"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 ๐
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 ๐
So, onward and upward. Let's go...."
Yep... whack her with me ear trumpet. These young things of today....... ๐ฎ
Hello everyone, haven't been on for a while, and can't talk about Sydney cos I only went there when I was young and that was about 80 years ago. ๐
But just thinking as today's 17th March... does anyone remember
the St Patrick's Day Parades? They were bigger than Moomba. In Melbourne the archbishop Daniel Mannix would lead them and was followed by schools, bands, Irish societies.... ... and everyone had to wear something green, even a ribbon, in honour of St Paddy..... and after the parade the grown-ups went to the nearest pub and drank Irish whisky until they dropped.
Well my experience with Melbourne is similar to yours in Sydney Panda... My father was posted there at the end of the war and my mother and I were moved down there to be near him.
The St. Pats marches must have been something to behold. ๐
Evening seniors--might grab the 900 snipe!
Good thing someone grabbed it Richo or it might have just vanished :^O
Good morning all ๐
I have been up to my neck in transcribing old letters for a friend of mine who is in the throws of getting her mother's diaries published.
I transcribed them too, all 10 diaries dating from when she was about 15 to about 30.
Now her letters and at present they are all from her first boyfriend, a serious affair when he joined the Navy in 1942 and was involved in the Pacific battles.
Of course he couldn't talk about what his ship was doing or where they went, but the letters back to her were so full of love and wanting to marry. Sadly as time went on and the war dragged on, distance began to take its toll and they finally broke up.
It was interesting to read of his attitudes about women working, which of course they all did while the men were away and the fort was held, but he worried that women would find work far more interesting than home duties and there would be no jobs left for the men when they returned.
He was adament that women should return to domestic bliss and raise children to help the race survive - this was their duty and "they had been doing it for hundreds of years"... their focus should be on their husbands and not on going out to work!
Ah me! how the world has changed. No always for the better tho.
It's been an interesting journey seeing the world through the eyes of someone from the last generation who took the trouble to write down here thoughts and feelings.
I bet no one knows that the Japanese did actually launch a couple of planes from a submarine that pulled into one of the bays down here. They flew over Mount Wellington and caused a great deal of fear.
It wasn't until after the war that the fact that German submarines also cruised our waters was made known.
Oh, and that was the other thing. I watched a documentary recently in which they discovered three Japanese submarines that had been destroyed during the war.
There were only three that could carry and launch planes and it was an odd feeling knowing I was probably looking at one of them that was mentioned in the diaries as having launched the planes down here.
They could carry three small planes and they were harboured under the conning tower. When the sub emerged they could open the doors and the planes were pushed outside. Then the wings were unfolded and they were shot off a long trajectory that went the full length of the submarine and into the air.
