hits its lowest point in the Northern Hemisphere. June is a month to revel in the warmth of the sun and dive into the pleasures of nature.

In my book YOUNG AT HEART: AGING GRACEFULLY WITH ATTITUDE, Edmund Campbell, a civil rights lawyer and social activist, said he "always got right" when he was in the midst of nature. "I used to be very tense, mainly about work," he told me. "That's when I began to realize the joy and importance of taking walks. You cannot get straightened out, unless in the presence of something living -- plants, sky! You can't get straightened out in a room. You have to be outdoors.

"I believe your level of consciousness is raised when you're outside and taking certain types of exercises," said Ed. " Your attitude toward life, your realization of what it's all about, is deepened by being in nature...You get a sense of oneness of life, the unity, let's call it the universal love that you see. You feel like you're part of something so much bigger than you are."

I agree.

Here in Sedona, Arizona, my new home, I live close to nature: rabbits, quail, snails, snakes, lizards, songbirds, tukey buzzards, javelinas, and coyotes. In June, I take morning and evening walks to visit these creatures, to see trees, walk barefoot on grass, to hear water, and feel the wind. It is my best time to be close to the earth.

YOUNG AT HEART WISDOM

YOUNG AT HEART -- MAY 2008

I learned about love from Lillie and Ralph Douglass, a sweet, devoted couple who lived in the shadow of Coffee Pot, a red-rock landmark in Sedona, Arizona. They had retired and often traveled to faraway places. Once in a small town in India, a mob attacked their Volkwagen bug while they were inside. They never knew why they were a target. They were simply glad to escape, by gradually inching away.

In my book YOUNG AT HEART: AGING GRACEFULLY WITH ATTITUDE, Lillie said, "We've been married 67 years and we're still in love. We've had a wonderful life together. My husband has contributed greatly to that, by being kind and considerate and gentlemanly. He also likes to drive a car or a trailer or a motor home in all kinds of countries."

Ralph added, "A lot of older people get mad at each other when they get older. For some reason, they don't get along. You have to have some love involved, or you don't go ahead. I kiss her three or four times a day to keep her in a good humor. Every day I go to the post office and grocery store, do a bit of work in the yard, and then we have a Scrabble game or dominoes or cribbage. We like to play all kinds of games together."

Lillie said, "Our two daughters and their children encourage us to travel. We just take off and go." Before they retired, they were pharmacists, Native American retail merchants, and Methodist medical missionaries overseas. They worked long hours and had a lot of fun along the way. Lillie even wrote a book about it. They were still going strong in their nineties.

I think of them whenever I pass Coffee Pot. Their spirit of love lives in that red rock.