The Old Duffers' Club.

As baby boomers move toward retirement and nursing home care, medicine can no longer ignore the daunting task of caring for the aged. The physical and emotional challenges are enormous-and shocking-especially for a culture that prefers to jump rather than wade into the experience of old age. A new book by Dennis McCullough, My Mother, Your Mother, offers "slow medicine" as a corrective to the quick, curative methods in which we were trained. A large part of the answer-as I was taught by the members of the Old Duffers' Club-lies simply in self-support, conversation and friendship, accepting our physical decay, and finding the inner gift of ourselves that never grows old.