Sixty-nine years old is a line of demarcation for me. In 1999, my mother, a widow, was sixty-nine years old when she eloped and moved from Western Massachusetts to Cape Cod with her new husband Ted, himself a widower. A new life with this new start.
My mother began her day, at dawn, with a 1.4 mile walk from her house on Paddocks Path to the Sesuit Harbor Café where she sat and watched the boats in the harbor before returning to her home. Then she showered and dressed and…
“Erline, Volunteer” Read the badge on the ID lanyard she wore around her neck, most weekdays, at the Dennis Senior Center. “I help serve lunch to the old people,” she told me when she spoke of this job she began very soon after she had moved. Continuing to volunteer all through her 70s and 80s, though her clients were elderly, she never grew old.
On the cul-de-sac that formed their neighborhood, there were only three houses, including theirs. In the other homes were: John and June. Michael and Ellie. “Your mother fits right in,”Ellie told me when I joined them at one of their dinner parties. “It’s like she’s always lived here.” At the Our Lady-The Cape Thrift Shop, Mom donated many items that she found in the large barn attached to her house. On weekends, bringing coffee and sandwiches, she’d sit and visit with the church volunteers who worked in the store.
“I had at least ten, fifteen good years,” she said when, years later, we spoke of that time.
When I think of how my mother, at sixty-nine, was still young enough, vital enough, healthy enough to not only embark on a new adventure, but to flourish, it spurs me on. Yet didn’t I return to school, and being older than all of my professors, earn a Masters in English at the age of fifty-two? And didn’t I, after my retirement, begin, at the age of sixty-two, an intense study of French, with, again, all of my teachers being younger than me? Je parle Français maintenant. Perhaps…like mother, like daughter…
In November, for almost two weeks, my husband and I will be in Old Québec City, where, I will speak only French. And, during that time, I will celebrate my birthday, mon anniversaire. I will be turning sixty-nine years old.
Barbara A. Rouillard is a retired special education teacher and is currently at work on a book-length memoir entitled I Laugh Because I Do Not Want to Cry.
How many times have you read that a large percentage of baby boomers (as in more than 20 per cent) have exactly zero savings for retirement? I know I’ve seen that figure quoted in numerous articles. So, it may come as a surprise that, according to Fortune magazine, the average boomer has a worth of $1.2 million! That means a large chunk, perhaps 80 per cent of boomers, have been socking away the savings for retirement and to pass along to their offspring.
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 at the retirement home tried downloading his sad family story. At first, I was 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 sibling rivalry with a sister four states away. We all need to listen to others as we would have them listen unto us. So, I listened. Then he got 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.
Elder Flats? Lawn Geezers? Yard Ornaments? Grammie’s Pad? Okay, enough of that. The question is what do you call those tiny homes that people are putting up in the backyard so that their parents can live close by? Answer: the technical term is accessory dwelling units, hereafter known as A.D.U.s, which have become all the rage. If I was living in someone’s backyard, I would go with the term yardbird.
Speaking of easygoing, I hate buying new stuff, but I do appreciate tools that make jobs less of a chore. The weather is starting to get really nice, so I took it upon myself to clean up the patio furniture. I used a brush and garden hose to get some of the dirt off, and then it was all over. You see the difference, clean versus dirty, and what can you do but keep going?
I own a collection of clothing with provenance. Like many Baby Boomers, I believe the ‘60s and ‘70s were peak fashion years, and there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken. I’ve just returned from a visit to my closet, and this is the report.
