All my life I’ve been mostly alone, and mostly preferred it that way. Still do. As I’ve mentioned before, though, retirement is rejiggering some of my mental rules. I’d never say I “miss” working, and co-workers, but saying and hearing “Good morning” wasn’t always awful, and once in a great while someone at work said something interesting, or unexpected, or so profoundly stupid I could write about it afterwards.

Now, there’s only me. I talk to myself, sure, but rarely say anything interesting, unexpected, or write-about-it-worthy.There’s no other human in my world, except family that thinks Chinese food is exotic, and a few friends-by-default — people I’ve known all my life who think they know me, and I usually don’t correct them — and my flatmates, of whom two out of three annoy me, and the third would as well, if I gave him the chance.I make friends very slowly, and I’m already in my mid-60s so there won’t be time to make any new friends. But I’d settle for a few new acquaintances.Maybe that’s part of why I joined Folio, the private library downtown. It’s working out OK. I’m writing this at Folio; it’s very quiet, and there’s no cat or fridge or frustrating flatmates demanding my attention.But Folio is where people come to read or write, not to talk. Other than ‘Hello’ when I check in at the front desk, nobody’s said a word to me here, nor have I spoken to anyone. It’s a library (Shush!), not a place to meet people.You want to meet people, you have to go someplace where people talk, so it’s time, I decided, to visit a senior center.Basically, a senior center is an old folks’ club. There’s one senior center for each part of the city, and one in each suburban town, probably all funded by the same government agency. All their websites brag of exercise classes and ‘healthy living’ lectures, and shuffleboard and pickleball, and special days when someone will be there to trim your toenails (an arduous task, for me). From my house, the closest senior center is somehow a three-bus trip, but the South Side Senior Center (SSSC) is only one bus away, about twenty minutes. Their website lists amenities that appeal to me, including a chess club, an old movie once weekly, and a regular meetup for talking about politics (“all perspectives welcome,” they say, but we’ll see). Plus they offer a $5 lunch for seniors, which sounds like a deal, right? So with less than lots of trepidation but more than zero, I decided to take a “free tour” of the SSSC.The place was not hard to find, but soon as I opened the door I was ninth in line. The check-in procedure is to line up at a computer screen, where everyone flashes their membership card to get in, but all the members are decrepit like me, so they stand there and fumble with their barcoded badges, and ask each other what they’re supposed to do, and “How does this thing work, again?”
The hallway was too narrow for fat old me to squeeze past, especially since half the people in line were in walkers or wheelchairs, so I waited and watched as somebody’s great-grandma dug through her purse for her badge, then turned it this way and that until eventually the screen beeped that she was OK. And then the next old fart did the same thing…
When I was finally fifth in line, the hallway had broadened a bit, and I was able to sneak up to the front desk. To a 50+ fake-redheaded woman at the desk, I said, “Hi, I’m here for the tour,” and she smiled pleasantly, but loopily.”I’m Cindy,” she said. “And you are?””I’m Doug,” I said, because I am, but on the desk in front of Cindy, a nameplate said she was Eileen, so I added, “What have you done with Eileen?””Eileen is on vacation,” she said. “She’s been gone a week, but she’ll be back on Monday.”I said nothing, but waiting behind all the walkers and wheelchairs had left me slightly cranky, so I pointed to the “Eileen” nameplate.”Oh,” she giggled. “Did I forget to change the sign? Guess I’ve been Eileen all week!” She reached for the nameplate, took it, slid Eileen out and replaced her with Cindy.”Well, not all week,” I said. “It’s only Thursday.” She giggled again, and I wondered if I knew Cindy from someplace. She seemed both bonkers and familiar.”You can just have a seat with Donley over there,” she said, head-nodding toward an old man in one of the waiting chairs.So I took the only other chair, and said good morning to the man who seemed to be Donley. He said good morning back, and that was our conversation. He looked older than me, but he was wearing a suit, and I, of course, was wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt.For ten minutes or so, Donley and I stared at the wall and watched the steady stream of old people trying to find their badges.Cindy burst into the lobby all smiles, introduced herself again, and motioned that we should follow her up the stairs. Then she stopped abruptly and said, “There’s an elevator, if you’d rather,” but Donley and I both opted to rough it. It’s a short stairway, five steps to a landing, and then nine steps to the top — just enough stair-climbing for me to feel I’d had a workout, but not so many steps that I felt exhausted.Cindy led us into a small cafe, which seems to be part of the senior center — all the employees and all the customers were old, and there’s no way to reach the cafe except by flashing your badge at the building’s main entrance. Cindy offered us coffee, but Donley and I both declined. Then the three of us sat at one of the cafe’s empty tables, and Cindy handed Donley and I each a copy of the senior center’s monthly newsletter. She then, for the next half hour or so, read most of the newsletter to us, covering everything that happens at the senior center, day by day.I don’t know whether Donley needed this, but I didn’t. The newsletter is available online, and I’d read it at home in my recliner. Thus this was a rerun, and I yawned more than once, not to be rude, just that I wouldn’t have said no to the coffee if I’d known she’d be reading out loud what I’d already read. When she got to page 8, where the newsletter lists the daily menu for SSSC’s $5 lunch, she mentioned that our lunch would be free today, as part of the tour.

I asked when the tour would start, and Cindy looked confused. “We’re midway through it,” she said, and giggled again, and that’s when I knew how I knew her. Cindy is totally Jennifer Coolidge, but with a neon red dye job. Which is a compliment, of course — Ms Coolidge is the Mrs Robinson of our time.But that “free tour” we’d been promised? It was only reading the newsletter at the table. We never got up and walked around the place. Still, it was a weirdly welcoming experience, as three different people (all old, of course, and all on staff) interrupted the reading/tour to chat with Cindy, and ended up also chatting with Donley and me.I traded a few more sentences with Donley, too, along the way. He looks about my age, but he’s actually more than thirty years older, in his mid-90s. “Jeez, you’re older than my mother!” I said.And immediately he asked, “Is she still alive and well?” I smiled and shook my head yes, and he asked, “Is she well preserved?””Yeah, she’s well preserved, like marmalade,” I said, “but I don’t think she’s looking for love. She’s got Jesus.””Well, we all have Jesus,” Donley said, and with that the subject was dropped, so I don’t think Donley & Mom are going to be an item.When she’d read the last page of the newsletter, Cindy said lunch would be in five minutes, and gave a pink lunch-coupon to Donley and I. “Will you be joining us?” I asked.”Oh, gosh no,” she said, “I have to get back to the front desk.” But she pointed us down a corridor and said, “Lunch is past that doorway.”Honestly, I did not want lunch with strangers, and I wanted it even less when Donley and I reached the doorway and I could see inside. The room was a series of long, folding tables set up end-to-end, which means there’d be strangers beside me, strangers across from me. The only person I’d know would be Donley, and I wasn’t even sure I liked Donley. (What’s with the suit, man?)Then another old man came up to Donley and smacked him across the back, and they started laughing like old pals. That’s the moment I should’ve jettisoned the lunchroom, and I might’ve too, but Donley interrupted the backslapping long enough to introduce his buddy, MattWho, which is like Matthew but was definitely pronounced “Matt Who” — and he was wearing a suit, too.Most of the other men in the room were casually dressed, so why were Donley and MattWho wearing suits? Worse, they both invited me to join them for lunch, and again, can’t tell you how much I wanted to say no and start walking.But I was there to meet people, right? And this is how you meet people. Ugh.Couldn’t say, sorry Donley, sorry MattWho, I never eat lunch with men wearing suits. Didn’t even know that was my personal policy. Guess it’s always gone without saying.So on this particular day, I had lunch with two men in suits. They were cordial and all, but it came out in conversation that they’d both been real estate agents, and they both lived in the same swanky and super-expensive retirement home a few blocks away. When they asked what my pre-retirement career had been, I answered, “Office flunky.””Hey, nothing wrong with that,” said MattWho. “Without you office flunkies, me and Donley never would have gotten our commissions processed.”The main thought in my head, though, all through lunch, was that I’d been to ‘senior lunches’ like this before, many times, but always I’d been visiting someone — my granny before she died, or old ladies from the church, or wrinkly retired gents that my dad had worked with — but this was my first old folks’ visit as one of the old folks. Yet another moment of realization, that holy cripes I’m old.Donley and MattWho talked about their complaints with the staff at their old folks’
home, and about recent real estate transactions they’d read about in the
newspaper. A few friends of MattWho’s stopped by, and I was introduced
to them. It was all very sociable, and I’m not.
Much more interesting than the conversation, was the line dancing class in the other half of the dining room. Thirty old folks — several with canes or walkers, and women outnumbering the men 29-1 — were doing choreographed dips and bends and curtsies, accompanied by rock’n’roll from the 1970s. (Which is fifty years ago!) It wasn’t West Side Story on stage or anything, and it wasn’t even entertainment for lunch; they were simply having their line-dancing class, ignoring the eaters entirely, but it was more interesting than the guys I was eating with. The dancers weren’t bad for a bunch of geriatrics.As for lunch, it wasn’t bad either, but also wasn’t great. It was salmon, with orzo and a small salad, and rumors of dessert. The salmon was good, but smothered in tartar sauce. The orzo was watery and bland. Desert was mixed fruit, probably from a can. The salad came with a musty-flavored dressing, and no choice had been offered. I ate it, but silently seconded the opinion of another old codger sitting near us, who tapped one of the waitstaff on the shoulder and said, “Whatever this dressing is, I don’t like it.””Sorry,” is all she said, and wow, that waitstaff was a marvelous sight. All the other employees and all the people eating lunch were ancient, but she was about 25 and gorgeous. As Donley and MattWho droned on about real estate, I wondered whether that woman was as gorgeous as she seemed, or simply pretty, and only gorgeous by comparison. She certainly stood out like a rose in a field of wilted weeds.And how can the senior center sell lunch for such a reasonable price, just $5? The secret is, it’s a senior lunch. Most seniors don’t eat much, so the portions were tiny, and of course, you can’t have ‘seconds’.Me, I’m not an ordinary senior when it comes to food; I still eat like a high school boy, so the senior center’s idea of ‘lunch’ only whetted my appetite. I left ravenous, and bought a burger and fries and shake on my way home.But before leaving, I joined the South Side Senior Center. Fifty bucks, for a year’s membership. I have the little card, and I’ll wave it at the computer as I come in.I won’t be having any more of the $5 lunches that leave me hungry, and there’s no potential for friendship with Donley or MattWho, but I’m going to try an old movie on movie day, and I’ll be there for the chess club, and heck, maybe there’s a line dancer inside me…8/10/2024   itsdougholland.com
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