It all started with the gift of a Fitbit my partner received from his children for Christmas. Wearing his device, he began avidly tracking his daily steps and his nightly sleep patterns. I decided to get one too, to help shake off the pounds I added to my frame over the holidays, and to get the incentives offered by my Medicare Advantage plan. I chose an off-brand smartwatch and eagerly awaited its arrival.

Once I figured out how to download the app, get the watch linked and synched, and strapped to my wrist, I was in business. However, I quickly discovered that reaching the recommended 10,000 steps per day is much harder than it seems. I walked, I ran, I jumped up and down, and jogged around the apartment. I checked my progress constantly. I discovered in the grocery store that my steps didn’t count if I held onto a cart, so I walked through the store pushing the cart with one hand, while swinging the other arm with conscious effort. Did anyone notice the crazy lady moving oddly over and over up and down the aisles? I didn’t care.

And it wasn’t just the steps that quickly became an all-consuming obsession. My device tracks my pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, calories burned, and more. With the pressure of my finger on the device, I was measuring my vitals 20 times, at least, per day. And the sleep cycles. Instead of asking each other how we slept as we lazily sipped our morning coffee, we were instead checking and comparing our stats, and our sleep scores. Instead of comparing dreams, we were researching whether the amount of REM sleep our devices reported was the right amount for optimal health.

Like any addiction, it’s when it starts interfering with your job, your relationships, or some other aspect of daily functioning that it’s time to take note. I was running in place really fast to wrap up my daily steps to the point where I had cramps in my calves the next day. I was thinking at night as I rolled over and couldn’t get back to sleep that my score wouldn’t be optimal. I think these devices are helpful as a reminder to move every day and to pay attention to our health. But for now, I am removing mine and just going for a walk outside in the fresh air.

Lee Stevens is a mostly wise elder and joyful writer in Hendersonville, NC

 

Anyone been on Main Street lately? Anyone still have a Main Street where they live? Okay, let’s say it’s not called Main Street. Let’s just say it’s the main drag in town. You know, the place where all the stores are/were. Maybe it’s been a bit decimated by the whole online shopping/Amazon thing, but there must be a few stores left in town.

The news only gets worse on this street. Most of the merchants are baby boomers. About 2.4 million small businesses in this country are owned by boomers and they employ over 25 million people. A lot of these owners are at a crossroads. They want to retire but there’s no one to pass the business off to and not a lot of potential buyers.

So what. You can get everything you need from Amazon, right? True, but aren’t we going to miss being able to pick up the pipe wrench to see how hefty it is? Won’t you miss pushing hangers of blouses across the rack to find something perfect to wear that night? Isn’t it relaxing to browse the aisles of a good bookstore to find a book that’s new or that you want to read again?

I’m the offspring of a merchant. I watched how hard my father worked to make a living and how hard he tried to offer great service and value. As much as I respected his upstanding reputation in our small town, I knew I didn’t want to be in the line of succession. I ended up working in the public relations field but that didn’t stop me from making the idiotic decision to open up a small retail venture. The first lesson I learned was that I was the least expensive employee that the business had. That is I was unpaid.

Retail is tough. You’re on your feet all day, you have to deal with rude people while still smiling, and the profit margins are thin. Like my father, the baby boomers who own these small businesses would strongly urge their children not to take over the business, and instead pursue a professional career.

Where does that leave Main Street? It’s a You-Won’t-Miss-Us-Til-We’re-Gone situation. Someday soon, there are going to be a lot of vacant storefronts there. Maybe we’ll be satisfied with ordering something and getting it delivered by drone within the hour, but it just won’t be the same as walking up and down the aisles of creaking hardwood floors to appreciate the highly curated selection of goods someone has worked hard to create.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

It’s 5:00pm on a Tuesday in January when I gather with two women friends for an evening out. We are headed to Asheville, 20 miles away, for dinner and an Indigo Girls concert. We’ve had some back and forth emails about who will drive, since we don’t see as well driving at night anymore, and discussions of which restaurant to eat at and where to park. All in our 60’s, the youngest agrees to drive and we set off. Once there, parking is easier than we feared, but the restaurant we had decided on isn’t there anymore. We walk back and forth in the cold for a few minutes, thinking we might be mistaken, then settle on a small Italian place.

The concert doesn’t start until 8:00, an impossibly late start time these days, but we are stepping outside our usual routine for this special night of music. For dinner, we share calamari, grape leaves, and crab cakes. We toast each other and talk of love, loss, loneliness. What will people think, one of us asks, if I start dating again? And my kids, who adored their father, what will they think? It’s okay, we tell her, just go slow. Be good to yourself.

We bundle up and head back out in the cold for the short walk to the venue. The anticipation is electric as people enter the auditorium and take their seats. I forgot what this is like – live music, the energy of the crowd. While I am usually at home in my pajamas reading a novel at this time, the groundswell of noise catches me up in its wave when the Indigo Girls take the stage and strike their perfect harmonies. At first, the three of us just watch and listen to the diehard fans sing along and dance; toward the end we are taking part as best we can. We stand up, we move around a bit. I wait to recognize a song I can sing along with, and finally, at the end of the encore, they start Closer to Fine. At last, we can catch the words and join in the chorus. Happy, we stream with everyone back out into the winter night. Laughing, we take a selfie outside to prove we were there. Heading home, we plan our next adventure. We don’t have to say, but we know we are indeed closer to fine.

Lee Stevens is a joyful writer and mostly wise elder in Hendersonville, NC

Here we go again. There’s speculation that millennials are leaving religion behind. Try to guess whose fault that is. Give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.

Right! Baby boomers taught their offspring fewer religious practices, so the kids have gone secular. Not even having families of their own one day will bring them back to houses of worship, so the thinking goes.

God damn those boomers. Wait, there is no God to damn them. Well none that they subscribe to.

Church membership in 2018 was at an all-time low of 50 percent. Only 42 percent of millennials (ages 18-38) were church members. And if that’s not bad enough, it was the God damn (sorry, I keep forgetting there is none) leftists who made matters worse. Democrats who were brought up in religious homes were three times more likely than Republicans to have left religion. It’s not just any boomers who have wrecked religion in this country, it’s the GD Democrats’ fault.

Why did I know this was going to come down to politics before we were done here. Maybe millennials have been praying for a change in leadership but their prayers have not been answered, so they’ve given up prayer and/or any belief that there is a God.

Where does this all end? You’re not going to believe this. Some of the remaining believers think that a bitter culture war is on the horizon (believers vs. non-believers). The only hope for believers, so the warped thinking goes, is for them to become the majority rather than the minority. They are counting on the constitution to protect their right to freedom of religion.

Just a reminder here: Freedom of religion can include the right to be free from religion. Just saying. And some folks are awfully selective about which parts of the constitution should protect and be obeyed.

Word of advice to all you lefties. Next time you get surveyed about your religious practices, you don’t have to confess to any particular affiliation. But make sure you tell them you pray every day that baby boomers will stop getting the blame for every God damn thing.

Jay Harrison is a graphic designer and writer whose work can be seen at DesignConcept. His mystery novel, Head Above Water, is available on Amazon and Kindle. You can also visit his author page here.

At the end of the day, my husband likes to drop all his change into an old plastic Atomic Fire Ball bin. A big one – something you would get from Costco or Sam’s Club. The bin was full, but we weren’t sure how to convert it to real money.

I looked into Coinstar but didn’t want to pay the fee. One can avoid the fee by getting an eGift Card, but Dale is a bit of a Luddite and suspicious of all things that start with a small e.

We’re doing it the old-fashioned way.

First, I went to the bank and asked if they accepted rolls of coins. They do. And they provided me with the flat paper rolls. When I got home, I separated the quarters, nickels and dimes. Dale asked what I was doing, and I said I was being nickled and dimed. Which is kind of true, because as it turns out, this is not how he would have done it.

Dale has yet to reveal his secrets to coin-rolling, but since I started, I think he’s extricated himself from any role in this fun family activity. That’s OK, because at this point, it’s like I’m on a mission from God.

So far, I have more than $300 in quarters. I’m out of quarter rolls and asked Dale what he thought about our next move. Should I take what I have to the bank and get more rolls? Or should we wait until we’ve finished and do it all at once?

It’s funny. We are so different, yet in some ways it’s like we’re the same person. Maybe that happens after 41 years. Anyway, we both blurted out, “Let’s do it all at once!” And we started laughing. Somehow, it’s exciting to see the grand total. Maybe that’s just how Luddites roll.

Of course, the real problem is figuring out how to actually carry in this pile of rolls without looking like criminals. Dale said criminals don’t bring stuff into the bank. They steal things from the bank. True, but there’s an armed guard at the entrance, and I can just see us holding some sort of parcel stuffed with coin rolls and the guard thinking it’s a gun or biological agent.

These things never go well for me. I can see it already. I’ll be on the ground bleeding out, and they’ll be apologizing to Dale for the mess and asking him if he wants it in $20s.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

 

My granddaughter Dana invited me to her apartment for Christmas dinner. At one point she suggested that I might want to, ‘at some point’, consider moving out of my two-story home and moving in with her, ‘being alone and all.’

On one of several trips to the john, I peeked into the spare bedroom that could be my new home. Turns out, Dana is a big-box fan and if you ever had anything to do with that kind of business, you know that everything they sell comes in twos or fours or twenty-fours. The room was chock full of paper towels, toilet paper, boxes of plastic garbage bags, laundry detergent, water softener salt, cartons of cheerios, cheese crackers and windmill cookies.

I finally located the bed under all the merchandise and tried to imagine a pathway to the attached bathroom. I would have to unpack all the paper towels. They were the giant-roll kind that would probably each last me three months. So, twenty-four rolls meant that I was looking at an eight-year supply. I pictured stacking the paper towels, floor to ceiling on the outside wall to at least provide insulation when winter set in. I mean, that’s what they do when they blow shredded newspaper in the walls for insulation, right? Only this way I can add another use to the recycled paper that was used to make the paper towels…environmentalist that I am. I would make sure to leave room around the window to let in light and air. And then the toilet paper…a six-year supply, unless I contracted dysentery.

The 8-pack of Cheerio boxes and a gross of Crystal Spring water reassured me that I probably wouldn’t starve if I somehow got locked in. Funny, isn’t it? You save all that money buying in quantity, but no one calculates the rent for an extra bedroom to store it all. Reminds me of that crook, Whitey Bolger, when they finally caught up to him in California, or somewhere, and he had 108 bars of soap from the Dollar Store stashed in his apartment. “Gotta save where you can…make my stash last,” he said. Well, I guess there is a price to pay for big-box savings—you have to make room to accommodate your institutional-sized economies of scale.

Hmm. Maybe we could swap—my house for her swag in exchange for her room.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara and his wife live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/