Month: May 2023

May 2023

By Richard Fleming

Photo courtesy of Nigel Tadyanehondo

I have decided to spill one of my peer group’s most closely guarded secrets. I do so hesitantly. I am afraid making it public might increase inter-generational conflict. But as a long time advocate for open communication, I think we boomers need to acknowledge one of our truths.

What I confess today is this: when we seniors wake up in the mornings, we often do not know what day of the week it is.

No doubt this idea seems unfathomable to those inhabiting Gen X and younger – the reliable, trustworthy folks who must go to work every day to make a living and contribute to the Social Security trust fund. For working people, each day of the week carries unique significance and high meaning. Each day feels distinct because of the work schedule.

For those working a Monday-through-Friday day job, for example, they wake up Monday morning acutely aware of what day of the week they are entering. Mondays herald a long and tiring work week ahead.

Tuesday mornings are slightly less jarring since only four days remain before the weekend.

On Wednesdays, folks wake up with a small sense of relief, knowing they’ve arrived at Hump Day, halfway through the week.

On Thursday mornings, the coming relief is palpable.

And no working-age person would ever wake up on a Friday morning, wondering what day it is. Not with the weekend ahead.

Saturday and Sunday mornings are celebratory. The alarm clock is less demanding. Breakfast can expand. Though time with kids and completing errands occupy many hours of the weekend, people’s time is usually more flexible than during the week.

Folks with other varieties of work schedules view each day of the week from the context of their own particular labor calendar. But they are never in doubt about what day it is when they awake.

Why is it so different for seniors, especially those of us further into retirement? Our focus upon awakening is not on what day of the week it is. Our attention is directed at trying to get out of bed, empty our bladders, and find our way into the kitchen to put on some coffee. Whether it is Monday or Thursday or even Saturday does not really matter. Each day loses its unique “feel” and significance. Life’s weekly periodicity ebbs.

There are some markers which distinguish one day from the next. Putting recycle and trash bins at the curb always comes on a specific day, so that helps keep us oriented in time and space. Regular weekly volunteer activities and babysitting responsibilities can also serve as identifiers for specific days. Holidays like Mother’s Day and Thanksgiving which take place on specified days of the week are very useful. But there is no denying that for older folks, the week’s seven days grow increasingly homogenized.

If I may be so bold, I will expand my revelation even further. For many of us seniors, not only are we often unaware of what day it is upon awakening, we often don’t know what day we’re living through in the mid-afternoon. Even night time can be kind of dicey. And the older we get, the more the days blend together. I have a harder time recalling what day it is now than I did two years ago, and I doubt the situation will improve two years from now. After all, why is it important to know whether today is Monday or Friday? Or some other day for that matter?

I do not consider my waning awareness of what day it is to be a problem. For seniors, this phenomenon is a feature, not a bug. With no work schedule looming over our heads, we can accurately consider each day to be a Saturday.

Of course young, working-age people would never mistake a Tuesday for a Saturday. These two days have less in common than cod liver oil and ice cream. And it’s cute how working people are so happy when approaching one of those three-day weekends that occur about 10 times per year. I get it. I used to feel the same way. Those long weekends were rare and special.

So the truth is now out. My peers and I have the privilege – and the responsibility – of enjoying recurring seven-day weekends. I understand this may be tough for Gen Xers, Millennials, and Zennials to learn about. But I will not allow myself to feel guilty. Unending weekends are one of the few and diminishing perks of reaching old age.

Since I now detect some rising intergenerational tension, I want to offer up one more reveal which I hope will lower the temperature and perhaps yield an armistice. Most seniors would gladly give up our endless weekends if it meant we could avoid the many and expanding disadvantages of growing old. Younger folks should not envy our seven-day weekends. As enjoyable as they are, they are far from idyllic. A year filled with Saturdays can become ordinary, even dull. Living through work weeks is what makes weekends so enjoyable.

I hope this final reveal is viewed by the laboring generations as an olive branch. Younger folks should be in no rush to live the way we older folks do. Young people need to keep working to maintain their own happiness. We seniors need them to always know what day of the week it is. It helps ensure our retirement benefits remain intact.

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May 2023

By Richard Fleming

We are each accompanied by our personal crew as we travel down the road. By crew, I am not talking about family, friends, and loved ones. These folks are our anchors. By crew, I’m referring to the people who provide expertise and logistical support as we navigate the path ahead. You know who I mean. Our team. Our plumbers and electricians. Our doctors and dentists. Our physical therapists. The photographers we hire for special occasions and the auto mechanics who keep us mobile. The pest control experts we call in when ants survive every elimination method known to Google. These folks make up our crew. We rely on them. None of us can hike this trail alone.

A peculiar facet of aging is that as we grow older, our crew grows younger. I don’t intend this statement to be humorous or metaphorical. It is simple mathematics. There is an inverse relationship between our upward trajectory in age and the downward trajectory of our crew members’ ages. It can be plotted on a graph.

When I was young, my crew consisted of folks much older than me. I still remember my pediatrician, Dr. Greene, who had graying hair, appeared to be very smart, and smelled like cologne. Dr. Welch, my dentist, did the best he could, considering he had arthritic fingers and I rarely brushed my teeth. My school teachers were knowledgeable, many decades my senior, and taught me well. My crew’s advanced years were reassuring virtues.

As I journeyed onward, my crew seemed to grow a little younger. In retrospect I now realize this was an optical illusion created because I was growing a little older. I still needed my crew. My wizened college advisors and medical school faculty did their best to help me chart a course forward. After I graduated, my senior work mentors distilled lessons that saved me years of effort.

My crew provided invaluable help in other areas of daily living as well. When my land line was on the fritz, I called in a telephone repair person. When my car’s warning light turned on, I relied on an auto mechanic. Backed-up toilets which resisted my fraught attempts at plunging and snaking required a plumber. Whenever I needed my crew, they would show up. Most of them were older men. A frequent phenomenon was that after completing the work, the repair person would end the visit by cracking a joke about old codgers or referencing some cultural quirks from two decades before I was born. I did not find their jokes funny. Apparently I was too young to understand them. Even though I was in my 30s.

It was when I reached my 40s and 50s that I discovered my crew had mysteriously become about the same age I was. My personal physician and dentist were both around my age. When I needed a plumber or electrician, the person who showed up usually looked to be similar to me in age. The upslope of my aging line appeared to cross the downslope of my crew’s aging line. And I now began to understand the jokes that crew members liked to tell after finishing their work. Their sense of humor was generationally concordant with my stage of life.

During those years I was occasionally surprised when a crew member looking a couple of decades younger than me showed up. These folks made me nervous. I was skeptical about their expertise and knowledge. How could a gastroenterologist that youthful possibly perform a competent colonoscopy on me? When I had to see an oral surgeon to remove a lesion, he was clearly too young to have completed dental school, much less specialty training. It was disorienting. Where were the crew members around my own age? The ones with the right balance of education and experience.

But life is filled with twists and turns. As I grew even older, my crew continued dropping in age. Simple mathematics, remember. Addition and subtraction. And this is where things get strange – in my 60s I began to feel more confident and secure with younger crew members than with the older ones. I became mistrustful of auto mechanics, window cleaners, and other crew members who looked to be as old as me. I was worried not only about their stamina and skill, but their cognitive abilities as well. If a dentist had as much gray hair as I did, how competent could they be, after all? Surely that older plumber’s agility was questionable, so how would they be able to fix my garbage disposal? (My older brother, a psychiatrist, would label my mistrust a form of projection.)

Now that I’m in my 70s, I no longer encounter any crew members who are around my age. To a person, they are younger. Some much younger. But I have confidence in them. My prior skepticism of young crew members has disappeared. My youthful team has the requisite vigor. Their cognitive abilities are intact and likely better than mine. I am happy to engage with these youngsters. They help me navigate as I move forward.

My about-face in who I most trust to support my journey reflects my maturation as the years tick by, one after the other.

But there is a downside to this evolution. I find that once again I do not understand my crew’s end-of-visit jokes. Apparently I am now too old. It is hard to find memes comical when I don’t even know what a meme is. How can I understand humor directed at celebrities or musicians I’ve never heard of? And how I can be expected to laugh about funny trends on TikTok that apparently everyone has heard of except me?

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