turning 60

Bucket List update

~ MaryG ~ 26 Comments

What are your top 10 travel destinations?

Between 2023 and 2025, I was on a real run with my Bucket List. I did all this stuff:

Grand Canyon ✅ 2023

Paris ✅ 2023

Finger Lakes & Hot Air Ballooning ✅ 2024

Outdoor Concert at Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) ✅ 2024

Yellowstone National Park ✅ 2024

Saw the Northern Lights ✅ 2024 & 2025 (right in our own town—we got lucky, twice!)

Key West ✅ 2025

Ireland ✅ 2025 (my 60th birthday trip)

But I haven’t really been anywhere for over a year now. This is due to my husband’s health. His shitty knees took a turn for the worse after our trip to Ireland last summer. He ended up getting two total knee replacements in 2025/26. If you haven’t heard, knee replacements are a real bitch. After that, he got a mysterious set of symptoms that may be partly related to the knees that I hope are finally subsiding. Fingers crossed! He’s back to planning for the future—he’s mapping out a new vegetable garden and signed a contract to purchase solar panels for our home.

I’m hopeful that we can start to travel again soon. I’ve rebooked a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine, which I had to cancel last year due to his knees.

Nowadays, everything I book is cancellable. For decades, I never canceled a single trip, but now that I’m in my sixties, I know that shit can and does happen. I had to cancel my planned weeklong Dance Camp because I got plantar fasciitis in my left heel. Oh well. These things happen.

My calendar is always marked with the last day I can cancel any trip without losing too much money.

Magical moment in Yellowstone National Park, August 2024, shortly before we became grandparents for the first time

Thursday Doors—Squeeze Burger, Sacramento

~ MaryG ~ 3 Comments

I went looking for a door photo for Dan’s Thursday Doors and found this:

If someone asked me yesterday if I’d ever been to Sacramento, the capital of California, I would’ve said no.

But I was wrong. My high school friend Susan and I took our 11-year old sons on an epic Northern California road trip in the summer of 2012 and stopped at the famous Squeeze Burger (formerly Squeeze Inn) in Sacramento. We were on our way to her house in Lake Tahoe from Oakland.

Upon further research, I found pictures of the famous cheese-skirted burgers online, which look familiar.

We were in the second Sacramento location (now closed), which featured the original tiny Sacramento storefront as a booth in the restaurant. Perfect for two boys traveling with their moms.

This is why pictures matter people. By the time you hit 60, you will not remember half the stuff you did in your life.

A first

~ MaryG ~ 15 Comments

I’ve mentioned (about 100 times) that I’m turning 60 this year. And so are all my friends from high school and college. We were all born in 1965–the first official year of GenX, which is usually labeled as people born from 1965 to 1980. Personally, I don’t really think 1980 belongs with us. I think GenX should be 1964-1979. We’ll take Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris (both born in 1964) and the millennials can have book-banning Ron DeSantis (born 1980), but I digress…

That’s right, the coolest generation is turning 60.

One of the coolest members of GenX—actor/writer Pamela Adlon (b. 1966)—sets her daughter straight in “Better Things”

Travel seems to be a top priority for people turning 60, but my friend Susan is doing something different for her birthday this weekend. She’s going on a silent retreat. This is a first. I’ve not heard of anyone else spending a weekend in silence for their milestone birthday. I like it though. It’s unexpected and exactly what she wants. Maybe she will have some sort of A-Ha moment that she will share with us when she gets back.

Cheryl Strayed (born in 1968) from her bestselling memoir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”

Class of ‘87

~ MaryG ~ 23 Comments

I have a couple of updates for you on the college class of 1987 (high school class of 1983). Most of us were born in 1965, so we are turning 60 this year. One of my best friends from college turned 60 yesterday. She broke the ice. Now the rest of us will follow…if we’re lucky. Making it to 60 is not a given. We’ve lost people—mostly to cancer, but sudden massive heart attacks have taken down a few of the men.

I appear to be the only grandparent in my college class of about 500, which is wild. A few people still have kids in high school, so I guess we tended to have kids late, but still…it’s a vivid illustration that the birthrate actually has cratered in this country.

Another observation is that people truly do age differently. Some people look 40 at 60, and some look 80. Money seems to be a factor, but not the only one. Most people are still working, but they’re either talking about retirement or saying they will never be able to retire. “Work ‘til I die” is some people’s retirement plan.

There is both a lot of concern—and a fair bit of bragging—about adult children in their 20s. “You’re only as happy as your least happy child” seems to be true. (But if you’re posting an effusive happy birthday message, with multiple pictures, for a 27-year old who doesn’t even use Facebook, you may need to let go a bit.)

Our parents, if we still have them, are very old now. I know of only one other classmate with two living parents like me. More of our mothers are still alive than our fathers.

For the first and oldest official GenXers, the Eighties was our decade. Nobody has quite so many formative memories of those years as we do. Do not challenge us to an 80s trivia quiz, because we will win. And we will also look back on it all with slightly rose-colored glasses. We’ll forget the bad stuff and laugh about that time we ate pot brownies at school and Mr. Ullman’s physics class finally made sense.

I never did see anyone get pizza delivered to a class like Jeff Spicoli, but that would have been amazing.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out the summer before our senior year in high school.
My 1984 look
The pizza delivery scene