The Seniors Thread :-)

[darksideofthemoon]

"This is for the Senior members of CS, those born before 1947. Baby Boomers and Generations X & Y are welcome providing you are over 18 🙂

But this is definitely for people who are facing the last long haul.  We have survived babyhood, childhood, being teens and twenties... We have learned to read and write, to drive, have probably been married and the women have survived child birth.

The challenges are constant and the near misses of death are also there.  If we have become a senior we have learned to survive so much, and along the way we have, of course, gathered a great deal of knowledge about life.

The  belief that age diminishes us is not true, it changes us and not all of it is bad.  Yes there can be various forms of dementia for some, but that is also a disease that can happen in younger people.  Alzheimer's can also occur - it is another form of dementia and generally occurs in people over 65, although that can occur much earlier too and not everyone is going to get it.

Most of us keep our mental alertness up to the moment of death, even if we lose our hearing and our eyesight, but of course this can happen at any age too.

What changes is our physical strength, which diminishes but our mental strength and patience grows, it has to of course, to deal with this aging thing.

Arthritis, heart trouble, strokes - all these things associated with age can happen at any time in your life - arthritis can happen when you are a child but they don't like giving out new hips and knees until you are in your 50s and 60s or later.  We can talk about that too.

Cancer can happen any time and that is also something we can discuss here if you like.

The point of this thread is to give the Seniors a chance to talk about how they are coping with age, the challenges it presents and the fears that can come with it... loss of hearing or sight, aging spouses, living alone, retirement villages, even death...

So I will ask that the Juniors treat us in kindly fashion and remember, all this is going to happen to you too - providing you avoid death before you get here 🙂

So, onward and upward.  Let's go...."

[freddie*rooster]

Actually on reflection I think santa had it hidden in her wardrobe and forgot about it until the tears started rolling down my face, that's when the story about silly santa leaving it in my brothers room was the better option than telling me santa wasn't real :^O

[freddie*rooster]

OMG barn dances with sweaty men in nylon shirts puke!!

:^O

[freshwater-2]

Now you have me worried freddie, did your brother try on the rope petticoat?

Freddie, did you get a wide elastic clincher belt to go with the petticoat.  A tiny waist was the fashion.

 Oh, remember the gold metal headache bands we wore around our foreheads..  We all thought we looked like Cleopatra

 My first high heels were called Baby Louis.  The heel was about an inch high.  And what about those Berlei Whirlpool bras.  OMG they were like ice cream cones.  That English 'actress', Sabrina, who visited here, made them popular. .

[purple_haize]

Darki, you mentioned learning how to cook and knit at school, I did all that, but when I went to high school one week we would do cooking & the alternate week, we learnt how to look after a home, how to clean windows, how to clean a stove, how to dust, how to starch shirts, how to iron and the list goes on........kids today would die if they had to do all that.:^O

I remember learning all the barn dances, square dances etc, this

thread is great, bringing back all the memories.

My mother took me shopping for my first lipstick, think I was 12yrs, she bought it at Coles and it was called *barely pink* ..barely is right, you could hardly see it.

I remember the bras, wouldnt be seen dead in one of them todayB-)

What about the butcher shop with all the animal carcasses hanging in the background and all the saw dust on the floor.

[freddie*rooster]

We sold rolled up newspapers to the butcher, he used 1 piece of butchers paper and then the newspaper to wrap the meat in for his customers 😄

He paid us by weight, we would roll it up into a log and tie it with string, many a rock slipped in between the pages:^O

[freshwater-2]

OMG Freddie, I sold newspapers to the butcher too.  I used to get threepence for a bundle.  I also collected empty soft drink bottles and took them back to the shops for refund.  This was my pocket money.

[freshwater-2]

Do you remember the currency......ha'penny, penny, tray, dina, florin, quid, half a quid, fiver, tenner.  Can't remember what a sixpence was called.

[corgidogz06]

I reckon 1950 should qualify. I have my seniors card to prove it. Great being born in 1950, half a century so I can usually work out my age.

[freshwater-2]

I used to get tuppence for each returned bottle.

I also used to dive for money from the Manly Wharf.  The tourists used to throw in coins and we would dive for them.  Dangerous when the ferry was coming in. We stored the coins in our cheeks.  I was only a kid.  If my mother had known she would have had a fit.

[ambercat16]

Can't remember what a sixpence was called.

was it a zack?

I grew up in NZ and I remember farthings, ha'pennies, pennies, thruppence, etc etc

I also remember having to learn how to multiply and divide pounds shilling and pence......and all those measurement tables like 16 oz = one lb, 14 lb = 1 stone etc etc

And then, after I had wasted several years at school learning all that stuff, along came decimals and the metric system and it was all for nothing:^O