Adults Don’t Get ‘Senior,’ They Just Become ‘Older’

A large banner across the Johnson Campus Center proclaimed: “Older Adults Day.”

I nodded silent approval the other morning as I made my way toward the building, where I was to talk on theatrical magic of the Victorian Era and demonstrate a few of the old classic tricks.

I felt good about knowing I was going to talk to a group of older adults. I had been afraid they were going to be senior citizens, and if you know me at all, the prospect of a roomful of senior citizens at 9:30 in the morning was dismaying.

I can tolerate senior citizens after lunch, but before the morning fog has lifted from my head it is about all I can bear to pry my own senior body out of bed and then contemplate my own senior face in the bathroom mirror. A roomful of senior citizens in the morning is simply a nearly unbearably spectacular way to be reminded that I, too, am getting old, old, old.

When I stepped to the rostrum facing about 140 older adults, I blurted out, “Well, you don’t look so old to me.” They laughed. They understood.

I think there wasn’t a person there under 50. Many were in their 60s and 70s. But they all looked good; they looked sharp. They were a marvelous audience. They were certainly not willing members of that dreary Senior Citizens’ Club of 10% discounts set apart from the viable world.

They were simply “older adults,” implying that they were still quite capable of intelligent thought and of making sensible decisions and of taking care of themselves, thank you. Maybe some of them couldn’t climb stairs anymore quite as quickly as the younger adults, but their interest and enthusiasm in life remained undiminished.

Healthy Attitude

The program at Rancho Santiago College is testimony to this healthy attitude. It is directed by Sara Lundquist, who screamed in astonishment when she discovered her marked coin in the innermost of a nest of locked boxes. I liked her immensely for her reaction. Everybody laughed happily. I could see they liked her, too.

The event that had brought them together was a semiannual celebration of the college’s New Horizons program for older adults. In the four years since it was founded, the program’s mailing list has burgeoned to 5,500 of the not-so-young from throughout Orange County and even from adjacent counties.

Marian Mumby, senior services specialist who spends her time organizing the 50-Plus Club for adults over you-know-what, told me that at least 2,900 of her kind of people attend Santiago College as students. As many as 80 of them have returned to college and earned their degrees.

Part of the New Horizons program includes 12 to 15 trips a year to interesting places, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, Death Valley and Victoria, B.C. And should any of the older adults require personal counseling, tutoring in a second language, instruction in health or nutrition, or exercise classes for older physiques, they are provided as well, Mumby said.

My old-time magic started off the day, which carried the theme of “The Good Old Days.” I couldn’t spend the entire day there, but I stayed long enough to watch a charmingly nostalgic fashion show of authentic clothes of the Edwardian and Roaring ‘20s eras. Most of the garments worn by the models, members of the 50-Plus Club, belonged either to them, their mothers or their grandmothers.

Those, let me say, “mature” figures adorned in those fashions of yore, some strutting proudly, others regally, put to shame most of the young peacocks I’ve seen in their “latest.” I was sorry to see the show, presided over by Shirley Hahn and Irene Edie, end; it was healing salve to my older adult eyes.