Habits

Plenty of folks past sixty will tell you their memory is fine because they can still picture where they set their glasses, even when they cannot name the person wearing them. That picture in your head is not memory staying sharp. It is the brain’s snapshot, gone in less time than it takes to blink…

Yes, you can still learn. That is the whole answer, and I will stand behind it at the pharmacy counter and at the senior centre both. The brain at sixty-five or seventy-five is not the brain at twenty-five, but it has not closed up shop. It has simply changed how it likes to work. What…

Tuesday morning, seven-thirty, and I am standing in my kitchen with a bowl of oatmeal going cold because I sat down to sort the week’s pill organiser first. The Sunday fill had gone fine. The breakfast had not waited well. There is a lesson in that little bowl, and it is not about oatmeal. The…

Company after sixty is not a question of luck, or of being the sort of person people seek out. It is a question of whether you have a table where you turn up, week after week, whether anyone came last week or not. I learned that at the pharmacy counter, and I re-learned it every…

Tuesday morning, 7 a.m., the sidewalk behind the senior centre on Elm Street. I was filling the pill organiser at the kitchen table before I left — Sunday’s job, but Sunday had gotten away from me — and I walked out the door with my coffee still on the counter. The air had that early…

Yes, a few alcohol-free days a week can clear your head. I have watched it happen at the senior centre on Elm Street, and I have felt it at my own kitchen table. The fog people blame on age is sometimes just the wine with dinner, night after night, never quite leaving. I am not…

Tuesday morning, half past seven, and the pavement along Elm Street was still wet from the night. I could see my breath. A friend from the walking group was already at the corner by the senior centre, counting heads the way she does, and I had my laces tied double because I learned that the…

The casserole dish was still warm when Phyllis set it on my counter and said, “I need to ask you something, and don’t make it into a project.” She had come to the senior centre on Elm Street for my Thursday table, the one with the brown paper bag and the coffee that tastes like…

The kitchen table was already crowded with the Sunday pill organiser and the paper calendar when Carol called from Arizona, her voice tight. She had her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a supermarket flyer in her hand, she said, but she couldn’t hold onto the phone number for the pharmacy long enough…

Plenty of people at the senior centre on Elm Street tell me the same thing. They skip breakfast, or they push lunch to three o’clock, and they say it keeps their head clear. I used to believe it too, back when I was on my feet all day in the basement pharmacy. A light stomach…