"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...."
Hahaha gil, my conditioner always tells me what they are eating and I don't always want to know ๐
Here's another list for the oldies...
It's an email doing the rounds of course ๐
My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.
Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting recoil.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took PE ... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honor those folk older than us.
We had 60 kids in our class and we all learned to read and write, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a letter grammatically correct,, FUNNY THAT!!
We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
We played โKing of the Hillโ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 48 cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.
How could we possibly have known that?
We never needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes.
We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!
How did we ever survive?
......
Actually only the strong did survive many fell by they wayside which is why things have changed so much. Still, they have gone to far and are now so atiseptic that they are destroying our natural immune systems... typical or wot?
