Think like an old person

Nothing noteworthy in the newspaper today, except for senior center and senior center ... see Tom Salemi's blog.

I was speaking with an older gentleman yesterday. He's 86 years old. He does not consider himself to be a "senior" and even objects to getting discounts based on his age.

This, and a conversation I had earlier today with a friend, made me think about this in a different way.

One: While it's true that baby boomers feel NOW that they wouldn't patronize a senior center (I certainly feel that way), I realized that it surprised me when my own parents started going to their local senior center. So I guess I have no clue what I'll be wanting or needing when I'm my parents' age, if I make it that far.

Two: I guess the notion of a center just for senior citizens is a little isolating and disenfranchising. But on the other hand, I definitely would not go somewhere to socialize, even now, where there was a multitude of noisy kids running around, shrieking, as some children will do.

One gets grouchy in old age (no excuse for that young woman at RMB&G, though, as she was young). Well, I get grouchier the older I get, anyway.

But my mother likes going to her Scrabble group at her senior center (I mean, where else is she going to play Scrabble? And canasta?). It has nothing to do with lack of funds to go elsewhere, it's that, I think, there are people there of a like age and with similar past experiences.

This older gentleman I met yesterday has a pool table in his basement, where he entertains his male friends. My mother has no such single source of entertainment in her home and would be jangled beyond measure at the thought of entertaining 5 or 6 people, at her age and in her condition (she has bad arthritis), at home.

I know my mother, who will be 78 this year, loves her grandchildren, but after a couple of hours with them in the house (especially when they were younger), you can see her nerves going haywire. She would never confess to this, however.

Gloucester's senior citizens center is right on the main drag, across the street from the harbor, and adjacent to a shopping plaza that has a grocery store, a bank and a drugstore. There's also a free-standing Dunkin' Donuts ....

But then, Gloucester, I think, has not 'sentimentalized' its waterfront.

Are we disenfranchising our senior citizens by building a place just for them? Is there a subtle message being sent that they are not good enough to mix with the rest of us? Or is there another, not so subtle message being relayed?

I don't know! All I know is that, as Ed Cameron writes in his letter to the DN, other communities around us either have one or are planning on building one in the near future (Newbury excepted, of course, as theirs disappears into the fog).