Many active seniors get better with age
SAN JOSE, Calif. — She has been old for so long she can remember when the first graying hairs and the withering of her churned milk complexion seemed to matter, as if the obliteration of her youth signaled the end of something. That was 20 years ago. At 82, Helen Connolly is actually — measurably! — getting better every day.
At the Saratoga, Calif., retirement home where she has spent the past four years, Connolly chooses from one of four exercise classes every day, plays boccie regularly with friends, and gets in a round of golf at least once a week. Her muscles are pumped, and so is her spirit.
"My golf game is better now than it was 20 years ago," she said. "I hit my drives longer than I ever did."
She hasn't had cataract surgery yet, but she thinks it might improve her game. "I keep waiting to get it because I can't see as far as I hit my golf ball."
What was it Bette Davis said? Old age is no place for sissies? She walked the walk — with painful osteoporosis that shrunk her, but never cut her down to size — while speaking up for America's fastest growing demographic: the golden old people. They are the liver-spotted gray panthers, the elder-hot cougars, the silver foxes and the not yet senile septuagenarians who are making old age new again.
Medical advances have combined with a greater emphasis on fitness at all stages of life to make it far less rare for people to live into their 90s. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of centenarians will grow by 660 percent over the next 40 years.
Hip and knee replacements have created a generation of bionic baby boomers, just starting to be fitted out for walkers with tennis balls stuck to the bottom. That's just how they roll.
Expensive retirement centers have transformed the dreaded old "nursing homes" to something more like Club Med than Club Dead.
And with Viagra, LibiGel and other chemical stimulants improving the quality of older people's romantic lives, there is anecdotal evidence that hooking up has replaced — or at least supplemented — nap time as the afternoon delight of choice among widows and widowers.
But to Sheldon Breiner, 73, a longtime resident of Portola Valley, Calif., and one of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial inventors, old age is not a stage of life worth worrying about.
"I don't look at these as the 'golden years,"' he said, boasting his resting pulse rate is a youthful 45 beats per minutes.
Breiner's work with magnetometers led to his invention of one of the first metal detectors used at airports and in government buildings following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He also cofounded the Peninsula Open Space Trust 32 years ago and still pursues work and play at the same exhausting clip he did 50 years ago.
"Talking to him makes people — particularly men — think, 'What am I doing with my life?"' said his wife of 47 years, Mimi, with a mixture of admiration and resignation.
The thing Sheldon Breiner wants to make sure he doesn't do with his life is spend its latter years in the isolation of a retirement residence. It's a life he can only contemplate with dread.
"It makes me kind of sad," he said. "I look around at the people there, and so many of them are my age. And they go have lunch, and they go have dinner, and they do exactly the same thing every day. I would be very depressed if I had to do it."
Mimi Breiner doesn't expect they will ever have a conventional retirement, but she wouldn't mind putting up her feet occasionally.
"I see the end zone as being closer than he does," she said. "He doesn't see that at all. I do wonder sometimes, could he walk a little slower so I can keep up? Could he sit down and eat instead of standing up in the kitchen? He always looks ready to fire up another project. Part of me wishes he'd slow down a little, but that's not him. He's a force of nature. What are you gonna do?"
<br>
