Books

At first glance, Oak Place might be just another senior living complex where older persons shuffle around waiting for the final curtain call. However, CEO Katherine Eich, has defied stereotypes and reframed aging, creating a community where elders can live fully in an atmosphere that values their often unsung, yet extraordinary lives.

One new resident is Stella Cordrey, an eighty-three-year-old sage who looks like a Norman Rockwell grandmother. She's actually a retired prostitute who hooked up with a United Nations Special Envoy. Together they risked their lives to smuggle millions of dollars of diamonds out of 1980s South Africa. Her secret would have gone to the grave with her had the FBI not shown up at Oak Place to investigate their scheme, exposing a story of love, a lost child, murder, and their efforts to end apartheid.

Stella's unfolding autobiography is not the only one hidden within the minds of Oak Place residents. Katherine invokes all residents to share their stories: histories worthy of being told, not buried with them. And, sages don't just live at Oak Place-like Katherine, they also work there. Dr. Jeff Titus keeps Oak Place filled with music, and Shirlee Jonas teaches a course on aging and sex, which includes solo sex. The Sages of Oak Place is about aging and those who have rejected a trajectory toward death that is boring and lonely.

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An ancient Japanese tradition holds that an object that is broken can be made stronger and more beautiful than before by mending it with gold, and this is the metaphor Claire Pennington applies to herself in the journey described in A Gold-Mended Life.

A Gold-Mended Life is about baby boomers and older persons with attitude who aren’t ready to exchange life and love for an afghan and a plate of cookies, whose smarts and sexuality can be envied, and who will not submit to the myth that aging is a disease, where you sit around stringing beads in heaven’s waiting room.

Talk about a late bloomer-- Claire is a sixty-year-old mother of three, newly separated, and giving her "stagnant quo" life a jolt by getting her first job in decades and taking her graying hair back to college and into counseling. If love is work, she and her husband failed to get the job done, and now Claire finds herself in a youth-worshipping society determined to "mend" her fractured life. As she evolves, she meets Edith, an eighty-year-old snorkeling sage who models courageous aging and probes difficult questions-- how does a death not learned from become a wasted death, and does death get easier with practice? She also befriends Cedric, a gay man with a warm sense of humor who longs for a friendship family. In her new job at a senior center, she advocates for the rights of seniors, including one who is being abused by her adult child. Claire finds a lover, Scott, sixty-five, who despite erectile dysfunction, shows her the sensual art of full body sex without the enhancer. But just as Claire's life gets on track, her husband Ross comes back, full of regret and asking for forgiveness in the face of his cancer diagnosis. Claire faces a daunting choice; embracing her new life or healing her old one.

Women of Achievement in Maryland History was published in 2002 and distributed to every school and library in the State of Maryland.  The book outlines the biographies of over 300 women, some dating back to the 1600s.

As the author, I was less interested in encyclopedic descriptions; rather I tried to capture the spirit and essence of their lives.  Certainly, this book contains the biographies of women who were first or famous: lawyers, doctors, business leaders, activists.  But it also includes those who tried but were unsuccessful within a society that rejected their talents and abilities, as well as those who blatantly challenged the system:  the Black woman not allowed to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, the scholar rejected from medical school because of her gender, the German physician who opposed the Nazis and helped rescue more than 1000 Jews from the Holocaust, and the brave woman who defied military authority and brought life-saving medical supplies to the battle fields of the Civil War.

Like missing puzzle pieces, we filled in the blanks of Maryland’s history, bringing these women’s stories to life.  We were not always successful—some parts of their lives were unfortunately buried with them.