glasses

Hope seniors know these already, and if you’re a young’un, they can help you, too. You will get old, if you’re lucky.

Use a “fitness watch” to help with diet and exercise and don’t stop it when you’re done exercising. Or stop it and then start it again as you shower and dress. You’ll be surprised at how hard you work getting clean and dressed to go home after your fitness session.

If you don’t have a fitness watch, get one. It is an interesting device that can do almost anything, including recording your sleep/nap time. Get one with the “fall-safe” option. It will call 911 if you fall and don’t answer the watch’s question in 30 seconds. At least my google watch will. Of note: Ace Frehly, the KISS guitarist, recently died from the results of a fall at home. Not sure if a watch would have helped, but it can’t hurt. Think “Help me, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” ads from years ago.

Amazon has entire pages of shoes for all seasons made specifically for seniors to “slip-on” without exerting the type of effort a fitness watch would record *. Of course, you can still wear lace-up shoes and add extra calories to your fitness routine. No, there are no “slip-on” socks, yet so we still bend over to remove and put on most socks. If you get loose fitting ones, you can get the socks off without bending over and save a few ergs of energy. Get a “reacher”** to pick them up if bending over is anathematic. (Today’s new word. Ask Ai.)

Give your most trusted child *** a key to your home or apartment building, Then, when you fall asleep for your afternoon nap the child can drop stuff off without waking you. It gives them the chance to check up on you, too, and see how clean and aromatic your home or apartment might or might not be. It would help, too, if you both had some sort of communication schedule, especially if the senior lives alone. My daughter and I try to talk every day or at least three times a week, and we never miss more than two days in a row. In a worst-case scenario, if I went to heaven in my apartment, it would only be two days before they found my rotting carcass. My building maintenance man says he wouldn’t know about “any” corpse until it started to smell. Don’t laugh, reader, it is a fact, not hyperbole for humor. Ai says “putrefaction” would take 4 to 10 days depending….

Depending on where you live, buy more reading glasses, cheap gloves, and cheap hats than you need. Due to our natural cognitive decline, it’s better to have these things in abundance than to need them and not have them, especially on cold, winter days. Or when shopping and trying to read labels. Look in Dollar Stores for economic quantity, and if you still trust yourself, buy decent ones from Macy’s. Oh, and Amazon, again: I bought 12 pairs of brown Jersey gloves for $9. Some are in the house, some are in the car, some in my man-bag/gym bag, and some are resting in the dresser drawer for when the others run away from home. Note: if you’re buying me a Christmas Present, do not buy fancy gloves or hats. If you do, and they are really pricey, they’ll stay in the drawer rather than mysteriously disappear. Hopefully, they can be re-gifted to “someone with all their faculties intact.” (See
“For Esme-with Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger. 1950)

In a later post we’ll talk about “layering” to keep warm, get cool, and then warm up, again, all with one coordinated outfit.

And if you live in a warm climate…you needn’t care about most of this post, you lucky bastage.****

*Except for summer. Or a move to the south. No socks! Socks suck

**You know what it is: a squeezy thingy at the end of an extension thing-a-ma-jiggy.

***If you have one.

****Michael Keaton in “Johnny Dangerously”, 1984.

Life doesn’t get easier with age. Here are some thoughts.

My eyesight is great, even with Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). AMD slowly robs your central vision…if left untreated. Get an “Ainsler Grid”, or simple sheet of lined graph paper, and tape either one to your refrigerator door. Look at it often, one eye at a time, and if any of the lines get wavy, get to an Ophthalmologist as soon as possible. An optometrist might be able to diagnose your AMD but he/she couldn’t treat it, so get to an OPHTHALMOLOGIST. If the word is too long, google “Retina Specialists” in your area. Of note, learn the difference in eye medical professionals.

Vision is great but not young. I suffer from the standard old age loss of “elasticity” in over 70-year-old eyeballs and need help with fine print. Like the smaller and smaller instructions on Tyson chicken about how to cook it. Or how to take prescriptions. You can buy “reader” glasses almost anywhere or pay your optometrist (sic, learn) for a fancy pair but if you’re like the rest of us who use them only for reading, you’ll need several pair (I have 10) spread around the house and car. They get lost, often, as if they have legs. Most often they’re lost on our heads. Since you need so many pairs, you don’t want to pay a high price for them. Dollar Stores have “trees” and trees of $1 readers in any magnification you need. They are just small magnifying glasses. The dollar store models really should not be called glasses because they are made of plastic. They work perfectly if you don’t scratch them, and if you do, buy another bunch. Like 10? My eyes were getting a little fuzzy, one time, and it made me wonder if my eyes were getting worse. Maybe a higher magnification? Thankfully, I was smart enough to see it was the plastic lenses getting “foggy”, not my eyes. A moist wipe didn’t clear them up, so I planned a dollar store trip to get cleaner, new ones. Google it! Yes, I did and after dropping all my foggy plastic glasses into warm water with a little dish soap, wiping with a paper towel, and letting them dry,—voila!–my eyesight returned to normal. Sadly, I was both pleased with myself, but angry it took ten years, and google, to learn how to clean “plastics”. Hope this one helps someone.

Try to remember the world is getting less and less interested in you and what you have to say. It shouldn’t need to be mentioned, here, but…life has passed us by. Get over it. If you pay too much attention to car and beer commercials, you’ll get depressed. For comfort, enjoy the prescription drug commercials: they are meant for us and young people with problems. But do not think the drug companies care about you, they want money. And, yes, young people do have problems but don’t “help” them by pointing it out…unless they ask and even then, be careful

Recent conversations with younger and older people have reminded me of how complex, diverse, exciting, and possibly fulfilling our old lives have been . If you feel bad about being passed by and rejected by modern society, close the blinds, turn off all electronic devices, and revisit your past. If we can remember our pasts, every one of us achieved something, saved something, earned something, did something, or otherwise enjoyed the heck out of our lives in those long-ago years. Celebrate it all. Blow your horn. But to yourself. Write it down, Record it with video or voice. Besides the self-therapy aspect of letting it out, imagine how much everyone else will miss you when they read about your life and what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, what you have survived.

And that’s a good place to end: The End. If you reached a certain age, especially if you’ve made it longer than the average life expectancy or lived longer than your parents: Woo Hoo! Champagne for all.

But let the kids pay for it. And don’t drink too much.

The Aging Man

Life through older eyes, as if anyone cares…

Not So Obvious Common-Sense Things for Seniors