Let’s talk about successful aging.  With the graying of America this is becoming an increasingly important question, not only for us graybeards already immersed in the golden years, but for middle aged and younger adults as well.  On average males born today will live to see 77, their female counterparts should outlast the men by some four years, living to 81.  By contrast, a person born in 1900 had a life expectancy of just under fifty years.

There is a caveat to this last statistics that isn’t so well known.  Life expectancy at birth has increased markedly because the chance of dying in your earlier years has greatly diminished.  However, if you make it to say 60 or 70, the number of years you have left hasn’t increased much at all over the last century or even century and a half.  A couple of years is all.  Which is to say, in earlier times those who made it to 60 were a hardy bunch of survivors that had grown used to staying alive.

But back to the average person.  A century ago likely that person was already dead.  So much for retirement planning.  That same person today not only makes it to retirement, but can expect an extra ten, fifteen, twenty, or even more years on this earth.  Whether enjoying or enduring or struggling through these years, that is the question of successful aging.

It is a question that has intrigued me throughout my adult life, a working life spent in the field of gerontology.  It is a multi-faceted field, encompassing both an ever-expanding body of knowledge and a vast service network.  Over the final twenty-two years of my career, until I retired at age 68, I managed a non-profit continuing care retirement community, or CCRC.  It was easily my most satisfying period of employment, one in which I got to stare aging in the face, in all its diversity.

You’d think after a career in the field that I’d have the answers to the big question.  But such is not the case.  For sure, there is no pat answer to what constitutes successful aging, or its converse, unsuccessful aging.   My only advantage over the proverbial man in the street is that I can cloak my answers in a lot of scholarly jargon, which is to say baffle them with bullshit.

In this blog I certainly will not attempt any definitive answers.  My aim is more modest, that is, to throw out some thoughts on the subject.  It is a question, though, that people should think about and hopefully take measures to increase their odds of enjoying a successful late life experience.

My first thought is a question:  Is successful aging an objective or a subjective state of being?

If an objective state, then successful aging should relate to a set of external variables.  Some examples might be amount of retirement income, health status, number of friends, ones social standing.  The enterprising social scientist could devise a set of variables, each amenable to measurement, for example on a scale of one to five or one to ten.  The clever scientist might further weight individual scores on variables according to an assessment of their relative importance to successful aging.  The final step would be adding up the points to derive a degree of success score.  Let say he/she comes up with seven such measures for which a perfect score is 50.  The scientist does some cogitating about it and decides that any score of 40 or above represents very successful aging, with above 45 as extremely successful.  Moderately successful might lie between 30 and 40.

Then another scientist, a contrarian, comes along and asks the objectively successful oldster, Are you happy with your life?   Some affirm the score and say something like yeah, life is pretty okay for me, especially considering the alternative.  But then others answer the truth, old age sucks.  Not exactly the response of a successful oldster.

So then this researcher goes to work and develops a set of subjective measures having to do with how one is experiencing his/her late life years.  Could be such criteria as having good memories, or a sense of having accomplished life purposes, or are you happy with your life now, or do you look forward to tomorrow.

Successful aging as a state of mind likely involves the ability to live in the moment and experience it fully.  A great, if apocryphal example is the Zen Buddhist who accidentally falls off a cliff and although headed for certain death, yet in transit admires a flower on a ledge half way down.

An interesting research project might be to study the degree of correlation between the scores derived from objective measures and those derived from subjective measures.  I suspect there would be some positive correlation, but I seriously doubt that the coefficient of correlation would be anywhere near a hundred percent.  Such a study has possibly been done, but I have long ago lost touch with the research side of aging, being retired after all with other fish to fry.  (Such as writing my PI novels that hardly anyone reads.  I shamelessly direct you to my web pages.)

The person in middle age, or younger, however he/she decides to define successful aging, should begin preparing for it.  Is health status considered paramount?  Then lifestyle habits and practices that promote health should take center stage during middle adulthood.  It won’t guarantee success, but an unhealthy lifestyle is more likely to contribute to a miserable old age, or to not even getting there.

At 78, do I regard myself as an example of successful, or at least reasonably successful aging?  I think that’s one I’ll keep to myself, at least for now.

At any rate, the question continues to fascinate, which is what spurred me to blog this subject.  I welcome your comments and your ideas.

Most fiction writers are like the California gold rush miners of eighteen forty-nine, the intrepid forty-niners.  They pan like demons looking for gold nuggets (readers) and go broke while the smarter, shrewder guys, those with their eyes on more certain profits, open supply stores, two story hotels thrown together with cheap lumber, bars and brothels, all crafted to service the needs of their marks (customers) and transfer the meager (for the most part) hard-won specks of glitter to their own pockets.  For smarter guys, read the paid advertisers, publicists,  cover designers, webpage designers, paid reviewers, agents, a whole host of entrepreneur that promise to make your books the next big thing, or at least generate some significant sales.  And they don’t have to write the damn books.  Of course the miners love what they do, which is why they put up with it.  And there’s always that one in a hundred who makes a decent living at it, and that one in ten thousand (one in a hundred thousand?) who discovers and mines a rich vein, and thereafter flies around in his or her private jet to book signings, guest lectures, and various exclusive literary events.

On this note, I could end this blog.  Keep it short.  But being a writer who loves to vomit words, bear with me as I proceed to the more personal side of this story.  Let me also make clear that I hold no enmity for my listing above.  They are not parasites nor sycophants–or at least not the great majority–but genuinely want to see their clients succeed.  It’s just the nature of today’s publishing game.

Since turning 71 some seven years ago I have panned my mental ore for five and counting books of fiction, four of the PI genre and one a collection of longish short stories.  Initially I wrote for my own amusement, as a way of keeping my brain active and nourished.  I would re-read my stuff and chuckle–at the best parts anyway–although more often, my overriding emotion was embarrassment.

After strong encouragement from my significant other and an ex-wife with whom I’ve remained friends, I uploaded them as they got finished to Kindle, using Kindle’s free software in consideration of my own somewhat meager retirement income.  I even POD’d them on Create Space and brashly ordered author copies that I gave away or sold at cost to friends and acquaintances here in the age-restricted (read senior living) park that I now call home.  My captive audience began reading the several that I had published on Create Space, as precious few of my chronologically challenged friends and neighbors own Kindles.  And they also echoed the enthusiasm of my two initial critics.  On all other fronts, my offspring have languished in obscurity.  Maybe a buck or two every other month or so into my checking account from Amazon.

Warmed by these informal endorsements, which I confess is music to my ears, I am embarking on a conscious marketing effort to gain a wider audience.  The risk to my self-esteem is that this wider neglect is due not to lack of proper exposure but to inherent deficiencies in the product.  But I have a robust ego and other compensations.  My golf game ain’t all that bad for a dude of 78.  And this summer I am contemplating chartering a small sailboat, just me and my late life love, for a nostalgic week of sailing in the Canadian Gulf Islands of B.C.  Yup, I still feel physically capable of this one last hurrah.

So onward.  I recently put together my own author website, hosted by WordPress.com, to which this blog is attached.  Each page contains the back-cover blurb and first chapter of one particular book.  Over the last several months, in anticipation of this marketing effort, I have extensively edited, revised, and even re-written long passages to make them more polished and readable.  I now truly believe that you do learn by writing.  My two critics who have been there since the beginning ardently support this thesis.  They have both pronounced my latest effort, The Revenge Dance, to be the real deal, professional grade.  Maybe not New York Times best seller rank, but in the mix, surely.  Okay, what are friends for!  So, shameless pitch time:  ninety-nine cents on Kindle.  Think of me as that lost, down-on-his-luck soul on the busy street corner, holding up that imploring sign ending in “God bless.”  You’d roll down your window and pass him a buck.  I’m betting on it.

(Daily prompt: precipice)  Next week I will be 78.  I am “standing” on a precipice.  Ten minutes ago (actually ten years ago) three of us, long-time sailboaters all, were on a passage from the Lasqueti Islands to Nanaimo in the Georgia Strait (British Columbia).  The boat was a Cal 34 owned and skippered by my long-time best buddy, Gary Johnson.  (I’d introduced him to sailing, but that’s another story.)  We’d left our sheltered anchorage in a moderate wind, put up the big sail, the genoa, not smart given the marine forecast of 25 knots.  But very pleasant sailing, the NW wind slightly abaft the beam, as long as we were sheltered by the islands.  Then we entered open waters, and suddenly it was blowing 30 knots, the seas really kicking up made worse by an opposing current.  What to do?  Loosen up on the jib sheet and lower the halyard just enough to take the pressure off the sail before heading into the wind to finish the job.  The wind had other ideas and promptly wound the sail around the forestay, leaving it flapping out of control.   I climbed out of the cockpit and started forward to grapple with the damn thing.  Gary and Ray both yelled at me to get back in the cockpit.  The better part of valor, fire up the diesel auxiliary and motor down to Nanaimo, leaving the damn sail flapping.  Motoring was a good idea, but I couldn’t abide the flapping, the thought of it tearing his sail to rags.  So I continued forward, very gingerly.  Reaching the bow, I tried pulling the sail the remaining way down.  But the halyard was jammed.  I started to stand up, which was too much for Gary.  If you fall overboard, there’s no way we can rescue you in these seas, but we’d have to try and all of us would drown.  You want that?  For not the first time, I was “standing” on the precipice.  I kneeled back down and crept my way back to the cockpit.  Readers should note that precipice has at least two meanings, my source being Encarta, the first, the more common, a steep rock face, and the second, as used in this tale from my past, a very dangerous situation.   What’s yours?

At 77, I have now entered the fourth quarter in the game of life.   A grueling quarter, hard to move the ball and the defense stacked against you to take away your best plays.  I spent my working quarters in the field of gerontology, the last 25 until I retired at 68 as a retirement center administrator.  Six years ago, I wrote my first novel as a kind of bucket list thing.  The result was an episodic, disjointed piece of junk.  It has long since been shit-canned from my hard drive.  But I didn’t quit, mainly because I found that I liked writing.  I next wrote several short stories and then started a second piece of longer fiction, which I titled Shady Acres, after the name of the long-term care center that is the focus of that tale.     

Shady Acres was the first of what has become a series.  It didn’t start out to be a series, so in submitting it and subsequent works to Kindle, I checked “no” in response to the question, “Is this a series?”  Afraid I can’t get by with that any longer, as three later adventures have followed.  Furthermore, I shamelessly refer to previous incidents in the later narratives.

They (the ubiquitous they) say that you should write about what you know.  Being of Norwegian heritage I don’t know much, or so goes the old Scandinavian joke, mainly told by Swedes.  However, I do know Tucson Estates, the setting for this piece of fiction.  Being of limited imagination, I’ve borrowed the specifics in excruciating detail.  Saves a lot of work and time in inventing things like street names.

Completely my own are the main characters, four happy go lucky retired guys, early sixties who find themselves, through no fault of their own, the four principals of their own Private Investigator firm.  It all started with Gus’ younger brother who just happens to be the FBI agent in charge of the Phoenix office.  How that came about is set forth in the beginning chapters of Shady Acres.

A final note regarding the masthead photo.  The dude in the photo wearing the pirate’s cap is, no surprise, your Tucson Estates author, Robert Solem, out partying and somewhat tanked.  He definitely shows his age.  The gorgeous lady at his side and looking at least ten years younger is his loveable late life partner.  Would you believe they’re the same age?  Birth certificates don’t lie (usually).