When it comes to gifts for Mom or Dad, really, how many golf shirts and chocolates are they going to put up with before they start hinting to your sister that they must have raised a herd of uncreative, humorless kids? Maybe get 'em this book instead. It's a tongue-in-cheek perusal of a whole lot of different topics that, based on a million talks and conversations with my senior audiences and peers over the last fifteen years or so, are insightfully examined in the hope of evoking a couple of sighs, two or three ah-hahs, maybe a shallow tear or two, and a bushel basket full of smiles and giggles as we help seniors find the words for what our hearts have been telling us ever since we began realizing that we're no longer twenty-nine years old. The book is a compilation, expansion, and enhancement of six years of editorials that I've written as the Editor of our local Detroit metro area American Senior Gazette newspaper, circ. 30,000; and those have been based in part on twelve years of prior days spent working as a marketing wizard for a home health care company, a position which enabled me to listen to, help educate, and usually entertain senior citizens in their homes, in their residential communities, and in their various coffee clubs. Therefore, the book's about life, love, grandkids, funerals, death, the afterlife, the before-life, the full-life, the non-life, marriage, sex, progress, hobbies, history, and pretty much anything else that has particular interest for people over fifty. And there're a lot of us! Other topics, like a senior's take on government, war, or religion, tap a lighter side of philosophy all wrapped up in what might amount to a "how-did-we-miss-the-boat-on-this" glance at a chuckling God who's scratching Her head; and a head-to-toe patriotism that wonders how the hell we're ever going to get a Sarah Palin to enjoy a cup o' jo someday with a Joe Biden, without them ending up rolling all over the floor together, in fisticuffs that can be a real embarrassment to little kids. It's meant to be a fun read, an emotional and inspirational read, and an intelligent, yet optimistic and multi-sided social commentary that gives a patient, reflective, and usually light-hearted voice to seniors from all walks of life. We baby-boomers--for now, anyway--run corporations, make decisions that affect a lot of money and people, create all kinds of cool stuff still, we read like crazed banshees, and, for better or worse, we're planning on eating and exercising, and staying involved in this wonderful world until well into our nineties! After that, some of us may settle down and just stick to our taxidermy, but NOT until after that! At the same time, though, in my 60 years, I've also met and worked with many terrific people who for years have battled monstrous demons: cancer, MS, arthritis, heart disease; or the Alzheimer's that robs them every day of the love of their life sitting lost and scared beside them at the kitchen table. It is my hope that maybe what I've written will offer at least one bright light in a darkened room for them, too. Sometimes all these folks have to offer us is the wisdom garnered from their ridiculously-difficult circumstances. I'd like to help give them their voice, both by echoing what they've told me, and by offering some words that they might use themselves to help express their lives, even if they do end up expressing them with a bit of a grin. These are the people this book is written for. The good, the bad, and . . . the rest of us, too. I hope, and fully expect, that senior readers will come away from any one of the chapters with a hearty laugh, a deep straight-from-the-soles-of-the-shoes reflection about how amazing and terrific this crazy world can really be; maybe a couple of ideas to make their own individual lives even a little more exciting, and a couple of thoughts about how important each of us really is to everything and everyone else all arou
About the Author: John Dzwonkowski, 63, is the Editor of The American Senior Gazette newspaper, distributed to about 30,000 senior citizens throughout the greater metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan. This is one contract John fulfills as founder and owner of American Corporate Communication, LLC, a company through which he offers writing marketing services to corporate clients across the country. John is also the founder/owner, writer, and actor for Scripture on Stage; a 20-year-strong theatrical production company through which he offers full theatrical programs, as well as written, audio, and video educational and inspirational programs to "bring alive the historical Jesus through the magic of theater and the quill of fiction." Thirdly, John is currently the Director of Religious Education for his local Catholic parish in Livonia, Michigan; following on his having done extensive work with youth, both as a child abuse/neglect caseworker in Detroit, and after 40+ years in various parishes as a religious educator. The purpose of his Eagleheart Project is the culmination of John's lifelong goal of a rather large real estate venture, intended to provide financial sustenance to a future wilderness youth leadership development camp, Eagleheart, in the northern regions of Michigan, intended to help find and nurture the young, already-self-motivated leaders of the Detroit of the future. John studied for the Roman Catholic foreign mission priesthood for nine years of college and grad school; and has been privileged to have been involved with some mighty wonderful people in the de facto military dictatorships of Bolivia and El Salvador for eighteen months; in the Appalachian mountain regions of North Carolina and Tennessee; on the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation; as an Industrial Areas Foundation community organizer on the west side of Chicago, an intensive urban training institute founded by Saul Alinsky; as a chaplain-in-training at Boston City Hospital and at the Turnabout Drug Rehab clinic in Boston; ...and with all kinds of amazing citizens all over the fabulous city of Detroit. But more than any of that stuff, John first and foremost feels genuinely blessed to have helped raise three of the greatest kids in the world--Julie, Andrew, and Lucas--with one of the coolest women on the planet, his ex-wife, but still good friend for 30 years now, Cindi.