Vaccinated seniors: Let’s enjoy life
Many tiptoe out into the world after coronavirus fears
Bobby Stuckey flipped through receipts this month, surprised to see a huge increase in cocktail sales, the highest in the 17-year history of his restaurant, even though the bar section has been closed.
The septuagenarians are back.
“Every night we are seeing another couple or a pair of couples in the dining room, and they feel so much relief,” said Stuckey, owner of Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder, Colorado. “COVID was hard on everybody, but you can’t even think of the emotional toll in this group. They haven’t gone out. They want to have the complete experience. It is just joyful to see them again.”
Older people, who represent the vast majority of Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, are emerging this spring with the daffodils, tilting their faces to the sunlight outdoors. They are filling restaurants, hugging grandchildren and booking flights.
Marcia Bosseler is back to playing pingpong — and beating all the men, she said — at her apartment complex in Coral Gables, Florida.
Randy and Rochelle Forester went out to eat with another couple for the first time in a year, and Rochelle Forester celebrated the pleasure of being “out of sweats, to put on some pretty earrings and lipstick and be back in the world a little bit.”
The upside-down world in which older Americans are drinking more martinis inside restaurants at a far greater rate than millennials will be short-lived. It is a fleeting COVID-era interregnum in which the elders celebrate while their younger
counterparts lurk in grocery stores in search of leftover shots or rage on social media, envious of those who have received a vaccine.
In a few months, all that will most likely be over, and vaccines will be available to all who want them.
For now, about two-thirds of Americans older than 65 have started the vaccination process, and nearly 38% are fully vaccinated, compared with 12% of the overall population, giving the rest of the nation a glimpse into the after times.
“I am just enjoying my life,” said Robbie Bell, 75, who recently went out with two friends for a birthday celebration in Miami — one of whom was hospitalized last year with a dangerous case of COVID — and even hit the dance floor.
“This is my just due,” Bell said. “Seniors gave up more than anybody else.”
Bosseler, who is 85, is thrilled to go back to live games of pingpong and mahjong at The Palace in Coral Gables.
“What was difficult was losing that intimacy of walking together and talking face to face. I missed not shaking a hand, or putting a hand on a shoulder.”
Her neighbor Modesto Maidique, who is 80, has tiptoed out into the world, grabbing his sandwich indoors. But his central goal, like many older people, is to see his grandchildren.
“I am about ready to jump in a plane and fly — and the sooner, the better,” Maidique said.
He also teaches a course on “lessons in life, love and
leadership” at Florida International University in Miami and “dreaded the thought of people being online and my not having the ability to interact with others,” he said.
His tentative plan is to hold a normal class in September.
Bell also dared to go out with two girlfriends for a birthday celebration. She and one of the friends are members of a ski club that suffered three deaths related to a trip to Sun Valley, Idaho, early in the pandemic, and one of her two dinner companions also became sick enough to be hospitalized. Their first dinner out was so jubilant that Bell made her way to the dance floor, where an older gentleman tried to grab her hand and dance. (For that, she was not ready.) She and her pals “were talking about how great we felt and how nice it
was even to be in each other’s company and talk and laugh,” she said.
Bell said she tries not to dwell on the losses and the pain of the last year.
“I am not going there,” she said, preferring to focus on the cheerful now.
But when she talked about her grandchildren, she began to weep.
“Do you know how bad it was not to hug your grandchild?” she asked.
Marsha Henderson, a former commissioner for women’s health with the Food and Drug Administration, also got inoculated and began helping her friends and neighbors find vaccine appointments in Washington. As she and her friends crawl out, she said, they are beginning to look at shaking up some of their routines.
“The Book Club Sisters will meet in April for the first time since COVID,” she said.
“The pandemic has encouraged us to look to a new genre, not our usual biographies or politics. We are trying to look to the future, Afro Futuristic short stories. No more Zoom. It will be a hoot!”
Many of those fully vaccinated are still cautious.
“I would say that we are less afraid but not fear-free,” said John Barkin, 76, who lives with his wife, Chris, 70, in Chestertown, Maryland. “There are so many stories about mutations, etc., and so many yet-to-be-vaccinated people seem to be acting more and more irresponsibly. Both of us feel that we have invested a year of being careful, so to continue on conservatively seems the way to go.”