Blogging from A to Z April Challenge: J

Aging: The Good, the Bad, and the Tolerable

J is for Jump

The older woman stood in front of me, hands on her hips, “You know old people can’t jump.”  Frankly, I didn’t. She had taken part in an exercise program I choreographed to the oldie’s songs that included a couple of jumps.

I was a graduate nursing student doing a practicum at a church on the south side of Chicago. My target population was the elderly who lived in the neighborhood and came during the weekdays for a hot lunch and social interaction with their peers.

Afterwards, this same woman entertained a group of other older women with a series of risqué jokes. She had them doubled over with tears running down their cheeks. Up until then I didn’t put the words sex and aging in the same sentence.

The week before, when I first stopped by the church auditorium to set up my schedule, I met an older man who was president of the social club. He was charming and accommodated my class agenda. I would come once a week and run a group exercise class. Afterward, when I rode the train home, I realized that he had been flirting with me. Really?

I picked geriatrics as my specialty in the master’s program at the university. In the late 70s, the study of older adults, geriatrics, and gerontology, hadn’t yet evolved as a body of study unto itself. The only two official classes available to me in the master’s program were Chronic illness in the Aging I and II.

In 1975, Dr. Robert Butler wrote Why Survive? Being Old in America, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and coined the word ageism. This book shone a light on how our society viewed older people. An aging theory at the time was called disengagement.

“The disengagement theory of ageing states that ‘aging is an inevitable, mutual withdrawal or disengagement, resulting in decreased interaction between the aging person and others in the social system he belongs to’. The theory claims that it is natural and acceptable for older adults to withdraw from society”. Wikipedia

I had bought all the aging stereotypes and didn’t even realize it.

It wasn’t the academic setting that enlightened me about the aging process. This group at the church showed me that older people weren’t prone to disengage from society. The president had a girlfriend. They went out to clubs to dance in the evenings. Another older man volunteered to teach photography to the disadvantaged children in the neighborhood. Many of the women worked within the church to provide meals, clothes, and other necessities for needy families.  As a group, they were interesting and social, pulling me into their conversations as I circulated among them after the exercise class. 

However, they had one thing wrong. Some old people can jump.