Even at 86 years old, Joe Weider gives you the sense he might have once been one of those Olympians. As he approaches the head of the table inside this wood-paneled room, Weider appears dapper and powerful, his muscular torso still filling out the gray pinstriped suit he wears with a starched white shirt and red power tie.
It took eight decades, but at last I know what is meant by \”second childhood.\”
The Alter Kayakers stand out for their awesome endurance and robust bearing, and they cram their days with endless bicycling, hiking, tennis, martial arts and river rafting. But no one has to quit when his abilities falter.
Dobkin doesn\’t play bingo, and she doesn\’t own a television. She occasionally attends a lecture or musical event, but generally, when she isn\’t working, she is reading, usually The Forward in Yiddish or English or The Jewish Journal. She reads without glasses, except for very small print.
The Joyce Eisenberg-Keefer Medical Center,which will be dedicated Oct. 29 as the newest facility at the Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda.
When sexy authors like Erica Jong and Jerry Stahl get together onstage, you expect fireworks. But when I drag my friend Kay up to Skirball for the Writers Bloc conversation, the room is too bright, and Kay tells me Jong\’s blue-framed eyeglasses and gold necklace make her come off more Carol Channing than \”sex goddess.\”
Weight-loss prevention is one of the principal areas of investigation at the Borun Center, a joint venture between JHA and UCLA\’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Housed on the JHA campus in Reseda, the center was established in 1989 to identify and test nonmedical measures that could improve daily care and quality of life for nursing home residents.
Some 10 million older Americans need some kind of assistance to get through every day. Family members (mostly grown children) provide about 80 percent of that help. Lots of those adult children welcome the opportunity to give back to their parents a portion of the love and care they received as a child.
But what happens when an abusive or absent parent, now well along in years, turns to his or her adult child for help? How in the world do you care for an elderly mother or father who showed you no love, compassion or understanding when you were young?
Amazingly, two-thirds of all the people who have ever lived past the age of 65 in the history of the world are alive today, according to Ken Dychtwald, author of \”The Power Years: A User\’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life.\” This suggests that our way-beyond octogenarians in the Bible were the exception, not the rule.
My mother and father are both in diapers. I wasn\’t at all prepared for this possibility. Dealing with the visual and olfactory aspect of my son\’s end products when he was a baby was an expected part of being a mom, but it\’s a completely different matter when it\’s my parents wearing the Pampers.
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