How do I get in on the Active Adult Community scene?

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition's insert on "Mature Lifestyles" 3/16/12

I’m wondering how and when I can get in on the “Active Adult” scene.  I’m curious about what goes on behind those fenced, manicured communities.  Are they keeping something in, or keeping the rest of us out? 

Haven’t you seen those billboards that advertise “Communities for the Active Adult?”  These little enclaves are restricted to those who are 55 and older.  Why, I wonder?  What do these communities do that is so special?  Are their backyard barbeques superior to the ones in neighborhoods populated by younger, less experienced chefs?  Are they saucier, more mellow, or do they use aged beef?  Is the loudest noise these residents want to hear going to be that of themselves snoring? 

Or is it just the opposite?  Are these people being wild and they don’t want anyone else to know it?  Now I’m thinking of “adult” in the context of those sickening, pasty yellow billboards that are plastered all up and down I-95.  They serve as much to pollute the mind as they do to promote their products.  Or maybe it is a tamer kind of wildness, where the residents are biking and skating around their neighborhoods without protective gear so as not to be poor role models?  (You know how impressionable those silly 54-year-olds can be.) 

And what happens when one spouse is significantly younger than the other?  Is the couple’s qualifying age determined by averaging, or by the younger partner?  Some of the more severe cases of May-December couples may wind up being disqualified.  

I guess the assumption here is that couples of the 55+ age group are not going to be bringing along a bunch of ragtag, crusty-nosed, children.  Because that can take the active right out of the adult.  I suppose these communities are for empty-nesters.  Disqualified, again. 

Mostly, these communities are meant for Baby Boomers.   “Baby Boomer” refers to the generation of people born between 1946 and 1964.  Technically, I have missed being a Boomer by two years.  Two years too late - as in I was born in 1966, not 1944, Smart Aleck. 

I have almost a decade before entering this esteemed phase of mature adulthood, but even in 2021, I doubt I will qualify.  It’s not the “adult” part that I will have a problem with.  I can sit through a war documentary as well as any other adult counterpart, and only doze off once or twice.  It’s the active part that will be problematic, of course. 

What does it mean to be an active adult?  You can clip coupons faster than your arthritic counterparts?  Does it mean you can zip into a handicapped parking spot before your neighbor, with her faulty eyesight and even faultier driving, sees it?

Of course, these are exaggerations.  If you look at a modern “mature” adult, you will probably see someone who is more fit than you, and more engaged in intellectual and community events than you were even aware of.  They just don’t make grandmas and grandpas with all those telltale signs of knitting needles and graying hairs the way they used to. 

Besides, at 55, you aren’t exactly a senior, unless there’s a discount involved.  If there’s a discount, we all want to be seniors.  We don’t even mind being entry-level seniors then - sort of a junior-senior.   Unfortunately, these discounts seem to be applied only to products with a senior stigma.  These would be medical products that are so embarrassing that you don’t want to confess to using them.  These are only advertised on channels being watched by aging adult males, well past bedtime: namely, The History Channel at 8 p.m. onwards.  Every ailment and dysfunction known to man, and mostly to man, gets good air time here.

That’s the tragic thing about aging: It’s so hard on you, physically and mentally.  Right when you have the experience and wisdom to handle it all, your equipment chooses not to cooperate.  It begins to deteriorate in an indiscriminate and merciless manner.  Sure, we all know there’s really only one alternative to the advancement of our years and the wear and tear on our systems, unless that secret, anti-aging product, for which you just received a coupon in the mail, really works.

I am still curious about the goings-on in these active adult communities.  I am planning to check one of these out some day.  Until then, I guess, I will have to be satisfied to live in a non-active, immature community.  It’s called “my house.”  Here’s one place where I am doubly qualified to be.

Jack Sprat and the Mrs.

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on 3/9/12

Do you remember Jack Sprat and his wife?  No, they haven’t been in the news for espionage or for embezzling funds or for blatant infidelity.  These are the characters from the old nursery rhyme.  Surely, you remember Jack Sprat, the man who could eat no fat?  Remember his wife?  How could you?  She didn’t even get a name.  I suppose we are supposed to be satisfied with calling her Mrs. Jack Sprat.  Regardless of her appellation, we do get the picture that she was the rounder one because she simply could eat no lean.

To me, it’s an ideal relationship.  The Sprats could go out to dinner, and after the Mrs. had wedged herself into the booth, and Mr. Sprat had planted his knobby knees under the other side of the booth, they could order just one meal.  He would guzzle down the water and chomp on a few ice chips while the Mrs. went to work on the creamy mashed potatoes and the slab of beef.  I’m sure she would need a milkshake, and if you’re going to splurge on a milkshake, why would you deny yourself the whipped topping and that single Maraschino cherry?  Jack is going to indulge in none of that.

What about the blooming onion with the sauce?  It has its basis in a vegetable.  Forget that. Jack might have to settle for only a whiff of that calorie-laden decadence, and even that might be too much for him.  The aroma alone would probably bowl him over.  He would probably just eat the green beans, even though that would seem somewhat cannibalistic.  If the man has any fat on him, it’s going to be in the form of his wallet. 

When the dessert rolls around, she might let him have a bit of the fruit filling from her pie – if he behaves himself and doesn’t make rude comments regarding her calorie intake.

I feel something like that couple.  My husband possesses much better will power than I do.  If he decides he will or won’t do something, you may as well throw in the towel.  You might feel like throwing the towel at him, but he is fairly firm in his convictions. 

He has a very strict dietary regimen.  Lots of tomatoes and fish – oatmeal and green tea, almonds and walnuts, blueberries, and spinach salads, and the occasional sugar-free cookie.  I, on the other hand, will everything else.  By choice.

The other day, our nine-year-old daughter complained that he hadn’t even tasted the birthday cake that she had dutifully made for her brother, even though she had removed the frosting from his tiny portion.  (I might have helped save the planet by making sure the frosting did not go to waste.)

When I conveyed his latest affront, he decided to be a good sport and made a big show of eating that one morsel of cake.  One.  It put the biggest smile on our little girl, because Betty Crocker isn’t always a piece of cake, you know.  It takes so little to make some people happy.  For a smile like that, I could have eaten the whole cake.  In fact, I might have…in small portions, of course.

So, what is the secret to the happy marriage of Jack and his nameless wife with the shameless eating habits?  We’re never told if Mrs. Sprat is a marathon runner.  You never know.  At least she might have been assigned a number for us to remember her by.  From the illustrations that accompany these rhymes, though, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that she was not.

You may recall that my wedding and engagement rings had to be cut off of my finger in the summer, just a few months before our 25^th anniversary.  That was because the 25 extra pounds I have added over the years had decided to aggregate right around that ring finger.

My husband, however, has lost 45 pounds over the last year.  A couple of months ago, as he was changing a filter in the car (at night), his wedding band slipped right off and went clinking into the abyss.  It hasn’t turned up anywhere in the car, and we still haven’t found it in the driveway or the grass. 

So, as a result, 25 years into our marriage, neither of us has our original wedding band on.  It’s a good thing I don’t believe in omens.

In the meantime, if someone wants to lend me a metal detector, don’t be shy. Mrs. Sprat will be happy to take you on a tour of the driveway.

Happy Birthday, “Surge”!

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on Fri. March 2, 2012

Our three boys’ birthdays fall in the space of one month.  They will soon be 7, 14, and 17.   The youngest was born on February 28^th in Ohio in 2005, just five months before we moved here.  He is finally forty pounds.  Here is one child who is happy to be in a booster seat because it’s a promotion from that car seat.  Happy Birthday, Nathaniel!

The two older boys were born in Northern California.  The middle son will be fourteen on March 31^st.  Happy Birthday, Niles!

My eldest son, who is the third child, has his birthday on March 4^th.  Happy Birthday, Sergio!  I can’t believe you’re 17. 

There were times that I thought he might not survive childhood.  Sometimes, frankly, I thought I wouldn’t survive him.  He was chronically sick, tortured by an eczema that prevented him from sleeping through the night, and besieged by so many food allergies that he could only eat what I made at home, from scratch.  Have you tasted my cooking?  As if he wasn’t tortured enough.

I know how fortunate we are – we have anesthesia and antibiotics and public sanitation.  We have relatively easy transportation and ridiculously easy communication.  We can expect our children to survive infancy.  We live in a vastly wealthy nation compared to most of the inhabitants of earth.  We have access to plentiful and safe food, and we usually have clean water.  (I hope this doesn’t raise any blood pressures in Bealeton.)  We live in a time and place where our dangers tend to be the hurried pace of life or the excess of things – food, pleasure, possessions, and leisure time. 

But there are always the challenges.  People who have not lived with a two-year-old human being sometimes don’t understand how unreasonable these cute little people can be.  The theory of getting them to do what you want, when you want, is very simple - until you try to put it into practice.  This varies with each child, adult, your combined moods, and temperaments.  Other factors may include the ambient air pressure, which side of the bed you happened to roll out of, and whether or not you are wearing “angry” colors.

When our two eldest daughters were two and four years old, my brother, who was doing his medical residency rotations, came to stay with us in Northern California.  He brought with him my very sweet sister-in-law, a perennially cheerful person, and their two sons, ages four and three at the time.  Our household expanded to eight people, with half of them being preschoolers.

Those five or six weeks were a joyous time.  It flew by.  After a few days together, however, I thought to myself that my sister-in-law didn’t quite understand child discipline.  Those boys were out of control, I thought.  Poor thing.

Then, I had a boy of my own.

Not just any boy, either.  He was Sergio.  Much of his infancy is a blur of projectile vomit and his screaming whenever I tried to set him down.  There was crying to, but I soon learned to control my emotions.  I used to load him into a backpack carrier just so I could vacuum the house.

(It would be years later when I finally acquiesced and let my husband talk me into having a cleaning service help us out.  There should be no question as to who is the smarter one.  What was I trying to prove, exactly?  That I could do it all, save money, and become neurotic whenever sticky hands approached a glass door I had just cleaned?)

My Sergio might have been a difficult baby, but he was also exceptionally (and redeemingly) cute.  I might be biased, but on a tour through Yosemite National Park once, a woman cooed over him and asked repeatedly if she could take him with her.  There is a fine line between flattering and frightening someone.  By the end of the ride, I was scared.

Sergio became a difficult little boy, perhaps because he saw and valued things differently.  His younger years were filled with what, to me, were weird obsessions.  I developed coping mechanisms.  I allowed him to ride in his car seat while holding an electric weed whacker just so we could get places.  I took him to church with a thirty-foot extension cord coiled into a big diaper bag.

By the time he was three, my parenting skills had not just deteriorated: They were gone.   Leaving the grocery store, a bagger who once escorted me could not understand why I insisted on pushing the cart.  Every time she tried to commandeer the cart, Sergio, buckled in the cart, had a shrieking fit.  She gave up and let me push.  She bounced along beside me and said, “You know, my younger brother was just like that.  They finally put him on lithium.”  She eyed my boy and leaned over and whispered, “Have you looked into lithium?”

Sergio is now taller than me (not difficult), weighs more than me (a little more difficult), and is a young man I am proud to claim.  The past seventeen years have been quite a ride!  Even without the lithium.

Happy Birthday, "Surge"!