October 15, 2019 —
By Frances Kolarek —
I got so much feedback from my belch at AARP for not paying more attention to the 90s age group, I realized I better put up or shut up.
So yoo-hoo! AARP! Looka here! Dick Van Dyke, 90 this year, has a new a book out. Keep Moving. “If I’m out shopping and hear music playing in a store, I start to dance.” he says. “I enjoy myself. I don’t think about the way I am supposed to act at my age—or at any age.” This from somebody who heard from doctors when he was 40 that he had such severe arthritis that he’d probably be in a wheel chair within five years. His reaction? He “lit into a dance.”
“I want older people to realize a little exercise is better than none,” he said in an interview published in the Washington Post. “Even just 10 minutes. I’m trying to talk people out of throwing in the towel.”
And reading on, I wonder if he’s been peeking at my blog. Van Dyke speaks glowingly of his supportive family, which encouraged him to resume doing things he loved to do as he recovered from a serious bout of pneumonia. It was, he says, “the key to my recovery.” May I quote Dr. Dean Ornish, again? ”I am not aware of any other factor in medicine that has a greater impact on survival than the healing power of love and intimacy.”
Cicely Tyson, at 90, is playing opposite 84-year-old James Earl Jones on Broadway in The Gin Game. It’s a play about two lonely people, withdrawn from the world, playing cards, each in need of companionship and support.
In the the world of sports, even as the Mets were losing the World Series, Luke Gasparre, age 91, was taking tickets and guiding fans to their seats at Citi Field, just as he had done at Shea where he worked as an usher from the time it opened in 1964. He recalls that as a teenager in Astoria, Queens, he and a friend named Anthony Benedetto could earn as much as $10 a night performing at a local club, Luke tap dancing, and the now Tony Bennett, pushing 90, singing.
Speaking of ball parks, did you see that picture of George Bush, père, in a wheelchair and Barbara with a walker in Houston where they were introduced ahead of an Astros playoff game? Like the song says: “No use remaining alone in your room …”
When it comes to validated, scientific research into the 90s age group, I find little. Why? A “sample”—a large group of people 90 and up—has been hard for researchers to assemble. I am glad to report, however, that there is a growing acceptance that the needs of people in their 70s, 80s and 90s are in no wise identical with those of people in their 60s. Or, for that matter, with each other.
To conclude on an upbeat note. A research group in southern California found that a couple of cups of coffee a day and moderate amounts of alcohol “are both associated with longer life.” They do not recommend that nonusers adopt such habits. And they speculate, that perhaps it is the socialization that goes along with the cup of coffee or the glass of wine that does the trick. What goes around, comes around.
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