When I think of boot camp, I think of soldiers doing 500 push ups and 700 sit ups in thirty minutes and then running 300 miles in the sweltering heat with 1,000 pounds of equipment strapped to their backs. Although many senior citizens are physically fit and just as strong as when they were young, I tend to think of boot camp for them as being more emotionally demanding than the physical boot camp for soldiers. The emotional boot camp …
When I was young, my mother used to tell me that I was wishing my life away because I always wanted to be older. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be older, I wanted the privileges that went along with being older. When I was twelve, I wanted to be thirteen so that I could be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be twenty-one so that I could get a driver’s license and vote. During …
I remember hearing about a 92-year-old man who was healthy, had all his teeth and hair, and had a good sex drive, and who was also very attractive. He lived in a condominium and he was always in the company of one or two beautiful, young women. Someone wanted to introduce him to a woman she thought would be great for him. The woman was sixty-five, intelligent, attractive, educated, and had a family who lived on the other side of …
About forty years ago, my community had a lot of senior citizens and a lot of restaurants offering all-you-can-eat early bird specials for $2.99. It didn’t take too long before the senior citizens ate so much of their three-dollar-dinners that they put a lot of those restaurants out of business. I remember one couple, in particular, who found a restaurant that was a little out of the way, that had an all-you-can-eat early bird buffet for $1.99. Their special was …
Yesterday was Christmas and I woke up with a fierce craving for a piece of rich, gooey, chocolate cake with chocolate fudge and a scoop of ice cream. The kind of dessert that should come with a warning label that says that it’s illegal or immoral and eating it is at your own peril. I was telling someone very dear to me about a restaurant that’s been in business for at least thirty years, and how, when one of my …
From time to time I have written about the positive aspects of aging. I have said, and still believe, that I have more liberties now than I ever had when I was young. At my age, I can say and do almost anything and people will just smile and let me be, probably thinking that they shouldn’t argue with me because I have one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in the grave and I can’t last …
I’ve always wondered how we’re going to survive as a species if we keep killing off our enemies and they keep killing us. I’ve wondered how our planet is going to survive the abuses we wreak on it like the fracking that is slowly causing our land to open up, engulfing property and lives in newly created vast sinkholes. And I keep thinking how our overindustrialized cities are putting such hardship on our planet and depleting our natural resources. And …
In most countries with a traditional culture, old people are respected and honored for their wisdom. In the United States, we tend to see them as old, doddering fools whose best years are behind them and who are just taking up time and space, waiting for the grim reaper to take them. But worst of all is that for so many people, their thinking gets fuzzy and they get mentally lazy. Doctors keep telling us that as we get older, …
Scientists are now saying that as you get older, you get nicer. They have done all kinds of studies to prove their premise that “The personality changes naturally over the course of adulthood. Researchers call it the maturity principle.” They claim that “From the ages of 20 to 65, apparently we become less angry and neurotic and more agreeable and emotionally stable.” I’m not a research scientist but I’ve always been an observer of human nature and I subscribe to …
Fifty years ago, if you were in your forties or fifties and you told someone that you were going to start a new career, they would have asked, “A new career at your age? and the emphasis would have been on the word, your. Nowadays, you can even be 93 and no one would bat an eye; they might even ask, “What took you so long?” Maybe it’s because people are living so much longer or maybe it’s because people …