By Riley McDavid

“What did you do in the army, Grampy?” my grandson asked me last fall. At the time he was doing a writing assignment for school.

“I was a spy,” I replied.

He was incredulous. “Really!” Then after a few moments he said, “You’re teasing me.”

“Nope. For real.”

Well — sort of. I wore headphones and listened in on Russian military communications. The Russians had a sophisticated technology — sophisticated for its time, that is — for scrambling their voice messages, and they didn’t know that we and our British counterparts had cracked it. I worked in a shack in a West German beet field that was about as close to the East-West German border as our government dared put us. We were known as “spooks” because on paper, we didn’t exist. On the rare occasion when one of us passed away, that person was posthumously transferred to the Signal Corps or some other outfit, because our organization didn’t exist either.

So I didn’t chase people around Europe like Matt Damon in the Bourne movies, and I didn’t infiltrate any East German or Russian spy rings. But it was still fun, and it beat the heck out of a lot of other duties you could get in the army.

Over the years I have occasionally heard about some truly authentic spies, and sometimes I have been totally blown away by their daring and creativity. Such it was when I read two weeks ago of the death at age 96 of George Vujnovich (pronounced VOIN-ovich).

George was born in Pittsburgh of Serbian parents but as a young man moved to Belgrade to pursue university studies. It was there he met Mirjana Lazich and eventually they married. When the Germans overran the country the two of them fled. In 1944, George was overseas in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, and Mirjana was working in the Yugoslav embassy in Washington.

George’s is a spy story with a lot of moving parts — so many, in fact, that the possibilities of failure were enormous from the outset and success seemed hugely unlikely. For months allied bombers had been taking off from Italy and flying over portions of German-occupied Serbia on their way to bomb German oil refineries, particularly those in Romania.

By some estimates, nearly half of those planes never returned. Many were crippled by ground fire and others shot down by the Luftwaffe. Day after day, crews bailed out of their crippled aircraft. By the spring of 1944 more than 500 of them had been taken in and hidden from the Germans by Serbian partisans, known as Chetniks.

When Mirjana learned about all the allied airmen essentially trapped behind enemy lines, she told her husband. Can’t you find a way to save them, she wrote in a letter. So he devised a daring plan, known as Operation Halyard, to rescue the downed aviators: build a secret airfield and fly them out. It actually got a little more complicated — they eventually had to build three improvised airfields, pretty much by using shovels and ox-drawn carts; bulldozers were out of the question.

The allies needed some of their own people on site so just after midnight on August 2, 1944, according to several accounts, in the silent sky over central Serbia, three OSS operatives parachuted in to the headquarters of partisan General D r aza M i h a i l o v ic: Captain George Musulin, a Serbo-Croat speaker from Staten Island who had played college football at the University of Pittsburgh and later played professionally for the Steelers; Lieutenant Michael Ryachich, also a Serb-American who was educated at Belgrade University; and Sergeant Arthur Jibilian, a Fremont, Ohio, native who was the team’s radio operator.

Vujnovich taught the three-man team how to blend into the local population. “I had to show them how to tie their shoes and tuck the laces in, like the Serbs did, and how to eat like the Serbs, pushing the food onto their fork with a knife,” Vujnovich told The New York Times.

Vujnovich directed the operation from an O.S.S. station in Bari, Italy. On August 10, U.S. transport planes, supported by fighter aircraft, flew into the first base at Pranjani. Depending upon which account you read, there were either ten or fourteen C-47s. They loaded 237 downed aviators and flew them safely to Bari. Over the next week 210 more were airlifted to Bari. Between September and December, another 55 were rescued, including Musulin, Rayachich, Jibilian, and two other OSS operatives who parachuted in sometime after the original three.

In spite of the complexities and dangers, the operation went off flawlessly without a single allied casualty or the loss of a plane. Unnamed but not forgotten by the men of the mission were the Serb partisans who protected the aviators for months. It wasn’t as if they could buy extra food at a local supermarket or order Meals on Wheels. “Those people had it pretty doggoned rough,” said downed airman Carl Walpusk. “They didn’t have much to give, but they gave.” Several of them lost their lives in the process when they began a firefight with Germans to divert them from the hiding place of the crew of a downed U.S. plane.

Never heard of Operation Halyard? It’s not surprising. For sensitive diplomatic reasons, the shoals of which I would not attempt to navigate, it remained highly classified for decades after it was carried out. General D r aza M i h a i l o v ic, leader of the forces that saved the allied airmen, was eventually tried and executed by the Tito government for collaborating with the Germans, a charge which Jibilian and the other OSS operatives spent years vigorously disputing. A number of books explore this controversy. In 2007 Gregory Freeman published The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II. There is also an illuminating video that includes interviews with Jibilian and others at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHmIUERMSwE

Next on the Age Well Calendar
Saturday, June 23: Casino Night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Clubhouse 5 in Laguna Woods Village. For $25, you get admission, $100 in play money, a bountiful snack table, and the opportunity to win some great raffle prizes. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Florence Sylvester Center, thanks to the generosity of many individuals and businesses and the outstanding support of Saddleback Kiwanis. Tickets available at the door.

By Riley McDavid

“You’re late,” Mrs. McD said as I walked in the front door.

“I am not late,” I countered.  “I am just not as early as I said I would be. I couldn’t tear myself away.” It was just before noon, and I had spent the latter part of the morning in a music therapy session at Age Well’s Adult Day Center. ”Did you know today is National Pet Owner’s Day?  And that the gerbil is the third most owned pet in the country right behind the dog and the cat?”

“Okay, smarty pants.  Where does the ferret rank on that list?”

“Ninth. Fish are sixth.”

“You made that up.”

“No way.”

“I thought you were going to observe music therapy.”

“I did.” I explained that the music therapist, Karen Skipper, had used National Pet Owner’s Day as a thematic way to link all the songs she and the group of about twenty people sang as she played the guitar. Every number was about an animal. She even brought her own pet, Bender. a mixed breed (“We suspect he may be part poodle.”) that the family rescued from a shelter. Bender spent most of the session in the lap of one of the ladies in the group.

“’Old MacDonald had a farm…’ they sang.”

“What noise did they say the fish made?”

“Glub, glub.  ‘…with a glub, glub here and a glub, glub there…’”

“That’s questionable.”

 “They also sang ‘How much is that doggie in the window…’ and ‘Don’t fence me in…”

 “Get to the therapy part,” Mrs. McD said. And I told Mrs. McD all about that as well.

Karen Skipper

Karen comes every Wednesday, usually with a guitar but about once a month the session involves drumming.   One of her goals is to engage the audience in music actively, either singing or moving.  And from the opening bars of  “I believe in music…” which begins her sessions, she projected a warm stage presence that draws the entire group in. A second goal is to get the people in her groups to interact with each other. After hearing her sing I asked if she is a soprano.

“Mezzo, but I’m getting over a cold.” Karen said.  “I’m not an entertainer although some people have called me that, but that’s not what I’m there for. I want to stimulate the brain.” She recalled the time she brought Scrabble tiles to another group. Each person had to pick one and then come up with a song that began with that letter.

“And I want them to reminisce.”

Which reminded me that during the session when we were on the subject of horses one lady became quite happily animated while talking about a pony that she and her siblings had as children.  “It’s like she was going back in time,” I recalled.

“And that’s good,” Karen said. “because for some of them, now is not the best time of their lives.  So if you can get them to talk about some of the better times of their lives and recreate those emotions, they can feel better about themselves. “

Karen’s love of music dates back to her youth. She sang in the church choir as a child and took up the viola at age nine. She was a viola major at California Lutheran University, and while there was intrigued by an article she read on music therapy. “Unfortunately Cal Lutheran didn’t offer classes in music therapy, but Arizona State did, so I took a fifth year there.” Today her official designation is Karen M. Skipper, Board-certified Neurologic Music Therapist. 

She was an activities director at Age Well — then South County Senior Services — for twelve years, and then branched out to offer music therapy at various organizations. She is the director of the Tremble Clefs¹, a therapeutic singing program made available by the Orange County Chapter of the National Parkinson’s Foundation that practices weekly at the Florence Sylvester Memorial Senior Center. Karen is also the owner/administrator of Orange Coast Music Therapy. (http://www.orangecoastmusictherapy.com/)

Becky Lomaka,  Age Well’s Director of Fund Development,  walked by as I was interviewing Karen.  “She’s very modest,” Becky said.  Two weeks earlier, when I was arranging the interview, Becky e-mailed me that Karen “is the best kept secret in our organization.”

The premise of all music therapy is that music is good for our health — mental and physical. The British used it with their soldiers after World War I, and the U.S. did the same after World War II.  And today it is used in many countries around the globe to help people with a number of different diseases and infirmities.

“Music,” Karen concluded, “is what feelings sound like.”

To know more about music therapy, go to
http://www.musictherapy.org/about/history/

______________________________________________________________________

¹Nope, that’s not a typo.  It’s a self-deprecating pun by people who have Parkinson’s disease.

Next on the Age Well Calendar

Saturday, June 23: Casino Night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Clubhouse 5 in Laguna Woods Village. For $25, you get admission, $100 in play money, a bountiful snack table, and the opportunity to win some great raffle prizes. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Florence Sylvester Center, thanks to the generosity of many individuals and businesses and the outstanding support of Saddleback Kiwanis. Tickets available at the door.

By Riley McDavid

When last we saw Arnie — “we” being Mrs. McD and I — he was sitting in his Meals on Wheels van, railing against computerized parking meters.  “They’re unconstitutional,” he said at the time. “Just rip out all the parkin’ meters. Take a sledgehammer to ‘em.”

In spite of his attitude toward computerized parking meters,  Arnie is hardly computer-phobic,  although, truth be told, there was a time when he viewed them as an evil only slightly less malevolent than the devil himself.  “Kids usin’ them pretty soon ain’t gonna be able to add or subtract or nothin’,” he complained.  “Nor spell neither.  Those so-called ‘word processing’ programs got spell-check thingies built right into them.  And by the way,” he said in a manner that sounded like he was about to throw a high hard one right at my head, “how in the name of the Lackawanna  and Ohio do ya process a word anyway?”

That was Arnie for years.  Then about a year ago his daughter Alex came for a visit from her home overseas in Vienna.  We were outside with Arnie when her cab drove up, and after a few hugs and so on, she announced, “I’m going to get you a computer, Dad. That way we can email back and forth every day.”

Arnie was aghast. “You ain’t gonna do no such thing! Nosirree. You bring a computer into my house and I’ll have to get a holy man to come and exercise it right out.”

“Dad, you already have  computers in your house.”

“No way,” he said.

“Way!” she insisted.  “Your microwave has a computer in it. So does your oven and your fridge.  And your DVR not only has a computer in it, it has a hard drive.”

Arnie was stunned.   “You’re kiddin’, right?”

“Nope.”

“Arnie,” Mrs. McD said, “you better get that holy man over here right away.”

Apparently Alex did a pretty good sales job on her dad, because the next day she and Arnie brought home his new computer. She spent much of the next two weeks teaching him how to use it. At one point he asked her how he could look up something online.

“Google it,” she said.

“Hey! You watch your language young lady!” he replied quite seriously.  But she explained to him, that far from being an obscenity, Google was a search engine, and he’s been happily Googling away ever since. These days Arnie can fairly be called computer literate. He emails his daughter several times a week, occasionally attaching a photo.  He keeps his check register on the computer.  A few months ago, with much trepidation, he began paying his bills online. Last week he came full circle.

“I don’t know how I ever got along without a computer,” he told the two of us.

Arnie’s experience is not unlike that of many seniors — they learn the technology ropes from someone in a much younger generation.  When young people need computer help, they call a help desk or a friend.  When old people need help, they call a grandkid. There are approximately 40 million seniors in the U.S., which amounts to about 13% of the population, and about half of them now use computers.

According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, there are more seniors in the U.S. using computers than there are teens ages 13 to 17. Experts, the Sun Sentinal reports, say seniors typically search for jobs or gather health information online. But for the most part they engage in the same online activities as people of other ages: checking email, swapping photos, visiting weather sites.

Computing may actually be good for a senior’s mental health. A few years ago, WebMD described a study that showed seniors who use computers reported fewer symptoms of depression. “The reasons for the pattern aren’t clear, and the new study that showed this was relatively small,” said the WebMD article.  “But the key might be connecting with other people and learning via computers.”

When seniors finally embrace the technology,  as Arnie did, it’s because they’ve reached a tipping point.  They dabble with it a bit, then they begin to explore, and then suddenly they realize all the vistas that are open to them on the web, and they go hog wild.

“I saw my daughter’s apartment house in Vienna on the web!” Arnie told us one day all full of excitement.   “I put the address in Google, and in a second or two, there it was. By the way,” he added, “did you know Vienna is in Austria, not Australia?”

Age Well Senior Services will soon be offering computing classes. Cathy Lee, Director of the Dorothy Visser Senior Center in San Clemente, (949-498-3322), says their computer center will be up and running in a few weeks.

Next on the Age Well Calendar

Saturday, June 23: Casino Night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Clubhouse 5 in Laguna Woods Village. For $25, you get admission, $100 in play money, a bountiful snack table, and the opportunity to win some great raffle prizes. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Florence Sylvester Center, thanks to the generosity of many individuals and businesses and the outstanding support of Saddleback Kiwanis. Tickets available at the door. 

By Riley McDavid

“He was a brave man who first swallowed an oyster.” — Jonathan Swift

“Have you seen those cotton-pickin’ newfangled parkin’ meters?” Arnie asked with even more than his usual serving of outrage.   He had just pulled up beside us in his van with a green-and-white Meals on Wheels magnetic placard on the side.

“Which meters?” I asked.

“The ones where you put a credit card in.   And no meter minder has to come around and see when your time is all done.  When the red flag pops up, a buzzer or somethin’ goes off in the meter minder’s cart and the minder can scoot right over here and write you up.”

“Very efficient,” Mrs. McD said.

“Efficient my foot.  It’s unconstitutional.  I looked it up on the web.  Some blogger says it’s an ipso facto ex parte bill of attainder.”

“All those things?” I asked.

“Every last one of them.”

“Have you been watching TV legal shows?” Mrs. McD asked.

“I have, and I’m gonna to sue.  I’m gonna demand a habeas corpuscle sine die.”

“Arnie,” Mrs. McD said, “I think you just don’t like change. Remember how upset you were when South County changed its name to Age Well Senior Services?”

“I got over that. And anyway, I like good changes, just not bad ones,” he said.   Mrs. McD  asked him what was his idea of a good change.  “Just rip out all the parkin’ meters.  Take a sledgehammer to ‘em just like Robert Redford did in Cool Hand Luke.”

“I think that was Paul Newman,  Arnie.”

“Whatever.  Those guys were in so many movies together I can’t tell ‘em apart.

“Arnie,” Mrs. McD said, “it’s not going to happen so just get used to the new meters.”

“I hate ‘em.  I’ll never get used to the dang things.”

I got to thinking about Arnie’s anger later that evening and it brought to mind a lecture I heard on TV last year.  The speaker, a psychology professor named Samuelson, was talking about change and specifically about how people react to something brand new in their existence.

As best I recall, his talk went something like this: “Several thousand years ago, a man I’ll call Grog held the first outdoor barbecue.  Somehow he captured some fire and created a roasting pit. For the first time, his family had cooked venison instead of eating (sorry about the imagery here) raw meat.  You have to wonder how his neighbors reacted. Shock? Delight? Fear?

“And how about when a fellow I’ll call Jadzik perfected the wheel and attached four of them to a flatbed, creating the first wagon.   The reactions must have been predictable. The optimist said, ‘Where can I get one?’ The skeptic said, ’You’ll never get me in one of those things,’ And the entrepreneur said,  ‘Gadzooks, I must invent the brake!’”

Dr. Samuelson went on to say that people react differently to innovation and change. When a brand new high tech product comes out, it’s not uncommon for people to camp out in front of stores the night before the release, wanting to be one of the first to buy the new million-gigahertz, bazillion megabit Whatchamacallit.  In the world of technology marketing, these people are called early adopters. They are risk takers.  They’re gambling that the product won’t be a dud. 

But not everybody is as accepting of new technology, he said.  In the 1980s, a successful northern California bank where Dr. Samuelson was a human resources consultant, was introducing computerization in all its departments.  Management told staff that, among other changes, it was replacing all typewriters with computer terminals. Henceforth memos and other documents would be typed on a keyboard and printed out on a freestanding printer.

Many of the secretaries were horrified at the prospect of losing their IBM model D typewriters.  Their reaction, Dr. Samuelson said, bordered on rebellion. So management mounted a major internal marketing campaign to convince employees that computers would make their lives easier.

And management also gave in — but just a little.  They announced that every department could retain one typewriter — just in case.  “It was to be kind of a security blanket,” Dr. Samuelson said. So in came the terminals, and, predictably, within a few months the lone typewriter was gathering dust in a corner of the department as staff members found out computers were pretty neat after all.

He said a similar thing happened to just about every bank in the country when they introduced ATMs. Some people jumped at the chance to get money from a machine, but many, many more were afraid of the technology. Banks spent millions of dollars trying to convince customers that the machines were safe, reliable and a heck of a lot more convenient than standing in a teller line. Their efforts succeeded because by one estimate today there are more than 2.2 million ATMs worldwide.

To be continued in Part 2: Seniors and New Technology

Next on the Age Well Calendar

Saturday, June 23: Casino Night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Clubhouse 5 in Laguna Woods Village. For $25, you get admission, $100 in play money, a bountiful snack table, and the opportunity to win some great raffle prizes. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Florence Sylvester Center, thanks to the generosity of many individuals and businesses and the outstanding support of Saddleback Kiwanis. Tickets available at the door.

By Riley McDavid

Leo Rosten, the screenwriter and humorist, said it best: “The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it.”

As Rosten suggests, for some people writing is a compulsion, not a choice. Having a burning desire to write isn’t something you acquire, like a college degree or a good tan or a new sofa.  It’s either in your DNA or it’s not, and if it’s not, no amount of work or study can instill the love of writing in you. Mia Hamm, arguably America’s greatest soccer player ever and herself an author, once said, “If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction or passion.”

New Yorker Florence Wolfson Howitt, who was born in 1915, was an avid writer from an early age, and, like many writers, one of her first works was a diary. Besides her love of writing, she was bright. She graduated from Wadleigh, an arts high school in Manhattan, at age 15, then went to Hunter College and was editor of the literary magazine. Later she got a master’s degree in English at Columbia.

In 1939, she married a dentist, and they moved into an apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, eventually raising two daughters. Along the way she wrote articles for Good Housekeeping,  Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, but those literary accomplishments were not enough to make her famous or make her believe she had reached her full potential as a writer.

Fast forward to 2005.  According to Columbia Magazine, the alumni publication of Columbia University, Ms. Howitt, who was 90 at the time, was sitting in her home in Pompano Beach, Florida, one Sunday morning when the phone rang.  It was Lily Koppel, a young writer working for the New York Times, who told Ms. Howitt she wanted to write her story. Ms. Koppel, coincidentally, was also a Columbia graduate and even more coincidentally (if there is such a thing as “more coincidentally”) had sublet an apartment in the same Riverside Drive property where Ms. Howitt and her husband had lived many years before.

Ms. Koppel told Ms. Howitt that she had come into possession of a diary that Ms. Howitt had written over a five-year period as a teenager. It seems a cleaning out of the storage area had taken place at 82 Riverside Drive, and in the process a steamer trunk was placed in a Dumpster. A worker, curious about what was in the trunk, opened it and found the diary. Eventually he gave it to Ms. Koppel.

“Oh, my God,” Columbia quotes Ms. Howitt as saying when she comprehended what Ms. Koppel was telling her.

Columbia continued: “Florence would soon become reacquainted with that passionate, precocious, privileged girl. In interviews on Sunday mornings over bagels and lox, Koppel used tidbits of diary entries to trigger Florence’s memory of the years 1929 to 1934, between her 14th and 19th birthdays, when she faithfully wrote a few lines every night about her whirlwind life in New York.”

There are entries about going to Playland, to a haunted house, to the beach, and to the Modern. “Tonight Bernard told me he loved me better than any other girl and I said the same,” she wrote. “It sounded like what we read in books,”

In another entry she complained about the people in Rockaway, where she was vacationing with her family one summer, saying, “How I long to go home.” But then she goes home and writes, “I went to school today and met all of my old school friends…but I miss some of the boys from Rockaway.  How changeable I am.”

From the interviews and the diary, Ms. Koppel wrote an article for the Times and then a book, The Red Leather Diary. One review describes it as “a journey into the past, traveling to a New York in which women of privilege meet for tea at Schrafft’s, dance at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and toast the night at El Morocco. As she turns the diary’s brittle pages, Koppel is captivated by the headstrong young woman whose intimate thoughts and emotions fill the pale blue lines.”

After The Red Leather Diary was published, Ms. Howitt became an instant celebrity.  Articles were written about her, she appeared on NBC’s “Today,” and she made appearances at book club meetings. It was an ironic kind of literary fame — Ms. Howitt became known not precisely for what she had written but for something someone else had written about what she had written.  But that didn’t diminish her enjoyment. “It was the most exciting year or two of her life, something she always sought,” her daughter Valerie Fischel told the New York Times of her mother’s unexpected fame. “She felt like a celebrity and was 92 years old.”

Florence Wolfson Howitt passed away on March 6 at her home in Pompano Beach at age 96. She was a talented writer whose literary fame arrived late — but nevertheless arrived in time for her to savor every minute of it.

Next on the Age Well Calendar

Saturday, June 23: Casino Night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. at Clubhouse 5 in Laguna Woods Village. For $25, you get admission, $100 in play money, a bountiful snack table, and the opportunity to win some great raffle prizes. This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Florence Sylvester Center, thanks to the generosity of many individuals and businesses and the outstanding support of Saddleback Kiwanis. Tickets available at the door.

By Riley McDavid

“Why the smartypants smile?” Mrs. McD said as I came in the door.

I took an appropriate pause to dramatize my superiority. “Because,” I said at last, “I just spent over an hour with a darling world famous celebrity as she delivered Meals on Wheels.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“I’ll let you judge that,” I said. “It was Lady Gaga.” I could tell by her raised eyes that for just a few seconds I had her fooled. But then she smirked and said, “Okay, what’s the catch?”

“You’re too smart,” I said, and, Mrs. McD, a person never known to lack confidence, nodded in full agreement.  “Okay, so every Friday a mother-daughter duo delivers meals to some residents at FountainGlen, a three-story senior apartment community in Rancho Santa Margarita.” The mother and daughter, I explained, are two members of the Castaneda family, mom Kimberly and (I confessed) five-year-old Natalia.

“And the Lady Gaga thing?” Mrs. McD asked.

“Last Halloween Natalia came dressed as a Hollywood star, and Herb Power, a retired Cape Cod native and one of the residents on their route, dubbed her Lady Gaga, a name that has stuck ever since.”

Natalia is popular with just about everybody in the complex, not just the Meals recipients. We passed a group of three talking in a common room just off the hallway, and all of them stopped with smiling faces to say hello to Natalia. “Everyone loves her,” one of the ladies said. 

“She brightens the day,” resident Miriam Rupple said when we got to her unit.

And while it’s good for the residents to have contact with the youngest generation, Kimberly says it’s extremely good for kids to be familiar with the lives of those in their seventies and beyond. She knows from experience — she is a second-generation Meals volunteer.  When she was a youngster she delivered with her mom in Inglewood.

“Natalia is in pre-school,” Kimberly said, explaining why she is available on Fridays.

“I am NOT in pre-school,” Natalia protested. “I am in pre-kindergarten,” and her mom looked properly admonished.

For a couple of reasons, the day I visited was a big day for Natalia.  First, a local store had donated candy bars as a kind of Valentine’s Day gift to the Meals’ recipients. Natalia had the enviable task of handing them out.  And, as he had promised a week earlier, Herb gave her a ride in his motorized wheelchair, a good distance up one hallway, and then back to his unit.

FountainGlen is apparently quite popular, because according to its web site, only one of its 166 units is available for rent. The complex is located on El Corazon, just a fraction of a mile from the Age Well site in the Bell Tower Regional Community Center.

As I quickly found out, there’s a plus and a minus when your Meals route is all located within one building.  The plus is that Kimberly didn’t have to do much driving, and she and Natalia weren’t constantly getting in and out of their SUV. The minus is that schlepping all those meals around on a cart involves some significant physical labor.  Meals volunteers bring three containers to each resident, and each container comes from a different food bag.  Since the bags are on top of one another on a cart, Kimberly had to remove each one at each door, and then replace them.  (For the record:  Kimberly didn’t complain an iota over all this.  I bring it up because it looked like more strain than I would welcome at my age.)

Kimberly has another helper — Natalia’s eight-year-old sister Katie. She was in school on this day, but often helps during the summer “Be sure to tell him I know everybody’s name,” she said to her mom when she found out I would be along for the day’s delivery.

“So that’s the story of Lady Gaga, “ I said.

Mrs. McD yawned, but I could tell she was faking the boredom. “Let me know when George Clooney is delivering,” she said. “I’ll get really interested then.”

Lady Gaga — Natalia Castaneda — with FountainGlen resident Miriam Rupple.

My thanks Cherie Unholz of the Age Well Bell Tower staff for much help with the entry.

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

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.”

___________________________

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.