Endure And Adore For Sure

I am 79 and three months. I hope to live to be a great grandmother maybe in 10 years when my first grandson may marry and has a child. I want to get my ballroom dancing book published on Kindle. I want to maybe dance in a competition next June 2014 and I will be 79 and 11 months then. People will say, “Wow, look at her at almost 80 and still dancing.” These are all dreams of someone still hoping for unusual things to happen to her.

So far I have had since 7-19-11 and including this article 600 stories on The Patches. This site is run by AOL and therefore at this age, I have a job writing for them. Pretty nice for my age. I also wrote for the Rene dance site online and have done that for 6 years and before that for 17 years for a dance magazine and for 2 years for the Fred Astaire website. Nayana Davis, the engaging former editor of my Patch site brilliantly realized that a senior still had lots to write and say and she gave me this forum for my thoughts. Young people are very sagacious and she has a keen sense of judgment, and she knew that an old lady senior had a great deal of new and old things to talk about.

The former regional editor of The Patch who I just met via the internet, Lisa Rossi who is a mom to two young children, a wife and an editor has written to me about two of my articles that she enjoyed. One was about the blue suede shoes that cost Mom thirteen dollars in about 1948 and the other one about all my pictures and paintings on the walls of The Clayman Museum. She said “Thank you for the post,Elita! I just moved into a new home and had a baby (he’s four month old.) Between him and my 3 year-old, I haven’t had time to hang up pictures. Feeling inspired to do so after reading your post!”

After reading her compliments, I feel real good and if I inspired Lisa to do some adding to her walls, I am honored to have motivated her.

I was thinking about what will I write about next for my (I call it mine) Patch.

Then out of nowhere, an email arrives and I almost deleted it before reading it and it quotes something I wrote for a site that my email pal Prill Boyle from Connecticut also wrote for, before I wrote my little piece. When I saw that she had written hers, I joined her and this was in March 2012. The title of it was “What will you be doing five years from now?” Of course, Prill is twenty years younger than me, so she has lots to consider what with her husband soon to be retiring and a ninety year old Mom living nearby her. I on the other hand at twenty years her senior (no pun intended) think a bit differently. Mom and Dad are gone, the children are grown and I have four grandchildren. Prill is a grandmother too and an author of a published popular book Defying Gravity.

My friend Brian StAugust of Towson is an actor.  He just became a first time grandfather in October to a little granddaughter Olivia from his daughter Jaime and her husband Michael. He is now starring in  a season ending episode of  Happily Never After on the ID channel. He also is finishing a period western movie Day Of The Gun. He plays a character named Simon Doubleday who also narrates the film. He is also working with his real life son Chris Kalman who plays his grandnephew in the movie. Brian is a senior, though a young one, who is doing what he loves the most, acting. This is a great happening for all seniors who continue on accomplishing  what they love doing at any age.

So at this age, you think that perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will become a great grandmother in your time. I however, am now, a great, great aunty of one, a little boy Stephen and he was joined in July by a sister Charlotte. So this is kind of pretty cool as the kids say, being a great, great aunty.

If someone asked you at this time, regardless of your now age, what you will be doing or hope to be doing in five years, I bet I would get plenty of different answers. Of course, it will depend on your age, financial status and of course, your health. Five years goes by plenty fast, especially as you get older.

  When you are a kid, you wait to become a teen, then you wait to learn to drive a car, then you wait to be able to take your first legal alcohol drink, to vote and to move out of Mom and Dad’s house. Of course, in my time, you lived at home until you married. You never moved away to an apartment even if you could afford it. Young men and young women stayed and lived at home and if they went away to college, they usually came home to Mom and Dad, while they were attempting to get a job. Even then, most of us stayed and lived at home. It was cheaper and easier. That was the style and the norm for the nineteen fifties and sixties. After that, things changed. Young people moved out, whether married or single.

For me at age seventy-nine, I still have dreams and aspirations of doing new things and doing some old things again. We do not as seniors want to sit around and watch television all day, nosh on sweet foods, and do no exercising. We need to be active and even when aching; they say to do some exercises.

So I am pretty active especially with the fingers and the brain in writing these articles on life when I was young, on life now as a senior and all about ballroom dancing from years ago and from now.

We still go some Sundays to the dance studio, doing social dancing. I and we dance pretty darn good still and most of the Sunday crowd are seniors. Yeah and Bravo to seniors who do not sit all day in front of the television set. Dr. Elaine Husni, MD, MPH and Vice Chairman of Rheumatology and Director of the Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Center at Cleveland Clinic says “a mistake is made to avoid exercise instead of making appropriate adjustments for the condition of Arthritis if you have it.”

We also need to keep our minds active and I do that by writing and more writing. I write for several online sites and hope to put many of my ballroom dance articles into a dance book in the coming of 2014. All of this keeps the mind and thoughts in an intellectual mode and this is very important.

We should keep on learning and doing and accomplishing with anything that we may desire to do at even this senior age, we are in. Reading books, doing crossword puzzles, using the computer, writing down your ideas and thoughts for now or from the past; all this keeps the brain active and alive.

Ballroom dancing is another source of brain use. Most people think you only dance with your feet; ballroom is made up of using your mind for the various steps, routines and movements. There is the old, cute saying when you are taking a lesson and you put forth the right foot instead of the left foot. The teacher will say “not that left foot, the other left foot.” That is a dancing joke of sorts. Sometimes you feel like you do have two left feet when you first learn dancing; however, you soon learn you do not have two. You have one of each and they will eventually move the way you tell them to move.

Seniors now are more capable of perfecting and achieving great accomplishments than they ever dreamed they could. You have to try different styles of hobbies to see what suits your purse and your desires.

There are always inexpensive ways to try new things. In dancing, you can learn by taking what is called group lessons. In these lessons, there are about eight to ten persons in the class, all learning at the same time. You trade partners and learn to dance with others, you may not know. Sometimes, that is pleasant and other times you wish you could just come and dance with the person you came there with to gain the knowledge.

If you find that hard, then you can pay for a private lesson which costs about three times as much for you and three times for your partner. If that is feasible for your purse, then do it. It is probably the best way to achieve your goal quicker. If that is not suitable for you, then you can learn at the less expensive way and you will absorb at a slower pace, but you are in no hurry at this senior age. Whatever is easier for you that is your decision.

When you put the question to yourself, what would I like to be doing five years from now, think long and hard and besides being healthy, think of the hobbies you would like to attain and to do with great realization and success. I have written about the seventy-nine year old lady in California who wrote me so many years ago, that she started to ballroom dance at that age because she read my articles in a dance magazine and received the courage to start them. So she did and she became very adept and proficient doing it at this later age. I was about 69 when she wrote me or even less. She went on to compete with her teachers and danced in many studio showcases showing off her skills. By then she was eighty-three and still going strong.

  I want to start at my seventy-nine year stage to become more involved with dancing, as I have been on a hiatus with my aching knees and receiving some Cortisone shots. Next week, I am going for a few sessions, three or four at the most to receive from a physical therapist some exercises to strengthen my back and knees. Then you will be hearing about my new accomplishments in ballroom dancing and my desire to maybe, compete with my teacher in a competition next June 2014, hopefully, the 14 number will be good luck and I will attain my new dream.

 When the asking is what you want to be doing five years from now, I will say, “besides still being around, I would like to be a dance competitor and win a few more awards to place alongside of the dance trophies and medals I have from twenty years ago. Those old trophies need some new neighbors to sit next to them and I hope to give them some next year.”

Think about it and write a list of what you want to be doing or accomplishing or relaxing about in the next five years. It can be three years, not five, whatever you think it should be.

Remember the old saying, you are only as old as you feel, let us change that to you are only as young as you want to try and become. Some women try to look younger than they are and they dress like they are teens. Be what you think you want to be and you will have the stamina to be successful and happy doing that. I love sayings and I quote them and the authors quite a lot. Here is one I just made up. “Endure what you have to and adore yourself enough to live happily for the rest of your life.” This is an Elita original saying, just created right now for this article.

Endure, accomplish, try, be, become and be happy for all the days of your life.