This is a reflection on the amusements and anxieties of growing older.""Small Comforts"" is a work of creative nonfiction that quietly probes the mysteries of an ordinary life when reviewed at middle age. Essayist Jeff Hammond, a midcareer academic who examines a variety of lifelong obsessions, frustrates any expectation that life's fogs dissipate as we age. At stake here is the need for those of us who have reached a ""certain age"" to examine who we have become with courage, honesty, and humor.Beneath the discoveries of a sometimes bewildered narrator lurks that strange sense of liberation that can brighten the process of getting older. Hammond's diverse musings on time and its effects will prompt an oddly calming discovery that many problems usually identified as ""midlife"" issues have actually been with us since childhood.In the narrator's seriocomic self-effacement, ""Small Comforts"" embodies midlife retrospection with humor and tender nostalgia, certain to appeal to the ever-growing middle-aged population.
