Keeping physically, mentally, and spiritually healthy – at age 94

Good physical health also requires proper physical exercise and activity for muscle strength, agility, balance and coordination.

The only formal exercise I do is the U.S. Air Force back exercise. Before I get out of bed, every morning, I stretch out on my back and raise one leg up a little and hold it up for 6 or 7 seconds. Then I lower it slowly, and raise the other leg and hold it and lower it. Just do the exercise once at first, then increase the number of times you do it. After a week or so, add raising both legs. This is especially helpful if you have a desk job or if you are an airline pilot, or if you sit a lot during the day.

Other exercise, for me, comes from climbing the stairs seven or eight times a day, playing the bass fiddle, walking, dancing and shooting pool.

Keeping mentally healthy depends on what you take into your mind, in the way of ideas, knowledge, images, etc. and on how you use all this to learn skills, and to work through problems, and to plan — and live — your life.

For me, as a little kid growing up on a farm, I learned a lot about nature. I studied hard in school, read a lot of books, read the Reader’s Digest, Popular Science and the Rome News-Tribune.

I didn’t set goals — I just got obsessions — learning to draw and paint pictures, learning to dance, learning to play the trombone, the bass fiddle, guitar and piano, and learning to write well.

Whenever I became fairly skillful at something, someone would put me to work applying that skill. After I learned to play the trombone in high school, I joined Rome’s first “Big Band” dance orchestra. Later, in WWII, I played the trombone in the 22nd Marine Regiment Band, where I learned to play the bass fiddle and played it in a combo at the officers club. Later, in 1961, Paul Nixon, co-founder of the Rome Symphony Orchestra, asked me to join the symphony as a bass player. I played with the orchestra for 34 years.

My first career was as a dance teacher. I taught ballroom dancing at the Bobbie Roberts School of dance. My wife, Bobbie, who had danced with the St. Louis opera, and in vaudeville and Hollywood musicals, taught ballet, tap dancing and theatrical dancing. Eventually I learned tap and ballet and taught once a week in Calhoun and in Cedartown. We operated the dance school, six days a week, from 1946 to 1966.

After taking night classes in art at Shorter College in the 1950s, I started participating in art and craft shows, sketching people in charcoal and selling my art work — and realizing my lifelong ambition to become a successful (and very busy) working artist, a career that lasted until my eyesight became too week for me to continue, in the late 1990s.

In 1995, my wife became ill, and bed-ridden, with congestive heartfailure — and I became a 24/7 caregiver for the next three years (with the help of Home Healthcare), because I knew she’d be very unhappy in a nursing home. She passed away in May of 1998. We had 52 wonderful years together.

In June of 2003, one of my wife’s former dance students, Linda Campbell Holder, came by the studio to buy some of my black and white prints.

We reminisced about the dancing school days. She was one of the advanced students that went with us when we were asked to entertain at civic clubs, etc.

I asked her if she had been doing any dancing, lately. She told me that her husband had died the previous summer, and that several months later she had had cancer surgery and hadn’t done much of anything since then — but, would like to take a few ballroom dance lessons. It didn’t take long for her to get updated and back on the dance floor, at the monthly dances at the Senior Center and other places, including ships at sea (she and her family invited me to go on cruises with them). I’m now blessed with a wonderful dance partner, a lovely traveling companion and a loving and caring “significant other.”

I can still see well enough to write on my computer, using 20-point type. In 1980, I started writing letters to the editor of the Rome NewsTribune. In 1998, I was given the status of “guest columnist.”

And I still play the bass fiddle with the Georgia Mountain Music Club band on Wednesday mornings at the Senior Center. And I still play bridge there with the Rome Duplicate Bridge Club, on Monday and Thursday afternoons.

For my spiritual enhancement, I attend church and sing in the choir, at Oostanaula United Methodist Church, located in North Floyd county, in a beautiful pastoral area, where I can worship with and fellowship with my fellow Christians, commune with nature and thank my Creator for guiding me and helping me to become a healthy and active nonagenarian.

I never dreamed I’d be enjoying such a wonderful life — at age 94. ROBERT RAKESTRAW