About

During our working years, we come across interesting and stimulating things without much intentional effort. That changes when we retire. In retirement, the impetus to make life interesting shifts to us. We have to pay attention, and not let the rest of life slide by.

Our working years also let us test our abilities in an environment where no one has a vested interest in making us feel better. In retirement, we become our own measure of “successful aging”.

That’s what the blog is about: making life interesting, creating a life that is productive and has meaning. To do that, I focus on the everyday: both inward reflection, and outward sampling of the world around me.

I’m an older woman, single because of the death of my husband Jeremy in 2002, a mother and grandmother, a traveler, a retired entrepreneur and financial executive, a former Peace Corps volunteer who has maintained ties to the village in Panama where I served in the late 1960’s, and an author.

I have two books in print: a memoir and a commercially published book about money, success, and happiness. My memoir, Good Daughter, Good Mother, is available as of June 2016. The book is about me, my mother, and a rural Panamanian woman named Minga. The theme is simple yet profound: if you don’t get what you need from the places you expect, you can find it elsewhere, and it works. I am also the author of  How Much is Enough?, which came out in 2002 and explores the linkages between money, success, and happiness. My late husband and I owned a financial services firm, so I have lots of technical expertise about money. In recent years, I am most interested in the psychology of money: why we make the choices we do, and how we come to feel about those choices.

I am committed to living a reflective life. Finding at least one thing to write about each day is not hard; if it were, I’d think I wasn’t living very fully. That’s why I’ve titled the blog “Pam Klainer’s Day”. The stuff of ordinary life provides us with all we need to figure out our most important questions.

Having turned 72, I’m also interested in conscious aging. In the As I Age section, you’ll find stories of having begun my eighth decade of life and hoping to go well beyond.

The section called Writer’s Group showcases my attempts at fiction.

Enjoy, and come back often.