Three Days With a Group of Perennials
We won’t call you junior citizens. Please don’t call us senior citizens.
Warren Turner said it best and here: “I don’t want to be a Senior Citizen.”
Me neither. That’s me in the plaid shirt & maroon hat next to my partner Rebecca.
I’m soon-to-be 73 and she is 72.
The average age of this group is 70.
The snap was taken two days ago, at Phelps Park in northeast Iowa, USA.
Rebecca and I live in two Iowa communities, one in the southwest and one in the northeast.
We invited our southwest Iowa friends to join us for three days of kayaking, biking, and eating.
On Thursday, we kayaked down Minnesota’s Root River.
After Bill took this picture he lost his phone in a shallow water bank.
Remembering exactly where, the next morning he retraced the three-hour route and recovered his waterproof phone, without a find your phone App. Bill knows rivers.
In the picture, I’m in the orange kayak that I would overturn a few moments after this picture was taken.
Bill, with the white hat & blue life jacket, and Mike (not pictured) would spend 30 minutes helping me retrieve & drain the submerged kayak.
On Friday, we biked Decorah’s Trout Run Trail; on Saturday, Minnesota’s Root River State Trail.
In the picture above, that’s kayak-rescuer Bill in the colorful shirt, with Rebecca to his left.
Bill, Rebecca and two other perennials joined 15,000 bikers in late July to ride 420 miles across Iowa on RAGBRAI (The Des Moines Register’s Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa).
There are 54 million Americans over 65.
If you’ve got to lump us together and call us something, why not perennials?
That’s one acceptable option offered by millennial Sam Tetrault here.
And Dictionary.com agrees, describing a perennial as
An older person whose mindset, interests, or lifestyles does not fit into any specific generational label.
None of us, whether older or younger, likes to be seen through the lens of a label.
Categories, even with politically correct language, miss what is unique about each of us.
Regardless of age, we want to be seen.
Not labeled.
Afterword
When our friends left Sunday morning, we took a three-hour nap.
And, later that evening, went to bed early.