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.

___________________________________

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.

By Riley McDavid

When Mrs. McD announced that Monday, October 24, was National Food Day, my salivary glands went into hyperdrive: pancakes, eggs, and sausage for breakfast, cheeseburgers and fries at my favorite spot for lunch, and industrial strength lasagna for dinner.

“No way, Riley,” she said. “Food Day isn’t a gastronomical triathlon to see who can consume the most sodium, carbs and fat. Its first goal is to show people how they can reduce diet-related disease by promoting safe, healthy foods.”

Disappointed, but ever the good sport, on Food Day I had my oatmeal breakfast and then drove with her down to the sparkling new Dorothy Visser Senior Center in San Clemente which was hosting a Food Day demonstration. Before an attentive audience in one of the new meeting rooms, Michelle Schuck from the Orange County Health Agency and Heather Rice from the San Clemente Wellness Committee gave tips on how to prepare meals that are both delicious and healthy. 

Virginia Schoenfield of the Wellness Committee told us that malnutrition is the number one malady afflicting seniors in this country.  Poor dietary habits result in increasing the numbers of people suffering from hypertension, diabetes and other chronic conditions. “But with a proper diet, all chronic conditions can be reversed, regardless of one’s age,” she said.

“Will good nutrition help Riley improve his ability to solve crosswords?” Mrs. McD asked one of the specialists, with just a hint of sarcasm in her tone.

“Actually it can,” the lady replied.  “Good nutrition helps the mind and the body to function better.”

Sam Olmstead,  president of the San Clemente Community Market, gave a brief presentation on his organization’s initiative to operate the first cooperative market in Orange County. Current plans are for the store to open in June of 2012.

Far from being an isolated happening, Food Day events were taking place all over the country. It is a national education effort aimed at improving eating habits.

After a while we wandered out to see the rest of the new center.   In a much larger meeting room, with a high vaulted ceiling and craftsman-type support beams, a three-hour Saddleback Emeritus art class was underway.  “The center is gorgeous,” said the art teacher, Lyndelle Stonick. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”

Art in the new Dorothy Visser Senior Center

The center’s director, Cathy Lee, told us the center serves congregate lunch five days a week, an average of 30 most days, but as many as 90 on Fridays.  “We have parties on Friday, “ she said.   She also gave us a  list of nearly three dozen classes and activities held at the center regularly.

The smaller meeting room where the food demo was taking place actually divides into two even smaller meeting rooms.  It also has a retractable wall so that it can combine with the larger meeting room and create a space that runs all the way from the front of the center to the back. She also showed us a room currently used for storage that will eventually be a computer room with ten stations. She said the room actually had much more stuff stored in it until recently when a single volunteer came in and heroically removed much of it. Near the computer room is a gym whose equipment Cathy and Beth Apodaca demonstrated for us.

On a table in the hallway we found some biographical information about one of the people most responsible for the creation of the center, Dorothy Bonnell Visser. Dorothy Bonnell was born in Brooklyn in 1902, where she also went to school. She married a sailor — but not just any sailor. He was Cornelis Visser, Captain of the Holland America Lines cruise ship Amsterdam, with whom she took many cruises and became an accomplished world traveler. In her later years she made two bequests, one for $600,000 and another for $326,000, that made possible the center that bears her name. Captain Visser passed away in 1990 and his wife Dorothy in 2006.

It got to be nearly one p.m. so Mrs. McD and I headed for our car.  We don’t get to San Clemente very often, so as we left the center, I suggested we go down to the pier for lunch.  When we got there, the lady server asked Mrs. McD for her order.

“Seafood salad, dressing on the side, hold the bread,” she replied.

“Marvelously salubrious nutritional choices,” I said, with just a hint of sarcasm in my tone.

“And for you. sir?”

“I’ll have the…” I began.

“He’ll have the same,” Mrs. McD said.

Upcoming on the Age Well Calendar

 Sunday November 6: The Senior’s Prom at the Irvine Marriott Hotel. Tickets are $40 presale through October 21, and $45 at the door. But FREE if you’re 100 or more. Includes buffet dinner, raffles and music by Johnny Vana’s “Big Band Sound.”

By Riley McDavid

Age Well’s McDee Awards are given from time to time to seniors who have made notable contributions to the lives of others.

 Michael Hart: He thought waaaaay outside the box

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.“ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French author/aviator who wrote The Little Prince.

In 1971 Michael Hart was looking at a pile of rocks — quite metaphorically, you understand.  It was actually a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer, a workhorse in the corporate world for applications such as library administration, nuclear power plant operation, and flight simulation. Other mainframes crunched huge volumes of numbers for banks, universities, and voting registrars.

But they all did essentially one thing: they processed data. Michael Hart had a radically different vision for computers.  He wanted them not just to massage information for the bean counters of the world, but to enable people everywhere to share information. At the time that concept was as revolutionary as manned flight was to the Wright brothers in the 1890s.

So Mr. Hart typed into a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois the text of the Declaration of  Independence, which is generally acknowledged to be the world’s first e-book. He then encouraged people to download it, and thus was born Project Gutenberg. Thanks to the pro bono work of hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, Project Gutenberg  today has more than 30,000 e-books in over 60 languages, most of them in the public domain and a relatively few still under copyright but reproduced with the permission of the copyright owners.

In his obituary of Michael Hart in the New York Times, William Grimes wrote that Mr. Hart took “the first tentative steps in a revolution that would usher in what he liked to call the fifth information age, a world of e-books, hand-held electronic devices like the Nook and Kindle, and unprecedented individual access to texts on a vast array of Internet archives.”

In a 2006 e-mail to the technology writer Glyn Moody, Mr. Hart predicted that there would be a billion e-books in 2021, Project Gutenberg’s 50th anniversary, and that, thanks to advances in memory chips, “you will be able to carry all billion e-books in one hand.”

So if you have a Kindle or Nook or whatever, you can thank the late Michael Hart, a man who possessed the vision to see well beyond the limitations of the computing stone age of 1971. “It’s a paradigm shift,” he told Searcher magazine in 2002. “It’s the power of one person, alone in their basement, being able to type in their favorite books and give it to millions or billions of people.”

Dr. Hedda Bolgar: At 102, she still goes to work

Google “Hedda Bolgar” and you get a list of titles that reads like a chronology — Hedda Bolgar at 98 … at 99 ..  at 100.  You get the sense that many of the writers thought they’d better do a piece on her quickly because she can’t possibly have much time left. But she continues to outlive their expectations.  Recently the L.A. Times did an article that noted the celebration of her 102^nd birthday.

Dr. Bolgar is a psychotherapist, and as admirable as her longevity is, it is hardly her only achievement in life. In the 1970s she co-founded the Wright Institute of Los Angeles, a nonprofit mental health training and service center. The Hedda Bolgar Psychotherapy Clinic, part of the Wright Institute, offers affordable service to people with limited incomes. Think of it as a sort of Meals on Wheels for the soul.

Recently, Experience Counts, a national nonprofit whose mission is to improve the lives of older people through training, community service and employment, honored Dr. Bolgar as one of America’s outstanding oldest workers.  She still sees patients four days a week and teaches on the fifth day.

“She is dedicated to improving women’s roles, especially the role of poor women and women in underdeveloped countries,” said a spokesperson for Experience Counts.

“Women must be agents of their own lives,” she told an interviewer. They must not be dependent on someone else to provide for them.”

Her patients range in age from the mid-40s to 88. She told an interviewer that “the older patients are delighted to find somebody older than they are, because I can understand what they’re going through.”

She says her patients’ major fear is of losing independence — that they won’t be able to move around, they won’t be able to decide what to do because somebody who is taking care of them makes the decisions. “If I have any fear, it’s that,” she says.

Dr. Bolgar was born in Switzerland in 1909, and received her doctorate in psychology at the University of Vienna. She was an outspoken Nazi critic, and in 1938, on the day Hitler’s forces entered Austria, she fled to the United States, fearing for her life. Since 1956 she has lived and practiced in Los Angeles. She was married for 33 years until her husband passed away. Marrying her husband she said was one of the best things in her life.

What does someone who is 102 think about death?

“Now I tend toward thinking I would like to be very conscious when it happens. It’s an experience, and there’s nothing like it, and I want to be there when it happens. On the other hand, I don’t like pain. If all I am is in pain and the only thing that matters is to somehow control the pain, then maybe I’ll feel differently.”

Recommended reading: A great interview with Dr. Bolgar in Caring.Com. on how aging can be enormously liberating.

http://www.caring.com/interviews/interview-with-hedda-bolgar-about-aging

Upcoming on the Age Well Calendar

Sunday November 6: The Senior’s Prom at the Irvine Marriott Hotel. Tickets are $40 presale through October 21, and $45 at the door. But FREE if you’re 100 or more. Includes buffet dinner, raffles and music by Johnny Vana’s “Big Band Sound.”

By Riley McDavid

Arnie was visiting the other day when Mrs. McD came home from bridge and announced that the eleven-year-old grandson of one of her bridge buddies would be attending Cotillion.

“Cotillion?” Arnie said.  “Isn’t that a number?  I mean like you got your billion, then a trillion, then a quadrillion, and then you got your cotillion.”

“A cotillion is a dance, Arnie,” I said. “It’s a grand event that people attended back in seventeenth century Europe.”

“Not quite,” Mrs. Smarty Pants said.  “It’s not a number, Arnie.  These days it’s a school for young people where they learn to dance and manners and etiquette and ….”

“And all that other hooey I never learned,” Arnie said with a scowl.

“Oh, Arnie,” she said. “don’t be so hard on yourself.  You’re a very polite guy.”

“So what’s this Cotillion?” I asked.

So she explained patiently — a little too patiently, as if English were not our native tongue  — that there are a number of different Cotillion organizations in the country, but generally they all focus on dance and manners and respect for others.  There are even formal dinners. The word is that the boys moan and groan about having to go but then they’ll actually choose to go even when it conflicts with a soccer practice or the like. “And so on,” she said after about ten sentences.

That night after dinner I was checking our email when one arrived from our daughter-in-law with a picture of our oldest grandson in suit and tie.  “He starts Cotillion on Monday,” she wrote.

“It’s all the rage.” Mrs. McD said.  Then she asked, “Where did you learn to dance?” That’s actually a bit of sarcasm, because to this day I am, to put it charitably, a so-so dancer.

“At the Polly Thomas School of Dance,” I replied with some pride. “It is quite renowned.” After we Googled it, she had to admit that the Polly Thomas School of Dance was impressive even if its curriculum didn’t seem to have helped me much. “More impressive than your snooty New England prep school,” I said.  “As I recall the police had to break up your senior prom.”

“They did NOT break it up!” she protested vigorously.  “They just hauled off a few drunk football players from the boys’ prep school on the other side of town.”

“Ah yes,” I said.  “Etiquette. Manners. Respect for others.”

But eventually we both agreed that teaching young people to dance and the accompanying social graces was really something quite valuable that can stand a person in good stead. By the time we reached adulthood, we both knew which fork to use, and all that sort of stuff, and we have always been quite comfortable at social functions, such as the Age Well Founders’ Tea Dance and the Age Well Senior Prom.

“Which, by the way, is coming up,” she said.

“It is.  At the Irvine Marriott Hotel Sunday, November 6. Raises a lot of money for Meals on Wheels. Raffle prizes and lots of fun. Tickets are $40 presale through October 21, and $45 at the door. But FREE if you’re 100 or more. Includes buffet dinner and music by Johnny Vana’s “Big Band Sound.”

“Are you doing a radio spot?”

“Sounds that way.”

“Then tell us where people can get tickets.”

“Any Age Well Senior Center.”

“Well done,” she said.

“Thank you.  And by the way, I heard it wasn’t football players at all.  I heard it was a bunch of rowdies from your girls’ field hockey team.”

“Lies!” she said. “All lies!”

By Riley McDavid

Okay, we’re a little late — Labor Day was last week — but nevertheless, Mrs McD and I want to pay tribute to a particular group of laborers.  We call them the 91-Cent Brigade, a term we’ll explain a little later. There are about seven hundred of them.  They are the people who volunteer their time to Age Well and to the many thousands of seniors that Age Well serves every year.

More than 600 of them donate their time to Age Well’s Senior Nutrition Program. That includes Meals on Wheels and the Congregate Lunches. Most of those who deliver meals do so once a week. Typically MoW volunteers drive to an Age Well center at about mid-morning, pick up their daily amount of meals, and drive through a route knocking on doors with the cheery greeting, “Meals on Wheels!” They may chat with a Meals client a bit, and they always keep their eyes out to see that nothing is amiss with the person or the household.

Meals on Wheels and Congregate volunteers collectively logged 51,000 volunteer hours during the fiscal year 2010-2011. The Meals drivers not only volunteered their time, but the use of their vehicles and the nearly four-bucks-a-gallon gas that powered the vehicles.

Other nutrition volunteers help set up and serve Congregate Lunches and clean up afterwards.  It’s the only restaurant in town where tipping is not required or even allowed.  In another blog we wrote about a typical volunteer who helps prepare and serve lunches to the people at the Adult Day Care Center.  “She makes salads, she fixes meals for those on special diets, she serves, she cleans up — she does anything that’s asked of her,” said her supervisor. And there are dozens more just like her.

Other volunteers assist at senior centers in a variety of ways: answering phones, staffing the reception desk, doing clerical tasks, serving as activities instructors and assistants, working in Adult Day Services and at the Alzheimer’s Treatment Center, and last but far from least, doing fundraising.

Then there are those who volunteer to serve on the Age Well board and on various advisory committees.  The board is the guiding force behind everything Age Well does. The advisory committees are pretty much an unseen but important facet of Age Well.   One of them, for example, is the reason Age Well has a new name and a new more energetic look on its buses and elsewhere.

Assume for a moment that instead of volunteers we hired all these people at minimum wage.  Age Well says it would cost more than $380,000 a year for the nutrition volunteers alone.

“That’s just hourly pay,” Mrs. McD said.  “On top of that you have to pay Social Security and other such payroll taxes.  Pretty soon that amount is up close to half a mill.” It’s an irony, she added, that while these people are happy to volunteer at no pay, if they really wanted to earn money, they wouldn’t have to settle for minimum wages.

So why do we call these people the 91-Cent Brigade?  Because thanks in large measure to their generosity, Age Well is able to spend 91 cents of every dollar donated on programs, and only nine cents on fundraising and the like.  In the world of nonprofits, that’s an astonishingly good ratio. It means that when you donate to Age Well, you can be sure your donation dollar is being stretched as far as possible.

So to all our Brigade members, and on behalf of the thousands of seniors you serve every day, thank you for all you do.

You can give now. Go to www.myagewell.org and click on Donate.  Thank you!

Coming up on the Age Well Calendar

Sunday, November 6: The Seniors Prom at the Irvine Marriott.