Archives for June 2022

I knew this day was coming. I joked about it years ago in a BoomSpeak post. Now it’s here. The robots have arrived in nursing homes. In Minnesota, 16 robots will soon be dispatched to 8 nursing homes around the state.

Before the pandemic, there wasn’t exactly a groundswell of interest. That was then. After 200,000 nursing home residents or workers died of the coronavirus, minds were changed. Three hundred nursing homes have closed. It’s harder and harder to hire caregivers to work in nursing homes. More than 400,000 workers at long-term care facilities have left the profession. People don’t want to work there and don’t want their elderly relatives to reside there.

Technology had already begun to fill the gap even before the pandemic arrived. Touchless meal delivery, video doctor consults, and home monitoring devices have grown in popularity. The next step is robots reminding us to take our meds, socialize with us, and pick us up when we fall. And don’t laugh –– smart toilets can monitor our meds and nutrition.

Japan is once again way ahead of us when it comes to the use of robots for assisted living environments. They had to be pioneers because they have the world’s oldest population and a limited labor pool.

While the robots will not replace human caregivers anytime soon, Covid-19 has opened our minds to the potential for robots to supplement the functions of human caregivers, and in some cases, perform these functions in a safer manner that prevents potentially deadly human contact.

I still have this image of a nursing home resident sitting in a robotic bathing conveyance that operates somewhat like an automatic brushless carwash. The suds come down and the gentle spray applies the water, then those floppy sponge things dance around a bit, followed by a gentle spray rinse, and then a warm blow dry. Pretty sweet when you think about it. Hardly any effort and you’re in and you’re out. Maybe not as personal as a human performing the service, but then again, maybe we’re not going to want personal bath services.

All I’m saying is that maybe Robby robot is about as personal as we’d like when it comes to some nursing home tasks.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon.

I’ve been sort of a slacker when it comes to writing, but I like to think of it as refining the art of the slack. I’m exhausted by the high standards of productivity some people set for themselves in retirement. Certainly, my days are reasonably busy, but I don’t document my activities with quarterly reports and the dreaded self-assessment.

While big goals typically require planning, preparation, and commitment, in the art of the slack, it’s important to set a low bar for the routines of daily life. This is contrary to my former approach, which was anything worth doing was worth doing with disturbing ferocity. I used to say my tombstone should read, “She tried hard.”

Retirement has mellowed me. I’m learning to enjoy life with less effort. It turns out the universe will nudge you one way or the other, and it all works out in the end. Still, I’ve learned a few important lessons you’ll want to know about.

1. Try to wash your sheets once a week, but they can wait if you’ve got something better to do.
2. Dress for less. You probably have all the clothes you’ll ever need.
3. Go gray. It’s less work, less expensive and beautiful.
4. Dust settles and will sit quietly minding its own business longer than you think.
5. Weeds look like flowers if you squint.
6. After a shower, squeegee and wipe it down with a towel. It’s a pain in the ass, but you might only need to scrub the shower once a month or less.
7. If you have a dishwasher, skip the pre-rinse. Google it if you don’t believe me.
8. Go ahead. Make a top-10 list but stop at eight.

If you’re among those who enjoy gathering metrics, please feel free to call bullshit on me.

We’re all here to learn.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

 

The rainstorm began around two o’clock in the morning accompanied by loud thunder that sounded like it could topple the tall bell tower of the largest church in Rovinj. The tower’s bells resound majestically on Sunday mornings before the first mass. The thunder woke me up, and I rushed to close the wooden shutters and prevent the rain from entering the bedroom. I love summer storms, the sound of raindrops, the look of wet, shiny cobblestones, and the fresh smell of the air after the rain stops. It excites me watching the night colors of the streets and the sea, listening to the rumbling noise descend from the sky, and anticipating the next morning that might surprise me with a wide blue sky without a single cloud to float across it. After the storm the sea seems motionless, and its surface is disturbed only by the landing of seagulls and the long dives of cormorants.

I woke up to a heavy gray day instead. My husband’s depression grew in volume by the minute. He was verbal and described his anxiety as an inability to focus on anything else but himself and his self-inflicted mental torture. He didn’t know a way out of it. One minute he was cold, the next one hot. I suggested having a coffee in a nearby bar and taking a walk. As soon as we sat at the small, round table at the bar, our friends joined us. Being surrounded by people whose company he once enjoyed, he became even more withdrawn. They didn’t interest him. He looked as if he was ready to jump out of his own skin but lacked the energy to do it.

After the coffee we took a walk on a path lined with tall cypresses on one side and the fragrant Mediterranean shrubs on the other. He continued to look at his cell phone that measured our strolling in steps, calories, and miles. He failed to connect to the beauty of nature around us because he thought that the numbers and charts he was monitoring were the only real world. This walk after the rain was just one of my attempts to save him from ruminating.

I wondered what color the next day will bring- blue or gray? Will I be able to notice these colors or just put my sneakers on and count steps, calories, and miles?

Romana Capek-Habekovic lives in Grand Rapids, MI. One of his stories appeared in New Reader Magazine in March 2022.

Hey everyone – they have named a new problem exclusively for baby boomers!

Oh, the excitement.

Demographers have projected that there will be a major eldercare bomb arriving in 2030. What to do, what to do?

First off, society needs to acknowledge that in a repeat of the original boom, there will be another boom coming that will impact eldercare.

How does society prepare for this boom? For starters, we need a payment and insurance system that can handle eldercare better than what we have now, because the numbers are going to be staggering. Two, we need to be proactive in keeping aging boomers as active and healthy as possible. Three, make sure eldercare is more easily accessed. And four, the tough one. Try to change the way our culture views the elderly, so that aging boomers are integrated into community life.

Something sounds very familiar about this scenario. That’s right! It’s similar to climate change. We are getting the early warnings that a storm is coming (I refrained from the term shitstorm, but there it is), and the question as always is will we do anything about it and will we react in time. Short answers: nope and nope.

The penalty for not acting is what some might call dire. A reduced workforce on top of higher costs for eldercare could force the economy to take a major hit, or an economic shock. In many first world countries where national health insurance programs are already in place, the social safety net will most likely be able to absorb the added costs associated with the 2030 problem. Not so in the U.S. Long term care costs in the year 2000 were $120 billion. In 2030, that figure is projected to be $270 billion.

The only note of optimism here is that generally speaking, boomers are in better health now compared to their parents when they were the same age. So maybe the analysts have not factored that into their calculations. Maybe.

Back to what to do. Take care of yourself, exercise, eat well and buy long-term care insurance. And support efforts to make eldercare more accessible. We’re all going to need it.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon here. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon.

I do jokes. Not professionally, since, technically, I don’t get paid. I just perform at family gatherings where sometimes I have to chum the audience with a few one-liners to get the hilarity level up and bubbling. I only fathered daughters who can seem, at times, indifferent to the appeal of my dad-humor. I can only hope it has passed to the next generation in the person of my youngest grandson, Zeno—my last hope to carry on the family gag-gene. I pried his face off a ‘screen’ he had been glommed onto for the last hour and forced him to listen to a joke. He was either polite enough or smart enough to laugh at the story. But that was just passive reception. I wanted more. I had the whole lore of storytelling to pass onto him. So, the next day I called him at home.

“Zeno,” I told him, “I wonder if you realize what a gift I gave you with that joke about the pig with the wooden leg.”

Silence at the other end. The click of screen button. “Uh-huh, grampa.”

“Listen, I don’t hand those jokes to everyone. They are precious, carefully crafted works of art.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, I want to be sure you remember the joke and most importantly the set-up.”“Hmm.”

“See, when my brothers and I get going we often share the same jokes, but in deference to each other’s craft we will ask, ‘Okay, so what’s your set-up on that one?’ See, there’s different ways to get to a punchline—the wording and the timing has to be just right. You can drag out the story too long. Or start laughing before the end. Messes it up. So, in the interest of introducing you to the fine art of storytelling, I’m gonna ask you to repeat the joke I told you last night.”

I can hear my daughter in background saying something to the kid before he sighs and basically repeats all the elements of the joke in order. I make sure to slather on the positive reinforcement for his recall before I proceed to school him on some fine points of my particular set-up for that story.

After we hang up I’m left feeling sad. We can only try to pass on hard-earned skills and insight to the next generation but sometimes the seed falls on hard ground. I can only hope that the gospel of good humor will sprout somewhere along my family line. BTW I’d tell you the joke but that’s not the point. This is serious. This is about the business of joke-telling and family traditions. Ha!

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

For most of my life, I was a natural girl. In my youth, my rarely trimmed hair grew long and straight down my back. I wore white eye liner and pink lip gloss for a while, but by the time I went to college I gave up wearing makeup altogether.

After my divorce in the 1990’s, one friend suggested I wear “just a little lipstick.” Another showed me how to blow dry the roots of my hair to give it more body. I said no, however, to styling products.

So I find myself here, at the age of 68, when the image in the mirror contradicts the image I maintain inside, needing a headshot for my writing endeavors. I talk to the photographer on Thursday, and we agree to meet downtown on Saturday. He suggests colors I should wear for best results, but nothing about how best to enhance my older features. This sends me into a tailspin. Do I need new clothes? Do I have time to get a haircut? I rush to the drugstore to buy eyeliner, mascara and lipstick.

The morning of the shoot I fuss with my hair, using some sample styling products I found in a drawer. The eyeliner I bought is long-lasting, so the mistakes I make in applying it I can’t fix. The mascara smudges against my brow and makes my eyelashes stiff spikes. The neutral lipstick barely makes a difference in my lip color. I stuff a canvas bag with more than necessary top changes and set out for the meeting place with butterflies wrestling in my stomach.

Downtown is crowded with people enjoying the day, without concern for their appearance. The March wind blows my tamed hair; my barely stained lips stick to my teeth. Once in our spot and he is set up, he instructs me how to stand and angle my head, and what to do with my arms. He says he shoots in bursts, and I should start with a serious face and gradually smile through each burst. We wait for the breeze to still. I try to fix my hair. He starts shooting and I relax into it, feeling my smile form naturally by the end of each burst. He shows me a shot. There I am, an older woman, maybe wiser, with tousled hair and faint makeup. Happy to be alive, with many stories still to tell.

Lee Stevens is enjoying life and telling stories about it in the mountains of Western North Carolina