Delta
She is 27. He is 72. It was the best sex of her life until he started taking blood pressure medicine. Now – to put it delicately – the equipment isn’t performing as it used to. Should she encourage him to take Viagra?
The Heavensview Sages call it the “va-va-va-voom” letter. It is one of dozens the group of women has answered since they joined the Elder Wisdom Circle in January.
“We told her not to kill him,” joked 73-year-old Mabel McGee.
The Sages, ages 68 to 84, also recommended that her septuagenarian stud muffin consult his doctor to see if Viagra was suitable. Then, they laid down the law: As people age, they lose certain capabilities. That’s something you have to accept if you care about someone.
Welcome to the place where Dear Abby meets the Internet and growing old commands respect rather than inviting pity. The Heavensview Sages and the Rocky Mountain Owls, their counterparts 10 miles down the road in Montrose, are among a national collective of 550 senior citizens answering more than 3,000 e-mails a month, mostly from 20-somethings. Correspondence comes from the lovelorn, the abused, the depressed and the plain old confused.
Californian Doug Meckelson’s idea to use computer technology and the accumulated knowledge of this country’s older generation to advise teens and young adults has taken off. The Elder Wisdom Circle website attracts a million hits and 65,000 individual visitors a month, Meckelson said. A handful of small newspapers syndicate an EWC column. A book is due out in 2007.
At places like Heaven’s View Apartments in Delta and the Centennial Towers in Montrose, the talk is not of budding celebrity. It is about a teen-ager trying to escape her meth-addled mom or a fiance who gets and displays scented cards from another woman.
The conversation is sometimes humorous, but the work is serious. By consensus – which is how they do everything – the Heavensview Sages say the saddest letter they’ve answered was from two brothers contemplating suicide. Though the Sages post responses weekly, they just had their first Featured Letter of the Week on the EWC website. It came under the title “My husband hurt our baby.”
A young father admitted to his wife of 11 months that he had pinched his seven-week-old daughter on the cheek to stop her crying. The child had a bruised lump on her face.
“You must sit down with him and let him know that this is his one warning, that another incident like this will result in his losing his daughter and you and being reported to authorities because you will not stand for it, even though you love him,” the Sages wrote to the wife. “You are young parents, and you are going to make mistakes; there are no perfect parents in the world. However, this mistake must be nipped in the bud, totally and completely.”
The writers of this reasoned, but compassionate advice are not trained psychologists. They are former nursing assistants, cafeteria ladies, bartenders, store clerks and telephone operators. They loved and lost and loved and won. They battled sexism and encountered substance abuse. They buried children and dissolved failed marriages. They are mothers, grandmothers and, sometimes, great-grandmothers. They graduated from the school of life.
Sometimes, with the Elder Wisdom Circle, the best advice is: Do as I say, not as I did. Mostly, though, it’s about honesty.
“They look for the answer they want,” said 74-year-old Delores Pettis. “We can’t do that.”
The answers contain an awful lot of tough love. You’re going to be told bluntly to get out of exploitative relationships.
Having an affair with a married man? “Re-bait your hook and go fishing in another lake,” the Sages will tell you.
Want to go with your baby’s Marine father to Japan, though you had an affair with another man while he was in Iraq? “Let your ex go on to Japan, and let the emotional turmoil that is surrounding you settle.”
The Rocky Mountain Owls of Montrose are just as direct.
“The mother sounds wild as the wind,” 82-year-old Bettie Tucker said of a meth-addled mom.
Her daughter “needs to be away from her mother, unless she agrees to get help,” concluded 80-year-old Dorothy Sumner. “People think only of themselves when they’re on drugs.”
On and on it goes. A 16-year-old boy who claims an overwhelming desire to touch girls’ breasts finds out that he’ll end up in jail if he doesn’t get help controlling his impulses. A mom crazed by the fact that her son is going to war discovers: “You have to let him go and do this. So make your peace and give it to God.”
Members of the Elder Wisdom Circle probably won’t find out if she can do that. For the Heavensview Sages and the Rocky Mountain Owls, that is the most frustrating part of the job.
“We would just like to know what happens to these people,” said McGee. With or without feedback, the women will gather around tables once a week on Colorado’s Western Slope. They’ll reach consensus on matters of individual intimacy, then share it with the whole world.
They’ll do it, explained Pettis, in the way that life has showed them works best.
“We follow the heart.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
