By Riley McDavid

In my undergraduate days, I took a class in general semantics taught by the late S.I. Hayakawa.  Actually, he wasn’t “the late” then, but very much alive. However, he has since passed on.

Dr. Hayakawa was famous for, among other things, his depiction of a fictional animal named Bessie the cow. Bessie was Dr. Hayakawa’s device for helping people understand the process of abstracting using what he called “The Abstraction Ladder.”¹ At the bottom of the ladder (I’m simplifying it somewhat) is Bessie, the one, the only Bessie the cow. On the next rung higher is the word “cow.”  Not Bessie, mind you, but just “cow.”  In other words a slightly more abstract representation of Bessie.  Go up one more rung and you find “livestock,” a term that not only includes cows but other farm critters.  Even more abstract is the term “farm assets” which encompasses not only living animals but barns and plows and balers and so on.

Okay, okay, enough already with the semantics lesson.  If you’re a parent you know what an abstraction is.  You say to your child, “Where are you going?” or “Where have you been?” and the child replies, “Out.”  To which you reply, “Could you be a little more specific?” i.e., go down a few rungs on the abstraction ladder.

This all came to mind Sunday evening when I was reading questionnaire replies that some Meals on Wheels recipients had sent to Age Well in December. Some of the respondents simply couldn’t afford to pay all or even most of the suggested donation of $6.50 a day.  Others were able to pay but needed meals because they were housebound and, as one lady with severe arthritis in her back wrote, “I am 98 years old and have difficulty standing to prepare my meals.”

Since I became associated with Age Well about three years ago, I have asked many people, in print and in person, to donate to Meals on Wheels. But Meals on Wheels, I realized as I read the responses of the Meals recipients, is too much of an abstraction. 

 “My niece was helping me pay, but her husband lost his job,” a homebound senior who is unable to pay for her meals wrote.  “She is trying to help as best she can. I’m 91 years old and almost blind, so the meals are a true blessing. Thank you!”

That’s Bessie-the-cow specificity. It’s not Meals on Wheels we’re contributing to. No, we’re helping a flesh-and-blood human being who may have no other alternatives.

“[My husband] is housebound and I care for him,” wrote another Meals recipient..  “As a caregiver I need this relief and help at times when I am exhausted or not well.”

“Our finances are very limited and have been for some time,” a lady wrote. But she sent a check anyway, and concluded, “I cannot express how much I have been blessed by Meals on Wheels and your volunteers.”

Many of them cited reasons why Meals on Wheels is so vital in their lives.  “I can’t drive to buy groceries,” wrote one. Another said she is legally blind and cannot see well enough to prepare meals. Inevitably some said they were facing high prescription costs and home heating bills. One man checked two boxes on the questionnaire and then wrote in big letters, “God Bless Your Work!!”

A few hours ago after breakfast I drove about two miles to swim at one of our community pools.  I don’t mean this as an ego trip, but look at how much you just learned about me in that last sentence. I am able to purchase food and prepare a meal at home. I have at least enough funds to maintain an auto — not nearly new but a functioning auto nevertheless.  I have enough vision to maneuver a car without maiming anyone. I have enough wits about me to pass a DMV test. I have enough strength to swim laps, albeit at a glacially slow pace.

If you have all these and other things going for you, or even if you don’t, please donate to help the people who no longer have all these assets and who depend upon Meals and its many wonderful volunteers. And be generous so that when our time comes, Meals will still be there.

The questionnaire said in part, “If you are already contributing at or above the suggested donation level, thank you very much for helping us continue our mission. If you or family members are unable to contribute, but you are still in need, God bless you. We will find a way to continue your service uninterrupted.”

Your contribution will help Age Well find that way.  Go to www.myagewell.org and click on ‘Donate Now.”

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¹ Full disclosure: A few scholars don’t think nearly so highly as I of Hayakawa’s Abstraction Ladder. They say it distorts the work of Alexander Korzybski, from whom Hayakawa derived many of his ideas.  I say phooey on them.  In eighteen years of teaching high school English, I found Hayakawa’s formulation a terrific tool for teaching young people how to organize their writing.

Next on the Age Well Calendar

The Captain’s Ball.   Saturday, March 3 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel`. The Captain’s Ball gala recognizes companies or individuals who have gone above and beyond in their caring towards seniors. It has been described as “the one ball you don’t want to miss and the best in Orange County.” Black tie.

By Riley McDavid

At fifty-nine, former Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby isn’t exactly a geezer but neither is she a kid. Rigby was the first American woman gymnast to win a medal in international competition, and more than anyone she popularized the sport in the U.S.  When she was twenty,  she officially “retired,” if you’ll excuse the word, from competitive gymnastics.

Much of the time since then, she has been playing the title role in Peter Pan in venues across the country.  This isn’t just a rehearse-the-lines and learn-the-blocking kind of role.  Pan literally flies through the air, engages in sword fights with Captain Hook and is hyper-athletic throughout most of the performance.

In 2005, at the age of fifty-one and after an estimated 2,500 performances as Pan, she decided it was time to call it quits, so she mounted one final farewell tour across the country, culminating in a New York City run during the Christmas season. News reports say the 4’11” Rigby was still in great shape thanks to a heavy workout regimen with a personal trainer. But she said that at her age it was getting harder to fly. (Think about that sentence for a moment.) The sword fights with Capt. Hook also took their toll, including one that resulted in a stab wound in the leg on opening night.  She finished the tour, not without a few farewell tears, and returned to her home in La Habra Heights (CA).

But wait! There’s more!!!

Two years ago she did a special performance in Missouri and decided she missed the role. So in 2011 she mounted a new tour, this one again ending in New York at Christmas time. In the January 23^rd New Yorker, Michael Schulman has a Talk of the Town piece about Ms. Rigby in which she indicates that she didn’t want any physical limitations to be a factor in  her performance.  The part, after all, is relentlessly physical. “You’re running around like a small child for the entire first act,” she told Schulman.  ”I thought, O.K., how can I be a better flyer, a better little boy, and how can I not get injured?”

All of this was interesting to me, but not nearly as interesting as the philosophy with which she approached preparing for the role. “As we get older, we tend to put restrictions on ourselves,” she said. “But I don’t believe that anymore. I still believe that anything is possible, and that’s a very Peter Pan kind of wishful thinking.”

For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about that idea of putting — or not putting — restrictions on ourselves.  Mrs. McD and I live in a community of 18,000 seniors, and we see both attitudes.  At the pool I see people clearly well older than I who do two laps in the time it takes me to do one.  A now deceased golf acquaintance was still shooting his age (and sometimes considerably less than his age) at ninety-four. Our gyms and art classes are filled with people expanding their strength and their creativity.

Last September, Floridian Donald Sugg celebrated his birthday by skydiving from 10,000 feet in order to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association.  It wasn’t just any birthday.  It was Sugg’s ninety-sixth. “He’s going to live life until he hits the grave,” his forty-two year old friend Bob Espy told the Orlando Sentinel about Sugg, who also has parasailed, whitewater rafted and traveled solo to Ecuador. “You have people who sort of are giving up. He inspires me. “

Have you despaired of ever getting your book published? Westport (CT) writer Tracy Sugarman didn’t, and later this year the Syracuse University Press will publish his first novel, Nobody Said Amen.  Sugarman is eighty-eight.

Google variations on “seniors” and you can find literally hundreds of stories like these.

Since we retired Mrs. McD and I have met people who in later life became accomplished artists, musicians, writers,  poets, and actors because they never gave in to the demon that whispered in their ears, “You’re too old for that.” They are senior Peter Pans, people who never want to grow up in a metaphorical sense, but rather want to continue to explore life with a child’s curiosity. Because as Peter says to Wendy and the Lost Boys when they want to leave Neverland, “Go on! Go back and grow up. But I’m warning you, once you’re grown-up you can never come back. Never!”

Next on the Age Well Calendar

The Captain’s Ball.   Saturday, March 3 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. The Captain’s Ball gala recognizes companies or individuals who have gone above and beyond in their caring towards seniors. It has been described as “the one ball you don’t want to miss and the best in Orange County.” Black tie.

By Riley McDavid

“That’s too funny,” Mrs. McD said.  It was just after dinner, and she and I were reading.

“I’ll bite.”

“It’s the silliest list of New Year’s resolution suggestions I’ve ever seen.  Listen: ‘Eat more chocolate … Change socks daily … Do less laundry and use more deodorant.’”

“You’re making those up.”

“I am not,” she said, and she held out the page so I could see for myself.

Sure enough, there they were in black and white. 

“It also says that only twelve  percent of people who make resolutions actually keep them.”

“Those are the ones who resolve to eat more chocolate.” I said. 

“And that the ancient  Babylonians promised their gods at the beginning of every year  they would return all borrowed objects.”

Just then the doorbell rang, and I went to answer it.   It was Arnie.

“I just came to return your whatchamacallit,” he said, holding out a hammer.

“It’s a hammer, Arnie,” I said.

“Are you Babylonian?” Mrs. McD said.

“Huh?”

“Ignore her,” I said.  “It’s kind of an inside joke.”

“But I have a real question for you, Arnie,” she said. “Did you make a New Year’s resolution?”

“I sure did,” Arnie replied.  “I make one every year.  And I always keep them.  I have lots of will power. Or won’t power, as the case may be.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not to smoke.”

“Excuse me?” Mrs. McD said.

“Not to smoke.”

“But you don’t smoke anyway,” Mrs. McD said.

“Doggone right,” Arnie said, “and I aim to keep it that way.”

“What was your resolution last year?” I asked.

“Not to smoke,” he said, “and I kept it all three-hundred-and-sixty-five  days. In fact, I’ve kept that resolution for the past twenty-two  years.  Resolutions really work if you just have a  little will power.”

“Let me guess,” Mrs. McD said.  “This year for Lent you’re giving up smoking.”

“Right,” Arnie said.

“Arnie,” I said, “a resolution isn’t real unless it means you’re making a real change. For something to count, you have to really mean it.”

“Well I don’t know about that …”

“Let me tell you a story, Arnie,” Mrs. McD said.  “You and Riley are walking down a dark alley when a mugger with a gun confronts you and demands all your money. So you two pull out your wallets and hand over your cash.  Only you hold back one bill and hand it to Riley.  Then you say to him, ‘Here Riley. Here’s the twenty I owe you.’  Now did you really pay him back the twenty you owed him?”

Arnie had to think about that.  Finally he said, “You betcha.  That twenty went from my hand to his hand.”

“But you knew he’d never get to keep it.”

“You guys are confusing me,” he said.   Then he turned his head quizzically and asked,

“By the ding dong way, what are you guys making for resolutions?”

“I’m changing my socks daily,” I said in a flash.

“I’m doing less laundry,” Mrs. McD added.

Arnie looked puzzled.  “Socks?  Laundry? You guys are nuts.”

Next on the Age Well Calendar

The Captain’s Ball.   Saturday, March 3 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. The Captain’s Ball gala recognizes companies or individuals who have gone above and beyond in their caring towards seniors. It has been described as “the one ball you don’t want to miss and the best in Orange County.” Black tie.

By Riley McDavid

Just a guess, but I suspect that the first Age Well blog entry back in June of 2010 was read by at most a dozen people, most of them members of the Age Well marketing committee. Ever since then we’ve been hearing anecdotal reports that our readership is growing. An Age Well board member attending a convention across the country in Florida unexpectedly bumped into a fellow who follows the blog. A staff member at a meeting of nonprofits in central  Orange County last year was buttonholed by a fellow who, I am happy to say, had nice things to say about our blog. A couple of total strangers came up to me — separately — at the Founders’ Tea last August and said they read it regularly.

Even Allstate Insurance reads it. No kidding!  On its website, the company recently posted a report on senior driving that credits almost all of its information to two blog entries we ran in September of 2010. We got a letter from a lady named Patti in Ellsworth, Maine¹, who says she has checked  out the blog. (Okay, she’s my niece, but family counts. However  I won’t pad the numbers by including my daughter, my daughter-in-law, etc.) The Director of Development at my high school, John Bapst Memorial in Bangor, thanked me for a small contribution, and included a note saying she enjoyed the blog. I Googled Riley McDavid the other day, and got ten references to our blog in just the first three pages.

But to the point: Because some of the latecomers to our blog never read earlier entries, I want to repeat excerpts from a few here.  Specifically, in this season of giving, I want to recall some people about whom we wrote because they gave a lot to others.  For example:

From the entry of January 3, 2011: Robert Macauley (1923-2010). Mr. Macauley, a successful businessman, founded the nonprofit Americares that has provided more than $10 billion in medical and other humanitarian aid to 147 countries. Yet all you need to know about Bob Macauley you can learn from one incident in his life. In 1975, when the fall of Saigon was only days away, the U.S. Air Force had mounted Operation Babylift to bring South Vietnamese orphans to this country for adoption. But on April 4, the very first flight ended in tragedy when a United States Air Force Lockheed C-5 Galaxy crashed not long after takeoff, killing more than 150.  When Mr. Macauley found out it would take more than a week to fly out the remaining orphans because of lack of aircraft, he went to Pan Am and chartered a 747 which succeeded in bringing 300 orphans to this country. 

Mr. Macauley didn’t have the $10,000 for a down payment on the charter, much less the $241,000 for the balance of the cost, so he and his wife took out a mortgage on their home in New Canaan, Connecticut, to pay for the flight. His wife Leila believed it was a fair trade. “The bank got the house and Bob got the kids,” she said.

From the entry of July 20, 2010: Dr. Robert Butler. (1927-2010). When Robert Butler entered the medical profession, caring for the aged was an unheard of specialty.  Almost single handedly, he changed all that by founding the field of gerontology.

In 1975 he created the National Institute on Aging, which he headed for six years. In 1982 he founded the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, the first such department at a medical school. He coined the term “ageism,” and in his writings pounded home a basic but not often recognized fact: in the 20^th century the average life span increased 30 years,  greater than the increases in the last 5,000 years of human existence. His goal was not just to have people live longer, but to live better longer.

“He was a giant and was one of my mentors,” said Dr.  Marilyn Ditty, CEO of Age Well. 

When he passed away, he left behind not only family, but countless colleagues and adherents to carry on his work, and millions of seniors all over the globe, most of whom had never heard of Dr. Butler but whose lives are far richer because of his pioneering successes.

From the entry of March 2, 2011: Len Lesser (1922-2011). Last August I gave a pitch for Meals on Wheels — and for the blog — before about four hundred people in Laguna Niguel. “I’ll bet not 20 people in this room recognize the name ‘Len Lesser,’” I said at one point, and judging by the blank stares, my estimate of 20 may have been too high.  But then I told them Len Lesser was the actor who played Uncle Leo on Seinfeld, and instantly I saw warm smiles of recognition around the room. 

Len Lesser had a marvelous career as a character actor — 168 film and TV credits over five decades. But unbeknown to most of his fans, Lesser had a second calling.  For many years he was a volunteer acting coach at the Canterbury Avenue Elementary School, in Pacoima.

“He had hundreds of television and movie credits to his name, yet there he was, spending hours at a school in an out-of-the-way,  low-income San Fernando Valley neighborhood,” L.A. Times Education Editor Beth Shuster wrote. “He worked with students who’d never acted before; some were immigrants more fluent in the language of their parents. He urged them to project, look at each other, feel the emotion of the plays…Lesser loved acting and he wanted to pass on his passion to others.  He helped the school mount productions as complex as Fiddler on the Roof and Oliver. But really he was just one of us.”

From the entry of February 9, 2011: Ann Timson: (According to Ms. Timson, “born during the war years,” and as far as we know, still very much alive.) Ann Timson was in a Northampton,  England,  shopping district in early 2011 when she noticed a commotion across the street involving a half-dozen or so young men. “At first I thought one of them was being set upon by three others,” she told the Daily Mail. “I was not going to stand by and watch somebody take a beating or worse so I tried to intervene.” But when she got closer she realized it was a robbery. The gang was using sledgehammers to smash the windows of a jewelry store. So Ms. Timson ran up to the men and started whacking them on the head with the only weapon at her disposal — her purse.

Sarah Jane Brown, a jewelry store employee, told Sky News, “We were terrified. We locked the door. We hid under the desk. We were really scared. And then, we looked outside and, God love her, she was running down the road, with her handbag in the air, banging them on the back of their helmets with her handbag.”

The miscreants fled on scooters, and the robbery was foiled thanks to Ann Timson , who is now known as Supernanny (or Supernan for short) in the British media.

You can read the entire pieces about Robert Macauley, Dr. Robert Butler, Len Lesser and Ann Timson by going to “Older Entries” on our blog page and scrolling back to each entry’s date.

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¹For those only vaguely familiar with the geography of Maine, Patti’s town of Ellsworth is about twenty miles from Bar Harbor and only nine miles from the crustacean lover’s ultimate destination, the gastronomically outrageous Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound.

By Riley McDavid

My neighbor Arnie is pretty careless with numbers.  “China has three trillion people,” he once told me.  Another time he claimed that a guy set a world’s record by reading aloud the entire text of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in seventeen seconds.  “In Russian!” he added. But my all-time favorite Arnie factoid is when he said that according to the U.S. Census, there are more swimming pools in California than there are people. 

So I was a bit skeptical when Arnie, who is a Meals on Wheels volunteer driver, told me the story of Arthur Vandenberg “He’s a volunteer who has worked there for years packing meals five days a week,” Arnie said. “Why over the years he’s packed more than three-quarters of a million meals.”

Now wait just a darn minute, I thought. My rule of thumb is whenever Arnie gives me a big number, I divide it by ten or maybe cut it in half.  So I went down to the Florence Sylvester Memorial Senior Center last Thursday to visit with Arthur, a Meals volunteer for the past twenty-five years and Meals packer for the past fifteen.  I found him in a relatively quiet coffee-and-donut room where there were maybe eight or ten people sipping and chatting. On tables spread around the room were canvas-type thermal food bags, the kind the restaurant delivery guy uses. It was a very relaxed atmosphere.

George Ritter Koschel (L) and Arthur Vandenberg pack meals into “hot” bags

During the course of the conversation I asked Arthur about how many meals he had packed. He came up with this formula: 260 weekdays a year times 15 years times 200 meals a day.

Voila! 780,000 meals, or a little over three-quarters of a million, just as Arnie had said.

Arthur Vandenberg is an 87-year-old Californian, with a trim build and lots of low-key energy. “I play volleyball four times a week,” he told me, and it was easy to believe. He speaks in moderate tones, but you quickly get the impression he’s a person of strong convictions. On his hat were two pins, one for ten years of service to South County and subsequently Age Well Senior Services and one for twenty-five years of service.  He and his wife Carmen live in Laguna Woods Village.

He grew up in Anaheim during the depression often working in his dad’s orange groves. When other family members had to leave the groves to earn money for the family, Arthur,  who was in high school at the time, says he tended them by himself. “I was busy,” he told me.  “I didn’t have time to get in trouble.”

“Tell me about packing meals,” I said, but before he could, a truck pulled up.

“Truck’s here!” someone said, and in a flash the coffee sippers went from zero to sixty. If you watch many NFL telecasts, you’ve probably seen Chris Berman narrate what is called “the fastest three minutes in television.” It’s a furiously breathless audiovisual recounting of all that Sunday’s NFL results in just 180 seconds. Well what happens after the truck arrives is the fastest ten minutes in Meals on Wheels.

Outside a fellow began unloading rolling food pantries containing Wheels meals from a truck. “You might want to find a place to one side,” Manager Chris Etcheverry warned me, and I quickly found out why. The food containers that rolled into the room can deliver a fierce blow to anyone in their way.

Instantly Arthur and the other food packers began unloading the pantries and putting the meals into the food bags.  I watched as he and George Ritter Koschel, wearing gloves to protect their hands, loaded meals heated to 160 degrees into red or hot bags.

Eventually the bags were piled onto heavy duty carts (carts that Arthur hand made, by the way) that were wheeled outside where the bags were put on tables for the Meals’ drivers to pick up.  And almost as fast as it began, the activity level wound down to a walk-in-the-park pace as the final bag began its journey to Meals recipients.  Outside the Meals’ volunteer drivers were on their way.

“Ten minutes,” Arthur said to me proudly. “We did all that in ten minutes.” Later he had to chide Chris.   “I had to work with two left gloves today,” he said. “Two left gloves. That just isn’t right…”

“Arthur’s a gem,” Chris told me.  “This is like a job to him. He hardly ever misses a day, and when he does, he calls in to let us know.”

I saw Arnie a few days later and told him how impressed I was with Arthur and his colleagues. “They’re all hard workers,” Arnie said. “By the way,” he added, without feeling the need for any segue,  “do you know what the world’s record is for the most Christmas trees chopped down in two minutes?”

“Golly no,” Arnie I said. “I was absent from school the day the teacher covered that subject.”

“Right.  Well, anyway, it’s twenty-seven.”

I tried to picture that, but it just seemed impossible. So I went home and told Mrs. McD, who looked it up on the internet”

“Surprise, surprise,” she said. “According to the Guinness Book of World Records, on December 19, 2008, Erin Lavoie chopped down 27 trees in two minutes in Virginia Beach, Virginia.”

Help feed the hungry! We tend to think of Orange County as an affluent area, but in fact there are literally thousands of seniors in our area who would go hungry without Meals on Wheels.  Please go to our home page now and click on Donate Now.  You can make a real difference in the lives of our elderly.