The "Old Block" Tells All.

Come on, dad. Wake up! You are the ultimate educator and adjudicator in your home. It is time to step up and give your progeny a fighting chance. Teach them everything, but when they are old enough, “Let them drive their own car.” You provide the GPS and maybe a little fuel, but the destination should be their own. You should only intervene to prevent them from driving off a cliff or having a head-on collision with misfortune. Daughters are very special. They get their first free hugs from you. (Little boys and big boys want them to pay dearly and severely for symbols and actions that denote love and affection.) Don’t let your daughter leave the house hungry for love, hugs or kisses. Fill her tank up with the good stuff, so she can make it back home safely, to get filled up with more free hugs again and again. Sons, however, are knuckleheads until they grow out of the “passenger” phase of life. You know how they are. They follow and emulate the “alpha dog” in their pack, and perfor...

Love, death, and break-ups hit us like a ton of 90-year-old bricks, falling from a demolished brownstone apartment house. If we are strong enough and quick on our feet, we can survive the imminent danger of cascading bricks and debris by preemptively side-stepping the entire cataclysm with a hardened heart. However, hardening one’s heart carries its own harbingers of misery, such as isolation, loneliness, and eternal “singletude”, (Yes, I made that word up. You’ll get used to it.). Break-ups, divorces, and trial separations are easy compared to death. (There are plenty of songs and movies that soften that blow for you.) Death is Mighty Mike Tyson rushing you from across the ring, with nothing but “bad intentions” on his mind! Death sucks all of the oxygen out of your lungs; weakens your knees so you cannot stand; and makes you consume heavy volumes of tissue paper for your weeping eyes and runny nose. Yes, it hurts, but that is not all! The damage is irreversible and often recurring, l...