My old friend recently moved to an elegant suburban retirement home. Her luxurious housing complex is just a short train ride from Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Many retired professors live there – from Harvard, MIT, and Wellesley, even international residents from as far away as Chile. You’d have to be in the upper brackets to afford the place. They love their spacious open-plan apartments surrounded by gardens. A concert hall hosts well-known professional musicians. Residents can order vegan, gluten free meals, and use the full gym and pool, (in fact more than one pool,). They insist that the staff of immigrant women who serve them are “so lovely.”

My friend described how residents lecture each other on their own specialties: “The political economy of Lichtenstein”, “Electronic Music’s Future”, “Critical Race Theory and Crime”, even “African American history”, though no African Americans live there. However, the administration plans a diversity initiative to recruit folks like that famous professor on Public TV, who was arrested for breaking into his own house.

My friend finds the contentious disputes amusing. Those elderly professors love to argue. They must miss the verbal jousting on their college campuses. The art history specialist objected to the framed prints by great white men lining the hallways. She managed to replace most of them with work by women artists. The public health professor demanded that everyone be screened for Covid, but after heated debates, she lost to the administration that wouldn’t spend the extra cash. Still feisty, many residents, even those using walkers and wheelchairs, held a protest outside the local bank demanding they divest their fossil fuel stocks, (though I suspect many profited from those same stocks).

After visiting, I considered putting my name on the very long waiting list, but when I checked with my financial advisor, she said, “forget it—you could never afford it.” What options are there for middle income people like me? I’d love to enter a community of active, thoughtful seniors in such a utopian setting, but for those of us too poor to afford the monthly stipend and the large buy in price, (which doesn’t go to one’s descendants), I guess we’re stuck in our own homes – if we’re lucky enough to have one. We’ll go on repairing the leaky roof, shoveling the snow, and carting out the trash for as long as we’re upright. Since exercise is good for you, maybe we’re the lucky ones.

Judith Beth Cohen lives in undisclosed location decidedly not in Cambridge, MA

I went to our family reunion at one of my nephew’s house. Beautiful place on a lake. All kinds of toys like boats and paddle-boards and floating docks. And that was just the lake. The rest of the property had a thriving garden and a rope slide and volleyball nets and bocce balls. Did I mention that my family is Italian? Yeah the food was over-abundant, and all the cookies were ethnic specialties.

Anyway, I mingled and hugged and kissed until at one point I stopped to look for the usual knot of gray-haired elders quietly observing and gently smiling. At first I thought they were hiding—the guys playing cards in a corner and the wives sorting out the food. But then I started scanning, scoping for ‘white hairs’ clustered in clumps. There weren’t any. Passing a mirror I realized that I was the only pale-head in the crowd…well me and my brother, Gus. A moment of truth—we were now the latest against the bookend on the family shelf. Somehow, all those cherished aunts and uncles, who added history and heritage to weddings and baptisms and funerals, had been checked out. I was the current historical touchstone, the recaller of family stories and self-appointed joke teller. Actually, many of those present had heard my store of jokes. Only the very youngest family members had yet to be exposed to my material. Although, I have to say that some of the tweener generations still liked to gather around for a few old groaners…a kinda ‘classics’ review. And I observed some of my nephews and nieces absorbing my pacing and patter for their own story-telling technique.

It took a while to relax and gradually let it sink in that I was now at the end of the runway—next for take off. I have to say, it didn’t hurt that there was a touch of elder-respect coming my way. I learned to graciously accept unasked-for second desserts and offers of more coffee. It was fun to be part of the mix, one of the old dogs snuffling and sniffing in the middle of the pack. But it was a bit daunting to realize that I had probably arrived at my ‘sell by’ date. I decided to enjoy it all while I could.

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

When I say roots, I mean the one that rhymes with boots, not puts. And my roots were firmly established sometime around 1955 give or take a few years. Like all children of the 50s, I played outdoors all afternoon and all-day Saturday without a care in the world. Apparently my mother and father were not worried either, because they never asked where I was or what I was doing. I can only surmise that nothing bad seemed to ever happen, so why would they worry? The children of today will never know how idyllic that world was.

Most of the time I was playing with other kids in the neighborhood, either in our backyards or down the street where there were acres of open land and even a small pond. Playtime nirvana it was.

But back then you had to root for a baseball team and I chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. Or they chose me. I think the appearance of Jackie Robinson sewed it up for me. Black athletes and white athletes playing sports together. Something told me this was right thing to do and this was the way it should be. Then much later along came a Brooklyn born Jewish pitcher by the name of Sandy Koufax and he was a rising star. To top it off, in one of most important playoff games, he sat out because it fell on one of high holy days (Yom Kippur to be exact). That was only a month after he had pitched a perfect game, so I think his talent was unassailable at that point.

Plenty of school mates were New York Yankee fans, but I just knew the Brooklyn Bums were my kind of team. I wasn’t too disappointed when they moved to Los Angeles. After all, they had palm trees there so it couldn’t be all bad.

I continued to be a Dodger fan right up to and through puberty, and then as one would expect, baseball took a backseat to girls and cars, the twin obsession of many adolescents. However, to this day I believe that my fascination with and support for my Dodger team taught me some valuable lessons about what it meant to be a righteous human being. And here’s a note to warm a Dodger fan’s heart: an original Topps Sandy Koufax baseball card goes for over $1,200 now!

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. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

When you were a kid did you ever do the thing, “I think I hear my mother calling”? It was a useful gambit when some bullies were threatening or a neighbor asked for help weeding her garden or a girl gave me the fish-eye after a perfectly good joke.

Well, I discovered a variation on the theme, the other day, when a guy on the cozy side-porch at the retirement home tried downloading his sad family story while we mellowed out in the morning sun. At first, I was being polite and he took it as interest (or maybe he didn’t really care if I was interested…just needed to ventilate) as he recounted the ongoing sibling rivalry with a sister living four states away. Seems she never got over the fact that she was two years older than him and therefore wiser.

I had to remind myself that we all need to listen to others… as we would have them listen unto us. So, I listened. Then he moved onto his mother and then his brother. By then I had stopped nodding and ‘uh-huhing.’ I mean, there are professional people who get paid to listen to these kinds of tales-of-woe. That’s their job. Me, I’m a professional photographer. Very disciplined, using very selective shot selection for a particular audience or assignment. So, I have low tolerance for people who rattle on and on with…but I digress.

So, how to curtail my fellow resident’s screed? I couldn’t claim to hear my mother calling. I’m not a licensed psychic. Just then my cell phone buzzed in my hearing aid. An update from my bank. I got an idea. I put my hand to my ear and nodded, saying, “Okay, dear. sure.” I looked at my fellow porch-sitter/ and said, “It’s my daughter. My granddaughter wants to talk to me.”

The guy nodded and walked away, calling “to be continued,’ over his shoulder. Not if I can help it, I thought, as long as I got my cell phone ‘calling’ me when I need it.

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