A History Lesson

We all remember fondly our parents’ and grandparents’ history lessons, don’t we? I mean the lessons like: When I was your age, we walked three miles to school through a foot of snow. (You almost expected that to be followed by: even in summer!) Why do you need such a big place? When your mother and I got married we lived in a closet in your grandparents’ basement. (A closet, really? I guess they never exaggerated in the old days.)

The history varied according to the subject at hand. When it came to the price of food, we all heard things like: I remember when we used to get a loaf of bread for five cents. Or when the subject was gas, it cost 25 cents a gallon back then. We rolled our eyes and wondered why older folks felt it was necessary to make such remarks. Of course, more things change more they remain the same.

Recently, as I was talking about The Beatles with one of my sons, my grandson took his attention away from the video game he was playing long enough to comment that he had learned all about beetles at school the day before. I realized that my history is quite different than that of my grandchildren. Like my parents I remember walking to school and I also remember buying a loaf of bread for less than a dollar.

With all the changes we see today, I wonder what my grandchildren will one day tell their children and their grandchildren. While we might say that we remember a time when there was no computers or cell phones, our grandchildren are more likely to reminisce about the newest gadgets now on the market and those which will soon be appearing, like the glasses that connect you directly to the Internet so you can secretly be online while walking in a crowd or while talking to people. With these glasses, presumably, a keyboard will not be necessary as you will be able to dictate emails. Will that mean that people will be going around talking out loud, but not talking to each other directly? As one journalist wrote: You will be able to make visual phone calls and see the other person in your glasses while cycling – or crashing!

Then again, as technology becomes “out there” people may simply choose to tune out altogether. That may mean that our grandchildren will reminisce about the time when they decided to go back to the day when people talked to each other. What a concept!

 

       THINGS I DON’T UNDERSTAND

 
The world is full of mystifying things. And as

                                                I’m getting older, there are more and more things I can’t understand. While I have always known that the world is complicated, I accepted it and didn’t think about it much. Not so now. I am forever asking the important questions about the mundane things that make up life.

For example, how can a suppository cure laryngitis? Having suffered a recent bout, I can testify to the fact that indeed it does. Then, the question that begs an answer is certainly how can a waxy substance inserted in the rectum work its magic in the throat? Most importantly though, I want to know who thought of this? A research scientist, obviously, but I want to understand the process.

And why is it that when celebrities cheat on their spouses they have an addiction while any other adulterer is simply a louse? It seems to me that money and addiction are closely related in a scenario when the more money a person has, the more profound the addiction appears to be. The solution couldn’t be simpler: let these poor souls give their money away and the addiction will resolve itself.

Another thing I don’t understand is who decides how much art is worth? Two people looking at the same painting might have very varied opinions, one person liking it while the other finding it rather boring. Whose opinion will come into play when assessing its value? What I really don’t understand is how any given artwork can be worth millions of dollars, tens of millions in some instances. How much would that work out per hour for the artist’s time were he still alive? That boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

With the advent of autumn, what I really don’t understand is how much last year’s clothes have shrunk over the summer. Must have to do with the heat. What else could it be? 

         

To Gray or Not To Gray

We’ve all been through it. The day we saw our first gray hair. We were shocked. Much too young, we thought, at 30 or 40, or even 50 for the lucky ones. But, like all the curves life throws at us, we learned to live with it even after that first hair went frolicking and quickly spread its color, or lack thereof, to a bunch of others.

Women quickly rally by visiting their hair salon so a colorist can hide any and all signs of aging. On the other hand, men overall seem to take the appearance of gray hair in stride. After all, it’s been drilled into us that men with graying hair look distinguished while women look old although that’s far from true. A few years ago, I accompanied my sister to her doctor’s appointment and met the physician, an attractive woman somewhere in her mid-forties with shoulder-length nearly all white hair. She looked stunning. Since then, I don’t equate graying hair with the need to hide it.

That inequality between men and women when it comes to hair color is not lost on young children. My sister’s young grandson asked her one day why grandmas didn’t have white hair, only grandpas did. Her son was quick to retort that the reason was that men think harder! Don’t write, I didn’t say it!

After you’ve accepted that your hair will never return to its natural color, you see your children in their 40s begin to follow your lead and sprout gray. You sigh as you secretly think that the human condition can indeed be a bitch. Luckily it favors everyone the same way.

Of course, a graying head is nothing compared to the shock when you discover that your eyebrows are also being attacked by gray. One day as I was putting on makeup my eye caught what I thought might be a gray hair above my right eye. Had to be the light in the bathroom, so I went to the window with a mirror and sure enough my eyebrows had taken a lesson from the hair on my head and decided it was time to show who was boss. I calmly tweezed it out, and luckily it didn’t have time to produce a progeny. But then again, why worry. I mean with ever changing styles, gray may soon be what “every woman should want.” I say this because marketing to women can be crazy. Why else would a company that markets navy blue lipstick be making a killing? 

 

Back in the Day
Adults have a reputation for boring kids with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were back in the day. What with walking twenty-five miles to school every day...uphill... barefoot...yadda, yadda, yadda! 
But now it is hard to not notice how the youth of today has it easy compared to when we were growing up! I wonder if they appreciate how easy things are for them.
= We grew up without the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up, in the card catalog!! 
= There was no email!!  We had to actually write somebody a letter with a pen! Then had to walk all the way to the corner to put it in the mailbox!  Stamps were 10 cents!
= There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes!  If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio. There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car.  We'd play our favorite tape and when ejected the tape would come undone rendering it useless.
= We didn't have Call Waiting!  If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal and had to call back. There weren't any cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". Think of the horror of not being in touch with someone 24/7!  And we didn't have Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!  It could be your school, your boss, your bookie, the collection agent ... You had to pick it up to find out!
 = We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics!  We had the Atari 2600!  With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'.  Your screen guy was a little square!  You actually had to use your imagination. 

= You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! When it came to channel surfing you had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel.

 =There was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.  Unlike today’s spoiled kids we had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons.
 = And we didn't have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove!   

=And our parents told us to stay outside and play all day long.  No electronics to soothe and comfort.  And if you came back inside you were doing chores!
= As for car seats, mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on.  If you were lucky, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place! 

 The question then is: How long would today’s kids last in the “back then” world?

 

Gift Giving   

I don’t know about you, but I find that deciding on an appropriate gift—be it for a birthday or Christmas—for adult children can sometimes be a challenge. Their homes are well equipped with all sorts of gadgets, and do they really need another sweater?

         There are other options of course like the latest bestseller, that is if they haven’t already downloaded it for their e-readers. Or tickets for a show or a sporting event are always nice to receive, but almost impossible to obtain if the children live out-of-town.

To me, a gift doesn’t have to mean something you purchase. I think that children appreciate receiving something that is being passed on, be it an exquisite set of glassware or a piece of art that you have owned for some time—or inherited—and no longer need nor use.  These types of gifts will no doubt make their way down the line to their children and beyond in due course where they will be appreciated all over again.

Such gift giving is a valuable tool when it comes to the downsizing we all must face at some point.  It ensures that our things are going to good homes. Of course, one should be sure the adult children will appreciate the things we want to give them. One way to find out is to simply ask them. “What do you think of that lamp?” Or “I wonder how much I could get for my mother’s tea set? Unless you want it, of course.”  Their answers will ensure the right person gets the right gift rather than the recipient thinking where to hide this “thing” while seeming so very grateful!!

Many of you must remember the film The Bird Cage, more specifically the rather provocative design on the china the hosts used to serve dinner. That was the subject of conversation between two women seated behind us as we waited for the film feature to start at the local cinema recently. From what I gathered one of them had such a set of china which she inherited from an uncle years before. She never dared throw it out and kept it packed and well hidden in her attic, however now that she and her husband were thinking of selling their house, she didn’t know what to do with the china. She would be ashamed to give it to her daughter, she said, so her companion offered what she considered the ideal solution. “Give it to a residence for blind people.” 

 

New Age

Like a lot of you, as I go through my daily morning routine, I listen to the radio to keep abreast of the latest news, weather forecast, and so on.  Recently, I was totally shocked when I heard the newscaster refer to a woman who had been mugged as “elderly.” The woman was 64 years old!

So, if young people—as the newscaster is—consider 64 as elderly, what do you say about people in their 70s or 80s? I personally think that mature would be a good word for everyone 50 and older, no matter their age. Of course, I suppose those in their 90s could be called elderly, but certainly no one else.

Don’t you find that age has undergone rejuvenation in the last few decades? Today, 50 is the new 30, and 60 is the new 40, and so on. Because today’s mature people have access to better health care, improved nutrition and are aware of the benefits of keeping active, they seem to age in a new way when compared to their parents and grandparents. I remember a day when people who were retiring at 65 seemed to immediately go downhill. They rocked on the front porch, literally, and looked at the world go by instead of being a participant in life.

Because of a large gap in ages with my siblings, I have nephews and nieces who are now retiring. And I can assure you that they don’t look “elderly.” They are all engaged in a variety of activities and give little thought to the number of candles on their birthday cake. Life has so much more to offer them. And every other retiree.

But, trust me, not everyone is looking at age in a new way. That is painfully apparent whenever your year of birth is required for security reasons to access accounts and such. As you give it, you can see the clerk’s eyes move ever so slightly as he/she tries to calculate your age. When I’m in a playful mood I recite my year of birth after subtracting a century from it. It’s fun to see the clerk glance at you, not quite sure if he/she heard right but hesitant to ask for a correction. Innocently, I simply say: “Don’t you think I look good for my age?” 

 

 

Exercising

As we age, we all know that regular exercise is a must if we want to stay healthy and flexible to say nothing of reducing arthritic pain, depression and anxiety. While some boomers feel they should be doing more to keep their body in shape, it’s not always easy to choose the right type of exercise when facing the reality that things like long-distance running must be left to the younger crowd.

           Personally, I don’t see the necessity of joining a gym. People often think that the expensive membership fee will be an incentive to go regularly, but that’s rarely the case as health club owners can attest. I also don’t see the need to buy expensive equipment like a treadmill which often ends up being a play field for spiders. It is so much simpler to walk outside. Granted, the weather can be nasty at times, but that’s why we have large malls where you can walk freely and securely as you window shop.   According to AARP, overweight people who walk 30 minutes a day, five times a week, reduce their risk of diabetes by nearly 60 percent.

A stationary bike, which is a good choice to reduce stress on joints, can be used indoors year round as you watch your favorite TV program or as you listen to your favorite music. Personally, I prefer to bike outside from May to the end of October. I find it’s a wonderful way to breathe fresh air while enhancing cardiovascular fitness. If you decide to get a bike, be sure to try it out and have it adjusted to your body shape and size.

A lot of boomers look to the pool for their exercises. Water workouts are offered in most communities where a trainer guides participants in specific exercises. It improves muscular strength and increases flexibility to say nothing of the cardiac benefits. The water provides resistance and you can exercise your entire body in less time.

Repeating the same exercise routine every day though won’t ensure you stay fit. A complete program includes flexibility, balance and strength training. The latter is obtained with lifting weights and you don’t even have to buy weights because you can use household things like filled bottles. Doing yoga is good balance training. The idea is to mix it all up in order to get maximum value for your efforts.