Mel Walsh

Take Your Driving Self-Test Here!

  Every parent says it: I don’t want to be a burden on my kids.

            That sentiment shows parents are beyond wonderful. Their kids have been a burden to them for decades and yet the parents don’t want to get back at the buggers.

            However, if you really don’t want to burden your kids, think outside the usual box of horrors---the one that involves nursing homes and you with the mental capacity of a daffodil. Imagine instead what a burden it will be for your kids to have a parent on the road who should not be driving. Think of the worries your children will have---images of geezer you mashed up in a car crash. 

            Further, collisions are not the path to geezer health and independence. If you get into trouble, your kids are the ones that will have the burden of visiting the ER, neglecting their jobs and children to look after you.        .

How To Know If You Should Hang Up the Car Keys

            The AARP puts forth these warning signs---their list, my words:

·      Your parking is way off. Not within the lines.

·      Scrapes and dings, not only on the car, but on the garage, mailboxes or fences.

·      Fender benders.

·      Stopping in traffic for no reason.

·      Getting lost a lot.

·      Not using signals or using them wrong---driving a hundred miles on a freeway with your left clicker on.

·      Hard for you to move into the correct lane of traffic.

·      Hitting curbs.

·      Driving too fast or too slow.

·      Slow response to surprise situations.

·      Getting all worked up when driving.

·      More close calls.

·      Claiming that “cars come out of nowhere” at you.

·      Trouble getting your foot from the gas to the brake.

·      Clueless about dangerous situations.

 

            I’d add a few more things: If your children tell you that it’s time to stop driving, they are probably right. If you have trouble seeing at night and can’t tell a black-coated person on the roadside from a penguin out for a stroll, it’s time to stop driving after dark.

            Other things to watch:  you‘ve gotten so short with age, you can’t see over the dash. Or you can’t turn your neck to check out the blind spot and everything looks like a blind spot.

 

            The truth is, some day, if we live long enough, we all will have to stop driving and it’s a good idea to begin thinking now how get to the store, the doc or your favorite watering hole. This is easier said than done, but public transport, friends, neighbors and moving into a town center in the later years are all possibilities.

            So is taking a younger lover with a clean driving record. Your choice.

           

On the Road Still: Staying in Charge of Your Driving

Question: Would you like to extend your safe driving lifetime by many years? Or do you want to hang up your car keys too early, either because of an accident or because you haven’t reviewed the rules of the road since you last made out in a Nash?

            Well, if you want to keep safe and happy on the road, consider the AARP Driver Safety Program, the nation’s first and largest classroom refresher course for motorists 50 and over. Also, any age driver can take the online version of the course at www.aarp.org.

            So Why Go?

            Partly to update your knowledge of driving technique. Example: It used to be that people were taught to hold on to the steering wheel at clock positions 10 and 2. Now the recommendations are 8 and 4 o’clock, so when and if an airbag pops out at 600 miles an hour, that airbag won’t throw your arms into your face.

            And then, do you know how far your chest should be from the steering wheel so you won’t get injured by the airbag in an accident? Ten to 12 inches . That’s easy for people with long arms, but manageable for the rest of us. (Further airbag hint: if, like me, you like to put your legs up on the dash during a long trip as a passenger, don’t. The force of the airbag can turn us into human pretzels.)

            Another example of changing rules: older people were taught to pump their brakes, but today, you don’t do that when cars have ABS, an anti-lock braking system. Instead, you just stay steady down on that brake. (To check for ABS, look for an ABS symbol on the dash when you turn the car on.)

            So What Else Is There To Know?

            Lots. Driving is like love-making. Just because you’ve been doing it for years doesn’t mean you know all there is to know on the subject. For instance, do you know how older adults get in trouble on the road? Are you thinking highway driving? Nope. It’s intersections. At least 40% of fatal crashes for drivers 75 and older take place at intersections.

            Why? The vision changes that come with age have a lot to do with it. Your peripheral vision (side vision) and depth perception (judging the speed and distance of oncoming traffic) both diminish with age. You may think “that car came out of nowhere” to crash into your side at an intersection, but it could have been that older eyes were playing depth perception tricks.

            How Do I Find an AARP Course Near Me?

            Go to AARP.org and put Driver Safety Search into the search box. More info at 1-888-227-7669. 

 Watch out for the intersections on the way to class.

A Very Moving Tale

This is a very moving story—literally. It’s one for Boomers and their aging parents, and I’ll start it with a question: Have you ever heard of Move Management?

Well, it’s a new and growing industry with about 500 specialists dotted across the United States. When older people decide to move to a retirement community or to assisted living, move managers can take on the burden of the move, leaving the family free to fight about who gets the turkey platter.

Seriously, move managers help the older person through the emotional trauma of downsizing. They sort, organize and pack possessions, give designated items to charity or family members, make dump runs, run tag or estate sales, manage the actual truck move and then arrange the new place so that it replicates the best parts of the old home.

Those move managers whose talent is interior design may oversee painting the new place in favorite colors, arranging the furniture in a familiar pattern and inventing a special  display of the objects and photos that mean the most to the movee.  The end result? There’s no place like the new home---except maybe the old one, but smaller and more edited.

Who Needs a Move Manager?

Can you say millions of us?

If you have ever helped an older parent move out of the old family home into a new smaller apartment, you’ll know how nice it would have been to have expert help during the process. It took my sister and me six weeks to help mom go through the house and garage, decide what to take, dispose of the rest, get the house ready for sale and we were still not finished after six weeks of seven days a week labor.

It would have been great to have a professional direct the proceedings and maybe instruct the men who were cleaning out the garage not to throw and break bottles of 1950’s insecticides into the dumpster.  (When the dumpster began steaming, the town hazmat squad arrived to prevent another Bhopal.)

Well, that was just us, but many are the hurdles to cleaning out the old family home and resettling in a new and smaller nest. There are not only logistics to consider, there are all the emotions connected to leave-taking and change, so a talented move manager will listen to the older person and make sure that when it comes to prized possessions, he/she has the best of the best in the new place. (Example, a vast collection of family photographs can be edited down to the outstanding pictures which can be enlarged, reframed and lit in a special display--- much better than photos sitting in old shoeboxes.)

If you want to talk to a move manager, go to the website of the National Association of Senior Move Managers at www.nasmm.org. Look for the state-by-state search engine. Also ask the manager of any retirement facility. They may have a recommendation. Then, too, some professional organizers will take on senior moves. Find them in the Yellow Pages under organizing services or at the web site of the National Association of Professional Organizers, www.napo.net. Search there under moving/relocation services.

            Opportunity for a Business

            Boomers looking for a business opportunity in a down market may want to learn more about starting a move management business. Begin at www.nasmm.org and also Google: Move Management Washington Post. There you will find an article about how other people started in the business.

            Finding a growing business opportunity in 2009 may be the most moving experience of all. Good luck.

The Way We Were (And Are)

Gerontology is the study of older adults and what a trip that field has been for this geezer! I went to gerontology school when I was in my sixties, the oldest person ever to get an MA in Gerontology at USC.

            Usually, young people study older people---20 somethings trying to understand the elders of the tribe. Each beginning gero student is like a young Margaret Mead doing anthropology work in a foreign land, The Land of Age. But I was the foreigner in the group, an indigenous population of one, the only degree candidate who was Socially Secured and Medicared. I studied what I was. They studied what they were going to be. I think I had more fun, already swimming in the surf they could only look at from the shore.

One Shining Memory: The Peak Experience

            Though the scholastic training was great and comprehensive, it didn’t and couldn’t catch all the experiences of aging in the academic net. There are things about being old that aren’t in text books.

Example: each older person’s enduring memory of a lifetime’s peak experience, an indelible image that has been burnished bright by faithful remembering over the decades. I think everybody over the age of 60 carries a proud and often secret recollection of a special moment in life, one that defines who they were and what they loved.

For my mate, Cranky Pants, it’s the time he first flew solo. For others, it’s the time they sang in the Civic Light Opera, or the time they taught school children in a foreign land. Or maybe it was the time they fought forest fires, or the day of the great earthquake when they went through the neighborhood shutting off the gas of people too panicked to find their own wrenches. Often the peak experience required bravery, the overcoming of fears, performance that was beyond the demands of everyday experience.

Whatever it was, the experience of remembering this one special time nourishes the self-esteem of older people whose pride can be eroded by the downers of aging. When people can’t hear, see or move well or even put on their socks, their pride leaks out. The self-esteem balloon loses a little air. So the recollection of a special moment serves to bolster the self-image, to guard against the erosion of a healthy ego.

And So???

And so if you are older and the proud owner of A Memorable Moment, I’d suggest that you not only secretly cherish it, but you display and enjoy any tangible reminder of your experience. Expand the pleasure of remembering with a photograph, a citation, a recording---any shred of physical evidence that you have been there and done that. And find someone who will listen to your story and tell you theirs---equal time to each proud moment.

Sometimes, though, people want to keep their memories to themselves or just share it with blood brothers. I know someone whose personal claim to fame is enjoying three liaisons in one day---his personal best---but you can bet he is not telling his grandchildren.

Giving Comfort to The Elders

One way to bring pleasure to older adults is to listen to their stories and if they repeat the same one too often---ask them to talk about other memorable moments of their lives:

What was the scariest time? Or the thing they most remember about mom or dad? What do they most want younger people in the family to know? To do? Do they have a legacy ideal they want to leave behind? What are their most treasured objects?

Last, though I don’t know the source, here’s a pertinent thought I wrote down and carry around in my wallet: “To love people is to sing the song that is in their hearts and to sing it to them when they have forgotten”.

Really, How Old Are You?

How about making a guess today? Polish up your crystal ball and tell me what age group is most unhappy.

            Some might answer that older people have to be the least happy. After all, if they are retired, they are unemployed with the loss of income and status that comes from the workplace. And what’s more, judging by their behavior, older people evidently have to be in bed by nine. It’s life in the dull lane, bored into unhappiness.

Actually, though, surveys show that older people are as happy as young people. Imagine that. It’s the middle-aged who are the least happy and no wonder. They have more obligations than any other age group. Think kids, jobs and foreclosing mortgages.

            So the idea that older people are crying into their beer (or Ensure) is, in general, a myth. But what makes older people happy?

A Look at Senior Self-Perceptions

            A recent study spotlights one reason we older folks aren’t down in the dumps about aging. We think we are much younger than we are. In a study published in the Journals of Gerontology, over 500 people 70 and older were asked how old they felt they were. On average, they felt about 13 years younger than their chronological age.

            And rather than take a one-moment-in-time snapshot of people’s attitudes, the study tracked perceptions about age and satisfaction with the aging process over a six-year period---this to find what changes might come to pass over time. Well, the perception of age stayed pretty steady over the years.  In other words, if a person felt 13 years younger at 70, he or she was likely to still feel 13 years younger at 76.

            And note that the question asked was very specific: “How old do you feel when you look at yourself in the mirror?” That a mirror was mentioned made the results even more amazing: if you asked me how old I felt when looking in a mirror, I’d have to account for the wrinkles in my answer and would have to up my number. These people had the same dilemma when asked to reflect on their reflections---and yet they still felt 13 years younger.

            Now, if you left the mirror out of the question---if you ignored the visual clues---and just asked how old people felt, you might get an even more amazing answer. I’ll bet they’d say they felt even younger than 13 years. In fact, I have read other studies that placed the perception level at 15 years younger than chronological age.

Kids, Try This At Home!            

Heck, you can try this experiment on yourself. Without looking in a mirror, how old do you feel? Then, when looking in a mirror, how old do you feel? Is there a difference? What is it?

I Make Me Feel So Young

Now, when it came to the study, was there a gender difference? Yes, indeed. Men saw themselves as four years younger than women who were their age equals. The investigators could only guess at the reason. Maybe women were trained over a lifetime to look more closely at their physical appearances and so were more realistic in their assessments. Or, one could say unkindly that men were more delusional about their actual age, which, if true, could account for older guys going after all those young trophy wives.

Bottom line: Nobody knows.

What Drags Down the Cheery View

            The researchers found that getting sick was likely to make people think of themselves as older. So staying well is a key to maintaining a pleasant illusion about our actual age. But then you already knew that. Nothing makes a person feel older than being marooned in a hospital bed or diagnosed with a geezer-related illness.

More research in this study---the Berlin Aging Study---indicates that “people who feel younger are less likely to die than those who don’t, given the same level of chronological age and equivalent physical health”.

So maybe thinking we are younger than we are is more than a pleasant illusion. It may be a life-saver.

Me, today I feel 50, but my knees are having an 80^th birthday party down below my belt. 

Grammy Knew Best

You know, the old folks at home had it right about health. Grandmothers back then were doctors in housecoats, and though we today think we own the advanced ideas about nutrition, my grandma knew as much in 1948 as many of us today, even though we are overfed on dietary info.

My grandma “got” the fact that fish and fish oils could help keep a family healthy. That’s why, like many Americans back then, cod liver oil was part of our daily diet. So were sardines---many, many cans of sardines. Sardines on Ritz crackers---that was the blue plate lunch special in Grandma’s Kitchen, with a side of tomato soup for a veggie blast.

Walking Her Talk

But gram didn’t just know what should be done, she did it and made us do it too. You swallowed your cod liver oil and your black strap molasses--no questions allowed.

Today, though, while many of us know what to do, we don’t do it and we don’t make our families do it. Our talk about health may be just show. If little Jason doesn’t like the veggies or fish that we oldsters know he should eat, he may be allowed to exist on burgers, fries and “juice” boxes full of sugar water.

Well, we had to eat what we were served and in an era of food scarcity, it made survival sense. The rule was: Eat it, no substitutions. Hating the globbiness of oyster stew, I was once made to sit at the table by myself for the hour it took to get that stew down.

Vitamin D and The Art Deco Grandmother

And it wasn’t just on the food front that my grandmother and others in the 1930’s showed some health smarts. Though today we are told the sun is our enemy---think skin cancer----the grannies and moms of yesterday used to put babies out to nap in the sun. Look at family photos from the Depression and you may see a diapered ancestor getting a Vitamin D bath outside in her baby carriage.

While I would not take sides on the sunning issue—not enough evidence  on benefits (Vitamin D and nature’s anti-depressant) versus drawbacks (skin cancer, sunburn)--- I do know that the women of yore were onto the sunshine vitamin and saw that children got it in short daily sunbaths.

The Gospel of Gram on Preserving Health

It was also gram’s goal to keep us from getting “run down”. Run down meant you didn’t eat right, spent too much time in the house reading the funnies and above all, didn’t go to bed early enough to get a good night’s sleep. Early to the mattress was the rule or you might get health cooties like colds.

Well, it took over 60 years for scientists to catch up to grandmother. This month a new study concluded that a lack of sleep was related to catching a cold. Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the investigation involved 153 men and women who were sequestered in a hotel for two weeks while cold viruses were stuck up their noses.

 But and however, only 35% of those exposed to the virus got a cold. The amount of sleep was the key to the puzzle. Those who got less sleep were five and a half times more likely to be sick than those who caught more dreamtime.

Grandma would be heartened to see that after 60 years, scientists have caught up with her. Really, scientists could have saved time and trouble and just asked my grandmother, who might have sent them to bed without supper for wasting money on something that was as plain as a sardine on a cracker.

Crystal-Balling the Year Ahead: Geezer Version

             Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I offer a crystal-ball guess about the aging scene in 2009:

January…The AARP begins the New Year by declaring that seventy is the new twenty.

February… The feds announce that Medicare will not cover Botox injections, this despite intense lobbying from fast-wrinkling Boomers. Angelina Jolie’s lips stage a protest.

March… The Big Two automakers arrive in Washington with the specifics of their rescue plan. They want to extend Medicare to old and ailing car companies. 

April….BigPharmCo recalls its arthritis pill, SleezeEase, because, despite black box warnings and the small print in TV commercials, some people actually took the drug and actually kind of expired from it. The FDA says it’s it not responsible, but will do better with the next black box drug that they will also not be responsible for.

May…. President Obama adds money to the CIA’s Viagra for Afghanistan program, whereby the allegiance of warlords is obtained by giving them little blue pills in exchange for information. This Erections for Victory program was started by the Bush administration and if you don’t believe this actually happened, google: Viagra Afghanistan. Better bribery through chemistry. Really.

June… Pain in the Prostate Month. The national poster boy is Gary Tenducci, 65, of Winnetka IL who managed to visit the small room 154 times in just one night.

July…The stock market goes into a summer dive with the Dow Jones staging another showboat meltdown. Investment advisors across the country tell retirees to hold their stocks, as “the market will eventually come back”. Seniors advise their advisors that they don’t expect to live to be 116.

August…Social Security recipients get another cost of living raise, but the government takes an ever-larger hunk out of each monthly check----typically $48 for shipping and handling, $102 for fair share contribution to assorted bailouts and $424 for prescription drug insurance, which was initially offered at $42, but---oh well. If any older adult is not satisfied with the check or with the government cooperating with bait-and-switch insurance companies, he or she may return the check to the US Treasury, no questions asked.

September… Seniors notice that the donut hole in their prescription coverage has gotten so large, it’s all hole and no donut. Millions protest by dumping their meds down the sink, thereby insuring that all the households on the town water systems are protected from heart disease and arthritis. The federal government, looking at the improved public health statistics, considers using Universal Drug Dumps as one way to get health care for all. The Secretary of Health, Education and Promises described the phenomenon as “a great big Boston Tea Party with a good medical outcome. What’s not to like?”

October…will be the first month that the S&P 500 goes lower than the temperature outside. Senior citizens across the country stage a protest by driving very slowly on freeways. Other drivers don’t notice anything new.

November….is Sunset Supper Month, when restaurants all over the country offer early bird dinners consisting of a wide-ranging menu of turkey with giblet gravy and turkey with giblet gravy.

December…Bing Crosby’ s rendition of White Christmas is digitally re-mastered into Green Christmas and everybody gives and gets solar-powered appliances. Small children receive training windmills as gifts to introduce them to clean energy. But all the grandparents are happy because their shopping was done in the pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-holiday super stimulus sales that started in May.

On New Year’s Eve 2009, the lights go on all over the world. This celebratory surge trips off the electrical grid. Five billion TV sets go dark which insures a high birth rate in September 2010. Senior citizens deny any responsibility. Seventy is not the new twenty. 

The Gratitude of Geezers

     Have the holidays cooked your goose? Are you fatigued, burned-out and down in the dumps? Now do you understand Scrooge better than you understand Tiny Tim?

These are all symptoms of Post-Holiday Stress Syndrome and if they describe you, here is a quick rundown of blessings to pat your attitude back into shape for the new year.

Things to be thankful for, or why we older adults are lucky ducks:

 * The move to privatize Social Security ended up in the political trash heap. Aren’t you glad? At this writing, the stock market is down around 40% for the year.  That dull old Social Security check never looked so good.

* The longevity revolution. The people in the US have picked up about 30 extra years of life in the last 100 years. Those smallpox vaccinations and various shots plus public health measures such as clean water systems have worked their magic. Now you and I might grow old enough to meet our great grandchildren before we meet Our Maker.

* The bionic geezer. Through the courtesy of titanium and various plastics, we can get our parts replaced when they wear out. So when bones break down, in we go to the body shop for repairs. Joint replacements keep many of us active and out of wheelchairs. Our grandparents didn’t have this medical luxury.

* Medicare. Some take this program of medical care and hospitalization for granted, but if every age group in the country had the medical coverage we older people do, we’d finally have health care for all. So here’s to extending the honor.

* Help with hearing. It’s no fun to lose your hearing, but the many kinds of hearing aids now available can put people back in touch with their lives, their mates and their TV sets. (Note: if you think Wolf Blitzer is mumbling, get a hearing test.)

* Help with seeing. Many blessings upon the eye care experts and the cataract surgeons. Eye care is miraculous now and here’s just one personal example:  If you have cataracts as I once did, the world can look like the brown-varnished paintings of the Old Masters. So imagine going in for cataract surgery and coming out to find the world really isn’t a Rembrandt painting. It’s brighter. Much more Matisse.

* New attitudes about retirement. Old notions of retiring to Bingoland are being replaced by ideas of unretirement, of switching to new careers and finding new passions. We don’t have to go out to pasture anymore.

* New attitudes about physical ability. The idea that older people belong in rocking chairs is being replaced by the idea that we belong on hiking trails, in gyms or competing in senior class athletics.

* The advent of the Internet and Google. The whole world is now ours to access. Just for starters, Google can help people search for a rental, make air and land reservations, look up medical info, find a classmate, a recipe, a book, a fact, or a lover. You can start and run a business online, visit faraway places and find any number of new friends. Also, email keeps you in touch with the people you love. So, almost anything you want is available----literally at your fingertips. Even pizza and honey-baked ham.

*  This newspaper. Be thankful for The Union. It is one of the few papers that value older people enough to run a column especially for them. Even better, I find that all ages read this column, either to see what it’s like to grow older or to find information to share with their parents. Also, speaking of forward-looking media, many thanks to KVMR-FM, they who give me the opportunity to host the on-air version of Second Wind at 89.5. Not many community radio stations cover the far side of life.

Last, thanks to all who read this column every week. You fix my PHSS, my holiday burnout. And what better cure than to have people appreciate what you do? 

So, Happy New Year to geezers and geezers-in-training everywhere. 

Undriving the Driver

What do an eighty-five year old man and a sixteen-year-old boy have in common?

            Two things: Both want the car keys permanently in their possession and both have the highest accident rates of any age groups. But the difference is that the teen’s driving will improve with maturity while older people will continue to experience deterioration in reaction time, in eyesight, hearing, distance perception, night vision and perhaps, if they take certain meds, clarity of consciousness.

When A Driver Loses His Edge

Now there are older people who are excellent drivers---I’d ride with them to hell and back---but there are others who are losing it and refusing to acknowledge the loss. Worse, there are others who have lost it. They get tickets, drive into trees, dent the car, forget their destination and generally worry their family members.

Then comes The Discussion: Isn’t it time for Mom or Dad to give up the car keys? Sometimes, a wise older person can see what’s happening without the family getting into it at all. These smart people just stop driving or restrict driving to the daytime or just to the corner store. Some of them enroll in an AARP course on safe driving, a course specifically directed to improving the skills of older drivers. Others begin to leave the driving to a mate with better eyesight. (One good rule: Whoever can see a person dressed in black, riding a bike without lights at night, should be the driver of choice after the sun goes down.)

But other older people are in complete denial and that’s when family members either step in and have a discussion about driving or if appropriate, confiscate the car keys, thereby insuring they will be left out of the will and not spoken to for months.

Here’s one solution that worked for Cranky Pants and his dad. Dad realized that his driving deteriorated. CP realized Dad wanted to control the car keys. An agreement was made: Dad had the car keys at all times except when he asked a home health aide or a family member to drive him somewhere. Other than the driving time, Dad had the keys. It worked.

Understanding Older People

 But why, you may ask yourself, do older people cling so stubbornly to their driving rights?

For the same reason the teen does: A love of independence. An appreciation of one of our basic freedoms---the freedom to go out.  And an older person has other concerns: who will get the groceries, go to the drugstore or travel to the doctor’s? And what kind of a dive does a social life take if you can’t drive? And how do you get to see your grandchilden’s soccer games without a car?

These and other transportation benefits that younger people take for granted are rightly treasured by older people, who, unless they live in cities, have poor choices when it comes to public transport or the possibility of walking to carry out errands.  So what to do? Here’s a second idea:

A Cost Analysis

How much money does it take to operate a car? For most people, it’s the second highest household expenditure after the mortgage. In some households, the money spent on cars almost equals the money spent on food and medical care combined. 

 So to do a cost analysis, consider the cost of the car, its financing and maintenance, the insurance, the gas, the registration and the costs of parking. Then there’s the fact that a car is a depreciating asset---evaporating money. Add in the parking tickets and the dent removal and that’s a chunk of change spent on transportation.

The calculators at AAA estimate that it now costs .71 cents a mile to own a financed car. If you drive 20,000 miles a year, that $14,200 dollars. Check out the figures for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/3pf2yn.

Fourteen thousand dollars could buy a lot of taxi rides when we can’t drive anymore---to say nothing of lower blood pressure. But few seem to think of the taxi option for older adults, as if it were an extravagance. But as we have seen, it is probably a bargain when compared to owning a car. Yet conventional thinking about this issue seems to end with taking the car away or using an inconveniently scheduled van service.

Me, when I’m 90, I’m calling a cab.

Find more information about dealing with older parents and their cars at http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/01/18/taking.keys.away.

Depression Geezers Speak Up

 

My Inner Swami is AWOL I don’t know what will happen economically and neither do the experts. Recession? Depression? Nothing?

What I still have, though, is that character within: Ms. Worst Case. Yes, I am a worst case planner. I imagine a worst case scenario, figure out how to handle it and then, relax, feeling I am prepared for the worst.

Now, older people can be helpful in these economic times because many remember the worst-case economic scenario, The Great Depression, either as young adults, teens or tots. And we are here as witnesses that a country can live through bad times.

Yes, work was very hard to get and food was sometimes scarce. We could not have second helpings of potatoes. Fresh fruit was an unknown. I practically fainted over a fresh tangerine in a Christmas stocking when I was five years old.  And we were educationally starved. Nobody had money for books and I did not see a book until I went to kindergarten.

So those were some of the downers, but, believe it or not, the Depression had some good things going for it. Even the worst case had silver linings:

Better Family Life: Today, critics see the nuclear family as an isolated unit, living below the poverty line when it comes to family relationships. In the Depression, though, generations often lived together to save on rent. In one small duplex, our grandparents hosted two sons in an unheated attic, a widowed son and his two daughters in one bedroom, my husband-deserted mom on the couch and my brother and me in the grandparents’ room. Ten buddies against the storm. It was a lively home, offering the comfort of relatives, the sharing of tasks and believe it or not, a lot of laughs.

And when generations live together, the youngest learn from the oldest. I hope I learned generosity from my grandmother Lucy. Though we hardly had enough food, when hobos came to the back door looking for dinner, my grammy fed them. And there were lots of hobos who wandered up from the railroad tracks. I think our house had the hobo hieroglyphic that said: Good Stew Here.

Community Togetherness: Again, critics say America has lost its sense of community and is separating into groups that have no common identity. This trend is sometimes called Bowling Alone. Well, in the Depression, almost all the people were in the same economic boat. There wasn’t the huge disparity between the classes that exists now, or if there was one, we didn’t know about it. There was no TV to bring in the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

My mom told me everybody she knew brushed their teeth back then with charcoal because no one could afford toothpaste. Didn’t that bother you? I asked. She said no---not that nor any of the other economies because all were practicing the same ones. Those were the days of party lines---several families sharing one phone line---and the excitement of getting hand-me-down clothes. (To this day I prefer gently used clothes to new ones. Someone else suffers through the starch.)

Better environment: We didn’t produce carbon dioxide when we drove because we didn’t drive. We didn’t have a car. We used public transport or walked. As for other energy use, there was no AC. Heating was minimal. My gram once chopped up a dresser to use as firewood on a freezing night. Saved by the furniture—what a story.

Excellent playtimes for kids. We got lots of outdoor exercise. Kick the can, tag, hopscotch, hide and seek, sliding down the sandbank…these kept us active. And there were no toys except sticks and stones and an old tin can but we had lots of fun. Really. Never did I feel deprived, at least not until I got to kindergarten and realized that books existed. Then I learned how to get to the “lie-berry”.

So those are just a few of the great things about the Great Depression and though we may never have another, it’s nice to know that living on a lower level economically does not mean living on a lower level emotionally.

So you who are young and frightened should look at us old cottontops and see that we have survived pretty well. And so shall you if it ever comes to it. But I am hoarding toothpaste just in case.

Going Down in History

 

A Surprise Request for Family History           

Go memoir yourself---that’s the current advice given to older people and it is a good idea. Those who come after us may want to know where they came from, genetically and geographically. But, in 50 years, unless you write it down, your past will be lost to the future.

Then nobody will know how you ate dirt during the Depression and how you saved aluminum gum wrappers as a way to insure victory during World War II.  Nobody will know the colorful sayings of your grandparents, or how they told you tales about “the old country”, tales that made you happy you lived in the new one.

            So, unless you are a president or a dignitary---not necessarily one and the same---first-person accounts are really the only way to preserve your past. Write about yourself, your parents and your grandparents and go as far back as memory and patience will take you. There are many books, courses and people to help get these memories and thoughts out and down on paper or tape.

But really, just start: I was born in so and so. My earliest memories were such and such. I went to school wherever and I had a big crush on so and so. This you can do.

A Surprise Request for Family History

Now, though we oldsters have been urged to write about ourselves, nobody tells us to write about our children and those are the people grandchildren may be most interested in. At least my grands are and why not? They are closer to their parents than they are to their grandparents and their curiosity about a more immediate past is natural.

Case in point: Last summer, at a three-generation get-together---a time when family stories will out---what the grandchildren wanted to hear were the stories of their parents---what were they like as kids, as teenagers and as young adults. They wanted to know who their parents dated before they ended up with each other and what kind of trouble or glory their parents got into before they assumed the role of middle-aged parents.

The time was ripe for blackmail, but I tried to keep to the truth without telling anything that would send the parents to the law books to see when the statute of limitations had run out on minor crimes of the immature.

That get-together got me thinking about doing a new kind of memoir, not about me, but about my kids---sort of a baby book continued. (Most of us kept those books, with the birth data and first picture, what weight was gained in the first three months. The little baby shoes kept too, or bronzed as if they were the infant feet of gods.)

Well, at least we kept those baby books until the second child came along and buried our good intentions under dirty diapers. After that, the biography of my kids just consisted of the class pictures, year by year, with the bad haircuts and goofy smiles. And after that, their history got even more brief----school yearbooks with short-cut designations of character: most likely to succeed, most likely to make trouble and so forth.

Making Up for Their Lost Years

So how to fill out the lost years of our kids for their kids? Maybe think now about a holiday present. Maybe buy a small blank book and start filling it in with short descriptions and available photos. Nothing fancy, but plenty meaningful to those who care.

My mom, a child singing star, had a scrapbook made by her mom---photos, reviews of performances and clippings from newspapers. If my house burns down, I will grab Cranky Pants, my laptop and that scrapbook, which goes to show that kids do treasure the memories of their parents and maybe that’s where some of our memoir energy might go—not unto ourselves, but unto our kids for their kids.

Now, you who are skilled at scrapbooking can really make something of this project. We who are not so skilled can still do something. A blank book, a pen, some photos, a little glue---a very nice holiday present for the grandkids.

If you can’t get started, just imagine your grandchild 50 years from now rescuing your scrapbook from a burning house. The house will likely never burn, but the desire to know about our parents always, always will.

Conventions: Once a Doubter, Now a Fan

I thought I lived in a house, but now know I was living under a rock---at least when it came to the great American institution of conventions. Until recently, all I encountered were the conventions put on by elephants and donkeys---the political conventions---which I discovered as a kid watching snowy TV pictures coming in under a set of rabbit ears.

            Viewing the vintage political conventions of both parties---well, that was when I starting doubting the intelligence of adults---all those silly hats and the cheering of feel-good speeches whose content was as light as a passing cloud. (I had a content detector even back in 6^th grade.) I thought some of the speakers made Milton Berle look like Socrates. So, back in grade school, I developed a prejudice against conventions. The behavior of conventioneering adults made me not look forward to growing up.

The Changing of a Mind

            There’s nothing like actual experience to change a mind harboring a fossil prejudice. Last week, at the national convention of the AARP in Washington, I learned there are interesting conventions, meetings where people actually learn things and come out at the end better for the experience. OK, pooped from all the walking and the over-stimulation of 30,000 new buddies, but better.

            Maybe I should get out of the house more, but I was blown away by the grandly scaled and beautiful Washington convention center. Imagine an exhibition floor as large as seven football fields and that was just the bottom floor. There were others that harbored a ballroom and a theater, meeting rooms, lounges, grand art-filled halls and most important, enough bathrooms so that one never ever had to wait. (Men may not get this, but women know the importance of no-waiting rest rooms.)

So What Was There for the Learning?

            What wasn’t there? You could learn about budget travel and retiring abroad, about foods that will keep you young, about fixing your digital photos and also about online dating, cruising in China, senior sex from Dr. Ruth in person and so much more, it would take all of today’s paper to relate. But if you wanted to find your dream job, learn about current brain research, catch up on what’s new in eye care, learn what to see in Ireland or where to take an art course in Mexico, someone was there to tell you.

            There were sections on tech---computers lined up classroom style if you wanted to learn to use one better (or at all).  Also, representatives from about every government agency you could name, plus info on Medicare literacy, financial smarts, building communities for successful aging and lots of fun stuff besides. Example: There was a three-band night club the first evening just to get people rocking and rolling, but by dinnertime all I wanted was a room service cheeseburger and bed. (If there is a late night party to poop, just ask me.)

Celebrity City

            Now, if you wanted to see Paul Simon in concert or perhaps Natalie Cole, Ramsey Lewis or Chicago, you could. Regis Philbin was there as were Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones and the newly famous Young@Heart Chorus, average age 81. Martina Navratilova was present to start off your morning with a fitness session and Chaka Khan was there to sing goodnight. Even Grass Valley has its reps: Both Carole Carson and I gave speeches and were interviewed by John Palmer on Retirement Living Television, though the expo was so big, Carole and I never saw each other.

 

            I did get to meet about 1,894 other people, mostly at Gallo’s Livingston Cellars booth, where, as a spokesperson, I helped introduce many Easterners to the virtues of California wine and, as an author, inflicted all who showed up with my book, Hot Granny. I also met the people who run AARP publications, so now there are faces on the masthead names that put together the magazine appearing regularly in our mailboxes.

            But, by Saturday afternoon, with a tropical storm adding its own excitements, people began tearing down the hundreds of exhibits on the Expo floor. It was as if an entire city was being dismantled. However, like Brigadoon, AARP’s National Event and Expo will rise again in 2009---this time in Las Vegas.

            So, next year, I’m saving October 22-24 for a (gulp!) convention. You can find out more at aarp.org/events or call 1-800-883-2784.

            And now I’ve got to go vacuum my office. The floor is littered with discarded opinions.

 

Make Your Own Village

 

Second Wind

            Some day you and I will be over the hill. And I say better over the hill than under it.

            Still, the fact is that sometime, when we are a bit more frail and doddery, we may need help to remain independent in our own homes. And if the body and energy falter, it’s helpful and sometimes necessary---to have someone do the driving, shopping, cooking, home repairs and all the other chores of life. It’s also nice when you are sick to have someone bring chicken soup and the pain pills du jour and of course the ice packs after your annual bad fall in the garden. And then there is the basic need for human contact, for pleasant company, for someone to nag and be nagged by---one way to know you are loved.

            I know, all that is what you have a mate for, but couples do not dive into Eternity in sync. It’s not a synchronized event—one always leaves earth before the other, which is a sobering thought, though it can be used to help appreciate your mate more now---absence making the heart grow fonder before the actual absence.

            What’s more, when it comes to counting on mates for help, many older people are not only widowed, but single through choice or divorce. Some are also childless or alienated from their children, so no caring kids are coming to the rescue if one does begin to falter in the life chores department.

             In yesteryear, the old folks and the young folks lived together---my widowed grammy shared my bed when she was old---but today, the middle manager son is transferred to the other coast, the daughter married and moved to Maui and the black sheep kid lives in Thailand and not for the weather. And even if the adult kids were still around within helping distance, most older people I know don’t want to be a burden.

            Like two-year-olds, we want to do it ourselves. Or maybe with a bit of help from other sources.

One New Source to the Rescue           

            So, assuming your family may not be the solution or even the one you want… and assuming you and I do not have a butler, driver, maid and handyperson on our household staff, we will need help and so will millions of other people in the US. And, mirable dictu---which means No Kidding in Latin---there is actually a solution to our needs, something that is happening quietly all over the country,

Making Your Own Extended Family

            The solution, already a reality in some places, is to invent an area support group, a “village” in your town. It means getting together a membership organization of older people that offers the following services: driving to appointments or shopping, getting the house repairs done, cleaning, help with housework, care when you’re down and out physically plus nutrition services---which often means meals delivered to the door.

            The model for this solution comes from Beacon Hill Village in Boston. The neighbors there got together and organized to help each other survive as older adults in their own homes. The Village offers household and home maintenance services, health and wellness help, including exercise opportunities. And since isolation can be a problem for older people, they also arrange small get-togethers, parties and trips as well as cultural opportunities for expanding minds and life experience. All in all, they say they want to make “remaining at home a safe, comfortable and cost-effective solution.”

            Through media exposure, people all over the US heard about Beacon Hill Village. They had so many requests for information about organizing this service for older adults that they now have a detailed handbook that covers all the how’s of starting a membership organization.

            The manual, which can be ordered by mail, phone or online offers help from the founders, the original business plan, marketing materials, fundraising letters, board and committee structures, budgets and ways to help you develop your own Beacon Village. The price for this package is $350 for non-profits and neighborhood groups or $500 for profits and municipalities.

            The web site is www.beaconhillvillage.org and the email is bhvillage@aol.com. Phone: 617-723-4117. Address: 74 Joy Street, Boston MA 02114.

            Doesn’t all this sound better than counting on Black Baa to come back from Thailand to pick up your meds at the drug store? Besides, he might make off with your pain pills.

Over 50?: Pack Your Suitcase Full of Ideas

Planning---what a pain in the posterior. Why not just be in the moment? Fly by the seat of the pantsuit?

            Well, when it comes to retirement, if you go with the flow, you may end up down the drain.  It’s smart to plan for retirement and that means doing more than buying a Harley and hitting Route 66---which gets us to one of the puzzles of retirement planning…what he wants versus what she wants.

Planning in Tandem

            If you are a partnered person, you’d better check out your plans with your other half, because he or she may be thinking of staying home, raising llamas and meditating in perfect quiet. You, on the other hand, may want to travel far and wide with a brass band in an old school bus, giving concerts in wayside parks all across America.

            Don’t laugh. People have very different retirement movies in their heads. One mate wants to head to remote deserts---peace at last---while the other wants to live downtown where it’s happening. One wants to spend money down to the last dime, while the other wants to forego present spending pleasures and save for a rainy day.

            And when it comes to family, some want to live near the kids, others have been there, done that and want to move to Mexico. Or, one wants to be the designated baby sitter, the trophy grandparent, while the other says, enough of diapers, spit-up and school recitals, this is the time for Us, not Them.

            So start talking with your partner. Better to fight---I mean negotiate---today rather than later when you find yourself trying to meditate in the middle of the brass band.

Planning for money

            I know, all the money that should be going to your 401k is going to Exxon. But you will need more than Social Security to survive at a decent level. However, when it comes to multiple sources of income, lucky are those among us who have pensions---a disappearing concept---or retirement funds that are not sinking---or houses that are not losing their value.

            Well, all any of us can do today is the best we can.

            If you want an economical way to invest and are up for the risk that goes with investing, look to Vanguard, the favorite of retirees everywhere for its low-cost investment vehicles. Not that you can’t lose money there. It’s just that Vanguard doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to buy into one of its stock or bond funds. They also have sensible investing info: www.vanguard.com.

             If you would to like to become more literate about money, read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle and Women & Money: Owning The Power to Control Your Destiny by Suze Orman.

Planning for work

            The age of eligibility for Social Security will probably be pushed up even more and that SS income won’t be enough anyhow, so be prepared to stay in the work force until you are old enough to be on the Today show’s Smucker’s jam jar. Most Boomers already sense this scenario and plan on working as older adults.

             What kind of jobs they will find is another story. I’ve met highly educated retired teachers in the checkout line packing my groceries. To get around the hiring issues---low-paying jobs and employers prejudiced against older adults----some people plan to start their own businesses when they get older, or sell their crafts or offer their services part-time. And later life may be the time to buy that franchise or start that store…any smart enterprise that will float your financial boat.

            Now, if you love your work, keeping on with it into old age is a dream come true---seriously. Good work is a keystone of worth, a link to the rest of the world and a way to keep our brains from turning into tofu.

            So bottom line: develop some kind of plan for your later years. You don’t want to arrive in Geezerland without a suitcase full of ideas.

            But getting a Harley is not a full-fledged plan and Cranky Pants tells me a spring tour of Greek temples isn’t one either.

            Darn.

Getting Around (No Matter What)

I kiss my cane. At least I used to when it helped me get out and about instead of stuck at home with a bum hip. I also once loved a walker, though my relationship with crutches after a ski injury was more love-hate.

            What these things have in common is that they are assistive devices. But, if ever good things have a negative image among the populace, it’s assistive devices. People don’t like the thought of using them.

            I hear this a lot:  If I use a cane or walker, people will think I am old. Given that a recent national poll indicates there is more prejudice against older people than any other group, I can see the reasoning behind not wanting to look old. Who wants to get run over by a heavy stereotype?

            But and however, it’s time the stereotyping of older people got zapped by the reality that older doesn’t mean done in or finished. It means experienced. And my hope is that experience will teach smart older people that it is far better to use assistive devices to get out of the house than to stay home watching TV re-runs. First-run living is better than re-run fiction.

            Here are a few ideas for re-gaining physical freedom:

            Canes: If you need a bit of help maintaining stability or taking weight off a limb, consider canes. They worked for Fred Astaire. Today’s canes come in more fashionable styles so they lose that sour medicinal look. Still other canes fold—great for travel---and some are gorgeously carved. Or, you can do what I did when I once needed a cane: buy a plain one and decorate it yourself. I cut out travel images from wrapping paper and used a little glue-like Hodge Podge to glue the pictures onto the cane. I could have sold that cane dozens of times to people who loved its jauntiness. For more ideas and products, go to www.fashionablecanes.com or www.houseofcanes.com.

 

            Walkers: These have gone the way of baby strollers. They used to be plain, functional and cheap, but have now gone upscale---almost into the lifestyle statement category.

            The original design still does a good job---supporting people on three sides as they get out and about. If you ever used one of these after surgery, you know how helpful they are. With just two front wheels, they are also light, fold easily and can be tucked into a car without effort.  But they are almost all designed to be dull. Rich, rich will be the first manufacturer that wakes up and smells the Boomers. There will be Elvis walkers, rainbow walkers and walkers with green leaves on them. 

            Some of the newer walkers---aka rollators---are far better looking---think Racing Green---have four wheels---think off-road----and added functions. Most of all, they have a seat, a great boon, for it means one’s walking range is extended. A person can get out to a fair or festival and have his own seat with him when he gets tired. There’s also a basket for a purse, sweater, water or small groceries, so you can take your stuff along. Very cool.

            Heads Up: People need to be sure to set the brakes on the newer walkers before they sit down, so the more advanced walkers with brakes may not be the best choice for an older person who can’t remember things. Also, many walkers are adjusted too low, so the people using them are hunched over, squishing lungs, ruining posture and making them look like what they don’t want to look like---old.

            Warehouse clubs carry walkers as do some pharmacies that stock heavy duty medical supplies. Online, check out www.planetmobility or www.cane-n-able.com.

If You Want to Jazz Up Appearances

            People who get around regularly in wheelchairs have learned how to dress and accessorize to show they are not dead to the world. Those using other assistive devices might follow their lead. So forget the stereotypical older person’s wardrobe. (Those wearing beige cardigans will be sent to the principal.)             Instead, wear a baseball cap in a bright color. Sport a tee shirt that proclaims something funny or eye-catching. Cranky Pants sports one that says Older Than Dirt. Who knows what he’ll escalate to if he ever gets a walker? Wear a bright bandana. Hang a license plate on the back.

            Try a little outrageous geezer behavior. If not now, when? Flirt with the sex of your choice. Nobody arrested an old person for winking. (I never understood why older men are called ”dirty old men” for behavior that makes younger men “studly”.)

            Last, use everything you can to keep on keeping on. Whatever it is or whatever it looks like, your assistive device is doing you a favor. You don’t have to kiss it, but “appreciate” may be the appropriate word.

Emotional Health: Keep Your Bucket Full

 

            Pretend you carry around an invisible bucket. When it’s full, it represents your positive vibes. Empty, your morale has gone bust. Now the job is to fill that bucket with fresh water to keep the morale plumped up and your well-being deeply hydrated.

            How to keep the bucket filled? Do what you love, be with people who accept you so broadly---opinion warts and all----that you don’t have to watch your mouth. Nice too if they love you and you love them. Also good for the morale to have a place that feels like a sanctuary. Some call this home. Others call it Nature. Still others call it the neighborhood pub. Doesn’t matter. Whatever relaxes. Wherever you don’t have to watch your back. Whatever fills your invisible bucket.

            Then consider what and who will drain that precious bucket. What will dry up the water, empty the juice, leave the pail full of dust and spider webs? A job you hate, people who make your spirit dry and itchy, the feeling you have no real home refuge. And here’s the self-generated desiccator: feeling sorry for yourself.

Poor Me

            There probably isn’t a person on earth who hasn’t one time or other felt sorry for himself, often with good reason. Who hasn’t felt shoved off the good luck trail, thinking that everyone else was dancing on the path, you the only one without a map and limping along in the brush?

            Older adults have even more reason to revert to the poor me trap. Reaching full maturity---aka the falling apart stage---we suffer cataracts, bad knees, low energy, hips that don’t work, joints that talk and feet that show their mileage. We are more vulnerable to heat, cold, smoke inhalation, poverty, insomnia, feelings of uselessness and certain dark thoughts like wondering when we’ll fall off the conveyor belt of life into eternity. (Some even worry once they’re plopped into eternity whether they‘ll be taking the up or down elevator.) But none of these thoughts or conditions will fill our bucket. Indeed, they can punch holes in the pail.

Stopping the Morale Leaks

            There are three secrets to happy aging and keeping the bucket full. One is to stop worrying about physical decline and do something either to prevent or fix whatever is driving you crazy. Modern surgery does wonders with eyes, hips and knees. Exercise and good nutrition--- plus avoiding processed foods with weird ingredients and high fructose levels---should promote health and increase energy levels. In other words, a lot of what ails us is manageable.

            The second secret is gratitude. When the levels are down emotionally, see the bucket as half full, not half empty. Be grateful that you actually have what you have. I know that is a platitude, an old saw, but clichés got to be clichés because they are true. Few things are as good for the morale as giving thanks for the good things you enjoy, whatever they may be.

            Now here’s a true cornball story about gratitude: Every morning I walk down the driveway to pick up this paper and I think of it as my Lucky Walk. I hear the birds doing their morning chirps and think I am Bird Lucky. I look at what’s growing and think I am Plant Lucky, more specifically, Lavender Lucky. I pick up the paper and think I am Writing Lucky. (Look, people actually read what I write. How absolutely lucky is that?)

            Next, I see the houses in either side of me and think about the people who live there and know I am Neighbor Lucky. And so it goes. On those mini-walks, I am also Goat Lucky, Horse Lucky and even Chicken Lucky because my neighbors not only love people, they love animals that I can enjoy without having to clean the barn. One might say I am even Horse Pucky Lucky.

            So those little walks can set the theme for the day: gratitude, especially global gratitude for the sheer miracle of being alive, breathing on a small dirt clod hurtling through space at muchmillion miles per hour, heading who knows where. The trick is not to care where, but just be happy for the ride.

            Now, the third secret…well, I forget. But then I am allowed to forget as I am practically old enough to have dated Cro-Magnon men. But I do remember that your job and mine is to keep our buckets full and share the overflow.

            Look around. Many folks are wandering around with dry pails. So throw a little water on someone today.  It’s a sure way to fill your own bucket. 

Thinking Smart, Thinking Ahead

Second Wind

            Some day you and I will be over the hill. And I say better over the hill than under it.

            Still, the fact is that sometime, when we are a bit more frail and doddery, we may need help to remain independent in our own homes. And if the body and energy falter, it’s helpful and sometimes necessary---to have someone do the driving, shopping, cooking, home repairs and all the other chores of life. It’s also nice when you are sick to have someone bring chicken soup and the pain pills du jour and of course the ice packs after your annual bad fall in the garden. And then there is the basic need for human contact, for pleasant company, for someone to nag and be nagged by---one way to know you are loved.

            I know, all that is what you have a mate for, but couples do not dive into Eternity in sync. It’s not a synchronized event—one always leaves earth before the other, which is a sobering thought, though it can be used to help appreciate your mate more now---absence making the heart grow fonder before the actual absence.

            What’s more, when it comes to counting on mates for help, many older people are not only widowed, but single through choice or divorce. Some are also childless or alienated from their children, so no caring kids are coming to the rescue if one does begin to falter in the life chores department.

             In yesteryear, the old folks and the young folks lived together---my widowed grammy shared my bed when she was old---but today, the middle manager son is transferred to the other coast, the daughter married and moved to Maui and the black sheep kid lives in Thailand and not for the weather. And even if the adult kids were still around within helping distance, most older people I know don’t want to be a burden.

            Like two-year-olds, we want to do it ourselves. Or maybe with a bit of help from other sources.

One New Source to the Rescue           

            So, assuming your family may not be the solution or even the one you want… and assuming you and I do not have a butler, driver, maid and handyperson on our household staff, we will need help and so will millions of other people in the US. And, mirable dictu---which means No Kidding in Latin---there is actually a solution to our needs, something that is happening quietly all over the country,

Making Your Own Extended Family

            The solution, already a reality in some places, is to invent an area support group, a “village” in your town. It means getting together a membership organization of older people that offers the following services: driving to appointments or shopping, getting the house repairs done, cleaning, help with housework, care when you’re down and out physically plus nutrition services---which often means meals delivered to the door.

            The model for this solution comes from Beacon Hill Village in Boston. The neighbors there got together and organized to help each other survive as older adults in their own homes. The Village offers household and home maintenance services, health and wellness help, including exercise opportunities. And since isolation can be a problem for older people, they also arrange small get-togethers, parties and trips as well as cultural opportunities for expanding minds and life experience. All in all, they say they want to make “remaining at home a safe, comfortable and cost-effective solution.”

            Through media exposure, people all over the US heard about Beacon Hill Village. They had so many requests for information about organizing this service for older adults that they now have a detailed handbook that covers all the how’s of starting a membership organization.

            The manual, which can be ordered by mail, phone or online offers help from the founders, the original business plan, marketing materials, fundraising letters, board and committee structures, budgets and ways to help you develop your own Beacon Village. The price for this package is $350 for non-profits and neighborhood groups or $500 for profits and municipalities.

            The web site is www.beaconhillvillage.org and the email is bhvillage@aol.com. Phone: 617-723-4117. Address: 74 Joy Street, Boston MA 02114.

            Doesn’t all this sound better than counting on Black Baa to come back from Thailand to pick up your meds at the drug store? Besides, he might make off with your pain pills.

            

The Daughter Makeover

It is probably a good idea not to look too much like yesterday.

If your get-up is from the 1940’s, 50’s or 60’s, people might think your mind is old-fashioned too. And that’s a liability when you are older. It can work against you both in the workplace and in life.

But brain fossilization just isn’t true of most older people I know. In fact, because they read and actually watch hour-long news shows, older people may be more up-to-date on world happenings than many youngsters who have their faces stuck solely in FaceBook.

Anyhow, I think it’s sensible to have your insides and outside match and when an opportunity came my way to get a little more with-it on my outside, I took advantage. This big opportunity for chic-ing up is known as visiting your daughter, though it can be done with anyone who knows you well enough to tell you that your pants are baggy in back and you need a new ‘do”.

Your Own Reality Show
The trick to this kind of truth-telling is to have the hide of a rhino and a willingness to throw your old lipstick in the trash. A credit card helps too, as you will be told to buy liquids to get the yellow out of your hair, to acquire a handbag that doesn’t have an I Like Ike button on the bottom, to buy some lip gloss which makes your lips shiny---and you looking a bit like a street-walker. (The geezer goes a-tarting---this week’s episode!)

So here’s what I learned in my week at The Daughter Spa----things we were taught to do that are totally not on fashion’s radar screen today.

• Suits are out. Bottoms and tops should not match, but they should go together. Going together is very liberally interpreted in today’s world.
• Shoes and handbags should not match and we fossils need to stop saying purse and pocketbook and start saying bag. (Bags have gotten so huge with tons of metal hardware---they look like portable armored cars.)
• Fanny backs are for dorks. (I will remain a dork: They are useful and a way to carry more junk onto a plane. Also, we don’t have to ask where our keys are. They are on our bellybutton.)
• Bright lipsticks, weird-colored eye shadows and eyeliners are out at The Daughter Spa, but colored hair is still in.
• When it comes to hair color, expensive streaking is still in and reduces root worry. (Gray is not yet the new blond, but I’m hoping.)
• White sneakers---our first choice footwear---is out. We can no longer be little old ladies in sneakers, but I intend to sneak my sneakers into my wardrobe plan which is so far: bottoms with elastic waists, tops that don’t have to be ironed and that don’t show marinara spots.
• Avoid bubble hair-do’s, aka the silver helmet effect. Also, condition your hair. Dull hair is a sure sign that you are nearing your expiration date. Look for products what concentrate on making you shine again.
• As for guys, they should drop the buzz cut and the thin ties of the 50’s, and preferably drop the ties altogether unless somebody died or got married. Unlike older women, older guys can still wear shorts and nobody cares about the knee replacement scars. They are marks of honor, like the dueling scars of yore.
• Anybody of any gender older than 12 is too old for a Speedo. Lands End has many bathing costumes for older people who left Bikiniville long ago.
• For women, waxing to de-hair various parts is in. So is making topiary out of a certain private spot. But I do not want an intimate relationship with hedge trimmers so I will live and die as nature made me---except for the lipgloss.

Words for the Wise
I usually hate beauty books: the advice is to buy mucho products and try to look young, young, young. Phooey, but I do say try to look your best and not like a relic in Madame Tussaud’s museum. Though it has an annoying title---How Not To Look Old---Charla Krupp’s book does have some tips that can be useful to the older woman who wants to look her best.

Yes, I know---being your best is more important, but if you still wear The Suit with the matching pocketbook and baby doll heels, my daughter will be at your door. She’ll put you in handcuffs and take you shopping.

Keep Your Emotional Bucket Full

Pretend you carry around an invisible bucket. When it’s full, it represents your positive vibes. Empty, your morale has gone bust. Now the job is to fill that bucket with fresh water to keep the morale plumped up and your well-being deeply hydrated.

How to keep the bucket filled? Do what you love, be with people who accept you so broadly---opinion warts and all----that you don’t have to watch your mouth. Nice too if they love you and you love them. Also good for the morale to have a place that feels like a sanctuary. Some call this home. Others call it Nature. Still others call it the neighborhood pub. Doesn’t matter. Whatever relaxes. Wherever you don’t have to watch your back. Whatever fills your invisible bucket.

Then consider what and who will drain that precious bucket. What will dry up the water, empty the juice, leave the pail full of dust and spider webs? A job you hate, people who make your spirit dry and itchy, the feeling you have no real home refuge. And here’s the self-generated desiccator: feeling sorry for yourself.

Poor Me
There probably isn’t a person on earth who hasn’t one time or other felt sorry for himself, often with good reason. Who hasn’t felt shoved off the good luck trail, thinking that everyone else was dancing on the path, you the only one without a map and limping along in the brush?

Older adults have even more reason to revert to the poor me trap. Reaching full maturity---aka the falling apart stage---we suffer cataracts, bad knees, low energy, hips that don’t work, joints that talk and feet that show their mileage. We are more vulnerable to heat, cold, smoke inhalation, poverty, insomnia, feelings of uselessness and certain dark thoughts like wondering when we’ll fall off the conveyor belt of life into eternity. (Some even worry once they’re plopped into eternity whether they‘ll be taking the up or down elevator.) But none of these thoughts or conditions will fill our bucket. Indeed, they can punch holes in the pail.

Stopping the Morale Leaks
There are three secrets to happy aging and keeping the bucket full. One is to stop worrying about physical decline and do something either to prevent or fix whatever is driving you crazy. Modern surgery does wonders with eyes, hips and knees. Exercise and good nutrition--- plus avoiding processed foods with weird ingredients and high fructose levels---should promote health and increase energy levels. In other words, a lot of what ails us is manageable.

The second secret is gratitude. When the levels are down emotionally, see the bucket as half full, not half empty. Be grateful that you actually have what you have. I know that is a platitude, an old saw, but clichés got to be clichés because they are true. Few things are as good for the morale as giving thanks for the good things you enjoy, whatever they may be.

Now here’s a true cornball story about gratitude: Every morning I walk down the driveway to pick up this paper and I think of it as my Lucky Walk. I hear the birds doing their morning chirps and think I am Bird Lucky. I look at what’s growing and think I am Plant Lucky, more specifically, Lavender Lucky. I pick up the paper and think I am Writing Lucky. (Look, people actually read what I write. How absolutely lucky is that?)

Next, I see the houses in either side of me and think about the people who live there and know I am Neighbor Lucky. And so it goes. On those mini-walks, I am also Goat Lucky, Horse Lucky and even Chicken Lucky because my neighbors not only love people, they love animals that I can enjoy without having to clean the barn. One might say I am even Horse Pucky Lucky.

So those little walks can set the theme for the day: gratitude, especially global gratitude for the sheer miracle of being alive, breathing on a small dirt clod hurtling through space at muchmillion miles per hour, heading who knows where. The trick is not to care where, but just be happy for the ride.

Now, the third secret…well, I forget. But then I am allowed to forget as I am practically old enough to have dated Cro-Magnon men. But I do remember that your job and mine is to keep our buckets full and share the overflow.

Look around. Many folks are wandering around with dry pails. So throw a little water on someone today. It’s a sure way to fill your own bucket.

Adventures in Dating

      Do older people date or has the mating scene been left behind with the bellbottoms and the lava lamps? Well, many singles over 50 would like to date and become doubles, but they have trouble knowing how. The bar scene seems ridiculous now:

    What’s your sign?

    Centrum Silver.

    So what’s a lonely older person to do? Here are some suggestions adapted from my book, Hot Granny. Though the principles below apply to all seekers, this advice was directed to women looking for single men:

What to do?

Try: The vast resources of other women. They know men, They have address books and memories. Their cousins, their co-workers and even their rejects may be just what would interest you. And you don’t have to already know these helpful women, Unless a stranger is talking to a lamp post, talk to her. I met my husband through a woman I sat next to on a plane.

Try: Getting out into the world of organizations. I know several people who were married late in life to someone they met in church. Others try political fund-raisers or they volunteer for food banks, community radio, music groups or alumni organizations. With the economy so constipated, do-good organizations need nice-do-gooders like you.

Try: Taking a class. Learn to fly fish. Go to a line-dancing class. Check out the offerings of the community college.

Try: Travel. Take a cruise. Take a cruise directed to an interest of yours…like jazz. Try an Elderhostel tour.

Try: Recovery organizations. If you have had a struggle with substance abuse, find an organization that encourages sobriety. One friend travels around the world, serene in the knowledge that anywhere she goes, she will be welcomed by fellow AA members---all of whom have a similar idea about how to have a good time.

Try: Getting active. Join a gym or a biking club. Hike with those who love the rivers and the mountains.

Try: The performing arts. Join a theater group, a band or a choir.

Try: The Internet. The Net is an adventure in cyberspace, but watch your back and know that many men who advertise for company already have it---they’re married.

Internet Adventures

            Dating sites on the Internet have proliferated like horny bunnies.  Each site may have different rules: photos required or not, memberships fees or not. But all will ask you to say something about yourself.

        If you have trouble tooting your own horn, you can ask a friend to help you with the write-up. Veterans of cyberdating suggest getting a book to learn how to write an appealing profile, take a good photo and discover ways to protect your personal privacy, such as www.myprivateline.com, a service providing a toll-free number that can be forwarded to your real phone number. (That’s so you don’t have to give out your home phone number right away--or ever).

        If you do decide to cyberdate, wear a well-tailored rhino hide. Older women can get bruised by the reality that some men are only after younger game. And the going standards used to evaluate women are often not related to character, kindness or experience---but to cuteness, bust size and layability. So, cyberdater, beware. And if your ego starts shrinking into a dry dustball because of rejections, stop the Internet action and get back to flesh and blood introductions.

Same Old, Same Old and Yet….

        If you haven’t dated in a while or even if you have, first dates as an older person can be just as nerve-wracking as they were when you were sixteen. Mellow years but same fears. Even the questions are the same:  What if you hate each other? What if you really like him and he doesn’t like you? What if he likes you and you hate him? Should you (blank) on the first date?

            But some concerns are different: You will no longer waste time on jerks. You will survive if he doesn’t like you. You now know how to gracefully disengage. You can finally trust yourself to decide what you want to do on a first date or indeed, on any date at all.

            So go forth and know it’s possible to be valued in your going-on-geezer years. Yesterday I told Cranky Pants, my late-life hubby, that a fund-raising mailer was asking him to donate an “appreciated asset”. He said no, he was going to hang on to me.         

###

Friends: The Best Blasts from the Past

There are friends and then there are old, old friends. The Double O friends are the people you knew at camp, grade school, high school or college. Maybe in the service, maybe from the old home town, but you, long ago, shared the same stomping ground. (Catholic schools count double points as a stomping ground.)

This shared history is powerful friendship glue and few emotional pleasures are as keen as reconnecting with these blasts from the past---maybe with someone who used to wear pedal pushers and giggle with you about Snooky Lanson on TV. Then there were the boys, now deep into their Social Security years. They wore porkpie hats, narrow ties and talked about bases and how to get there. (Rarely did they hit a home run in the 1950’s, but it was intriguing to imagine.)   

Taking Up Where You Left Off

      One of the miracles of growing older is finding that these friendships are a renewable resource. The character, the humor, the spunkiness, the smarts that attracted you are likely to still attract decades later. Last week, the woman who made me laugh fifty years ago at the wrong time in school made me laugh at a memorial service for our dead classmates. Bad girls---and inappropriate still.

      Probably inappropriate forever, though we are too old to go to detention. And my goal is to be inappropriately giggling with Witty Patricia 20 years from now.

Some Things Never Change

            Well, they change a little. Women still are champs at exchanging confidences, though the character of the subject matter differs over the decades. We still do talk about men or the lack of them, makeup, clothes and family. We no longer exchange recipes---been there, done that. We no longer complain about cramps, unless they are in our legs at night.  To our credit, we talk a lot more about politics, the world, the environment and voting. We seem to have become far more aware of the main issues on the global docket and more involved than ever in trying to bring about change. So we’ve improved. Gone beyond Snooky to Obama.

            Men will have to speak up for themselves, but my observation at home is that the people Cranky Pants loved back then and still knows now are high on his list. And perhaps one of the greatest male mentors when it comes to treasuring vintage friendships was Tim Russert, devoted to all the people he knew way back when in Buffalo. Case in point: Sister Lucille who showed up at his memorial service.

Words to the Wise

            Maybe you’ve stayed in touch with the oldies and goodies and maybe you haven’t. If you want to get in touch, pick up a phone. If you don’t know where the person is, try Google, a marvelous online tool for finding lost lambs. I re-found a friend on Google after forty-five years, a woman I had lost to time, travel and marriage. (Wedding bells do break up that old gang, especially when a woman changes her name, which is why I kept my maiden moniker, so the kids from 8^th grade could find me.) Many schools also keep rosters of alums. To find relatives, try the genealogy websites or call the family busybody.

     Note that later life friendships have become chic. There’s a new and growing business in girlfriend getaways with many web sites and even a magazine that advertises special places where women can go to enjoy time-outs together. If you Google girlfriend getaways, you’ll come up with many options for group get-togethers. (ABC News touts the nearby Napa Valley as one of the 10 best.)  There’s even a niche tee shirt business that concentrates on “she-shirts” for girlfriend getaways. And for those with money to burn on terrycloth-robe resorts, a site called www.girlaway.com lists the world’s best destination spas.

But you don’t have to spend money or set aside a week. Just go grab an old old friend and raise a glass to the past. Sometimes the past is a very pleasant place to visit, even if you don’t want to live there.
.

How to Get Family Email Without a Computer

           OK, you know and I know there are people who did not grow up digital. They were tech-deprived. Their messages were not instant, their friends lived next door, not on Facebook, and when they were young, a lap top was something you sat on if you were a little kid in need of comfort.

            Those people today are known as grandparents and some of them---I won’t name names---are resisting the best part of the modern world---computers, family email and getting the latest pics of the grandkids playing soccer.  I know these resisters and here’s how they think:

            If I get involved with computers, the computer will explode when I push the wrong button and maybe I too will explode with frustration because I don’t understand what it’s all about and maybe I am too old and dumb to learn. So I’ll stay out of the fray. 

            But these grandparents are leaving themselves out of the main family communication loop. And though older people may prefer to communicate by snail mail and the phone---it’s what they know---the grandkids they want to hear from don’t. Let’s see a show of hands here from those grandparents who get letters and regular phone calls from their grandchildren.

I thought so. Today’s kids speak email and if grandparents want to stay in touch, they have to put a toe in the tech water. Luckily, there’s a pleasant, easy compromise solution and it is called Presto. Remember that name because it’s how people can get emails and photos from the family without owning a computer or knowing how to do anything but pick up their printed-out email at home.

So What Is Presto?

            Think of it as nana technology, just made for grandparents. The device looks somewhat like a little fax machine and, like a fax, it plugs into a phone line. Made by HP, the device is called a printing mailbox and that’s just what it is. Family and friends can send emails and photos and presto, the little printing mailbox goes to work and prints them out.

            There’s no spam and no way to get in trouble on the net with criminals and porn salespeople. If gramps wants porn, he’s going to have to get a computer. And if he wants to send email back to his family, he’ll also have to get a computer as Presto provides incoming emails and photos only.

All of which is surely better than nothing. I think of Presto printouts as a family news report---who is doing what, what the new baby or the new house looks like, how little Madison’s smile has changed now that she’s lost her front teeth.

The Presto machine is on sale as I write this for 99 bucks, though it usually retails online at places like Amazon for $150. To run it, you need the $9.99 monthly services of the Presto people. Practically, someone in the family who is comfortable with computers will set the device up, though the Presto people say the process is a breeze.

Learn much more at www.presto.com. They even have a section of testimonials from older people who did not want to be Presto-ized, but who changed their minds as soon as the emails and the family pictures began appearing in their living rooms without their doing a thing. No typing. No sitting in front of screens. You can reassure grandma by telling her Martha Stewart was so impressed by Presto she did a TV segment on it.

Now, if you are looking for a Father’s Day present for a computerless older dad, think Presto. Maybe several kids can go in on it. The son or daughter physically closest to the parent would be the one who sets it up. And also, it’s not just a device for older folks. The Presto people gave out their printing mailboxes to mothers of soldiers in Iraq. 

So thank you, Presto. And maybe your service will gently pull some grandparents into the 21^st century.

Come on in, the century is fine.

Planning for the Future---Or Not

Do we know each other well enough to talk about the deep personal stuff? Yes? Then here’s a column that may help in the years ahead:

When you hit 65 and the birthdays after, you’ve moved into a new neighborhood of life. Some part of you knows you could graduate from the planet any day now and nobody would say you died too young. And this could happen just as you were enjoying senior matinees at the movies, bass fishing shows on TV and payback checks from Social Security.

And next comes the secret question we all ask ourselves: When will IT happen?

Then the next questions: Should we pay off my credit card bills or leave them for the kids? Should we plan long-range as if we would hit 100---say plant a redwood, adopt a foster kid or start a new career or marriage? Or should we plan as if IT will happen tomorrow? Maybe we should finally make that will leaving out the disagreeable Jimmy or maybe we should wander over to the undertaker and pick out a designer urn. (Is Versace into that yet?)

Another option: Maybe we should recognize that we are on a sure-to-sink personal Titanic so we might as well go first class. Live it up. Eat chocolate until we smell like new Hershey bars. Drink double dirty martinis. Grab the next attractive stranger on a street and kiss him or her, risking jail for the sybaritic life. Or is it hedonism? (I always get them mixed up which means I don’t do enough of either.)

Another option: Don’t think, Don’t plan. Let life and its opposite happen.

So What To Do, If Anything?

            Me, I am not zen enough for the last option---doing nothing---which is why one friend always tells me: don’t push the river, it flows by itself. But I push rivers and urge streams along because I like the illusion of a little control in my life. So I try to come up with some sensible way to live, not knowing how long I may have---20 minutes or 20 years. (If it were 20 minutes, I certainly would stop writing this and put on lipstick to ready myself.)

            But I split the difference, knowing either is possible—tomorrow or 2036. I try to live in the moment, enjoying every day, knowing I have done the paper work required of us older adults---the will, the power of attorney and all the health care stuff. (But I overdid it once, paying for a cremation back in the 1970’s and now I can’t find the paperwork. Neither can the bonfire people. Up the creek on this one.)

            As for downsizing and passing on the legacy possessions, I asked which kid wanted which thing so everybody gets something of emotional value from the house. But since none of us will remember what we said, I’m writing that down now. And Cranky Pants and I won’t let visiting kids leave the house without taking something. The somethings they don’t have room for go to a thrift store. 

Planning on a Long Future

            On the other hand, I went back to school at 65 to get an advanced degree in gerontology, which is the study of geezer life forms---all the better to write and broadcast about later life. I also got re-married in my late 60’s---Cranky Pants and I thought as “long as you both shall live” was finally doable at our ages. And now I am planning what I want to be doing in my 90’s besides still writing.

            So I try to cover both sides of the question. What I don’t do is live every day as if it were my last. If it were my last and I knew it, why it could ruin the whole day. Instead, I appreciate each day as if there weren’t an endless supply of days.

Because there aren’t.

Words to the Wise

            Here are two helpful books if you want to work both sides of the lifespan street: Putting Things in Order by David Finkle and Ellen Baumritter, a write-in diary and workbook that helps organize papers, thoughts and wishes. And on the other side, try Dare to Be 100: 99 Steps to a Long Healthy Life by Dr. Walter Bortz, who gives this advice: Keep your foot lashed to the pedal. No braking allowed.

            OK, doc. (He’s 78.) 

###

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Truth About Grandpa & Grandma

Some of you do one thing that really warms a columnist’s heart. You clip out these words, sending them to people you care about. Now that’s just about the highest literary prize there is---ending up on a refrigerator door--- and I want to thank you. Below, by the way of thanks, is a column that you may want to pass on to your adult kids.

The Truth From Grandma and Gramps

* If we geezers are not now vegetarians, it is unlikely we will give up our BLT’s tomorrow, even if you think we should. (Incidentally, you are probably right about the virtues of the veggie/grain diet, but the habits of our stomachs seem to overcome the conclusions of our brains. Still, take heart from the fact we are eating fewer things with eyes and more things with leaves.) 

* You should keep pestering us on one subject---becoming at least as computer literate as our grandchildren. So keep on your soapboxes. You are right on this one. Without some knowledge of computers, we are out of it and will be getting more out of it as the years pass and as everybody but us and the dog does email.

* You are in charge of your kids and greatly influence their relationship with us. Even if you don’t think we are the perfect grandparents, put in a good word for us now and then. Maybe tell our grandchildren a family story that puts us in a good light, rather then tell them about the time Mom almost burned the house down or the time Dad told off Aunt Martina at Thanksgiving, saying there were two turkeys at the table and she was one.

* We may pooh-pooh Father’s Day and Mother’s Day as commercial, but we are secretly delighted when you remember us. A phone call is nice, a visit better and a visit with a meal not involving our cooking services best of all. And no, Dad doesn’t need a new tie and you should not give in to his whining about being the only grandpa on the block without a flat screen TV.

* If you think one or both of us shouldn’t be driving, state your case. We may not want to hear it, but we also don’t want to injure anyone. And please help us find another transportation solution because we surely don’t like to be grounded any more than you did. And if we at first don’t want to hear you, remember this: As you wanted to get out of the house and on the road at 16, we geezers have the same instincts. The Route 66 Dream never dies. Old drivers never die---someone just takes away our car keys.   

* We may offer you our family possessions while we are still living, just to lighten up on worldly stuff and to have the pleasure of seeing what we love at your house. If you can use these things, say yes. It will not jinx us or send us to a premature death, nor does it mean you’re greedy.

* Alternatively, we may ask you which possessions of ours would mean something special to you after we graduate from the planet. Please speak up and tell us. Again, it’s no jinx, but it will give us pleasure to know the silver teapot or the turkey platter will be going to a good home. So please tell us. (We may need reminding to write it down so that all you kids can know who gets what.)

* Don’t get bent if we drop the habit of giving holiday presents and go instead to the retreat position of sending greeting cards. We love you, but we really don’t know what you or your kids want anymore. Our incomes shrink in retirement and some of us are not often thanked for the presents we have sent. So don’t get bent if we aren’t Santa anymore. Been there, done that.

* Come visit. Some grandchildren have never seen the homes of their grandparents, never tasted grandma’s meatloaf and never ridden on grandpa’s tractor. If you want your children to be influenced by something other than the video game du jour, Grand Theft Auto IV, let them hang out a bit with us.

And we promise not to tell them all those embarrassing stories about you.

###

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Q & A: Common Issues After 50

Here are some basic questions about life after 50, ones I’ve been asked since it got around that I am interested in gerontology----the study of geezer life forms. I’m hoping the answers might help readers who are wrestling with the common issues of aging:

Q:  I just turned 50 and got my draft notice from the AARP. I don’t like growing older. Too many wrinkles. Any advice?

            A. Look at it this way. Age is a party you don’t want to go to but once you get there, you have a good time. Some report the later years are perpetual recess with no teacher looking on.  Frankly, it’s great to do what you want after doing what everybody else wanted for 50 or 60 years. And remember, the only way to avoid a new birthday is not to be here anymore. So write this in lipstick on your mirror: Better to be over the hill than under it. Not that I think 50 is over the hill. No age is over the hill if you decide to see life, not as a hill that tops out at 50, but as an interesting journey through many ages and stages. And stop looking at your wrinkles. Seriously. Worrying about wrinkles is like doing housework---not the most interesting way to spend a life.

            And don’t knock AARP without giving it at least a chance. Visit www.aarp.org for information about a huge variety of subjects interesting to people 50 and over. A sister site, www.aarpmagazine.org, presents articles online in case you didn’t finish the AARP magazine in the doctor’s waiting room. The AARP organization and its magazine have been stereotyped as fodder for geezers, but they are, in fact, a lot more up to date than the people who don’t read them imagine. (Disclaimer: I will have an article in the summer issue of the AARP magazine so I have profited in the low three figures from this association.)

Q: My grandson is having his sixth birthday next month. His parents have hired a clown and a jump house. I’m invited, but don’t want to go. Little kids’ parties should be for little kids, plus I am already getting hints that a special present is due. It all puts me off. What to do?

            A: Some children’s parties have gone over the top. It’s high living for tiny tots. Grandparents who grew up in the Depression may have trouble with that.

First, if you don’t want to go, don’t go. You’ve earned the right to escape torture at the hands of rowdy six-year olds. But please give some kind of a present. Just don’t be guilt-tripped into giving more than you want. So say no nicely to the party or make a cameo appearance, but keep your opinions about the event to yourself.  Wet blanketing the occasion is a no-no.

Q: I took early retirement and had a ball relaxing for six months---but now I want more focus in my life. Long ago I wanted to be an artist. Is there a way I could do that now without making a fool of myself? 

            A: It’s only foolish to sit on your dreams. You’ve gone through a common first stage of retirement---the honeymoon stage---where you enjoyed the release from work as well as many fine napping opportunities.  And for those who have been chained to work, retirement may be life’s first chance at sustained creativity of all kinds---photography, writing, arts and crafts. The trick is to foster those feelings instead of stifling them as too foolish, too late or too ambitious. Read this excellent guide to discovering your creativity: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Also, check out the art courses at colleges and recreation programs. Last, make yourself a place at home to experiment. You don’t need a loft in Paris. A kitchen table will do. Enjoy.

###

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Saints Among Us

There are some saints you don’t pray to. Instead, you pray about them and for them. The saints I have in mind are the family members who care for the ill, frail, infirm and brain-impaired. These caregivers are the silent saints of our culture. In California alone, there are 1.8 million householders caring for someone 50 or older, mostly parents or spouses.

If you haven’t been there, it’s hard to imagine what these caregivers contribute and what they endure in the name of love. For them, love isn’t some ethereal feeling, it’s cleaning up after Dad when he’s peed on the floor. It’s dealing with Mom when she doesn’t know who you are. It’s getting the meals, doing the laundry, giving the meds, keeping the environment safe, preventing falls, being on night watch, wondering how to feed a person who can’t swallow, learning how to understand someone with a stroke-induced speech loss, figuring out how to lift a husband out of bed without ending up bedridden yourself, and last----and it’s always last----learning how to take care of yourself so there will be enough of you left to take care of someone else.

Bald Tax Facts

And what these caregivers provide does effect you, even if you can’t imagine how. Here’s how: the care they gave at home is what keeps their loved ones out of nursing facilities where sixty-eight percent of patients are on Medicaid, a government-financed program, a program funded by your taxes. So if you haven’t yet applauded home caregivers for humanitarian reasons, you should thank them for providing tax-free services to people-in-need, many of whom would otherwise be getting publicly-funded care.

And what’s more, caregivers render these services often at great expense to themselves, either not being able to work outside the house, or having to work restricted hours, or losing time on the job to responsibilities at home. And you can imagine what those diminished work options mean to their own eventual Social Security benefits.

Local Help for the Sainted

            There is some help for local caregivers---never enough, of course, a lack made worse by the recent closing of the Lutz Center. One upcoming opportunity, however, is a series of classes for caregivers called: Yes, I Can! 

Free to all family caregivers, the classes are on Mondays, April 14 though May 19, with a final class on Thursday May 29. The time is 10 AM to 1 PM and the place Sierra Nevada Home Care, 1020 McCourtney Road, Grass Valley. Reservations at 1-800-635-0220.

            Organized by medical social worker and family caregiver, Evelyn Donaldson, all the essential subjects are covered: caring for the caregiver, communication and behaviors, body mechanics, incontinence, legal and financial planning, nutrition and speech and community resources---where to go for help.

Other Help

            There’s excellent help on the Internet at www.caregiver.org, home of the Family Caregiver Alliance. They have an entire section devoted to caregiving tips and offer audio classes in the subject complete with downloadable workbooks. There’s also an online discussion group.

So those are still more reasons for a caregiver to become computer literate if she or he has not yet learned to do the digital dance: all the practical help and camaraderie available online from Family Caregiver Alliance. 

Words to the Wise

            Other local sources of aid can be located by calling our wonderful, all-knowing Helpline. They not only offer resources for caregivers, they offer help to all ages and almost all problems except where to get free Botox injections and if that is your only problem, I want to change places with you. Contact Helpline on the net by googling: Grass Valley Helpline. Their email is helpline@nccn.net and their phone is 530-273-2273.

            Last, the next caregiver you meet, genuflect. Crown her with laurels. Better yet, bring her supper, a bottle of wine and maybe offer a few hours of respite. She deserves nothing less.

###

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pack Rat Is In

I can pass for normal, I really can, but I wonder if I am in fact a garden-variety geezer. Or maybe something else?---like a nostalgia-addled, memory-ridden, photo-burdened acquisitor of memorabilia? You tell me.

            Is it normal, not only to be a pack rat, but a pack mule riding around in her life with hundred-pound sacks of old snapshots and mementos? Compare my experience with yours: Did you save your dance cards from the 1950’s? Did you save the wedding guest list your mom wrote back then as well as the dorm assignment mailed to you in 1954? Did you save birthday cards from the 70’s, to-do lists from the 80’s and your week-at-a-glance calendars for the last few decades?

            Me, I can tell you what I needed to do in October 1970: “Decide about downstairs, meet with Sam Radelfinger, ZPG meeting”, and I can also tell you who came to Thanksgiving the same year. I even have the menu and the head count: 24.

            Is this normal? Am I nuts or just a natural born historian?

            Whatever I am, it’s got to change. Because a keeper kind of person accumulates, and accumulates and pretty soon her past is bigger than she is.

            Case in point: We had a small leak in a pipe under the house where I stored my banker’s boxes full of photos and memorabilia. Yesterday I discovered the boxes were damp and today, boxes emptied, the entire house is littered with my past drying out. It’s on the dining room table, the kitchen counters, the bed, the bookcases and the heat registers.

My parents’ past is drying out along with mine---photos taken at the seashore in 1932, pictures taken with a Brownie way back when skirts were longer and hair shorter. Yes, even my grandparents and great-grandparents are drying out on the dining room table.

            Oh, the sweet smell of mildew in the morning.

So what do I do with the stuff I rescued? What do you do with your stuff?

Do I pack it all away in archivally correct see-through sleeves? That would fill about 20 huge binders and they would have no room to rest in this house, the shelf space being taken by Cranky Pants’ photo albums from 1958 to 2008. (It takes one to know one.)

Should I scan and digitize it all, putting it on the Internet for future generations to see? Maybe give it to the kids and let them do with it as they will? Or---calling up some Zen energy---stop worrying about it and let go? Realize it is not my present and future life I am trying to hold onto, just images of lives long gone. Over.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Words to the Wise

Well, I still haven’t figured it out except to stop the damage and think before I store things. And I am not sure a digital camera is going to help.

Say I do take years of digital pics and transfer everything onto CD’s. Well, 50 years from now, when my grandkids go searching for their pasts, will the computers of the future be able to read the media of today? My new computers can’t read anything I did when computers first came out. And you do remember 78’s, 45’s and 33’s?  And CD’s can disintegrate. On the other hand, I’ve heard there are archiving spots on the Internet, but how do I know they’ll be in business in 2058?

Which is why I like physical images I can hold in my hand: eyes and hands don’t go out of style. Maybe I just take the best of the images---either scanned from the old pics or newly transferred from a digital camera---print them out on nice archival paper, stick a few of the very best in a safe deposit box for future generations, put some up around the house in frames and let the rest go. Maybe that will be progress.

Meanwhile, it looks as if I will be having dinner tonight with my great grandmother on the table. I heard some of my ancestors used to end up under it, so that’s progress too.

###

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Geezers Going Green

Going Green

Going green is not just for the young and Birkenstocked. I have gone green without changing a thing. The same ecological miracle could happen to you. Maybe when Earth Day comes you will even be hailed as the cool geezer with a teeny, tiny carbon footprint.

Here’s how I got green without even trying:

I was just a run-of-the-mill thrift queen from New England, the place where my cheap---I mean thrifty---ancestors settled in swampland because swamps were a good buy. They and other queer ducks like them are still known back there as Swamp Yankees.

Now those love-a-bargain genes show up in my life today, not in swampland, but in a great love of thrift stores, second-hand anything and, most of all, garage sales, my idea of a morning well spent. This penchant has earned me no little suspicion among those who think, if you can afford something, you should buy it. These are people who would die if they were seen prowling a Salvation Army store and who never learned the glory of the hunt for garage sale treasure. (Clueless on the old stuff front, they probably think eBay is a body of water.) 

Anyhow, given the scorn heaped upon me by people of a buy-new disposition, imagine my relief to learn recently that I was not tight, but green. Ha! Redemption is at hand for the cheap of heart. Because it seems that recycling clothes, books, furniture and other objects of desire is good for the planet. It means no energy and materials are used to make new stuff. It means that no landfills are filled. It means that you are green, good and will definitely go to Ecology Heaven where you will hang out with John Muir and guys who oversaw recycling centers.

Easy Ways to Recycle Stuff

            Let me count the ways:

1.      The informal trade between women. My daughter and I trade back and forth when we get sick of our clothes. One of my friends just outfitted me with some numbers from Chico’s that her new husband didn’t like. (He wants her all swirly and girly.) I have done the same kind of off-loading to friends when I got too big for my britches--literally.

2.      The classified ads in this newspaper. A good place to sell---you can post photos---and a good place to pick up deals, especially on furniture. Also where you can get the scoop on garage sales.

3.      The local radio shows that feature call-ins about stuff wanted and for sale. On KVMR, it’s Flea Market on Thursdays at 1 PM, 530/265-9555. On KNCO, it’s Swap Shop, Monday-Friday at 3 PM and Saturday at 8 AM, 530/477-5626.

4.      The many great thrift stores in this area---meccas for bargain hunters.

Words to the Wise

            Do you want to be doubly sainted? Well, deal with the thrift stores that not only help the planet through their mission of recycling, but support excellent non-profit organizations. Below are a few. Find others in the Yellow Pages under Thrift Shops. Hours for drop-off times can be a little weird, as can the list of treasures they will take or not take.

Animalsave Thrift & Treasures, 520 East Main, Grass Valley.

Food Bank Gift and Thrift, 13467 Colfax Highway, Grass Valley

Hospice Gift & Thrift, 754 Zion, Nevada City. Stores also in Penn Valley and Colfax.

Thrift Shop---Cancer Aid, 317 South Auburn, Grass Valley. 

            Now, if anybody gets on your case about your activities in the used stuff world, tell them that if they tried it, they might like it. I write this in a desk chair with a mink stole thrown over the back in case of night chill. It cost 10 bucks at a garage sale and I don’t think the lady who once owned it ever wore it.

            And if you happen to love antiques, well, easy sainthood is yours. What is antiquing but honoring the recycling gods with your credit card? When I go antiquing now, I tell Cranky Pants that I am not shopping, but reducing the carbon footprint of the world.

            If he swallows that excuse, I have a recycled bridge I want to sell him.

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Navigating Retirement

Retirement used to be simple. You reached your 60’s, got an award pin from the company---forget the gold watch--- and died before you could do anything else. At least that’s how it was for my favorite grandpa, Henry, and for many of your immediate ancestors. 

            But now, we potential geezers have to be on our toes. Retirement is no longer simple. The good news is that it’s no longer simple because gains in longevity mean we have a lot of living ahead of us. We don’t keel over at 62 like poor Henry.

And navigating the years ahead will involve many decisions: Who are you now that you’ve retired? How should you spend your remaining time? Do you want and need to go back to work? Full-time? Part-time? As a volunteer?

What about your mate or home companion? Does he/she have the same plans and ideas? Does your mate want to stay home while you want to trek in Nepal? Have you found the most engrossing hobby/passion in the world while your partner is just sitting around drenched in envy and wedded to a serious TV habit?

Staying in synch with your partner remains an issue in retirement no matter how long you’ve been together. One may not want to retire. Ever. The other can’t wait to hang it up at work. One might want to spend money. The other may want to save it for a special trip on his 100^th birthday. She thinks she owns the house because she’s had it to herself everyday. He may think he has some rights to domestic space besides his chair, his side of the bed and the BBQ. So, as you can see, retirement presents many rich opportunities for fighting, grousing and generally getting lots of new issues on the marital agenda.

Now, do I have any suggestions for retirement survival? A few:

* Don’t expect to get retirement figured out right away. It is a life passage, not an evening banquet event. A friend told Cranky Pants it takes about 3 years to get comfortable in the new life and that seems about right to me. If you can dance the dance sooner, good for you. If you take longer, you can keep me company.

* Know that you will have new issues to figure out with your mate and as usual, compromise can work wonders. She may have to give up some turf. He may have to try a little travel. They may have to decide how much to save, how much to hold out for taxes and how much to blow on a really great experience or object of desire.

* Use all your smarts when it comes to money, even if you haven’t used those mental muscles before. When your house is depreciating, when stocks are down and CD’s earning so little that they can’t keep up with inflation, you will feel up the creek but there’s always a little paddle called your brain.

Proven ways to survive: Don’t waste anything, buy smart, go back to work, take up a paying hobby, share living space, downsize living space and arrange your smaller quarters as though you were making do on a small yacht. Also, make sure you are getting all your benefits plus realize that the spending of money and the enjoyment of life are not the same thing. I could live in a one-room shack if it had a good roof, a stove, a feather pillow and rose bush growing near the door.

* Now that you may have the time, help out the world. Governments on all levels are having big money problems, so social services are shrinking and so are the budgets of non-profit agencies. Be worthy of your extra years on the planet and give back, or, if nobody ever gave anything to you, just give anyhow. It’s time to break the stingy cycle.

* Stay healthy. I’ll still need you as a reader in 20 years.

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Spring Blessing Count

It’s spring and the rump is sprung, at least if you are older and have lower back troubles. But when the daffodils are waving at you, it’s hard to focus on the pain that can come with aging and much easier to focus on the pleasures of growing older. So today, now that we have passed the vernal equinox and gotten the flu and the winter blues behind us, let us count our blessings.

Blessing One: We are alive. (Now don’t say “duh”! because the reality is that just about one hundred years ago, Americans lasted on average only until their late 40’s.) Women hardly had time to get all hot and menopausal. Men had no time to play retirement golf badly. Both were pushing up daisies, so there was no great need for a program like Social Security. Not that many people lived long enough to need it.

Blessing Two: We have a better chance than ever of reaching really old age still able to enjoy life. Treatments for chronic health problems now exist, therapies that help us to be feisty 80, 90 and 100-year-olds. How many of those elders were around when you were young? I did not know one person over 72. In our family, we would have sold tickets if we got anyone over 80.

Blessing Three:  Yeah, our hips and knees give out as do our eyes and shoulders. But and however, hip and knee replacements can restore people to full function. So can shoulder and eye surgery. Many of us would be using guide dogs to tell us where to drive our wheelchairs if it weren’t for the blessing of modern surgery.

Blessing Four: As much as we fear being bag ladies and guys, it is not likely we will go hungry or homeless in our old age. Yes, retirement shrinks the income and some have mortgage or rent trouble, but most of us most of the time will not be sleeping under freeway bridges or searching dumpsters for slices of cold pizza.

Blessing Five: There’s lots to do that is either significant, absorbing or fun. If you are bored when you’re older, you just don’t have your arms open to receive gifts such as volunteering, creative endeavors, geezer sports or the glory of seeing political candidates on immense flat screen TV’s. (Just kidding about that. With heads and mouths almost at life size, that is actually scary.) But the world needs your help and also, isn’t there a creative genius lurking inside? To be happy, you do need meaningful, rewarding occupation. And they are there for the taking---a blessing each one.

Blessing Six: We live in the Light Ages now. Anything you want to know you can pretty much find on the Internet. So there is no reason to be the clueless codger of the stereotype, the person who keeps up on nothing. Now you can track news, health issues, financial information and travel info, to say nothing of the fact that you can find companionship on the social sites and also email unsolicited advice to your grandkids. (If you haven’t yet fallen for a computer, get in touch with the volunteers at the Gold Country Computer Learning Center. They’ll adjust your attitude so painlessly you won’t even know it. 530/272-0497 or www.gcclc.org.)

Blessings Seven and Eight: Paul Newman and Sophia Loren are still alive.

Words for the Wise

            When you can’t fall asleep at night because you can’t figure out what Governor Spitzer was thinking when he threw it all away, think instead about your blessings. More interesting to count them than sheep. Really.

So how high a blessing count can you get? Well, it’s fair to count good meatloaf, the daffodils, Fluffy, money in the bank, stretch jeans, Medicare, the Yuba River, the county libraries, free speech, George Clooney and the Easter Bunny.

            So I got you started here, but I hope you never finish this list and that’s a blessing too: a blessing list with no end in sight. Enjoy, and may there be many chocolate rabbits in your basket this weekend.       

            

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Book Seller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Grandkids: Nature Illiterates?

            I wish there were a school for grandparents---Grandparenting 101.

Because sometimes we grandparents wander cluelessly through the family landscape, wanting to help our grandchildren grow up well, but not knowing how to do it in today’s world. Well, after 12 grandchilden and a little clueless wandering myself, I have finally gotten a few clear ideas about how to help.

What I see happening: Children are becoming isolated from the natural world. Reality is a video game and outside is the distance between the family car and the front door. Activity is structured, competitive sports on manicured fields dominate the “leisure” hours and it seems to me most every kid hour is accounted for. No time for daydreaming or just wandering around the world.   

Well, there are fewer woods in which to wander, catch frogs and build forts. Then there are the media scaring the bread pudding out of parents who see stranger danger behind every bush and West Nile virus in every bird.  And thus the kids can become shut-ins, scared of the great outside and turning into nature illiterates. So, OK, they may learn in school about the forests of the Amazon, but can they name the trees in their own backyard?

Now, if people don’t appreciate Mother Nature, they are not likely to be good stewards of the environment. Even our generation, we who did more in the outdoors than our grandchildren, are not the most perfect of nature’s caretakers and I wonder what’s coming next. Can people who have only seen green through a window, go green, vote green? Time will tell.

So What Can Grandparents Do?

Plenty and what works will depend on the particular child and his/her inborn inclinations. Here are some things to try to connect children to the natural world:

Gardening. Some kids will be fascinated by what grows in your backyard. Big hits at our house: Herbs like mint and lemon verbena, cherry tomatoes, lavender, the spaghetti sauce tree (bay) and pomegranates (though the last should be broken open outside).

Cooking. This is one way to teach where food comes from. For instance, some kids think whipped cream comes from a can and it is a great science experiment to have them take out an eggbeater and whip the cream that comes from the cow. Then they eat their experiment.

Fishing. Bring out their inner hunter by taking them fishing. Some kids will love this, others hate it. Then try something else like…

Berry-picking. If you grow berries or really know a wild blackberry from a poison berry, take them berrying.

Sky-watching. This has gone over big at our casa. Getting up in the middle of the night and watching meteor showers seems like a great adventure to three generations of us. (These astronomy lessons can be supplemented by the great NASA images on the Internet.)

Scouts. Depends on the program---but can be a good way to learn about the outdoors.

Summer camp. This depends on the summer camp. Some are about computers and weight loss, not the outdoors. Check out the program and send them with someone they know so they won’t get homesick.

Camping with the grandchildren. Some kids love this and others wish they were at the mall.  If you are going to camp, make sure the kids are dressed for the weather and that you have all the needed equipment. Give each a flashlight to check out monsters and other night visitors.

Hiking. Again, it depends on the kid. Some will think it an adventure, others a death march.

Pets. Though the trend seems to be to try and make humans out of pets---dress them, send them to school, give them little beds---they are non-human animals unburdened by civilization and are thus instructive about mammalian behavior. I like to point out the way dogs are superior to us---their sense of smell, their capacity for direction, their utter faithfulness and lack of judgment---but kids seem more interested in their reproductive antics. Whatever works.

Words for the Wise

            To get more ideas, go to www.sciencenewsforkids or www.hookedonnature.org. Read Last Child in the Woods: Saving Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. And know that you are doing right by your grandkids when you become an advocate for the world outside their window.

Mel Walsh is a gerontologist and certifiable geezer. Her book of advice for older women, Hot Granny, is available at The Bookseller in Grass Valley and online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Thanks For Your Memories....

You have a story to tell. It’s about your life---where you were born, what happened after that and then, what happened after that and so on up until today. You may think your story is the same old, same old---school, work, mates, kids, lots of pizza---but consider the fact that there are people who would find your story fascinating—the heart and soul of real life on earth.

These people are called sons and daughters. They may have children---your descendants---the distant fruit of your loins---though where the loins are has always been a mystery to me, but I can guess.

Anyhow, those grandchildren and great grands may be very interested in what you did and what you thought during your time on earth. I know I wish I knew more about my grandparents. Whatever made them decide to take us all into their home during the Depression? Two bachelor uncles in the unheated attic. Another uncle, widowed with two daughters, in one bedroom. Grandma, grandpa, my brother and I in another and then, poor husband-deserted mom on the couch. What made my grandparents take on the task of helping us all when there weren’t even enough potatoes to go round the table? How did it work out for them? Did they regret it, especially when I called Grandma a “stinker” one day? (Mouth washed out with soap for that one.)

Writing Life Stories

Now, you don’t have to be Churchill to attempt a memoir. Just a few stories written down or taped will do, but first you have to overcome your own resistance. Here’s how: If you imagine you are not important enough to tell your story, think how much you would like to know about the lives of the people you come from. Well, someone might feel that way about you.

And, if you think you are not a born writer, just put a few things down on paper any which way. You will not be judged on your grammar, but a great grandson in 2092 might love to hear about life in the 20^th century, however the story is told.

If you can work a tape machine or a video camera, do that or have someone do it for you. Talk about your own parents. Talk about a person or someone who influenced you.

I have an audiotape of my dad in the hospital in his 90’s. I hear him answering the bedside phone this way: “State your case.” Yes, that’s how he answered phones. Small memento, maybe even simple-minded of me to value it, but I am glad I have that tape. And years from now, someone will treasure a trace of you.

Help at Hand

            There are many books on the market to help you sort out what to say and how to say it. I’m now reading Your Memoirs by Hawley Roddick. She gives hints about how to get the process started and how to handle the delicate issues---mom’s fondness for gin, dad’s girlfriends or the time Mother Saint Ida caught you canoodling with Handy Andy in the cloak room. A look in your bookstore or on Amazon will reveal dozens of other book choices.

Memoir products are now segmenting into specialty areas and morphing into other media. For instance, there’s a new DVD just out: Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Also available in the memoir cornucopia: ways to track your spiritual biography and how to pass on your ethical values. Ask about these choices at the bookstore, library or on the internet from that great guru, Google.

Words for the Wise

            If you want hand-holding, personal historians are at your service and some give free initial consultations. Go to www.personalhistorians.org to find one in your area. Locally, Pat Barrentine offers this service at www.lifelinestories.com. Other local personal historians include Susan Luccini at 530/692-2538 and Suzanne Warren, who specializes in video histories, 530/268.2184, www.silveravenuepictures.com.

            So then, consider getting parts of your life recorded in some way and do it while your memories are still in retrievable storage.

             

12 Tips: You'll Give Thanks for This Thanksgiving

                  It’s November, kickoff time for the Official Semi-Pro Entertaining Season. This is the month harried cooks call the Butterball Hotline on Thanksgiving morning to find out how to cook the turkey they forgot to defrost. 

            But, as any hostess knows, there may be other defrosting jobs on Thanksgiving---maybe breaking the ice with grandchildren who barely know you, maybe getting family members to relax and enjoy each other, nursing drinks instead of grudges.

So here are a dozen tips to warm up visiting grandkids and their parents, especially when they are spending the long Thanksgiving weekend with you:

1.                  Get off to a good start. Family members may have driven a long way to your house---over the river and through the traffic jams. When they come in the door, have refreshments at the ready. Maybe an easy mulled wine for the grown-ups---you can buy the spices already assembled. (Try Aspen Mulling Spices.) Do the same with apple cider or sparkling grape juice for the kids.

2.                  Avoid a seasonal nervous breakdown over the Thanksgiving meal. Get help. Grandkids can stuff the celery with cream cheese. They can whip cream for the pies (and lick the beaters). If they use manual egg beaters instead of electric machines, it’s safer and keeps them busy longer. And of course, pull the adults into the action, too. Even a cooking-impaired person can drive to a bakery to pick up a pie.

3.                  Provide nostalgia as a first course for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s one sure-fire way to get people talking and enjoying themselves. At each place, put a memento of that person’s past. Maybe their third-grade picture, a report card, a crayon drawing---anything to get the nostalgia flowing. I am wicked, but I put out the graduation certificate of my first-born son---he who graduated some 40 years ago from Little Beaver Nursery School. Digging up the past this way can make for an hilarious start to the meal.

4.                  Relax about manners and about whether or not everyone likes your cooking. If you have a kids’ table, know that your Brussels sprouts will be offered to the dog. Hey, you did it too.

5.                  Get out of the house. Families can get restless if confined long together. Maybe it’s the noise and the constant interaction. Anyhow, plan some expeditions for both generations. Think holiday craft fair or the special movie that opens on Thanksgiving weekend. Your grandkids will know what that special movie is, even if you don’t.

6.                  Get active. If the weather and the yard allow, throw a football around. Kick a soccer ball. Go walk in a park. I know one family that hikes to a designated Bird Tree in the woods and there they hang up bird goodies like suet and peanut butter stuck into pine cones. Then the birds have a holiday too.

7.                  Think games. Ask your visiting family what games they love. Cranky Pants’ family members lay out a huge puzzle that anyone can try to put together. We also do charades---pretty primitive charades so the youngest won’t feel left out. I do a pitiful imitation of Big Bird—all dignity left behind.

8.                  Do family theater. If anyone sings, dances, plays something musical or does pig calls, ask for a demo. Ask, don’t insist. Some grandchildren have learned Thanksgiving poems or songs at school and are freshly rehearsed for your viewing pleasure.

9.                  Be quiet on the negative front. Don’t criticize—not even the studs in the nose. It takes all kinds to make a family and this is the only one you’ve been issued.

10.              Be imaginative with the grandkids. They like to play, so give Native American headdresses to young family members and they can play at being the first Indians at the first Thanksgiving. Just a feather and a ribbon will work. One year I dressed up my daughter in full costume, moccasins and all. A faux squaw-ette, she went around the neighborhood to wish them all Happy Thanksgiving. Forty years later, I still hear the stories about that Thanksgiving.

11.              Remember the visiting pets, the grand dogs of the family. Have a treat ready, plus water and food bowls in a corner.

12.              Order in pizza on Friday.

What To Do About Holiday Dread

            If holidays are so much fun, then why do we dread them?

            Is it exhaustion from family—too many people all at once and in repeated doses?

            Well, truth to tell, though family occasions are satisfying---this is my clan, where I belong---they can be fraught with issues. (Now there’s a word: “fraught”.) It means burdened and loaded and is related to the word, “freight”. Freight is baggage and families, as we all know, come with a complete set of baggage, some of it matching, some not.

So what’s to be fraught about?

You already know:

1. Old history, enmities that aren’t water under the bridge, but emotions still dammed up, waiting to explode over a minor holiday incident---maybe the ”wrong” gift, maybe being late for the festivities---nothing that’s a big deal but, yikes, some unhappy person will make a big deal over it because he or she is carrying some heavy freight from past injuries, real or imagined.

2. Present behavior. Rich, rich rich is the depth of opportunity for getting upset with family over the holidays. It may be your sacred habit to open presents on Christmas Day, never before. That’s your gift code. But your son’s new wife opens them Christmas Eve. Is she not clueless beyond redemption? Or maybe your grandson Johnny smokes and though he’s outside, the smoke drifts in the house and you wonder what he smokes, anyhow. And why won’t he listen to you about his lungs?

Well, you can fill in your own situations. Think “fraught” and you’ll have many a holiday story to tell. My own worst moment: when my mother and step-father announced their divorce on Christmas Eve. I still feel sorry for myself 40 years later, which shows how long the half-life of family freight can be.

So What To Do?

            There are ways to keep family holidays upbeat. Not completely upbeat, of course, for the seasonally disgruntled will do their gruntling no matter what. (That’s why the story of Scrooge has such wide appeal. We all know someone like Scrooge. Heck, we all are Scrooge at times.) But there are ways to morph families into a fun mode so they won’t scrooge up their time together.

            Generate A Comedy Hour: It’s hard to be mean when you’re laughing. Snug in with the family during the holidays with some classic comedy DVD’s or some old Bill Cosby videos. Make it three-generational entertainment if that is your audience. And no, not George Carlin.

You can even tell your own one-liners. Really. Here’s one you can do Thanksgiving Day:  When people go around the table saying what each one is thankful for, you say: “I’m thankful I didn’t get caught”. And then refuse to say more.

As for other family comedy, even our dogs get into the act. I confess Tiger has been dressed up with a reindeer antler headdress. We think it’s funny, but then we are easily amused. He seems proud of it---like a crown.

Do A Holiday Movie Night: Movies are the universal, cross-generation language. Everybody has an opinion about a movie: Wasn’t he cute? Hated the casting. Great story. What’s the best holiday movie? A Christmas Story? It’s a Wonderful Life?

If you are stumped for ideas because the youngest in the family may not love Miracle on 34^th Street the way you did, then check out this book: The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide for Watching Together by Ty Burr.

Words to the Wise

            The fun and nostalgia of old movies is a positive thing for families, but it’s entertainment generated outside the family. Instead, maybe the most meaningful input over the holidays comes from family members themselves---when they tell you what they do, think and feel.

So ask about their lives. Do you know what your marketing director son really does in his job? What about your grandkids? Ask them to tell you about YouTube, MySpace, text messaging and the latest video games. And ask the little ones: What was the best holiday present you ever got? Then tell them about yours.

This is a humbling exercise. I discovered what I don’t know about my family is amazing. But then, what they don’t know about me is amazing, too.

            And yes, I am thankful I never got caught.

Grandparenting 101

            I always thought grandparenting would be a piece of cake. You’ve raised one set of kids and now there’s another set in the family. How hard can it be? You already know how to change a diaper. It’s just deja poo all over again. And the rest will follow along from there. Right?

            Probably not. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to be a grandparent and after 12 grandkids, I begin to think I should have gone to grandparent school. Even the best of us will make mistakes, offering advice when we should shut up, buying the wrong presents, over-helping, under-helping and just generally screwing up when it was really our intention to be wonderful grandparents and to receive, unasked, a license plate holder that announces to the world we are the best grandparents in it.

Help for Hapless Grandparents

            Well, parents have their guidebooks for raising children, but until recently, the older generation didn’t have much in the way of readable resources for good grandparenting. But now, there’s a magazine called GRAND and I recently interviewed the founder and CEO of the magazine, Christine Crosby, a grandmother herself so she knows the turf. Christine told me there are 6 top mistakes that grandparents make. (Only six! I figured she hadn’t been watching me. I batch-process mistakes in this area.)

Here are the top six mistakes:

1.                  Telling the world about an upcoming baby before the parents have a chance to do it themselves. Wait until they want to announce the pregnancy.

2.                  Offering your unsolicited opinions about the naming of the baby. Yes, parent might pick something so off-the-wall, you’ll wonder what they were thinking. But shut up.

3.                  Offering your unsolicited opinions about upbringing. Yes, you and I are Spock-certified, hardened by field experience, but times change and so does parenting advice. My rule: unless they are about to step off a cliff, be quiet.

4.                  Hanging around their house like the King and Queen of the family, instead of helping with dishes or babysitting. The most valued grandparents seem to be the ones that pitch in. (My contribution is small, but tasty. I teach some of the older grandkids how to make slow cooker meals for their parents.)

5.                  Buying gifts before you ask. Some parents have very definite ideas about what toys are allowed in the house, what kinds of clothes they want for their kids and what kind of electronic gadgets are OK. There’s also the danger issue. Some products may be great for the older kids in a family, but bad for the smallest. You may want to buy a set of Legos for the first-grader, but the rug rat in the family may like to eat Legos. So ask.

6.                  Not following the parents’ rules. You may not agree with the rule that little Johnny can’t never eat candy or isn’t allowed out on Halloween, but again, it’s their call, not yours.

Words to the Wise

            GRAND magazine is available with a free trial subscription at www.grandmagazine.com or 800-810-0260. The content is wide-ranging with info about health and life in the older lane plus profiles of famous grandparents like Tina Turner and Mick Jagger. (I am seriously glad he is not my son-in-law. Imagine following his rules.)

            

Un-Worrying: Lesson One

     What me worry? Well, yes, but not what I worried about 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Because each stage of life has its own fears. A baby may worry about the next bottle, an adult about the next job, a mother about the next birth. By later life, enough worry categories have accumulated that we older people don’t have the mental storage space for the load we carry. Me, my brain doesn’t have enough cubbies for the clutter.

     I have an entire worry wardrobe, age appropriate of course and up to date---I worry about the war in Iraq, not the one in Korea. And am I like you….wildly eclectic? I worry about my arteries, deer in the garden, the hearing of iPodded grandchildren, my husband’s devotion to pizza, the mercury in the water, the unavailability of Breck shampoo, the state of my soul, leaves in the gutters, dust mites in the pillows, bears in Alaska, the pain in my shoulder, the botulism shots so popular with the barely wrinkled young. (We avoided botulism in our canned green beans, they shoot it into their lips. Go figure. Or rather, go worry about it and keep me company.)

Lightening the Load.

     Actually, maybe it will do both of us good to lighten up our worry loads. Worry is about as useful to us now as a poodle skirt or a zoot suit and like the old clothes in the back of the closet, the worry wardrobe doesn’t really become us, is probably out of date and doesn’t fit anymore. So what to do? You can’t give your worries to the thrift store. 

     Professional organizers say the first step to reducing actual closet clutter is to take everything out of the closet for evaluation. Does it fit? Is it useful? What do you get out of keeping it? Well, maybe the same technique works for reducing worry clutter.

     Take out each worry and examine it. Above all, is it useful? I think the answer is that worry is seldom useful unless a spur to action. Worried that the roof leaks? Then fix it. Worried about politicians? Then vote them out of office. Worried about the fact the earth will someday crash into the sun? Stop it. You have no control of the universe.

     And listen to my mom, she who told me she worried about something for 45 minutes and if she could not come up with a solution, the worry went into the dust bin. It got discarded and if it popped up again---a nasty characteristic of worries---she just threw it out again.

     But first do an inventory of your worry load so you’ll know what to toss. Me, I sorted my worries into bins. There was the family bin, the world bin, the health bin, the money been---(I mean bin)---and so forth.

As for the family bin: I decided not to worry about my husband. He’s old enough to worry about himself. And decided not to worry about the grandkids as their parents do it for me.  And so I went through my messy mind---throwing out what was no longer necessary or could be delegated and I am down to a manageable worry load.

Words for the Wise

     Now the one worry that every older person has is fear of dying. Face it, the gray hairs let us know we are within dying range and a daily scan of the obits rubs it in. But I have a solution here and it isn’t a firm belief in angels or major drugs or even a lobotomy. It is enjoying your life.

     Don’t ask me why, but when you are having a good time and are in the groove, on the beam, doing right by yourself, you just are not so bothered by the thought of death. Maybe you are too busy having a good time.

So that is my prescription. Rx: Enjoy yourself. Yes, it is later than you think, but when you are having fun, you don’t give a damn. Poet John Dryden figured this out in 1685:

“Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own,

He who, secure within, can say:

Tomorrow do thy worst

For I have lived today.”

            

Only Dead Is Too Late

I hear it. All that whining. I’ve done it myself and it goes this way: I’m too old to be creative. Too old to write a novel. Too old to take up music, painting or poetry.

Well, you are only too old if you think you are and yes, maybe physical limitations are dragging down your dreams---you can’t hike the Pacific Crest Trail on those old feet. But here’s a story about a creatively-blocked woman whose arthritic hands were so painful at 76, she had to give up her favorite hobby, needlework.

So what did she do after that? Give up and turn into a geezer droid? No, she took up painting. No lessons. Just do-it-yourself. She started painting at an age when her peers had already packed their dreams away in the attic.

Her name was Anna Mary and maybe you have heard of her for she is known as Grandma Moses, America’s most famous folk painter. Born in 1860, she lived to 1961and painted over 1500 pictures between the ages of 76 and 101.

Grandma Moses was a major celebrity in her 80’s and 90’s. She exhibited her work across the US, in Europe and in Japan and painted what she knew---rural New England, often nostalgic images of her youth---farms and village landscapes. One of her paintings hangs today in the White House and another was recently valued on Antiques Roadshow for $60,000.

Some hobby.

Inspiration Is At Hand

            If you want to absorb the mentoring lessons of Grandma Moses and take in a bit of her can-do creative spirit, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento has a treat for you. Starting tomorrow and running through January 6 is an exhibit called Grandma Moses, Grandmother to the Nation. It’s a rare chance to see her paintings and learn more about her enormous accomplishments as an older woman who, while she was ancient chronologically, was young in aims and ambition. There’s even free admission for grandparents on Grandparents Day, Sunday, September 9. Find more info at www.crockerartmuseum.org or call 916.264.5423.

Not an Isolated Case

            Now it’s easy to dismiss Grandma Moses’ accomplishments by saying they were a once in a blue moon kind of thing, but almost every day I see evidence that people are extending their productivity into the years that used to be known as retirement. Here are just a few examples from the various fields that seem to intrigue people:

Memoir: Many older people think they have a memoir inside them and they are right. So they should get a lift from the experience of eighty-something Marjorie Hart whose memoir, Summer at Tiffany, was published this year by Harper Collins. This is Marjorie’s first book. She went to a writer’s conference and was spotted there by the editor of a major publishing house.  The rest is history---I mean, memoir.

Poetry: Are the 80’s and 90’s too late to write poetry? Not if you are Anne Porter whose first book was published when she was 83. Her most recent book of poetry, Living Things, was published at 95.

Like Grandma Moses, Anne Porter is inspired by ordinary things. Cleaning her purse, she found a ticket that said: Keep This Ticket. So here’s what she wrote:

I keep it carefully

Because I’m old

Which means

I’ll soon be leaving

For another country

Where possibly

Some blinding-bright

Enormous angel

Will stop me

At the border

And ask

To see my ticket.

Words for the Wise

            Give your inner artist or writer a chance. Take a course. Read a how-to book. Or just fling yourself into it willy-nilly. And don’t be discouraged by first paintings or first drafts. Mostly, they will stink. But over time they will stink less and sometimes begin to be pleasantly fragrant. And last, remember what poet Anne Porter proclaimed---that doing art of some kind may be the only thing that extreme old age can’t ruin. As she said: “You can’t dance anymore, you can’t drive anymore --- but you can still write.”

            Amen to that.

The Incredible Disappearing Retirement

I love the kind of exercise that requires nothing physical. That’s why I love free speech---the exercise of which is just about my favorite thing after cookie dough ice cream. Which is why I will tell you about an idea that is not yet widely accepted, but one that you may need to prepare for even though it hasn’t yet gone mainstream:

Retirement as we know it may cease to exist.

Yes, the old retirement script had men dropping out of work at 62 with a gold watch and spending the rest of their days playing golf in plaid pants. Women were housewives who didn’t retire---frying the bacon that the men bought home with their pensions---and both sexes died before they could get bored with retirement or each other.

Now we live 30 or 40 years more than our grandparents. Now most women spend some time in the workplace, which, believe it or not, in my lifetime, was an astonishing idea, so women today have their own part in the retirement picture. And now, bottom line, people have time after leaving a conventional job for a whole ‘nother life and a whole ‘nother script.

Two lives---at least--- for the price of one.

What’s not to love?

Boomers Believe It

            Boomers, the people born between 1946 and 1964, already get this new idea. Several surveys by the AARP show that about 80% of Boomer workers plan to continue working at least part time after they hit 65. So they are already tearing up the old life scripts, which is what you’d expect from people who did sit-ins in the dean’s office.

            On the other hand, some older people, those born before 1946, are caught in the middle of this social change. They were born too early to surf the new wave of Boomer non-retirement and too late to relax into the old patterns of their fathers. The sounds you hear are these older people being crunched between two conflicting ideas---no work in retirement versus work in retirement.

Example: My own experience with people born before 1946 indicates that some of them---I don’t know the percentage---wish they had not retired at all, wish they had not bought into the old way of thinking about the later years. They miss the workplace---the work itself, the income, the social life and perhaps most of all, an identity the workplace bestowed upon them.

So the question for many of these crunchables is what do they do now?

Some volunteer at meaningful tasks---running food banks, housing the homeless, keeping the local music scene going, raising funds for libraries, day care centers, rehab groups and hospitals. Some seek out part-time work with previous employers. Others are starting their own businesses---maybe on eBay, maybe in a storefront or selling their wares at craft fairs. A few have taken up parenting again---taking care of grandchildren, usually because the parents have gotten into trouble, drugs or jail.

So the peers I know are trying, but society is slow to take advantage of older people who want to go beyond volunteering back into the workplace. One issue: the pay scale of experienced workers is higher than the pay scale of younger people. So companies may go with the cheaper workers, foregoing experience and an established work ethic in favor of lower personnel costs. 

            Well, luckily, it looks as if Boomers, the about-to-be-geezers, will avoid some of these hard issues. Times will change, working in the later years will be considered natural and Boomers will continue to work, either because they want to, because they have to or because they like the things extra income can provide in later years, like enough money to take that cruise to Alaska.

Words for the Wise

            If you want to continue working, stay healthy. It’s hard to carry on if you can’t walk or have heart trouble. And get fixed---no, not that way---but if something doesn’t work on your body---hips, knees, eyes---find the most experienced and most consistently recommended surgeon and get your body into the shop for repairs.

            You do it for your vehicles. Now do it for your body. So you can keep on truckin’.

A Post-Retirement Affair With The Stars

            Retiring can be a jump out of the frying pan and into a fire. Yes, there’s no more job stress, but what pops up next in the life cycle is identity stress. Who am I now that I don’t have a job title? And then another question: What will I do next?

            Well, as a newly retired person you will someday answer who you are going to be for the next 20 plus years. No, probably not a rock star, but something else will begin to form a comfortable mold for your life.

One road to a fresh identity: trying out various pursuits---trying out hobbies that can turn into passions or volunteer work that can turn into a calling. So here’s this week’s hobby suggestion: Look up! Look up at the moon and the stars. The night sky used to be the TV set of the ancients---the stars moving in slo-mo through the night.

Backyard Astronomy For Dummies

            Now you don’t have to be Galileo to get a bang out of the night sky. And you don’t have to be a scientist to raise those binoculars and look for the rings of Saturn. You just have to be curious: What’s out there?

            Wowie! What’s out there will knock your socks off. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz recently summed up the latest news from outer space: At last count there are 246 other planets going around other sun/stars. There’s one planet that is 17 times the size of humongous Jupiter and scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope estimate that there are as many as six billion hot Jupiter-like planets.

            So we may not be alone and thank goodness for that---all that planetary real estate and just us in the universe? What a waste. Centuries ago, I would have been put in jail for suggesting this, but if we are the only life in this unimaginably vast universe, I’ll eat my binocular strap.

The Rewards of Skywatching

            So what do you want out of a hobby? The challenge of learning more and more, worlds without end? You got it with astronomy. How about mystery? Well, where did the Universe come from? Or do you want action? Billions of galaxies slamming into each other? Or galaxies exploding into super novas? You got in it with astronomy. Even on our home planet, all is not quiet. The moon probably came from another planet smashing into Earth. And do you like history? How about a story that is billions of years old and still going? And how about the really deep questions? Like what the heck is dark matter and how come it gobbles up galaxies? So there’s food for thought in astronomy and if brain activity is good for brain health, you’ve got it when you are a skywatcher.

What Do You Need To Start?

            A pair of skywatching binocs with a tripod. A star map. A flashlight topped with red cellophane so you can see in the dark without the light interfering with the viewing. A nice lean-back deck chair so you won’t fall backwards.

            Also, go to a star party. These night skywatching events are held at the old Nevada City Airport and announced regularly in The Union. Generous science educators and sky fans like Alan Stahler are there with telescopes and guiding advice.

            Then, to learn more, google websites like these:

Space weather; astronomy picture of the day; Hubble site; Sky and Telescope magazine; Astronomy magazine. And for grandkids, go to www.dustbunny.com. Actually, this site is a great place for any age to begin.

Words for the Wise

            If you want the thrill of a skywatcher’s lifetime, plan a trip to a bed and breakfast in Benson, AZ that offers big telescopes for night viewing in the desert. You can hire your own private astronomer from the University of Arizona to guide you through the night sky. Check it out at www.astronomersinn.com.

            So don’t say there’s nothing to do in retirement. Older people can take on the universe. Begin August 28 with an eclipse of the moon, 2:52 to 4:22 AM. I’ll set my alarm if you’ll set yours. 

Where Do Older People Go?

So where do people go when they get up in years---when they grow older than dirt?

Well, some of them go nowhere. They stay home. Gerontologists call this aging-in-place. And older people say it’s exactly where they want to grow old. At home.

But sometimes older people can’t stay home alone. Let’s say they are in their 80’s or 90’s, living by themselves and having trouble with the daily chores of life: driving, food shopping, cooking without catching the curtains on fire, taking the right meds at the right time, managing finances, even getting dressed, bathing or going to the toilet by themselves. When there’s trouble with these ordinary parts of life, with aging-in-place, it’s time to think of something else.

So What’s The Something Else?

            There are some solutions: living with the “kids”, hiring a caretaker, going to an assisted living facility, becoming a resident of a life care community and residing in a skilled nursing facility.

Living With The“Kids”

Popular elsewhere in the world, this choice is going out of style in the US, maybe because parents and children often live far apart in this large country. But both my husband and I grew up in a three-generational house and all of us were richer for it.

Grandparents today, though, may want something else for themselves and so may their adult children. Frankly, the success of the arrangement depends on the people, on whether they are tuned in to the art of getting along with others in close quarters. Sometimes the family can do well together when there’s a granny unit on the place---close but separate, communal but private.

Caregivers

            A good caregiver can help an older person live at home for longer than she could on her own. A caregiver can be hired from an agency, an ad or from one’s own personal network. Some are life-savers. Some are disasters. Just be sure to check references and monitor performance after the hire.

Assisted Living

            Now an option that has spread across the country, assisted living facilities can offer a studio room, 3 meals a day, help with all the activities of daily living, a peer group of friends, classes on site and transportation to the doctor or to fun activities.

Again, some facilities are good and others are not. Staff turnover is a big clue here. If people have been on staff a long time, the facility is probably pretty well run. But high staff turnover is a sign of problems. Also see if there is a functioning family advisory group, others you can talk to about the facility.

            Don’t just judge a place by its décor. One of the worst assisted living facilities I ran into was a very glossy place. But it was woefully understaffed. Residents who fell out of bed at night had to call 911 to get help, because the staff didn’t answer the phone.

On the other hand, one of the best facilities was small, a bit worn in the furnishings, but very homelike. Nothing special to look at, it provided great care.

Just keep in mind that if a person goes downhill medically, they will be likely be kicked out of assisted care, unlike what happens with the next option, life care.

Life Care

            There are three levels of residence at a life care campus: Independent apartments for active older people who may still be very involved in the community, assisted living facilities for those who need more help and last, a skilled nursing department for people who are ill or need rehab after an accident or surgical procedure. As people get older, they may move from one level to the next, though I know of one 100-year-old man who still lives in an independent apartment.

            Often there is a non-refundable entrance fee and then a monthly fee for the apartment, the meals, the nurse-on-site, the classes, the activities, the library and yes, the weekly maid service. Residents have to pay their own phone bills, take care of their cars (if any), clothes, gifts and so forth. People claim it is like living on a cruise ship.

            Some life care facilities have special Alzheimer’s units.

Skilled Nursing

            This level of care is needed by people with a serious illness or by those who just need a leg up---often literally---after an operation. More and more, doctors are sending their patients to a skilled nursing facility after major operations rather than keeping them in a more expensive hospital.

Words for the Wise

            If you don’t know where to start on this search, you can call the national Eldercare Locator at 800/677.1116. They can put you in touch with the Area Agency on Aging where you live or perhaps, where a loved one lives. Then you can ask about the range of care options. Eldercare Locator can also track down many kinds of services for older people nationwide---your tax dollars at work. Finally.

Wolves in Your Wallet

Here’s some good news: In the United States, we who are over 65 have $15 trillion dollars in assets. Wow, fifteen trillion geezer dollars, which probably doesn’t even include those valuable old Fillmore posters or the vintage bellbottoms in the back of the closet.

But with so rich a prize, there’s a downside: wolves in the shape of people trying to get into your bank account, to sell you terrible investments, to get you to wire them money overseas or to ask you to give them personal banking information---this so they can steal your identity and your dough. Worst still, other people who actually know you---the relatives, the caregivers---may pressure you to change a will in their favor or get you to add their signature to your bank accounts. Note: When they say “joint”, they are not referring to a smoke, but to a joint bank account that will be theirs as soon as you fall off your twig.

A Few Ways To Say Goodbye to Your Bucks

So how do bad people take your money? Let me count the ways. Actually, I can’t count that high because there is a new scheme of the week for robbing older people of their assets. Here are just a few scams to keep in mind:

The letter or email from a stranger wanting help in transferring money from a foreign county to the US. I have gotten these letters and emails from China, Africa, Canada and most recently from Iraq, where I would supposedly make a huge commission helping a “patriot” transfer money from Iraq to the US.  But, of course, I have to send some of my own money offshore to make the whole scheme work.

The phone call from the “bank” or the “DMV” wanting to confirm your personal information. There will be some plausible reason why these imposters supposedly need this information from you. Hang up. They just want to steal your identity.

The email from a “bank” or “PayPal” or “credit card company” wanting personal information from you. This is called “phishing” and the sucker fish they want data from is you. And don’t be fooled by websites that perfectly mimic the real ones. They are counterfeit. Delete the email.

Investment seminars given for older people by “certified elder planning specialists” or “registered financial gerontologists”. These hucksters with their few days of sales training are well paid to steer older people into unwise investments such as deferred annuities that, according to real financial specialists, are usually a bad idea for most older people. So stay home from the seminar, even if they offer a free lunch. To read an excellent investigative piece on this subject, google: deferred annuities New York Times.

Pressuring the elderly to change a will, give out an ATM code or add the cheater’s signature to bank or investment accounts. I know a case where a woman nagged a very ill person, convincing him the only way to save on taxes was to make all his accounts joint with her as the other signer. The scheme worked, the culprit came away with a six-figure haul and the family could never prove undue influence. Moral of the story: beware of people who try to get you to make changes in their favor when it comes to your financial accounts or will.

And you do have a will, right? That Fillmore poster should end up with the right person. So should your dog. And yes, OK, the money too.

Words for the Wise

            There are wolves in the woods, though they may wear sheep’s clothing as a “certified” this or that. To get informed about real advisors, take an online trip to www.wikipedia.org. Look up certified financial planner. The link will tell you how to find a qualified professional and what 10 questions to ask him or her. Meanwhile, read up on the subject. Try The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by Vanguard founder, John Bogle.

            So don’t let the shysters win. Seventy-eight million aging Boomers are going to need trillions because living to 100 means that the nest egg has to last 30 or 40 years. Bottom line: Stay alert financially so you won’t be eating Fancy Feast feline entrees in your golden years.

Are You Revolutionary?

Here’s a question---do people in a revolution know they’re in a revolution or do they wander clueless through world history? Did it take getting run over by Paul Revere’s horse for a Massachusetts farmer to realize he was in the middle of the American Revolution? Did it take seeing coeds run naked across campus to know we were in the middle of the Sexual Revolution?

            It may be hard to know a revolution when you are in the middle of it---can’t see the revolution for the trees---that’s unless something dramatic illustrates the times---like a musket shot or a bare behind.

Is There an Age Revolution?

            Though the defining moments of high drama are still to come, I think we’re in a revolution when it comes to aging. I don’t know if we are in the beginning or the middle of the transformation, but there’s a huge sea change going on in the culture when it comes to attitudes about growing older and opportunities available to older people. We used to call this kind of change a “paradigm shift”---one pattern of looking at the world crumbling to extinction, replaced by another and quite different pattern.

So here’s the old pattern of thinking about age: Hit 50 and begin to wonder if you are going to die in the next 20 minutes. Life is about over. Day is done and so are you. Nothing to look forward to except shuffleboard with the other blue-haired outcasts. In this way of thinking, people past 50 and 60 were perceived as old dogs with no new tricks unless the trick involved gramps pulling a quarter out of young Johhny’s ear. Basically, an older person’s job was to wait around until life limped to an end.

Here’s the new way of thinking: We’ve added an extra 30 years to American lifespans in the last century. With more time and better health than our great-grandparents, we can look forward to many more adventures. (My mate, Cranky Pants, actually calls his date book his Adventure Book. Yes, that’s cute and he is too.) More important for you, it’s reasonable to expect further adventures---today, tomorrow and twenty years from now. I know people in their 90’s who are still looking forward rather than back.

So what’s to look forward to? A long life with a chance to do an amazing list of whatevers. Start your own business. Become a consultant. Travel to far-away places. Raise Havanese puppies. Invent a gorgeous garden to replace the crabgrass. Go back to school and finally get the degree you missed out on. Get a horse, write a novel, do your memoirs or climb a mountain.

Example: This year a climbing record was set by 71-year-old Katsusuke Yanagisawa. He climbed Everest, 29,035 feet, and was the oldest person in the world to do so. No slouch either was 69-year-old Werner Berger from the US who also made the Everest summit this year. Two great geezers in one record-breaking year. Mr. Berger has also climbed the highest peaks on each of the seven continents. High fives all round for the silver-haired set!

Words to the Wise

So what’s ahead? Expect to see 77 million Boomers change the face of aging. Those who love Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Jonathan Livingston What’s-His-Face are not going to join the AARP without changing what it means to be “retired”. Retirement as a concept may itself retire. Ages sixty to seventy may be just a time of transition---a morphing from one endeavor to another. You may supplement income by working at a part-time job or turn yourself into a craftsperson or you may finally have the time to give back to your community.

But, whatever is ahead in life, you can tell the revolution is here when one thing happens: you don’t mind telling your age. Older is finally good. Now that is dramatic.

When Mom and Dad Move Near the Kids

They’re old. They’re moving. They’re moving to be near you. It’s Mom and Dad back in your life again. Or it could be newly widowed Mom by herself, alone among her moving boxes.

Or, maybe, if you are older, you are the newcomer in this situation. You, an older person, have uprooted yourself to be near son or daughter, only to keep losing your way on their confusing freeways, making you wish you were safely back where you came from.

Either way, either viewpoint---when older people move to be near adult children, it’s called a dependency move---a downbeat gerontology term. Me, I have never met an older person who wants to be dependent on the kids. Also, some who make the move to be near family are still in their youthful 60’s, wet behind the ears when it comes to handling retirement and not one bit dependent.

But, whatever the cause of the move or the age of the mover, there are ways to settle in and be happy or ways to stay out of the loop and down in the dumps. Let’s look first at what may get a newcomer down to the point of thinking two martinis would make a very nice lunch. Here’s a bit of advice for my fellow oldsters:

New Geezer in Town: The Problems

Did you ever see a plant pulled from its roots? It wilts. Some older people wilt too, especially if they have no life experience with moving and making a home in a strange place. The older person may feel bereft---leaving behind friends, neighbors, doctors, dentists, stores, haircutters, clubs, churches---all the things that are familiar and keep us comfy in the world.

Some older people are geographically homesick. They miss the sea, the snow, the beach, the city---whatever it is that the new place doesn’t offer. Others can’t stand the environment in the new place---the heat or the cold or the bad air.

And often, to their surprise, the older folks may find their adult children and their children extremely busy leading their own lives---work, school, sports, hobbies---and they don’t have too much time for the oldest generation. There’s a bit of wiggle room, of course, for the generations to see each other, but it probably won’t be enough to constitute a dependable social life. So grandma and/or grandpa will need to connect to their new environment independently---to make their own lives and not sit home watching I Love Lucy re-runs on TV.

Some Ways to Make It Better

            First, realize that moving is a chance to begin life all over again. It’s time to try new things, make new friends, go to new places, maybe find parts of yourself you never knew you had. (No, not the belly. You knew about that.)

One of the first tasks is the same task you had in kindergarten—making friends. You can still go to school to find them. Look up the courses in the local community college, pick one and go. It’s fun, enlarges your mind and will ensure you meet people with like interests. Also, if you are a digital dud, become computer literate. If you don’t have a computer, look for inexpensive desktops. And tech experts say laptops will be a lot cheaper by the end of 2007.

To meet more people, volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Try hospitals, hospice, music groups, art groups, museums, youth organizations, churches, food banks, homeless programs, historical societies and libraries. If the first try doesn’t ring your chimes, try another. Volunteering your time is a worthy and reliable way of making friends and feeling that you have some useful role in the world. So pick up the phone and call.

Words for the Wise

            There are clubs made to order for the new people in town. Most communities have Welcome Wagon or newcomers clubs. Check them out with a Web search or in the Yellow Pages. If you’re single, look for the singles’ clubs at community centers or check out the singles’ groups associated with different interests----hiking, skiing, food and wine. But whether you are single or double, don’t rely only on your offspring for your social life. You brought them up to be independent adults and darn it, that’s what they are.          

                                    

Honoring The Inner Brat

      Do you have an Inner Brat? Is there a stubborn two-year-old inside trying to get out, digging in his heels against unreasonable expectations, not willing to waste time chasing brownie points by doing the bidding of others?

Me, I think I do have an Inner Brat. He says no to things that used to be a yes. And I’m not alone. Silver-haired folks, mindful of time marching on, now find themselves saying no to the marginal social things they used to be willing to be dragged to. And they are also saying no to acquaintances who invite themselves over for weekends and vacations. It’s no to a lot of things when you’re older---no to the marketers on the phone and no to the people who ask you to sign weird petitions at the grocery store and no to another holiday at the house of a bad dog relative.

No. No. No.

And when it’s no in situations where it used to be yes, I figure it’s my Inner Brat at work, doing his job of keeping my priorities straight even if my conscious self is too dumb to do it.

Why Do Older People Begin to Dig In Their Heels?

The many yeses of yesterday were OK when we had all the time and energy in the world. Back then, we could afford to say yes. But when hair turns silver, when people have passed through the valley of the shadow of Social Security, it strikes them hard that time and energy now have limits, so they begin to say no and mean it. Out go superfluous things, irritating situations and vintage TV movies we never liked in the first place. (We older women no longer do spaghetti Westerns. Men finally abandon Pride and Prejudice.)

Saying Yes to The “No” Stage

Maybe it’s one of those predictable passages of later life---older people going through a “terrible two” stage, except their stubborn “no” phase begins at 60 and can last for the next 40 years. Whatever it is, I see it all around me…men and women whose mouths used to say yes when their hearts said no, now synching their words and behavior and saying no when they feel no. And it’s one of the good things about growing older---the freedom to say no and the conviction to say it out loud.  Some may call it cantankerousness. I call it authenticity, honoring yourself after years of saying yes and not meaning it.

Examples       

            Like horses refusing to jump the fence, some women won’t jump back into their old domestic responsibilities. After 50 years of meatloaf, older cooks may be burned out and they simply refuse to be Betty Crocker anymore. It’s eat out, take-out, microwaved dinners or the husband taking up the spoon.

            Or take hostessing. After years of running their homes as B & B’s, sometimes as a pad for friends of friends, some older people are saying: Sorry, this won’t work for us. Sorry, I just don’t have the energy anymore. Sorry, my days as Martha Stewart are over. Here’s the phone number of a hotel.

            You probably have your own example: you won’t go to those boring club meetings any more, won’t volunteer at the place that doesn’t honor your talents, won’t repair the computers of any neighbor who asks----the list can be endless as you leave certain mid-life behaviors in the rear view mirror. 

            And one good part about saying no is that now it is the truth. Your energy is limited. You’ve done your time in the trenches. You can rest. Unless you don’t want to, of course. There are people whose life force is astounding and if they get pleasure still doing what they used to do, more power to them.

Words For the Wise

            So welcome your Inner Brat. He may really be your guardian angel, trying to keep you happy and healthy. And as for you, it’s no dishonor to admit to personal energy shortages, plus it’s smart to save your battery power for the higher priorities of life. Keep the steam in your boiler for the people and things you love.

The rest is cosmic dandruff. Brush it off. Or ask the Inner Brat to do it for you.

                                    

Copyright © Maryellen Walsh 2007

When Your Brain Goes Missing

              Blanking out. It happens---those senior moments when what you know you know goes AWOL. 

There’s the Lite Senior Moment---as in: what was the name of that movie where John Wayne was in Ireland and he had the big fight? These are the tiny private forgettings.

And then there are the Bad Senior Moments. Bad Senior Moments are usually public and turn your face red. It’s when you forget the code for the ATM machine and there’s a long line in back of you waiting to get money.

But relax, please. Blanking out happens and it probably happened all your life, but it’s when you are an older adult that society takes notice. We name and shame the forgetting: Gary Geezer is having a senior moment, poor thing.

But to keep things in perspective, didn’t you have Teen Moments when you couldn’t remember the names of people at the party or you forgot who fought the Punic Wars or you totally spazzed on the time you were supposed to be home?

Sometimes I think older people are too worried about their little mental lapses. They imagine a big, bad diagnosis on the horizon when they forget where they put the car keys. However, they have always forgotten where they put the car keys. But if you forget where you put the car, that’s another story----except in a big mall or an airport parking lot, where everybody of every age forgets where the car is.

Tips & Tricks

Here are some common senior moments and a few ways to compensate:

Someone asks you a question and you know you should know but you don’t.

In this situation, you say---“I’ll get back to you on that”. Or you say: “I need to look that one up in my files”. One friend says his memory bank is down right now, but he’ll know the answer as soon as his brain is back online.

            You can’t remember people’s names, especially when you meet them out of the usual context. Other than passing a law requiring people to have their names tattooed on their foreheads, we can simply tell the truth: my mind is blank. If you see this memory glitch happening to others, be kind and tell them your name.

            You cannot remember what you are supposed to do when.

            Most of us handle this with a date book and with written lists. I find making a list on a large Post-It note and sticking it in my datebook keeps me from losing the list. But what happens when you lose your datebook or the tech device you may now use as a calendar/reminder list instead?

Unless you’ve made back-ups, you are up memory lane without a paddle.

But your cell phone should have the numbers that were in your datebook. And I keep a teeny address book stuck in my wallet so if I lose the bigger address book, there’s a backup. My man, Kranky Pants, keeps two datebooks, one in a briefcase and one on the desk, so if either floats off into Never-Never Land, he has the other.

What he and I have to remember is to co-ordinate our calendars. Catching up with each other on Sunday mornings works for us. That’s after a Saturday night when he thought we were going to a concert and I thought we were going over to a friend’s house for dinner.  Simultaneous senior moments---one of the deep thrills of aging.

And then there’s another common dilemma, perhaps the one that makes us feel most foolish:

You go in a room and can’t remember why.

This is when you just say the hell with it and walk out again. If it was important, your brain will let you know.

            Words For the Wise

                      I forgot. Give me a minute. 

Golden Aging

             I’m a little seasick. The horizon seems to be shifting. I know what it is though----a sea change, a turn in the tide in how people think about aging. People used to think if they lived past 50, they were in heaven’s waiting room.

            Do you remember that old view of aging? Adults in retirement are not worth much. They are empties to be discarded, geezers to be made fun of, retards glued to their bingo cards, good only for the booty they might pass on when they die. If they babysat the grandkids for free, their stock went up, but not very far. Basically, older people were over.

            Actually, one hundred years ago, many of them were literally over. The average age of death then was late 40’s. Now we have better control of the epidemics that used to do us in along with a medical landscape that, for all its faults, keeps us going another 30 years.

Seeing the Shift

            Now have you had one of those moments---a flash that indicates you’re living in the middle of the age revolution? Have you had one of those moments when social change is made visible and I mean good visible—as though someone handed you an ice cream cone?

            I had such a flash last week. I wrote a book encouraging people to think about getting older as a second wind, not the end of the good times. As part of a book tour, a TV interviewer asked me how old I was. In front of six million people, I said 71. I said 71 twice, which did not make me 142, but did make me the recipient of emails from all over the country.

Thanks, they said, for letting people know that older adults are not the living dead. Thanks for telling the truth about your age. It’s about time people are proud of their years and experience. Thanks for not lying, as though your years in the world are something to be ashamed of.

So that was one good moment for me, one shift in the social horizon---to tell the truth about age and not have a flock of morticians run towards me with their shovels.

Other good moments come when I see that a large number of volunteers in local non-profit organizations were born in the 1930’s. Which means older people are not only useful, but critically so. These organizations might shrivel up and die if the older people in the community didn’t contribute time, money and smarts. The parks would be docentless, the grand jury room empty, the theaters would lose much of their live audience. The local classical music scene would shrink, leaving for world safe for hip hop, but perilous for Ludwig Von Beethoven.

Other Signs of the Shift

Bob Barker, the TV personality, is still in the national spotlight in his 80’s and when he recently announced his retirement, he said no one told him to retire. He just wanted to do it while he was still on top of his game.

Top of your game in your 80’s. It’s the age revolution.

And it’s happening to ordinary, non-celebrities, too. I’m not the only person who began a new career after 60. I meet store owners living out their retail dreams. I get email from older people who have started new businesses rather than retire from the world. I recently interviewed a woman in her 80’s who had her first book published this spring and by one of the major publishers in New York.

So life ain’t over ‘til it’s over. Only dead is too late and you and I aren’t there yet.

            Words For the Wise

            If you want to check out this columnist’s truth-telling moment on CBS, do an internet search using four words: Early Show Mel Walsh. Then scroll through the other books until you get to Hot Granny. Click on watch.

And maybe consider joining me, not only by telling how old you are, but by declaring you are proud of every single candle on your cake.

Mother's Day Debriefed

     Well, it’s about a week after Mother’s Day and the butter in the Eggs Benedict has worked its way to the waist. But there’s other fallout from the Sunday that was and the greatest may be the older woman’s seasonal evaluation of her adult children. For nothing gets a mom thinking more about middle-aged Johnny and Josh than the Sunday in May when she was supposed to be rewarded for giving birth to them.

            What gets us older parents started on this subject? Maybe it’s the Mother’s Day flowers (or their absence). Maybe it’s the ceremonial Eggs Benedict or the fact that nobody invited some of us out for a meal. But I think I can hear the litany:

            Why didn’t I get brunched like all my friends? Why don’t the kids visit?

They have cell phones implanted in their ears, so why don’t they call? And why is Mother’s Day all about them and their families and not about me? They may think of me as Mother Emeritus, my ovaries on Social Security along with the rest of me, but don’t they know that mothers never retire?

            And so it can go---a private grousing of epic proportions. But if and when you find yourself playing the witness for the prosecution of ungrateful offspring, here are some things that may soften your thinking.

Your Kids May Be Super Short on Money

To make ends meet, they may be working the long hours that the unions were once supposed to reform. Some of our children do a 9 to 9 gig, two jobs just to afford housing in a market where a tear-down can cost a half million dollars---all those long hours to pay down their mortgage, one that is big enough to fund the equivalent of 20 houses from the 1950’s and 60’s.  Also, if our offspring are women, they may have job-ettes, which means the pay is lite and the work is menial, but the mortgage rates are the same no matter the gender or the job. So, bottom line, our kids may not have the dough for fifty-buck bouquets or large brunches hosted by their credit cards.

Your Kids Have No Time

            If they have children, their leisure hours are non-existent. To begin with, today’s moms and dads are unpaid taxi drivers. They drive the daily school route and then the routes for after-school and weekend sports. These unending drives mean the daughter you sent to that excellent college now spends much of her life looking up the tailpipes of other taxi-driving moms.

Your kids also drive their kids to play dates, sleepovers, music lessons, art lessons, first-run movies involving action heroes and many of the finest pizza parlors in town. That’s in addition to being room mom, homework helper, housefrau, etc. etc.---a drill that is familiar to us older women.

Visits & Vacations

            As for family visiting, your kids have less vacation line than other First World  workers and they may not want to spend it on your living room couch with the kids on the floor. And they are under pressure from their kids to go spend vacations with Walt Disney.

            What? Is Mickey Mouse more important than Grandma? Yes, and if you do not learn that small minds think that way, you will lose your granny license.

Words For the Wise

Think phone.

Our extended family now communicates on the run, which is not as good as a fireside chat, but better than silence. I catch my kids on their taxi runs or I get near my phone during commuter hours which is when the calls come in---mostly from sons and step-sons bored with their commute. If I am near my computer during these calls, I act as newscaster on the MBS---Mom Broadcasting System. I give headlines and sports scores.

As for seeing families on vacation in an environment interesting to all, eight of us are about to camp on the Sonoma Coast---a no-host situation where all pitch in. (Theoretically.)

Meanwhile, yes, your kids should have at least called last week. If they didn’t, send them this column. And if you are a mid-life adult whose parents have trouble understanding your life as an unpaid taxi-driver, send this.

And both of you, pick up the phone.

When Mom Is AWOL

I admit it. There is a downside to longevity. Live long enough and you’ll become an orphan. And some of us never get used to this. You’d think we’d adjust to life without parents---it happens to all older people---but no, not me.

Every time I want to call my mom to tell her what the kids did this time, I’m vaguely surprised that I can’t. She’s gone. And those old home phone numbers we knew so well---the ones began with names like Plaza or Sycamore---those numbers, if they still work, would be the wrong number because Mom and Dad don’t live there anymore. No one knows where they do live now, but many of us have a fantasy that they are sitting on pink clouds looking down on us.

My mom, I can tell you for sure, wouldn’t be that much of an overhead busybody. But she might phone me very long distance to tell me my horoscope for the week. That used to be her job after I left home. I figure the horoscope thing meant she was still trying to prepare me for life. When I was in my 60’s, she was still preparing me for life and we would laugh about it---one woman on Social Security trying to bring up her daughter, another woman on Social Security. Age doesn’t wither the mother instinct.

Missing Mom

            Frankly, I miss buying a Mother’s Day present. That’s what I tell myself, anyhow, but what I really miss is mom. Who else remembers the exact time of your birth and your birth weight? And what’s more, on Mother’s Day, I not only miss her, I miss my mother-in-law and every older woman I knew who inspired, comforted or urged me on. Big global missing going here on for Mother’s Day. But luckily, there are ways to honor our missing moms and feel a bit better about them being AWOL on Mother’s Day.

A Little Comfort

Our country traditionally honors mothers with a yearly offering of Eggs Benedict. That’s the ceremony for the moms still with us. But where we lag is where other cultures excel---finding ways to honor the ancestral moms, the ones who have gone on to make meatloaf in Heaven.

Now maybe your departed mom knows if you honor her and maybe she doesn’t, but it might make you feel better to do a little something for the person who has done a lot for you. Try…

            Altars: A photo of the departed is the centerpiece. Stick a pot of flowers and a little candle next to mom’s photo and call it an altar. Yes, she’d giggle at the idea. Altar, schmalter. But I like to look at my mini-shrine. I put it in the kitchen so she’d feel at home.

            Photos as gifts: Give your grandchildren a picture of your mom and/or your grandmom and even a picture of you. Also send along a bit of family history, maybe a just a sentence…”This is your great, great grandmother Lucy, who, whenever a woman was sick, would say “She has the teezy-weezies in her egg bag”. (That was my grandmother, the folk gynecologist.)

            Memoir: OK, you don’t have to do a full memoir, but how about a memoir-ette, writing even a page about your mom to pass on to your family? Start with something easy. Which of her dresses dazzled you? What perfume? What lipstick?

            Framing a Letter: Kept any letters from mom? Frame one. Hang it. Enjoy.

Words For the Wise

Look around the world to find other ways to honor departed moms. Here’s one more:

            

Invite Mom to Dinner: Other cultures both ancient and modern set a place at the table for the ancestors. You could do this and I won’t tell. I have done it myself, just because it feels welcoming and right. I served shrimp scampi---mom’s favorite---and all of us at the table raised a glass in remembrance.

So Happy Mother’s Day. Now eat your Eggs Benedict and clean your plate.

Advice for the Amateur Lover

           OK, you know what we’re supposed to do when we grow older---besides play bingo and criticize the young. You and I are supposed to give advice and I certainly would if only I knew what advice to give. But the older I grow, the less I know. I now question almost everything I was taught as a young girl who was hogwashed with ideas that her prince would come, that pumpkins would turn into Porsches and that a couple could live happily ever after, even if he were a prince and she a scullery maid, a Dusterella from the kitchen crew.

But and however, after decades of observing the coupling of humans and sorting out which matings worked and which went kaplooie (including my own), I now have at hand a small packet of usable advice I will pass on. If it makes sense, you can share it with the young people in your family who may not yet know how to ID the Wrong Person For Them even if the WPFT came with a black box warning tattooed on the forehead.

Same Old Delusions

Read the current singles ads and see that some nonsense has stayed the same over decades. People are looking for others who like sunsets, long walks on the beach and candlelight. As if those tastes count when you are cleaning up the baby’s burpy deposits on your shoulder at 3 AM.

So here is some advice---hard won and field tested for over 50 years.

Look At…

Ability to relax with potential mate.  No matter how sexy, if someone gives you that walking-on-eggs feeling most of the time, move on to somebody who won’t drain your adrenaline reserves over the years. Old shoe people wear well.

Body rhythms. Morning people should mate with other morning people. Night people ditto. I don’t think there are any afternoon people. Maybe Oprah.

Level of energy. Don’t mate an active Type A with a couch potato. One will always be critical of the energy level of the other.

Addictions. Drugs, booze, sex, spending---these are the addictions that drive people crazy and eventually apart. And the effect on the children is always profoundly negative. So check out the habits, both obvious and hidden.

Abuse. Nobody should hook up with someone who dishes out verbal or physical abuse. Nobody. Ever. Even if the culprit is sorry in the morning and brings flowers home at night. Abuse is a pattern and it will happen again. You betcha.

Feelings about family and children. If one person shies away from family life and has doubts about having children, he or she should not mate with Mother or Father Earth.

Similar literacy levels. It can happen that someone who reads the N Y Times Book Review can live happily with someone who never reads at all, but this couple may not have a lot to say to each other after the sex glow wears off.

Out-of-Bed Experience. If life out of bed is way worse than life in bed, think again. Ditto for the reverse. Horizontal and vertical experiences should roughly match, at least most of the time, celestial moments excepted.

Humor. If he or she can’t laugh at life and with you, don’t even bother.

Words to the Wise

That’s about it…50 years as an observer/participant and all I learned fits in one column. I don’t know if that’s pathetic or par for the course.

Anyhow, if the above makes sense, pass it on to a young person in your family, the one who maybe be going out with The Wrong One or just looking for The Right One. Notice I don’t mention The Perfect One, for there are no marriages made in heaven. And maybe that’s the last piece of advice from this grandmother: Look for someone who is as about as imperfect as you. Not way worse. Not intimidatingly better. Just about even in most ways most of the time.

Now that may be a match.

What Wouldn't You Do?

            Some questions wake us up---a pail of ice water dumped on the head. Here’s one: If you had only one year to live, what would you do?

Here’s another: Why aren’t you doing that now?

Me, I have trouble with those wake-up questions. My priorities are not so tidy that I can answer fast and then believe myself. So I’m backing into a reply by asking a third question:

What am I doing now that I wouldn’t be doing if I had only a year to live?

That question makes it easier. Subtract everything that is a major pain in a body part and look at what’s left. That’s the basic pay dirt of your life, the things you enjoy or find worthwhile. Next add in the things you always meant to do. Now you have a handle on what you’d do with that one last theoretical year.

Older People and Time

            People who toddle on past 50, 60 and 70 know that they are getting up there, there being the place where time Matters with a capital M because by then one knows how fast time passes. Birthdays for the older adult pass by like subways stations seen from a speeding train.

So yes, we silver heads have time on our minds. We know having a long future is no longer a given the way it is to a five-year-old who has a lifetime supply. Time---the living and breathing left to us---turns out to be the most precious commodity on earth.

The Good Obsession

            So me, I’m getting obsessed about my most precious possession. If you think shoe obsessions are bad, I confess I’m someone who keeps opening my mental closet to admire and count the days I might have left. 

So, yes, I’m a time junkie. Can’t get enough. Always looking for more. Try and take it from me and I’ll smack you one.

OK, I won’t do that, but I will say no to the person who asks me to knit booties for orphan squirrels. I pick my volunteer work and am beginning to get the sense to know when my calendar and heart are full. Still very involved professionally, I put my goals into A, B and C categories and then pay no attention to the C’s.  Older people shouldn’t be playing in the minor leagues when it comes to priorities.

Family: The Confession

Increasingly, I am more selective about the energy expended on relatives. If a literate, phone-toting grandchild can’t thank me for a gift, no more time spent picking out special gifts. My beloved ingrate gets a singing email greeting instead. And this may lose me my granny license, but I say no to the very kind invitations to kids’ birthday parties. If I wanted to ruin my hearing, I’d go to a rock concert instead. I figure graduations from 8^th grade, high school and college for 12 grandchildren will keep me busy enough in the calendar department.

Friends

As we all know, there are friends and then there are friends. The less desirable ones never call unless they want something. Well, I want something too---good friends--- which means a fairly even exchange of concern, favors and time. Users and takers should be pruned away for the life and the health of older people, we who just don’t have the energy to be taken advantage of anymore. Gerontologists call this pruning process “social selectivity’’ which means we older people get fussy about the company we keep. No more bad bosses invited over for dinner..

Words to the Wise

            I talk these issues over with friends and they say they feel guilty saying no to time-wasters. But if we don’t honor our time, who will? Nobody else watches our hourglass. Minding time is a job that can’t be delegated. So maybe we should go ahead and get living as though we had just one more year.

Then do that for the next thirty.