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...."

[serendipityricho]

Evening seniors.

Just checking your all behaving!

Been a bit busy with RL.

Will return when i get my sense of humour back.

-Carry on -rewardless.............Richo.

[kengillard]

Richo....♥night folks

[rose*petals]

Received this email tonight -

Someone asked the other day, 'What was your favourite 'fast food' when you were growing up?'
'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I informed him.'Except for Fish & Chip shops and we ate it all so unhygenically from newspaper wrappers'
'All the other food was slow.'
'C'mon, seriously.. Where did you eat?'
'It was a place called 'home,' I explained.
'Mum cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the lad was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.

But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I'd figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore jeans, set foot on a golf course, travelled out of the country and credit cards had not been invented.

My parents never drove me to school. I had my mothers bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).

We didn't have a television in our house until the Queens Coronation.
It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at 10 pm, after playing the national anthem and epilogue; it came back on the air at about 4 p.m. and there was usually locally produced news and everything was live.....or film.

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home... But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and many boys delivered newspapers --My brother delivered a newspaper, seven days a week. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.

Film stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the films. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence (except cowboy films) or almost anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.
Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?

MEMORIES from a friend:
My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it... I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?
Headlight dip-switches on the floor of the car.
Ignition switches on the dashboard. There were two postal deliveries per day.
Trouser leg clips for bicycles without chain guards. The street lights were turned off at about 11pm each night. Soldering irons you heated on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn indicators. Corona fizzy drinks were delivered in glass bottles by lorry each week, and the empties returned.
.>
Older Than Dirt Quiz:
Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones you were told about.
Ratings at the bottom.

1. Sweet cigarettes
2. Coffee shops with juke boxes
3. Home milk delivery in glass bottles
4. Party lines on the telephone
5. Newsreels before the film
6. TV test card patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again. (There were only 2 channels[if you were fortunate])
7. Peashooters
8. 78 rpm records
9. 45 RPM records
10. Hi-fi's
11. Metal ice trays with levers
12. Blue flashbulbs
13. Cork popguns
14. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-3 = You’re still young
If you remembered 3-6 = You are getting older
If you remembered 7-10 = Don't tell your age
If you remembered 11-14 = You're positively ancient!

I must be 'positively ancient' but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really OLDfriends....I just did!!!!!!!!!

(PS. I used a large type face so you could read it easily)

[lyndal1838]

I remember all of those things, except the party phone line. By the time I was old enough to be allowed to use the phone it was a single line.

When I moved into this house in 1970 my neighbour told me that when she had the phone put on in 1954 it had been a party line with someone in the next street.:O

[rose*petals]

Lyndal, we lived on a farm in a valley and there were about 5 houses on our party line.  We all had different rings - ours was short, long, short but you always knew others were listening.

[lyndal1838]

Come to think of it, I used to go up to Rawdon Island near Wauchope to stay with my cousins...all the phones on the Island were on a party line.  That would have been as late as 1959-60 and I believe they were on a party line for some time after that.  I had forgotten that because I never had any reason to use the phone....it was on the wall and you had to get onto the exchange to have your call put through.

[darksideofthemoon]

Good morning all 🙂

Rosie it must be such a wonderful feeling, I'm so glad it's happening xxx

HI ya purple and Gil 🙂  Let's hope Gil she she settles and is happy there.

Hi ya Richo, yes we are behaving in your absence :^O  Do get that humour back soon, January has been such a bad month for so many. 😞

Rose petals I remember having to give hand signals when driving to turn right or to stop... Nowadays you'd probably lose your arm...

Yes sprinkle the clothes and roll them up to make them damp so you could iron the wrinkles.

I'm definitely positively ancient :^O

Oh and not only just party lines but no 000 emergency calls... getting to the doctor for treatment for accidents... ambulances I can't recall, although I remember sitting in an accident and emergency ward and watching ambulance officers bring in someone on a stretcher.

Haven't things changed 😮

[darksideofthemoon]

What a pity we don't have any members in their late 80s and 90s here, the things they would remember.

My mother remembered when the Sydney Harbour Bridge didn't exist!

[kengillard]

my mum had a photo of the Harbour Bridge....half built...it hadn't yet met in the middle.

[lyndal1838]

My grandmother was born in 1893 and boy, did she have a few stories to tell.  She was also a great photographer so in many cases I have the photographic evidence.  I have photos of the harbour pre-bridge too....both my grandmother's and my parents photos.

I was 41 when she died, so well old enough to remember her stories as I had heard them so many times. Even my daughters heard them first hand too.