Life slips by with few truly memorable moments till one day some wag asks, “how does it feel to be a senior citizen?” I can’t resist a lead like that, “exactly the same as not being one, I answered.” His next words were, “I envy you. I can’t wait to turn sixty two and start drawing social security.” It was tough but I didn’t ask, “Are you crazy? Nobody wants to hang it up that young.”

Unfortunately, some do, so they can spend their later years turning moldy while they mutter about the sorry state of things.
But a great many don’t pack it up when they reach “retirement age,” whatever that means, because they can’t afford to or don’t want to. If you do not have the resources on which to retire don’t fall on your sword just yet my friend, there is life after official senior citizenry arrives. If you anticipate the change it can be fulfilling, challenging and rewarding. It has to do with one’s attitude toward life.

Since reaching this plateau I have subscribed to the AARP and get the magazine, MODERN MATURITY. On occasion I pick up a free senior’s publication at the supermarket. Sometimes there are stories on “how I’m coping,” a buzzword covering a lot of territory. But I’ve got to say it, crafts, creative shuffle board or TV for breakfast sound dull. Deadly dull!
Mankind thrives under the challenge of responsibility. He is not well suited to live without purpose. A sense of accomplishment is superior to learning how merely to cope, to just get by. Take my friend “mean” Joe Green, numismatic consultant, for example. He is ninety four and works six days a week. “they need me down at the office and I get bored unless I do something useful.” Another friend started a new business in his mid seventies. His rationale: “I tried golf for a couple of weeks and knew I’d go crazy if I didn’t do something better than that for the rest of my life.”

The English language is one of the few in the world containing the word or the concept of leisure. Perhaps we should think more about the satisfaction of achieving than of happy stagnation. One needn’t toil as in younger days. Slow down some but don’t quit just yet. Leisure is swell but stagnation is stupid.

If you don’t carry hate, revenge, or conflict in
the satchel known as your psyche you will be a whole lot better off for it. And the best way to do that is to make a serious effort to develop a forgiving nature…  and, to put you first on the list of those to be forgiven.

It’s possible to hold serious resentment in our hearts against us. If life hasn�??t gone smoothly, if there has been failure or loss or disease we often mistakenly accept the blame and we need to find a way to forgive the hurt and anger we hold against ourselves.

The act of forgiving is a two-way street, that is, it benefits the forgiven person but the chief beneficiary is the one who is granting forgiveness.

Some years ago I needed some rather specialized artwork and a young woman was recommended to me. I called to discuss the work I wanted done. Things went smoothly until she asked for my name. Suddenly she shrieked, YOU!! Followed by unintelligible bluster laced with unprintable expletives. The ferocity of her outburst left me speechless. What have I done? Was all I could stutter? You fired my husband. I did? When? Eight years ago. She slammed the phone in my ear.

I had to think hard to even remember the incident and harder still to connect her with it, let alone recall the details but she had obviously borne a grudge all that time, waiting for the day when she could unleash her maledictions on me. The experience must have been painful to her and often on her mind to produce such a venomous attack. But to harbor it for eight years? How very foolish!  If her intent was to inflict some kind of punishment on me she had failed. She hadn’t hurt me one iota, I’d forgotten the matter, secure in the knowledge that the firing was proper but she had brought herself a lot of pain.

After thinking about the situation for a few minutes the details came clearly to mind. At the time I was a partner in a company that managed thirty to forty associations, most of them not-for-profit entities. The young man, only twenty-two years of age had been assigned to a large Kiwanis Club as their paid executive secretary. He performed so poorly that the club asked us to replace him. We didn’t have another position for him and I was elected by the other partners as the one to inform him of our decision. His wife must have been persuaded that I did it with malice to have held her anger for so many years.

Forgiving and forgetting are inseparable twins. You haven’t truly forgiven someone, or yourself for that matter, if you keep harping on the subject. �??To forgive is divine,�?? suggests that we are incapable of true forgiveness, that only God possesses this attribute, but I disagree. We are fully able to forgive those who trespass against us, though it is a rare person indeed who employs a full measure of mercy and forgiveness and wipes the incident from their memory, forever.

If you are carrying grudges or resentments against anyone, including yourself, here’s how to get rid of them. List everybody and everything you’re mad at; your boss, the government, the car salesman who sold you a lemon, your advancing age, your illness, put them in a leak-proof wrapper and as you toss it away forgive them all.

You will emerge a changed person and life will take on a new radiance, which you had forgotten existed.

In their eagerness for early success some counselors offend their clients with aggressive behavior before the ink on the contract is dry. It’s wise to spend the first month winning the hearts and confidence of the staff, and the board. One is as important as the other, especially if the dedicated staff works at low pay for a struggling agency and may see your fees as exorbitant and your support staff as overpaid clerks and secretaries.

In one such contract, a private school, I was welcomed as rapturously as a swarm of African killer bees by everybody, except the executive director, who liked me, or so I thought.

All was going well until we began to write the vital communication pieces which would define the institution’s mission and services for consideration by the philanthropic community.

In session after session with the development committee of the board I was severely criticized by the director, who had founded the school, and the head of the English department for what I had written.; a double-barreled barrage of criticism. I could do nothing right. Syntax, style, vocabulary, grammar, content, everything was wrong with my work.

Then one of my staff had an inspiration. Would the director accept her own words? What have you found, I asked. We have a copy of her doctoral dissertation, was the reply.
I copied two pages of the book the director had written on the institution to receive her terminal degree. I presented it at the next meeting. With no hesitation whatsoever I got the usual reaction. WHAM ! BAM !! Both barrels. Director and English department head in unison.

Wait, please.

Why? This doesn’t define our programs properly. I can tell at a glance.

Before you go further you might like to know who wrote this.

Didn’t you??

No. It’s taken from a work by a well-known educator.

Whose?

Yours.

There is a profound silence. It becomes painful for everyone present. Quietly, I step into the delicate void. In a voice barely above a whisper I ask the chairman, may I continue? Previous compositions are immediately approved, future editions are cleared almost before they are presented.

Back in my office I am desolate, wracked with self-reproach. Did I really have to do that? I’ve probably alienated the director, the only person in the place who likes me.
With the opposition silenced, the air cleared, the director and I go on to become good friends, the campaign is the most successful they have had, and we decide one day while sharing hot chocolate and an oatmeal cookie that we both handled the situation poorly. She was threatened by my growing popularity with the board and I was too eager to win the campaign. We should have talked. Had I done what I did privately we would have reached the same result with little or no pain to either party and no embarrassment to the committee.

We decide there may be no such thing as a perfect squelch. In the nasty business of squelching it is quite likely that both sides, squelcher and squelchee, will emerge as losers.

As a kid outside one of the world’s smallest towns I often heard the world’s loneliest sound: the wail of a whistle from a distant train. Our town didn’t warrant a stop, not even by the milk-run local. Unless our only grocer, Mr. Nadler, raised the “passenger” signal, they just highballed straight on through. No reduction in speed. Just a sustained blast of the whistle which started a quarter mile before it reached the town and continuing for a quarter mile past it.

Mail was delivered or picked up by a couple of Rube Goldberg contraptions at either end of the blast zone. At the start of the scream a hook on a pole snatched the bag hanging out of the mail car. At the end of the half-mile-howl another hook held the outgoing mail which the train rudely shanghaied and shoved in its open maw. Sometimes a bag fell beneath the thunder-wheels and was ripped in shreds, but that’s another story. This one speaks only of loneliness, that one of childhood treasures lost.

That solitary sound of the steam whistle is unknown to newer generations, except as heard in movies which can’t begin to replicate the real thing. It needs to be heard at day’s end, just like it says in Down in the Valley, “hear the train blow, love, hear the train blow, late in the evening, hear the train blow,” and when you’re young, and yearning for something better than the hardscrabble life your dirt-farmer Dad is scratching out on government give-away land. You want to talk thirty something? Ask about pre-war Western Canada in the dirty thirties. Say the words, Back-to-the-land; or Vivian, Manitoba, and I’ll be transported, instantly, back in time to a place called lonely street.

The ululating wail came keening in on a wind that had picked it up a hundred miles away, in a spot called Nowhere, and surrendered it in another place with the same name. Nowhere owns a lot of land on the Canadian plains. Your youthful mind sees wondrous visions as it hears the distant sound of the train even though you have never been aboard one. Happy people, smiling people, rich people, ride the rails bound to the wondrous places of your visions and to thrilling and glorious adventures. A million miles and light years from lonely street, Gogi Grant re-captures your youthful ache. “In a lonely shack by a railroad track, I spent my younger days, and I guess the sound of the outward bound, made me a slave to its restless ways.”

There’s a nostalgic surge, bereft of any desire to live it again as with happier recollections, that is soon swept away by the hurdy-gurdy of your much-less-than-lonely life. But for a moment you felt it, deep down, and aching sad.

“Oh, if I had the wings of an angel, right out of this prison I’d fly. And into the arms of my mother, and there I’d be willing to die.”

“As I walked down through the streets of Laredo, as I walked down in Laredo one day, I spied a young cowboy all clothed in white linen, all clothed in white linen as cold as the grave.”

“His saddle horse did stumble and on him it did fall, that boy won’t see his mother when the work’s all done this fall.”
I don’t understand why some folks like the sounds of loneliness, they just do, that’s all. Mom did. But she loved heaven more and she sang of it, too.

“When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more, when the morning breaks eternal, bright and fair. When his chosen ones shall gather over on the other shore. And the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there.”

A hint of sadness there too, I reckon.

Nowadays mankind attempts to map the outer limits of the universe but without the dread of the Ancients when they pictured the edge of their world. Still, there is a tingling anticipation of what might appear in the next telescopic photo from the edge of the universe.

We all live at the edge of unknown territory. It is called tomorrow, and we can never be certain what it holds for us. For some there is an eager anticipation and for others a profound disquietude.

Whatever your view of tomorrow is we all know it’s inevitable. Let�??s face it with the courage of the ancient mariners.

They invariably sat at the same table. It wasn’t a very good table. In fact, it was hardly a table at all. It was more a shelf that had been created when the restaurant had been renovated. It was a sideboard for a coffee urn but as business grew the owners pressed every inch of space into service. It faced a stub of wall with chairs on one side only, but it was theirs on Saturday night.

They were quiet, hardly speaking to each other and rarely to anyone other than the waiter. The woman’s attire never varied: a shabby dress under an old raincoat that must have been stapled to her body. It stayed on, even in the heat of summer. On her head, for want of a better description, was a worn gray cotton aviator helmet. It fit her skull tightly. Wisps of white hair crept onto her forehead. The chinstrap hung loose, often dipping into her soup. She always ate soup. Never once did she change her order and neither did the old man. She never smiled. He did. Once each night and always at the same hour, almost to the minute.
They came in at the same time, left at the same time, never occupied another table, never changed their bill of fare. Now and then the old man wore something different. Unlike the woman he removed his coat in winter (didn’t wear one in the summer) but not the scarf draped round his neck. It was as permanent as her helmet.

At the same hour each night he would get up from the table and make his
way to the side of the room where an organ provided dinner music. He would put a dollar bill in a large snifter set out by the organist to collect tips. The organist primed the snifter by placing a dollar in it when he came to work.

It was at that moment that the old man smiled, a wan stretching of his face, devoid of mirth. He mouthed something only the organ player could hear, but he needn’t have bothered. It was a request that the organist had begun playing as soon as he made his approach. Having paid his dollar he would begin to dance.

He was not Bojangles.

It was an awkward shuffle not in rhythm with the music. It was curiously like birds seen in nature films, bobbing up and down, turning round and round, a ritual incongruous in a room where no one else ever danced. An earnest expression occupied his face as he executed what must have seemed to him a graceful and entertaining performance since he would look first to the organist, then the other diners and mutter, thank you, before he sat down.

No one ever clapped for him. Except for the organist’s patented weary grimace, no one even gave him a smile. Not even the old woman. He may as well have remained in his chair for all the notice she took of him.

I often watched these two curious people and wondered who they were or what they once had been. I would never know. Like the other regular patrons I ignored them, or tried to, feeling slightly embarrassed by the gyrations of the little dancer.

Times have changed. Many years have come and gone since those halcyon days of our youth. We tremble on the cusp of our golden years, my lady and I, and wonder how it will be for us,. Will we move in ever shrinking circles, remembering the way we were? Was that what the little dancer was doing? Remembering happier times? Or was this his way of saying, �??look at me, I belong here. Can�??t you applaud my performance? I am still somebody.”

But he was not Bojangles.

For the most part, nostalgia is a pleasant experience, an emotion to be savored, maintained as long as you can, even expanded and explored. An experience you treasure and exploit, one you can control, a normal, healthy pastime often associated with daydreaming.

The random thoughts known as wool gathering, though they resemble nostalgia or day dreaming differ from nostalgia in that they are virtually unconscious moments. They occur when we let our minds drift, when we are preoccupied or distracted from conscious, controlled thought. When one wool-gathers a lot of fuzzy thinking occurs and such non-directional mental activity produces many of life’s hair-brained schemes.

For many, nostalgia is an emotion to call on when you are feeling low or facing an unpleasant experience, like visiting the dentist or getting a colonoscopy. Imagine yourself in happier times and ignore the procedure the medical profession must inflict on you from time to time and the ordeal will soon pass.

It�??s also a very useful experience for those who have been gilded by the golden years (GY). You can bask in the pleasures you embraced in pre GY life knowing full well that the pleasures of the past can�??t be taken away from you.. In fact, as the years pass memory enhances our experiences and we are amazed at what we accomplished.

on developing a private list of one-word descriptors

�??Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Richeliue 1839

It is mightier than all the arsenals on the planet, stronger than all the armies of the world, more powerful than all the governments on earth.

Words are so powerful that they can stop wars and change ordinary men into angels. They can create new ideas, which can save the human race from its apparent bent to destroy itself. They govern all that we have and all that we are, all that we have done and all that we will ever do.

It is not how many words it takes to arrive at a certain place or time but the selection of the right words. It may be the selection of a single word that changes us into the person of our dreams, that captures the good life that all men cherish, that triggers a resolution of peace between hostile nations.

We all spend our lives employing the words in our personal vocabulary, the resident mind-dictionary which we all possess we never turn off the stream of language, it is always on even when we sleep. It is on when we are distracted or unconscious or when we are merely daydreaming.

Words can make us happy or they can tear down the joy of life and plunge us into despair. To call someone by a derogative can destroy that person’s self respect or confidence. This especially true with children and parents should take great care before they give their kids nicknames such as lazy, good-for-nothing or weird.

Since language is the chief means of communication in our lives it behooves us to study it well and perfect our use of it.  A practical suggestion that you might consider is to develop a list of words that mean the most to you and to arrange them in the order of their importance to you,

This exercise will bring your value system into sharp focus, maybe for the first time in your life. It can be unsettling if you have never done anything like this.

You will want to keep this exercise private, at least until you have come to a state of comfort with your list. Start with the top ten words and gradually increase to fifteen, then twenty, then twenty five and so on. You will find yourself re-evaluating your choices as you increase the size of your personal lexis. Its ultimate size is your personal call. I myself have not gone beyond fifty. I reckon that is an attempt at putting too fine a point on it.

In some instances you may want to use a phrase where the choice of a one-word descriptor is ambiguous. As an example, I use �??to love�?? and �??to be loved,�?? instead of the single word love, which is very high in my lexis. You may want to use words like patience and other attributes of character and still consider them values to be achieved.

This project can take many days to complete, even months and years. I started my list in 1982 and still revise it from time to time. I am 76 years old and life is still dynamic and needs adjusting daily to stay healthy and an ardent member of the living family of man.

I have had two brain surgeries for Parkinsons and have just learned of a Hawaii woman who had three million cells taken from behind the retina of a donor in China and transplanted to her brain and she is doing very well. At 57 years of age she had all but become a total invalid and within weeks of her transplant by a Chinese neurosurgeon in Beijing she was skiing in Colorado.

I am investigating how to get in the queue for the procedure and to learn if it is done anywhere else. I will keep readers of my blog posted on developments.