It amazes me how inconsistent the age phenomenon is. Many times I've had a conversation with one of my young tennis students that said something like this: "How old are you, Hannah?" "I'm five and a half." "What do you say. You're the same age as Anna." “Oh no, he's not my age. He just turned five.” For a child, a year is a very long time, but as I approached middle age the years seemed to fly by at an ever-faster pace. of us are only given a certain number of years before we die. I had my first experience with the death of a loved one in 1971. My mother was diagnosed with cancer while I was in Europe and died less than a year ago. month after I returned. My father's mother, who lived next door to us in Santa Barbara, died a month later. My mother was fifty-eight and had not lived a long or full life. My grandmother was ninety-four and had lived too long. Life isn't always fair, a lesson I learned and saw repeated more than once. I graduated with a two-year English-oriented degree in 1973 and married Kira later that year he had moved into his mother's house while Kira, Deb, and I rented the old farmhouse next door. Kira's family had a summer cottage on Grenadier Island. This is the same island where Heffernan's restaurant was located, but their residence was on the west side instead of the east side, and at the end of the island instead of the foot. The Duke location had the convenience of being located closer to the nearby communities of Rockport, Ontario and Alexandria Bay, New York. The west side of the island faces the Canadian mainland while the east side faces the sea. The Grenadier's setting was quieter and marine traffic was low compared to Comfort Island where... half of paper... twice a week, but playing tennis balls together, going fishing, hiking or participating in a professional sporting event was a rare event. My experience with these activities was usually with a friend or under the direction of a private camp program. I felt like I missed something important by not having a closer parent-child relationship with mom and dad. It helped me understand that it is important for children to have someone who is available to listen to their concerns. I decided to talk to children as if I were talking to an adult. I treated them as equals and had a genuine interest in what they had in mind. Because I treated the children the way I treated them, I built a relationship with them. When they became adults, I didn't have to switch gears and take on a new personality around them. We had already established a line of communication that works at any age.