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If you’re reading this on a cellphone somewhere, please stop. No, seriously. You can read it on your computer or in an actual copy of the paper but, please, stop reading this and look around you.

OK, are you back in your office or at your home?

It’s disturbing how often our cellphones become an escape from the here and now. I get it: We’re waiting in line to order a hamburger and we want to do something, so we plan our vacations or send text messages to our friends.

In the process, we’ve lost sight of what’s around us. It’s as if we’ve covered our eyes with electronic blinders and we can’t be bothered to pay attention to our surroundings.

I was recently driving through town and noticed a woman walking a large, chocolate Labrador along the sidewalk. His rear legs were pointed out as he walked. As I drove by, I noticed that the woman held the leash on her wrist as she was completely absorbed in her cellphone. Seconds later, the dog relieved himself on the sidewalk while trying to keep up with his oblivious owner. The dog looked uncomfortable as he tried to multitask.

I realize dogs are an enormous responsibility and that every time someone walks a dog, that person may not feel the urge to dedicate his or her complete attention to a conversation with the family pet.

“Hey, Tigger, look at that squirrel over there. Oh, wow, there’s a bunny. Do you see the bunny? Oh, wait, there are two bunnies.”

“What do you smell, Fifi? Was there another dog here a few hours ago and did he leave you a little scent present?”

We don’t have to connect with our pets every moment of every day. But wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to pay them some attention while we were out walking them? After all, how often do they come over to us when we’ve had a tough day, or give us their paw—or offer us companionship?

Everywhere we go, we have the opportunity to tune out the world around us and surf our way to somewhere else.

It’s thrilling to travel halfway around the world and send pictures instantly of a magnificent sunset, or the Eiffel Tower or a three-toed sloth. We can be connected to almost anyone almost anytime.

That shouldn’t give us license to disconnect from the people and the pets around us. It’s the economic concept of opportunity cost applied to our attention. The opportunity cost of paying attention to what’s on our phone is that we ignore our surroundings.

Remember those public service announcements which said, “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” Maybe we should have messages that pop up on our phone suggesting that “It’s 6 o’clock, do you know where you are,” or maybe, “It’s 6 o’clock, pick up your head and check out the here and now (or H&N).”

Maybe we should also develop an H&N logo we can put on clothing or notebooks. It can even become a verbal reminder to our companions.

“Class,” a teacher might say as she noticed her students taking furtive glances at their phones, “H&N, right? Let’s learn the material now, while you’re here.”

H&N may be a way of encouraging us to be where our bodies are at the moment, and not where the internet has taken us.

Dogs, meanwhile, shouldn’t have to multitask while they’re relieving themselves. If Fluffy could talk, she might say, “For goodness’ sake, H&N, I need a moment here.”

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I have hundreds of new friends I’ve never met, and a profound appreciation for the people who created them or shared their lives.

I recently attended my first BookExpo at the Javits Center in New York City, where I was surrounded by booksellers, librarians, agents, book publishers and authors including Stephen King, James Patterson and John Grisham, with numerous budding luminaries in the mix.

A highlight for me was a panel of children’s book authors, which included actress Isla Fisher, who has starred in movies including “Wedding Crashers” and “Definitely, Maybe.” While I was intrigued to see Ms. Fisher in person, the other authors owned the stage, as Fisher readily admitted that she wasn’t a writing peer to her fellow panelists.

Jason Reynolds, an African-American writer for middle-grade and young adult novels, electrified the audience.

He talked about how he used to visit his great Aunt Blanche in South Carolina, where the sun was so scorching it burned his neck. His aunt, who was 85, sat on her hot porch, smoking cigarettes and watching the children.

Aunt Blanche planted a pecan tree — as he said, a “pea can” — when she was 4. The tree had become enormous by the time Reynolds was a child, providing shade for the younger crowd.

Reynolds, a 2016 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature with “Ghost,” suggested that books offered the kind of shade he desperately needed, providing relief from the heat.

Reynolds asked himself, “What if I get to be the pecan tree?”

Jennifer Weiner, meanwhile, has ventured from the world of adult fiction and “Good in Bed” to writing for a younger audience, which includes her recent book, “The Littlest Bigfoot.”

Weiner said she does much of her writing in the equivalent of a large closet in her home, although she completed “half of a book waiting in a carpool line.”

Dutch author Marieke Nijkamp shared some insights into her latest book “Before I Let Go,” which is about a girl named Corey who loses her best friend Kyra.

Nijkamp, with fans waiting in a long line for the blue-haired author’s signature, said she “definitely goes for a walk right after I kill a character.”

While circling the Javits Center exhibits, I bumped into Owen King. He is the son of acclaimed author Stephen King, and is promoting a book he wrote with his father called “Sleeping Beauties,” in which all the women but one in a small Appalachian town become wrapped in a cocoon when they go to sleep. If someone awakens them, they become violent. That leaves the men without the civilizing and calming influence of women. It sounded to me like an adult version of William Golding’s classic “Lord of the Flies.”

In describing the novel, Owen King said he enjoyed the time writing and editing the book with his father. He described how a King dinner time activity includes coming up with story ideas, many of which never see the light of day.

I asked Owen, who was clad in an untucked plaid shirt and looks remarkably like his father, what caught his eye at the Expo. He highlighted a book by Steve Steinberg about a Yankees pitcher named Urban Shocker. King said he loved the name and found the story compelling, about a pitcher who went 18-6 in the Yankees’ famous 1927 season despite battling heart disease. I picked up a copy, which was autographed for my son, and I look forward to learning about Shocker’s world.

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If you were to ask those of us of a certain age, we would insist that we want to age in place. That is, we want to continue to live in our houses, cook in our kitchens and sleep in our bedrooms. This is a worthy goal for it saves family and the government a lot of money. Statistics have shown that hospitalization and nursing homes are far more costly than living at home. Still, we also know that more accidents happen in the home, and that means continuing to live at home presents certain challenges.

The greatest hazard, it would seem, is for older adults to fall. Now, and for the last score of years, there are programs with certifications that train people how to make homes safer, especially for preventing falls. For example, the National Association of Home Builders offers a course that trains CAPS: certified aging in place specialists. These may be builders, remodelers, occupational therapists or interior designers who can come into a home and make suggestions for retrofitting.

There are 3,500 such specialists but Dan Bawden, from Houston, who helped develop the program in 2001, told The New York Times there are 10 times as many needed to upgrade such homes. The highest rate of home ownership in the country, some 80 percent, is by older people, and the great majority of us are in single-family homes.

The three most important features allowing residents to move around safely are: to have an entrance without steps; to live on a single floor; and to have hallways and doorways wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs and walkers. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, less than 4 percent meet that description. And if further features are thrown in, like doors with lever handles — rather than knobs — plus light switches and electric outlets that can be reached from a wheelchair, that rate falls to 1 percent, according to the recent article in the Times: “Planning to Age in Place? Find a Contractor Now” by Paula Span.

At this point, with about 10,000 Americans turning 65 every day, it would make the most sense for every new house to be constructed according to what is termed “universal design.” Such homes would have bathroom grab bars, higher toilets, curbless showers, widened doorways and added lighting. Such features would promote independence for the disabled and older people.

There are other associations that offer similar certification programs. Certified Living in Place Professional program is one such. Local agencies on aging and senior centers may also give this kind of information. What seems to work best is if an occupational therapist and a CAPS, or equivalently trained graduate, team up to interview each homeowner and determine what is most needed.

Costs for these modifications can be a problem. There is little government help for such remodeling, with the exception of the Department of Veterans Affairs and perhaps Medicaid. Some states do offer tax credits but not many. Mostly such alterations are privately financed, despite the potential savings from staying at home. A bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress last year for a $30,000 federal tax credit, but to date it has gone nowhere.

Approximate costs could run as follows, according to Bawden: two grab bars installed for $200-$300; replace doorknobs with lever handles $60-$90; for every relocated electrical outlet or switch, $175-$250. Those are the smaller costs. Then there is replacing a tub with a roll-in shower at $8,000-$10,000, and an entirely new bathroom with universal design elements for more than $25,000.

The biggest hurdle of all may be to get older residents to feel that they need such modifications. At the least, kitchen floors might be textured rather than covered with tiles that are slippery when wet; the color of the kitchen counters might contrast with the color of the floor as the more elderly lose depth perception; front edges of stairs could be outlined with colored tape; freezers are safer in a pullout drawer at the bottom of a refrigerator — and, for Pete’s sake, get rid of those much-beloved throw rugs.

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We all have our routines. We go to certain restaurants, drive certain routes to work and support certain gas stations, where we know we’ll get a competitive price, a friendly response from the attendant and rapid service.

When we travel, everything changes. We sleep in unfamiliar beds, flick the channels on television stations where the stations aren’t the same numbers as they are on Long Island, and navigate along routes that aren’t our familiar pattern.

Breaking the routine offers us a chance to step away from our lives and to experience something new. Maybe we’ll go to a museum in a new city or visit a place we’ve seen in a movie, which blends both the familiar and the unknown.

Our level of adventure and appetite for risk — as in, what happens if I don’t like the experience — can rise or fall depending on our travel companions.

Recently, I visited another city for a weekend with my daughter, who was traveling with a group of her teenage contemporaries and their parents. We all managed to get to our designated stops in our cars and to return to a hotel chain so ubiquitous that, with the blinds closed and without access to the local weather on TV, we could have been in Anywhere, USA.

We each had a GPS and an address for our activities which reduced both the stress and the adventure that came from the unknown.

While we could have gotten lost, the probability of that seemed slim. Getting lost, nerve-racking as it might have been 20 years ago, is almost an impossibility with navigation systems built into cars, phones and watches.

Following an afternoon activity, several of the girls decided they were hungry. One of the members of the group suggested a national pizza chain, to which the others readily agreed.

I wrinkled my brow at the suggestion and wondered, as a cellphone order was quickly placed, whether we might want to try a local pizza restaurant instead.

“No, that’s OK,” I was assured. “This will be better.”

I waited in a packed car until the order was placed, at which point the girl in the back transferred the address to her mother, who was riding shotgun during my weekend away with my daughter.

“Honey,” the mom said, “are you sure you dialed the closest restaurant?”

“Yes,” the daughter grumbled, shaking her head at her mother.

“I just checked the address for this restaurant and it’s two hours from here. You sure you want a pizza that far away?”

“Wait, what?” the daughter said, double-checking the address and the phone. Sure enough, the restaurant was on the other side of the state.

“Wait, before you order from a closer one,” I said, as she was already searching her phone for a nearby restaurant, “we’re sitting right outside a pizza restaurant. Don’t you want to try this one?”

“No, thanks,” she said, trying to be polite to someone else’s parent. “We want this one.”

When we got to the closer restaurant, we ran into another parent who was picking up pizza for his family. With so many other local choices, how did both families make the identical choice?

I suppose they might have discussed their food preference during the day. That was unlikely, given the social split in the group.

Alternatively, they have become so accustomed to the familiar that they prefer it, even when traveling.

I suppose when the opportunity for something new and different knocks, people don’t always feel the urge to answer the door.

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Dear Teddy,

First I want to tell you how heartsick I am to have put you down. I know that is the final act of love for a responsible pet owner when a beloved animal is suffering and no longer functioning. Nonetheless I ask your forgiveness for this ultimate act that ended our 12-year relationship. Little consolation but just know that I miss you every day.

As I think back on your life with us, there are so many vignettes that come to mind. We selected you from a litter of 11 fuzzy golden puppies because you suddenly stretched your neck and quickly licked the tip of my son’s chin with your tiny tongue. It was the winning gesture.

You started life in our home in the kitchen, where we had a tile floor and a crate for you. In what seemed like record time, you were housebroken and we decided that you were smart. On the advice of a neighboring dog owner, we hired a dog trainer for a short while, and he confirmed our judgment. “This is one of the smartest dogs I have ever trained,” he said to our delight, although it did cross my mind that he was probably telling us what we wanted to hear. As time went by, however, you showed yourself quick at understanding what was expected of you. Or was it you who trained us to do what you needed when you needed it done?

Anyway, we have a lot to thank you for. Thank you for teething on the windowsills, the moldings, the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets and anything else you could fit your little mouth around. Thank you for grabbing the hem of a favorite cashmere sweater in your tiny teeth and giving it a good rip. Thank you for finding a sheepskin glove carelessly left on the chair and digesting the index finger. And throughout that first year and the years thereafter, you always delighted us with your puppy-like curiosity.

You were growing at a prodigious rate, and by the following year, you made clear your preference for the beach. Because you were a retriever, we would throw a tennis ball along the sand and wait expectantly for you to fetch and bring it back. Proving that you were not simply one of the pack but to be appreciated for your individuality, you looked after the ball with a bored expression. “Give me a real challenge,” we read in your eyes. So we picked up a stone about the size of a squash ball and threw it half a block. You were after it like a shot, went directly to it among the thousands of rocks on the beach and carried it back to us. But you didn’t give it up. Instead you preferred to chew it, which eventually ground down your front teeth. That was not so smart, I will concede, but it seemed never to hamper you in any way. You also loved to chew sticks and went clamming for rocks with attached seaweed. These you pulled out and brought to the high-water line then tore off the seaweed.

You had a mind of your own, we realized early on, as you ran into the water and would not come out when we wanted to return home. You would turn to face us, water up to your knees, and dare us to come in after you. That was acceptable in summer, but not so much in the midst of winter. And you certainly had a mischievous streak, being selectively deaf when you disagreed with a command. So much for the trainer.

You were interested in people, even more than you were in other dogs. And you were absolutely democratic, going up to each person in a room or on the road, skipping no one, and greeting him or her. Some were uncertain, since you were rather a large dog. “He just wants to say, ‘Hello!’” I would try to be reassuring, and you would wait patiently until each gave you at least a perfunctory pat. Satisfied, you would move on. You were like the neighborhood mayor.

Our family members, friends and neighbors miss you. At least some of our neighbors do. The rest can probably manage just as well without your tearing across their lawns, looking for a “sweet” spot. Most especially, we miss you in the evenings, when you would wiggle and wag with pleasure at our homecoming. And you would flatten yourself across our knees seeking and giving affection, as we relaxed in the living room after dinner.

Goodbye, my sweet dog. Thank you for filling our home and our lives with your love. The memory will not die.

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He survived all manner of close calls when he saved the world seven times but my favorite James Bond, Sir Roger Moore, succumbed to cancer earlier this week at the age of 89.

Many of my friends and contemporaries thought Sean Connery’s suave and debonair flair for the super spy with all the right moves and the smooth delivery of his “vodka martini, shaken not stirred” line was hard to top.

There was something, however, about my age when I saw the Bond films with Moore that put him at the top of my list in the 1970s and ’80s. The endless combination of gadgets and arched eyebrows made him a welcome distraction in the midst of the Cold War.

I didn’t have any particular need to delve into his psychological profile or his family history, topics the more modern films have tackled. Moore’s Bond was a man of action, staving off disaster from wealthy, eccentric and egotistical villains who often had colorful, mercenary sidekicks.

Watching Moore battle with Richard Kiel, who played the impossibly strong, metal-toothed Jaws in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker” was pure entertainment for me as an adolescent.

The Bond movies, which started in 1962 with “Dr. No” and are still going strong 25 films later, have had many memorable opening scenes. Told to “pull out” of his mission in Austria, Bond skis away from Russians determined to kill him, but not before shooting several of them, including the lover of someone who would later become his partner in the movie.

He escapes by skiing off a cliff, where he seems to fall for an impossibly long time, kicking off his skis and flying through the air with a red backpack that seemed irrelevant until he pulls a string and a parachute with the British flag emerges, accompanied by the blaring Bond music. Moore tugs on the strings of his parachute, as he floats toward the screen.

That’s when Carly Simon’s music takes over. I suspect we’ll hear “Nobody Does it Better” in the next week or so.

Growing up surrounded by water on Long Island, I reveled in Moore’s journey into an undersea world in a car that turned into a submarine. Moore and Barbara Bach (who played Major Anya Amasova, aka Agent XXX) battled against Karl Stromberg (acted by Curd Jürgens), whose plan involved encouraging war between the United States and Soviet Union so life could begin again in the oceans after humans destroyed themselves.

Enemies in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and for much of “Moonraker,” Moore and Kiel team up at the end of “Moonraker” after Bond convinces Jaws that the villain Hugo Drax has no need for Jaws or his bespectacled girlfriend, Dolly, in his new colony of flawless humans. When Kiel speaks at the end of the movie, saying only, “Well, here’s to us” to Dolly (played by Blanche Ravalec), his voice is almost impossibly normal and tender, adding to the ongoing tongue-in-cheek nature of these high-action films.

After Kiel died in 2014, Moore said how “totally distraught” he was at the death of “my dear friend.”

While most of us never met Moore, many fans of the franchise felt a sense of loss to hear of Moore’s death. Through his seven Bond films, Moore delivered memorable lines, often with a self-confident smirk, such as when he pushed Drax out into space, encouraging him to “take a giant step for mankind.”

While all of the seven films that starred Roger Moore weren’t equally good, there were times — especially in “The Spy Who Loved Me” — where nobody did it better.

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The best way to get to know your kids, especially if they are teenagers, is to drive them and their friends, teammates and classmates. If your daughter texts you from school and asks, “Hey, Mom and/or Dad, can one of you drive three of my friends around?” don’t hesitate.

The answer, of course, can’t be what you might think. You can’t say, “Yes! Of course, that’d be great.”

You’ve got to play it cool, because the moment she catches on to the fact that you actually have ears and are listening to the conversation in the car, you’re done.

Yes, I know the temptation, after a long day, is to pick up only the kid that you’re responsible for, the one whose clothing you washed for the 10th time this week and whose teeth are straightening because you brought her to the orthodontist for yet another visit. However, the rewards from just a tad more effort more than tip the scales in favor of the few extra miles.

The key to making this supersecret spy mission work is not to let them use their phones, to take routes where cell reception is poor or, somehow, to encourage conversation. If they’re all sitting in the back seat, texting other people or showing each other pictures on one of the social networks, then the effort, time and assault on your nose aren’t worth it.

Seriously, anyone who has driven a group of teenagers around after a two-hour practice should keep a container of something that smells more tolerable nearby. When it’s too cold to stick my head out the window or when the smell becomes overwhelming, I have become a shallow mouth breather. But, again, if the conversation goes in the right direction, it’s worth it.

Put four or five or seven, if you can fit them, kids in a car, and you might get some high entertainment. If you’re quiet enough, you might learn a few things about school or your kids.

“So, Sheila is so ridiculous,” Allison recently declared to my daughter. “She only talks about herself and her feelings. Have you ever noticed that? She turns every conversation into a story about herself. I mean, the other day, she was telling me about her brother, and her story about her brother isn’t nearly as interesting as my story.”

At that point, Allison then talked about her brother and herself for the next five minutes.

Tempted as I was to ask about the story Sheila told about her brother, so I could compare the stream of stories about Sheila’s brother to Allison’s, I knew better.

The boys also enter the realm of the car social laboratory experiment after a game or practice.

“Hey, what’d you think about the movie in French?”

Wait, they watched a movie in French? Again, you can’t ask any questions or everyone retreats to their phones or remembers that the car isn’t driving itself. You have to be inconspicuous or you will be relegated to the penalty box of listening to one-word answers from your suddenly sullen sports star.

“You did well in that presentation in English?”

A presentation? English? Quiet! Quiet! You have to breathe normally and act like you’re giving all of your attention to the road.

Once the car empties and it’s just your son or daughter, you can ask specific questions. You might want to mix up some of the details, just so it doesn’t seem like you were listening carefully.

“So, you had a presentation in history?”

“No, Dad, that was in English,” your son will correct. Then he may share details that otherwise would never have made it past a stringent teenage filter.

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Everyone knows about the doctor who was forcibly removed from his place on a United Airlines plane when no one volunteered to give up seats to accommodate a flight crew traveling to another airport. Fortunately for the doctor, another passenger videoed the event, and the video went viral. The public outrage that followed is prompting congressional hearings, new rules within the airline industry and new laws regarding removal by police of an unwilling passenger.

I think it is fair to say that the reaction to the incident is one of total disbelief that such an act could happen here in the United States. The callousness and utter disregard for the safety of the man, incidentally a paying customer, are astonishing.

Yet here is another story, closer to home and less violent, of insensitivity to customers. I was riding the Long Island Rail Road home from Penn Station on a weekday afternoon, expecting the usual change at Huntington for Port Jefferson, when an announcement over the public address system advised us that the connecting train was arriving across the tracks on the south side of the station. We were told to use the stairs to cross over if we wanted to continue east.

It seemed a bit of an inconvenience until we walked down the platform to the stairway and found the entrance blocked. Turning around to find the next closest stairway over the tracks, I saw that some of the passengers behind me were using walkers or canes. As they saw the locked gate to the stairs, they became frantic. The next crossover was a half block down the platform. Did you ever witness people with walkers and canes trying to run? The sight is pathetic. And the rest of us didn’t look too graceful, huffing and puffing our way to try and catch the waiting train.

The stairs were steep to the top of the overpass, and the passages on the south side leading back down to the platform and to the parking lot were confusing. We ran by an elevator, and some of us pressed the button, but it took what seemed like forever to arrive. Once inside, we were confronted with different buttons that were labeled, each with an ambiguous letter. We pushed the wrong button and wound up on the ground floor. Breathless at this point, we rushed back up the stairs to the platform just in time to see the train pulling away. Those with the walkers and canes, as well as those of us too slow to navigate in time, perhaps a dozen in total, were left to wait the hour and a half until the next train. The moans were loud.

There is, of course, pressure on the engineers and conductors to keep to a schedule. A regular report grades the on-time performance of the LIRR, and there is much disgruntlement when the trains are habitually late. So there was reason for the train to pull away before all the passengers had crossed the tracks. But where was the caring? Some of the passengers were lame. Some were old. Some were just out of shape for a sudden dash up, around and down the granite stairways. It would have taken perhaps another two minutes for the rest of the group to reach the train.

Where was the respect for the paying customer?

Perhaps this sort of disregard is inevitable in a monopolistic situation. There is no other train line to use. There aren’t that many different airlines left in our country after the assorted mergers. Or is it something else, something having to do with our society as a whole? Yes, in many ways we have become more tolerant over the past century, more accepting of differences. We have also become more relaxed, less formal in our dealings with each other — and not in a negative way. But there are some aspects of previous generations that are sadly scarce. I could name a few: politeness, honor, civility, patience, respect. We rush around a lot, but I’m not sure we always get where we want to be. And if we don’t rush, we get left behind.

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On the eve of this year’s Mother’s Day, I have a question to ask you. Do you ever think of your parents as people? Sounds like an odd question, but I mean thinking about them in terms of the times they live through, their private satisfactions, their fears and phobias, the experiences that mold them and so forth. We know the facts they choose to tell us about their lives but not their deepest thoughts and feelings.

We can’t ever really know them, even though we grow up in their home. Most of us consider them as loving to us, making our lives comfortable, caring for us when we are sick, instructing us how to behave, making our favorite birthday dinners. But there is more to their existence than their interactions with us.

I sat down to try and picture myself in their shoes.

I know that my father met my mother when he accompanied his older brother to the home of his brother’s fiancée for the first time. There, coming down the stairs in a red dress, was the sister of the fiancée, my mother. To hear my father tell it, he was struck instantly and forever by Cupid’s arrow. Although he was only 15, the sight of her took his breath away. So we know what my father was feeling, but how about her? Did she catch sight of him and feel the same overpowering love at first sight? Was she coming downstairs merely out of curiosity to meet her older sister’s intended, then to slip away for the afternoon with her friends? Did she have nervous or polite conversation with my father? What did they talk about? By the time she was 15 and he was 17, he had persuaded her to get married during her lunch hour in Manhattan’s City Hall. They prevailed upon two men in a nearby barbershop to be their witnesses and to swear that they were both of age. They then returned to work and to their separate homes that night.

My father was triumphant, I know, because he told us so, for now he had the love of his life as his own. Did he have any idea what that meant? You know, the stuff about making a home, supporting and caring for a wife? And my mother, my always and eminently practical mother? How had he convinced her to do this without telling her parents, her brothers and sisters, especially her older sister with whom she was dearly close? Hard as it is for me to picture, she must have been wildly in love.

Theirs was a youthful marriage that worked. They were seldom apart, only during the workday, and they eagerly reunited in the evenings. I could sense the quickening of her breath as we heard his key in the front door. And they began their nightly nonstop conversations as he entered the apartment. My sister and I fell asleep each night to the hum of their voices coming from the kitchen.

My dad was born in 1904, my mother in 1906, so they had both lived through World War I. My dad was lucky to be too young for the draft, but how did he feel seeing his older brothers marching off to war? And my mother? Was she worried about the fate of her older brother? I never asked them.

My parents decided everything together. My mother was more assertive about her opinions, but if my father didn’t agree she would back off. And while he seldom disagreed with her, when he did he was not reticent to let her know. They lived through the Great Depression, but I don’t know if they worried about money or job security. Were they afraid? There was no unemployment or health insurance then. Did they have nightmares about standing on breadlines? I never asked.

I do know that by 1939 they started their first business with all the life savings they had managed to scrape together. Then came Pearl Harbor and World War II. Once again my father was saved, being just beyond draft age. Did they feel threatened by the attack and the war? What were their thoughts and feelings? How did they cope with the stress? I came along then, but at no time in their lives did I think to ask.

Now, of course, it is too late.

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What keeps us young? Well, certainly eating healthy foods, exercising and sleeping are all on that list.

But there’s something else that works, too. If you can, try hanging out with a group of younger people at a party, even if the music is loud and incomprehensible.

At a recent party, I wasn’t sure what my daughter was saying, as I watched her sing every word with her eyes wide open and her hands fluttering at her sides like a butterfly’s wings.

It’s as if both of my children have sped up the needle so fast on their speech that I suspect that what’s coming out of their mouths probably started out as distinct words at some point. I’m hoping that the message they are repeating isn’t something offensive or objectionable, like, “Environmental regulation is bad, so let’s put the fox in charge of the hens at the Environmental Protection Agency. Go fox, Go fox, Go fox.” No, wait, this isn’t about politics.

A room full of children at the party, held by a family friend, made me think a bright scientist may one day figure out how to harness that energy, store it and release it at just the right time, either when someone needed to warm a house or a heart.

The next generation seems to follow a simple formula: Why walk when you can run, skip or flip, why talk when you can shout and why stay on the ground when you can challenge gravity to hold you down?

I recognize that loud parties filled with perplexing music may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The decibel level may damage hearing aids, destabilize pacemakers, or rattle fillings or dentures.

You don’t need to attend a kids party, especially if you weren’t invited to one, to share the exuberance of youth. Have you stopped your car on the way back along familiar routes to watch a T-ball baseball game, to listen to a chorus singing music you might know, or to watch a marching band trying to master John Philip Sousa while figuring out what yard line they’re supposed to be on when they reach the high notes?

All that energy begets energy. I’ve heard people talk about how their children keep them young. Imagine multiplying that, even for a day or a few hours, by however many kids are celebrating the moment in a way that doesn’t get bogged down in blinking Blackberries, a pending deadline or a need to disappear into the immobile ether of the television.

And if you’re fortunate enough, you can engage with some of the next generation in questions they raise about the world. Many of us think we are pretty knowledgeable. That may be the case, until a child asks us a question we can’t answer. Of course, we could rush to the internet to find an answer we might soon forget, or we could try to inch our way to an answer or even revisit a question we hadn’t pondered in years.

I’m sure teachers feel the same kinds of highs and lows that appear in so many other jobs. They have to discuss the Magna Carta year after year, or explain how the change in Y over the change in X represents the slope of a line.

But, then, every once in a while, a student may ask a new question that brings the material to life and gives the teacher an opportunity to learn from the student. The best answers inevitably lead to the next best questions.

Energy, insight, curiosity and joy don’t exist solely in the world of youth, but they are often easier to spot among a group of children whose joie de vivre lifts off at a party.

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