Three out of five seniors living in California had high blood pressure in 2005, up from half in 2001. Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Sacramento, Yolo, Madera, Merced, Tulare, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties all saw statistically significant increases in high blood pressure, according to a UCLA study released today.

“If those trends continue . . . we’re going to come up against a wall as to what medicine can do to keep these people alive,” said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health and coauthor of the report based on the California Health Interview Survey, which polls 45,000 households across the state every two years.

The study found that significant racial gaps remained. Diabetes and obesity are nearly twice as high for Latinos and African Americans than other groups. In addition, seniors from those groups, as well as Asian Americans, were three times as likely to report difficulty getting enough to eat.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

I think most of us would rather be who we are now than who we were in high school. But we’re so busy complaining, you’d never know. “Maybe I have early-onset Alzheimer’s,” another friend in her early fifties whined the other day at lunch. Maybe. But maybe she sometimes forgets things because she has too much stuff crammed into her brain -– how long each of her labors was, the birthday cake flavors preferred by everyone at her office, how much her mutual funds lost this quarter, the lyrics to every song written between 1960 and 1979, and which of us paid for lunch every time we’ve been out together in the past twelve years. This kind of stuff can overload anyone. Me, personally, I have an entire part of my brain dedicated to really bad movie dialogue and another to the Latin names of every perennial in my yard. Is it any wonder that sometimes I can’t remember my ATM password?

I’m getting tired of my midlife friends acting like they’re eighty. I don’t have much sympathy for you if you grunt when getting off the couch after you’ve beaten me in three straight sets of tennis. Or if you ride a Harley to work every day and then complain that your ergonomic chair doesn’t have enough lumbar support. And don’t tell me your hearing is going when you actually hear everything I say behind your back just fine.

It’s a matter of the glass half empty or half full … with your dentures in it. Why claim age-related problems before their time? I think we just need a different perspective in our thinking and our language:
You’re not having a senior moment. Just think of it this way: all circuits are temporarily busy. Please try again later.

• That extra weight you’ve put on in the past fifteen years isn’t middle-aged spread, it is personal growth.
• Those aren’t hot flashes you’re experiencing, they are your body’s way of letting the world know you are still hot.
• It’s not hair loss, you’re clearing your head.
• And those extra hairs in your ears and nose are an improved filtration system.
• Wrinkles? What wrinkles?!? Those are life lines and you’re proud of them!
• You’re not having trouble seeing close-up, you’ve become more outer-directed.
• You’re not less sexually-active. You’re just less self-involved.

It seems kind of silly at first, but the way we think about ourselves and the language we use when we talk to others defines the life we live. Now, if I could just get the word “Geek” off my forehead.

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

The latest victim of the financial crisis: baby boomers’ retirement. With plunging stock values and tanking home prices, an increasing number of boomers approaching retirement age are postponing travel plans and staying on the job longer. According to a study in October by AARP, 65% of people over the age of 45 say they will delay retirement if the economic situation doesn’t improve significantly. Since that survey was published, stocks have sunk lower and the economy has formally entered into recession.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Listening to the CD, you could imagine all the songs were actually just recorded, with Elvis standing there in the studio.

It’s not only a recording that will evoke memories but the related video about the making of “Elvis Presley Christmas Duets” is captivating.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Lisa DeAngelis and Randall Cobb look like investing geniuses right now. While the S&P 500 has dropped more than 40% since last year’s peak, the Atlanta couple’s retirement portfolio is sitting pretty, earning 4% or so a year.

DeAngelis, 45, and Cobb, 54, aren’t stellar stock pickers; they aren’t brilliant market timers either. They just have almost all of their savings in Treasury notes and cash. Always have.

“I can’t stand to see my portfolio go down,” DeAngelis says. “My mother, a Depression-era baby, taught me that Treasuries are the only investment that will never fail you.”

Sorry, Mom: History begs to differ. Though a 4% gain may look downright spectacular these days, the all-cash-and-Treasuries approach is far from fail-safe. DeAngelis and Cobb hope that slow but steady will guarantee them an on-time retirement.

But inflation - historically 3% a year and a projected 4.4% in 2008 - will erode the ultra-low rates they are earning now. Over the past 80 years, intermediate-term Treasury notes have returned about 5% a year on average and 30-day Treasury bills, a cash equivalent, have earned 4%.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Beds, though, aren’t the best place to keep money, even amidst 2008’s financial turbulence. Having substantial cash at home is vulnerable to theft and can be wiped out by fire, with no means of recovering the loss.

So what’s a scared baby boomer to do?

Remain calm, said Edward Jones financial advisor Tony Talbert, who’s spoken with lots of worried investors in the last few weeks. The stock market always recovers, even though all stocks have been taken down in value now, he said.

Individual investors bailed out of the market at a record rate in October, withdrawing $55.6 billion by mid-month, according to TrimTabs Investment Research. A recent Associated Press-Yahoo news poll showed seven in 10 of those surveyed were anxious that stocks and retirement investments are losing value.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

When I started having nightly dreams that my mother was cutting my long dark hair, I knew it was time to move out of my Egyptian-Jewish parents’ Brooklyn home. The year was 1968. I was eighteen, and I had tried leaving twice before— once when I went off to college just after high school, and a second time, the following year, when I came close to renting a studio apartment on a quiet street in Manhattan. Each of my earlier attempts had ended in failure: the first when I returned from college without completing my freshman year; the second when I allowed my mother to talk me out of making the move.

This time, I kept my plans to myself, locating a cheap, fourth-floor, rent-controlled walk-up, not far from Brooklyn College. The building, one of three identical brick structures that lined the street, had a dim central lobby with two worn staircases on either side; on each floor, four apartments opened out from a small, dark landing. My apartment was in the top right corner of the building, with a bedroom to the east and a living room facing south. I envisioned mornings watching the sunrise over the college clock tower, afternoons drinking tea, and evenings of quiet study looking out into the sky. I signed a three-year lease and surreptitiously transported my books and clothes.

“How, Joyce, can you do this to your mother?”

The voice was that of my mother’s best friend, Suze, calling me a month later, as soon as she had heard the news. For my mother had tried to keep my departure secret. That her only daughter was living in an apartment by herself was a shame, a sign of the family’s failure. But Suze must have sensed something wrong, must have questioned my mother until she confessed.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said to me.

Slumped on my narrow mattress on the floor, I had no words with which to answer this woman I had known since childhood. I could see that she was right; my behavior was killing my mother, or a very large part of her dreams for me. Yet I was certain that to have remained at home would have been to court my death, the devastation of my dreams. For while my family hoped I would marry an Egyptian-Jewish man, keeping house for him and raising children who would themselves marry other Egyptian Jews, I cherished another ideal: the life of a writer, an artist, an independent woman— a woman who took lovers perhaps, but never a woman who settled into the domesticity and despair I could see had engulfed my mother.

But for a young girl, or as my mother called me in French, “une jeune fille,” to live alone, without husband or parents or other relatives, was among the greatest transgressions our Egyptian-Jewish immigrant community could imagine.

“You should be finding a husband,” Suze said now. “You should be out enjoying yourself. Instead you will be in your filthy apartment cleaning your filthy toilet.”

We both knew it was not the filthiness of the apartment that was at stake. I was the one who was filthy, I was the one who would never become clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed. The only explanation for my actions must be that I had given myself up to indiscriminate sexuality, refusing all respectability. I was “une femme perdue,” a lost woman, “abandonée.” How could I explain? It was not sex that I was after, not really.

Yet I was indeed “une femme perdue”— adrift in an uncharted and terrifying New World, without bearings or direction. It had taken all my strength to make the move, all my energy to shut the door against my mother’s grief and my father’s shame. Now that I was in possession of my apartment, what was I to do in it? Most days, I lay on my mattress, unable to rise, afraid to walk outside, paralyzed by the enormity of my offense, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I had done. Authenticity? A life of freedom and creativity? It was all I could do to brush my teeth each morning and take a shower in the, indeed, filthy bathroom.

The apartment I had imagined as a sunlit nest loomed now as an alien darkness, inhospitable and cold. Mold grew in the kitchen sink and cockroaches prowled the hall. The empty living room— without furniture or window coverings— echoed loudly to my step. Only in the bedroom, with its mattress on the floor and a few wooden crates stuffed with books and papers, could I find any peace. Yet even there I could not still the voices that told me I was wrong, bad, ungrateful, sick.

“You are killing your mother,” Suze said again. “You should be ashamed.”

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

Our boomer generation has lived through a lot. Wars, assassinations, demonstrations, and drugs. The 2008 presidential election doesn’t change that. But if one thing’s for sure, it’s that the election does bring an end to the string of boomers in the White House. And for one writer, Mayzee Klaus, it brings much, much more. We aren’t publishing Mayzee’s piece to be partisan because her relief isn’t shared by every boomer. But she certainly speaks for many when she says, This one’s for us.

Obama did it. He pulled it off. And I have no doubt he did it for me.

Of course, it wasn’t only for me. He did it for Rich and Marie too, who after graduating from Swarthmore College spent the next ten years of their lives organizing workers on the factory lines. He did it for my very first boyfriend Ricky, a member of SDS, who taught me about political activism as he instructed me on the horrors of the Vietnam War. He did it for my cousin Gail, a Freedom Rider at the age of 19, riding into the segregated South to register voters.

He did it for Dona who took in the homeless and counseled women ravaged by rape. He did it for Lisa on the front lines in the Valley of Virginia, working as fast as she can to protect the beauty of that magical land between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. He did it for Nancy, who taught self-love at the cost of earning a good living. He did it for Lorenzo’s father who passed away last week at 92, and who had despaired at what had happened to his beloved country. He did it for Wendy telling her students that war is not the answer, in spite of warnings from the school administration. He did it for Paul and Lisa, to thank them for their mellow musical protest on the streets of buttoned-down Moorestown, New Jersey. And, he did it for my dear friend Mary, who couldn’t even bring herself to hope.

There was the old black man I met outside the 7-Eleven who wore an Obama button on his cap and told me that it was the first time in his life that he had given money to a political campaign. “Wasn’t much,” he said, “but glad I could do it before I died.”

There was Rashid and there was Frank, an Indian and a Barbadian, two new Americans, transit workers living in Queens, New York, who came down on a bus with hundreds of others to help get out the vote in Pennsylvania. They spent their hallowed day off going door to door in suburban Philadelphia, door hangers in hand. Obama did it for them.

And, of course, it goes without saying that he did it for Andrew Goodman, one of the three white civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964, and for John Brown and for Rosa Parks and for Dr. King himself but he also did it for Father Michael Doyle in Camden, and for Alice Paul, Cindy Sheehan, Cesar Chavez… and countless others.

He did it for all of us children of long ago who have always known there was a better way. We could see it, feel it, taste it. He did it for those of us who had forgotten it was possible.

Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

However, according to Dr. Nicholas A. DiNubile, we are now paying a high price for our hubris. An article published in the April 16th copy of the New York Times turned the word “Boomeritis” into a household term.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place

America’s health care needs are great

When I learn of examples in my community about people who can’t afford to go to the doctor about their medical problems, it saddens me deeply. And, when I think of the opening scene in the movie “Sicko” where a man decided to only have one of his amputated fingers reattached due to medical costs, I shake my head in wonder at how America has let health care get so far out of control.

Divided We Fail launches health care campaign

I was pleased to see that Divided We Fail, a coalition of senior, business, and union organizations, is launching a post-election advertising health care campaign. Its purpose is to encourage the president-elect and the new Congress to keep their campaign promises, break Washington’s gridlock, and solve our health care and financial security crises.

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Post from: BoomerCafe ... it's your place