Am I the only baby boomer wandering around at 3:30 in the morning? I don’t think so. Apparently baby boomers are more susceptible to sleep apnea at this stage of their lives. If your blood pressure has been dropping and you’re tired all the time, or (you’ll love this one!) you stop breathing momentarily in your sleep, you should see a doctor.

Insomnia and sleep apnea occur more often as you get a bit older and heavier. Things get flabby and the parts start to loosen up – like your airways!! Yikes.

If none of these symptoms hit home, maybe you’re just as stressed out as the rest of us who are awake in the early hours. According to those who measure things, about three fourths of baby boomers surveyed say that they get less than eight hours of sleep a night, and one in six has difficulty falling asleep. You made it through crying infants and out–all-night teenagers and now this?

Just the noise of the cat puking in the living room can wake you from a sound sleep. Then as long as you’re up cleaning the floor you might as well get a glass of water. And after the water it only makes sense to go to the bathroom. Maybe then it’s a good time to plan that fantasy trip to the Greek Islands. Should you go with two or three days in London on the way to Athens? Has anyone sent you email in the middle of the night? You never know. If I’m up they could be up. It’s only midnight in LA…but they go to bed at 8 pm don’t they? You could get off the computer and go out on the sofa to watch TV. Home improvement shows are perfect for putting you to sleep. You start watching Amy the carpenter on Sweat Equity reruns and wake up twenty minutes later with drool on your chin (sorry about that Amy).

All the health gurus say you should get eight hours of sleep but what if you never slept that much? What if you’ve been getting by for years on six hours?

I’d like to help you with this problem, but I’m going back to bed.

(This is a Best of BoomSpeak post from some time around 2014)

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. 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.

“Strawberry — Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors.” (Lifted from a cereal box.1) It’s hard to find a better bit of obfuscation out there, meaning Legal went above and beyond in making Marketing toe the line of provable claims.

Just what does “Naturally Flavored with Other Natural Flavors” actually mean? Does it mean natural strawberry flavor, along with other natural flavors? Does it mean the cereal is naturally flavored with other natural flavors (just not necessarily strawberry)? And why not make it more direct with “naturally flavored with natural flavors”, or even “naturally flavored”?2 Heck, a comma would end the confusion.

The ingredient list revealed not one mention of strawberry, unless it was hiding among the scientific poly-syllabic chemical names at the bottom of the listed contents. Natural flavor shows up- as just that- without further explanation.

Taste-testing revealed that not only are there no dehydrated chunks of strawberry present, the flavor is anything but strawberry-like. Maybe there was an astringent element, but that could have been the age of the soy milk3 used to accompany it.

So what might the flavor actually be? I suppose one could add a tablespoon of dirt and call it a natural flavor, but not for lubricants along the production line. Perhaps they hang a pint of strawberries over the bagging machine and hope occasional molecules of strawberry essence drift to the cereal below. It is truly a mystery. But this doesn’t have to be a single rant; there are three other such “flavors” to try.

1. We live in litigious times so I‘m hesitant to expose the maker or the cereal in question.
2. Honestly, the less ambiguous you make it, the more open you leave yourself to an irate retiree with too much unplanned time on his hands trying to generate interest in a class action.
3. Oops, I may have stumbled into another food borne controversy. If there is no actual milk in soy milk, can it still be called soy milk? See also: almond milk.

(From the Best of BoomSpeak, 2019)

Garth Fromme bears no actual malice toward the Quaker Oats Company, but he does get miffed at chicanery no matter its source. He is in his fourth life, still struggling to deal with this unnatural state called “retirement.” 

It was like watching a movie without sound. We had a window seat inside the air-conditioned restaurant. A couple sat at an outside table, slightly lower than us. It was a body-reading experience. The man, two-day beard, white, maybe mid-twenties, faced a woman, perhaps Latino, around the same age. Neither wore wedding rings. They stayed connected with each other with eye contact, body language. The guy was cooler, more constrained. The woman wriggled her feet, leaned forward, finger-played the hair alongside her face. No cell phone fiddling, people watching, blank-eyed self-absorption for either of them…a focused encounter, a serious date.

Was I being voyeuristic? Hell, my hearing aids weren’t doing the job in the noisy restaurant. I could barely hear the conversation between my wife and our two friends across the table. I grasped maybe two or three words in a sentence. I could tell the topic but not the content…just a bit better than the silent mimes outside. I was busy observing and filling in the blanks on two fronts.

I’ve made movies. The story elements are mostly non-verbal—setting, clothes, music, make-up, gestures, action. Words are important but dialogue is only one component. I saw a Japanese movie once that had only four words, titles actually – winter, spring, summer, fall and all the rest was action. A study in cinema as storytelling.

Our food finally came and our table conversation slowed down. Outside the woman and guy kept engaging. The guy, a study in non-verbal minimalism simply nodded from time to time while the woman leaned forward working subtle smiles and engaging eyes. I suddenly had the feeling that I was a fan at a soccer match where folks on the field deked, dodged and shot while us in the stands clapped and passed the popcorn.

So, in effect, I was in the middle of two silent movies absorbing gestures and facial reactions, smiles and laughter in a vacuum of dialogue. Our friends smiled and nodded gentle affirmations. The guy outside, however, never smiled while the young woman really worked the scene.

When they finally got up and left, I wondered if they had a future together; if she would continue to absorb his every word, send so much attention, so many signals, his way. It was working so far.

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/

More important than “to love and cherish” or “in sickness and health” is the vow we made to each other many years ago – no early bird dinners. I’m not sure how it all began, but it may have had something to do with watching some seniors shuffle into the local Horn and Horn Smorgasbord Cafeteria at 4 o’clock in order to get the cheaper Early Bird dinner. One of us looked at the other and we vowed at that moment, to never, ever go to one of those things.

It’s a lot like the “shoot me if I get like that” promise that spouses extract from each other. There’s something about a herd of seniors being corralled into a cafeteria to eat at 4 pm (whether they’re hungry or not) that’s very unsettling. The restaurant views them as a captive audience that can be manipulated easily by the promise of a discount because they’re living on fixed incomes. Maybe that’s why there are so few guys wearing ascots or women wearing diamonds at an early bird dinner.

Does eating dinner at 4 pm mean you’re in bed under the covers by 8? Why does being older mean you have to miss all the fun? We want to eat at 8 pm and stay out until 10 or 11. Where’s the fun in sitting at home watching reruns? I would rather eat less and pay less than be rounded up like docile cattle for the chow line because the restaurant wants to fill some seats and get me out before the high rollers show up (if there areany high rollers going to cafeterias).

Even the elder hostels give me pause. Sure, the programs are great and they take the guesswork out of the planning, but there’s that herding thing going on again. Like lemmings following the lady with the red umbrella at the museum. I’m too much the nonconformist to go there.

I’ll take the discount for seniors at the movie theatre, museums, for bus/train fare, and at the supermarket. That’s only fair. We paid our dues by paying full price all these years. And it’s okay if a younger person allows me to go ahead of them (age before beauty is a reasonable accommodation). But, we have promised ourselves that there are no Early Bird dinners in our future, and it’s a promise we intend to keep.

(Best of BoomSpeak from 2009) 

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. 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.

Nearly every Friday, my father drove my mom and me into the city from our suburban home to visit his mother. Sometimes, one or more of my uncles would visit at the same time. After a few minutes of chatting with my grandmother, the men would adjourn to the front room, leaving the women and children in the kitchen.

When I was old enough to join the men in the front room, I learned some surprising things. Every one of these men had worked—or still worked—on boilers. Boilers were central to our lives. It still astonishes me how much there was to talk about when it came to boilers.

But what really surprised me was the opera music playing continuously on the record player while they discussed boilers. And they didnt just listen passively—they knew opera. They could name the composers, recount the stories, discuss favorite arias, and even sing sections in Italian, despite none of them speaking the language. To my knowledge, none had attended college, much less taken music appreciation courses. Yet they had all worked for years as young men, painting the walls and ceilings at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago, while opera rehearsals went on all around them. Without paying for a ticket or ever wearing a tie, they amassed an impressive knowledge of opera.

Though I eventually understood how that happened, I still don’t know how they became so familiar with existential philosophy. But their discussions of philosophy weren’t meant for the real world. The group’s reaction during one of these Friday night Boiler, Opera, Philosophy sessions to my announcing that I was considering becoming a philosophy major was a telling one. It became awkwardly quiet, though no one expressed outrage or offered sarcastic judgment.

The next morning, my favorite uncle showed up at our house and handed me a painting of a bum sitting under a tree, reading a book. He left without a word. There was no lecture about getting a real job or the dangers of dying hungry on the street. There didn’t need to be. It worked. I eventually became a geophysicist working for an oil company.

Over fifty years later, I have that painting hanging in my study.

But I still need to get a boiler!

Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois

I used to go to a playground after dinner when I was young to watch guys play horse shoes in deeply worn pits. It was a deserted field basically. In one corner was a swing set for the grade school kids during recess. There was a baseball backstop at the far corner of the field…before Little League and no permanent bases. The ground was covered in small gray rocks compacted to a hard surface you didn’t want to fall or slide on. When a buddy of mine and I went there to practice fielding grounders with the school as the backstop, a brand-new hard ball would be reduced to shreds after one session. Next time out we would have to cover the ball with black friction tape (white adhesive tape didn’t last). Hours of repetition on what, back then, seemed like acres of open space, now looks more like half a city block. Which was a welcome lure to the wide-open spaces for us compressed neighborhood dwellers. Too bad there wasn’t any greenery on site. Still, it was unobstructed room to run, to breath. No cars.

Sunday mornings offered another use for Italian men in our unofficial ghetto as soon as their wives left for the 9:00 mass. They slid over to the playground with a sack of bocce balls and the studied art of launching a heavy ball, underhanded, with a shuffling trot to knock aside opponents crowding the little ballino. Then sticks would come out to measure the closest to the target ball. In all, it was a great chance to hang with some old-world buddies, smoke some twisted, foul, Perogi cigars, chat in the mother tongue, reach back for childhood games from the old country and basically let the women fulfill religious obligations.

If we used our imaginations we could create a ball diamond with scraps of cardboard for bases. It was better than trying to play ‘home runs’ in the allies dissecting our blocks. Not to mention losing balls that sometimes launched into close-cropped backyards. The trouble was you had to walk four blocks to get to the school playground. You had to gauge the level of group interest and available free time before dinner. So, the alley on our block often served for short term versions of the national pastime.

The A. L. Holmes playground on Detroit’s Eastside served many purposes. You just had to pick the right time.

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/