Birthdays have never meant much to me. In fact, I like prime numbers so much that I adopted them as my age, regardless of how old I really was. I was 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, then suddenly my seventieth loomed and for the first time, a birthday seemed significant. I called up my friend Beth, who was approaching 100. She suggested a walk, and for the next three years we walked every Wednesday, talking about art, friendship, love, aging, the passions that still keep both of us going. All of that is in my new book, Walking With Beth. You’ll find snippets from other works-in-progress in Passages.