How to be a senior citizen in Phoenix, Arizona


When I turned fifty, I decided that I would call myself "middle-aged" until I was 100. But now that I'm knocking on the door of sixty, I've decided to go ahead and call myself a senior citizen. I've earned it, simply by staying alive this long. I'm eligible for senior discounts based on my age, not what I've done, or who I am. I'm a senior citizen in Phoenix, Arizona.

I've always been fascinated by senior citizens in Phoenix. I live in Glendale, which is not far from one of the the most famous retirement communities in the world: Sun City. I used to go over to Sun City, and I would wonder what it would be like to be a senior citizen. Over the years I've determined that there are many ways to do it. I'm still figuring it out, and it looks like I'll have a lot more time to do it. Here are some options:

• Being a grumpy old man. I learned how to do this from comedian Dana Carvey in the 1990s. His character on Saturday Night Live was "Grumpy Old Man", and he would rant about how things were better "in his day", including not having seat belts. He would say that when he was a kid he had nothing to play with except broken glass, and "he liked it!" (that was the tag line). You can Google more of his comedy, and it's kind of amazing how easily a person "of age", who means well, and is just talking about how it used to be, can become a ridiculous grumpy old man.

• Being a frightened old person. Yes, there are a lot of things to be scared about in Phoenix. I see it all of the time, and it just makes me sad. I believe that many times fear can just be common sense combined with information, which young people don't seem to have. In my quiet little suburban neighborhood I know people who are horrified about things, maybe stranger danger, or things that I never think about. My next-door neighbor, an elderly widow, was horrified on the night of December 31st, 1999 - and I really don't know what she expected. I walked over to her house and knocked on the door that night, just said that I was next door. Of course I knew that I wouldn't be able to do anything about planes falling from the sky, or the Second Coming, but I let her know that I would be right there.

• Being a person who is empowered by age. This is what I wanted to grow up to be. When I was a kid, and when I was a young man, I imagined that life would teach me things, and show me things, which would make me the man I wanted to grow up to be. I wanted to grow up to be Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird". I wanted to be a man who understood how the world worked, who stood for something, someone people could turn to. I wanted to sit on the porch and talk to the DA, I wanted to know the mayor by the first name. I wanted to take what life had taught me and make the world a better place.

I can still hear my dad saying that "there's no fool like an old fool". And I've had a lot of time to think about it. Yeah, getting old sucks, and life is difficult, but there's no reason to be a fool. I refuse to be a fool, but I embrace being a senior citizen.


Image at the top of this post: Article for Old Folks Day in Mesa, Arizona in 1920. Not a term that's used much anymore, but there are still plenty of these people, who have lived a long time.
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please become a patron.

Become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more